Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/573

Rh matter has likely been grafted upon an older form and the whole tale has come to represent a slow accretion from one generation to another through many phases of culture and over vast periods of time. Whether a race of dwarf men inhabited lands that were later invaded by men of larger stature and more advanced culture and gave rise to conceptions of gnomes and "little people," as suggested by Sir Harry Johnston, is a matter of purely speculative interest. As this writer has ointed out, the African forest pygmies, who represent a very ancient type of man that was once widely spread in Europe, as well as in Africa, have certain characteristics, as suddenly vanishing from sight and as suddenly appearing, that might well have given rise to folk myths. Such may have been the origin of our Santa Claus, a hyperborean dwarf-myth arising out of the reindeer-herding Lapps in that dim land beyond the Scandinavian mountains.

The gift of the mythopceic faculty belongs to childhood—individual and racial. Education in the modern sense—the education of the school—is its arch enemy. The rank, tall-growing weeds of knowledge soon choke out this joyous bloom of the aboriginal soil. We enter the school and straightway a mist drifts across our past, blotting out the early years, and the days of romance, and myth, and make-believe are speedily forgotten. Yet out of this enchanted mist—for it is enchanted, like the mist that shrouded Geraint when he left Enid to fight against the knight—some of us may still, in rare moments, have glimpses that will make us "less forlorn." As Geraint dispelled the mist by the overthrow of his adversary, so we must, if we desire these visions, break through the mist that envelops them with the magic arm of imaginative memory, for no weapon of knowledge may serve us in its stead.

The backward extension of each individual life through many generations of germ-plasm carries us all back to a common racial childhood. Much of this racial childhood is recapitulated in the first years of individual existence—old race instincts, strange primitive ways, and the love for stories about beasts, and men, and fairy people. These myths and folk tales are thus part of a racial heritage, and happy indeed are those of us who, in our maturity, can still feel with the poet when he exclaimed—

 —Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

As we love Æsop and Uncle Remus, the Odyssey and the Celtic tales, so we love these folk stories of aboriginal America, for they are of the same lineage—the early, unsophisticated outlook upon life and the Powers of Darkness.