Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/49

 ascertained, the rest of our theory followed on the ordinary lines of the evolution of human institutions. To take an example in another province. Savages of a certain degree of culture make hand-turned pots of clay. Civilised races use the wheel. Peasants in remote disstricts of civilised countries make hand-turned pots of clay much like those of savages. The savage tale answers to the savage pipkin. The vase from Vallauris answers to the civilised myth. The hand-turned pot from Uist or Barra, answers to the peasant märchen; pot and märchen both surviving, with modifications, from the savage state, among the non-progressive class in civilised countries.

Such pipkins from the Hebrides (where Mr. Campbell collected his Tales) resemble much more the prehistoric and savage pot than they resemble our Vallauris vase, with its classic shape, ornament, and balance. Just in the same way, the West Highland or Russian märchen is much more akin to the Zulu story than to the civilised myth of Greece, which turns on the same ideas. In both the material and the imaginative product, you have the same process of evolution. You have the rude stuff, clay and small flints and shells for the savage pot, savage ideas for the savage tale. You have the refined, selected clay for the civilised vase, the ingenious process of fabrication, the graceful form and ornament. In the realm of imagination these answer to the plastic fancy of old minstrels, and of Homer or Apollonius Rhodius, refining and modifying the rude stuff of savage legend. Finally, among the non-progressive crofters of the Hebrides you have (in manufacture) the rude clay, the artless façon, the ornament incised with the nails; and you have, in the imaginative province, tales almost as wild as the working of Bushman or Zulu imagination. (Campbell's Tales of the West Highlands).

Here then is an example, and dozens might be given of