Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/232

222 changed, and they were transferred to the setting of a higher civilization. Oftener than not the authors who treated them were wholly unaware of the history or meaning of the material. Yet a chief result of the critical scholarship of the last hundred years has been to show how the highest products of literary art are derived from simple elements of popular tradition.

CHARACTERISTICS OF POPULAR NARRATIVE

From the historical point of view, then, popular fiction has an important place in literary education. But in and for itself also, without regard to historical standards, this great body of writings possesses a direct human interest not inferior to that of the literature of art. The works selected for the present series illustrate very well the varieties of the type and the phases of life with which it may be concerned. The collections of Andersen and the Grimms offer, in general, the least complicated of narratives. The tales, or Märchen (as they have come to be called in English as well as in German), deal with simple episodes, localized, to be sure, but having for the most part no marked national or personal character. They are universal in appeal, and almost universal in actual occurrence wherever folklore has been collected. A very simple stage of narrative is likewise exhibited by the Æsopic fable. The hero tale of Ireland, on the other hand, is a more complex product. Here there is accumulation of episodes, with something like epic structure; and definite characters, half-historic and half-legendary, stand out as the heroes of the action. The localization is significant, and the stories reproduce the life and atmosphere of the northern heroic age. Both the narrative prose and the numerous poems that are interspersed in the sagas testify to the existence of a distinct literary tradition, still barbaric in many respects, in the old bardic schools. Finally, the "Arabian Nights" presents a still more elaborate development in a different direction. The fundamental elements again are beast fables, fairy lore, and popular anecdotes of love, prowess, or intrigue; but they are worked up under the influence of a rich and settled civilization and depict, with something like historic fullness, the life and manners of the Mohammedan Middle Ages. The collection,