Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/464

 430 Traditions of the Baga7tda and Bnshongo.

Baloch are highly imaginative peoples. Their traditions, which are voluminous and renowned, are often, not to say commonly, cast in the form of ballads and songs. In Europe the ancient Greeks, the Scandinavians, the Irish, the Albanians and southern Slavs are striking examples. Even where narrative songs are not evolved the imaginative element is still powerful. Among the Cherokee of North America an experienced scientific observer related a few years ago that there were still a few old warriors left " who live in the memory of heroic days when there were wars with the Seneca and the Shawano ; and these men are the historians of the tribe and the conservators of its anti- quities."^ The events of the past appeal to their most sacred emotions. It is easy to see how these events must become more and more clear to them, and the particulars grow vivid as they brood over them or retail them to others in their religious assemblies or by the camp-fire in familiar talk. But the introduction of the element of imagination is the destruction of historical authenticity. " A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure." And pleasure is. the staff of memory. I do not suggest that the lie is either wilful or conscious. Unknowingly imagination reconstitutes the picture not as it was, but as a defective memory, and a sense of the fitness of things unite to determine what it ought to have been, and therefore must have been.

Special precautions are sometimes taken by peoples un- acquainted with the art of writing to preserve their memory of events. Without stopping to consider others, it is only necessary for our present purpose to mention two. One is not uncommon among the more advanced African tribes, and reminds us of the old Welsh and Irish bards or the Doms of north-western India. In Senegal, among the pagan tribes and those recently converted to Islam, there is a sort of special caste, called griots, almost to be described as slaves. Every Friday evening the king's

^ Mooney, Jiep. Bur. Ethn., xix., 232.