Page:The Allies Fairy Book.djvu/27

 spread his hands and snap his fingers as he recited to a spellbound audience the tale of “Koshchei the Deathless” or “The Soldier and the Vampire.” These blood-curdling memories are now forty years old, and belong to a period when all we knew in England of Russian literature was what the gigantic, gentle Ralston, with his beard flowing as he strode along the street, chose to tell us of its wonders.

It was from Ralston that we learned, in those far-off days, of the mythical beings which people the imagination of the Slav races. In spite of the efforts of the Church and the spread of education, nothing can prevent the Ruthenian or Serbian peasant from believing that the woods are full of fauns and elves, the rivers of sprites, and the houses of “lares” or domestic fairies. Noises that foretell death, beneficent gnomes whose task it is to reveal the place of buried treasure, mirrors which give back mystic forms instead of reflections, all the superstitions of the extreme West are repeated in slightly different shape by the soothsayers of the Slavonic peoples. We find in Galicia evidence of second sight which hardly differs even in expression from that of the Highlands of Scotland. But, side by side with these things which seem common to all folk-lore, we find grotesque and mysterious inventions for which no Western equivalent is forthcoming.

When we reach the Japanese tales for children, we meet with singular differences from and interesting resemblances with the western European fairy-story. They had much the same literary fate as the “Tales of Mother Goose,” for, after floating about in the unwritten gossip of country places, they were crystallized into their present form by men of letters in the seventeenth century. The greatest of Japanese novelists, Kiokutei Bakin, who died at a great age in 1848, took a very special interest in these tales, and it is owing to him that they have received the careful study of a succession of Japanese scholars. Aston, the historian of Japanese