Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/132

 124 human Mrs. Gamps. Fairies take fancies to human infants, and exchange their own brats for the babies. Humans obtain various gifts from Fairyland by stealth or gift. Humans can enter the land of Faerie, but find time passes only too pleasantly and swiftly within its confines. Human lovers can get fairy wives by robbing them of their fairy robes or "husks." These five Topica—Fairy Births and Human Midwives, Changelings, Robberies from Fairyland, the Supernatural Lapse of Time in Fairyland, and Swan-maidens—these form Mr. Hartland's themes. What has his science to say of them? This leads on to another question: What does he seek to find in them? What, in other words, is his problem?

Mr. Hartland seeks origins; we are all on the scent for origins nowadays. How did these curious ideas about a fairy world, where things are other than they seem, where no Newton has discovered a law of gravitation, where time has wings and clocks spell years for minutes, where human beings lose their sense of time, and fairy maidens doff their quaint garbs—how did mankind come to think such things? Mr. Hartland answers in short: men have been savages, and savages regard all these things as natural, just as much a part of the normal course of things as marrying many wives or eating human beings for food. Civilised men have grown out of all these things, but—here is the important point—civilised mankind has passed through them all. The fairy world is a survival of savage imagination, and the science of fairy tales consists in tracing these survivals.

So far, Mr. Hartland is only applying to a well-defined group of tales the method first suggested, as far as I know, by Mr. J. H. Farrer in his "Savage Life", but developed and made popular by the keen insight and literary skill of Mr. Andrew Lang. So far as this theory professes to explain the origin of ideas occurring in folk-tales that are manifestly absurd, yet equally manifestly believed in, it has won the battle all down the line. Men changed to beasts, beasts