Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/146

 108 succeeded, I believe, in finding—a reasonable and plausible explanation of the statement, thereby reducing apparent nonsense to actual sense.

A sceptic of another order, however, equally incredulous but less impatient, will explain the whole difficulty by assuming that the "glass castle"—to pursue this illustration—is the creation of the popular fancy. Now, although I hold no settled opinion on this subject, I am strongly inclined to doubt whether the uncultivated mind is more poetical and imaginative than the cultivated. The play of fancy seems to me much more the outcome of culture than of ignorance; and the imaginative faculty stronger in the gentleman than in the peasant. Unquestionably the lower class is swayed by deep-rooted feelings and beliefs which it cannot explain; but are these not the shadows of what was once substantial? When the Saracen rider used to ask his startled horse, "If he thought King Richard was hiding behind that bush?" or when the Scottish peasant woman frightened her child into obedience with threats of "the Black Douglas", there was, it is true, no real cause for terror in either case, except during the brief lifetime of Richard and Douglas. But Richard and Douglas were not creations of the popular fancy, although the dread of them eventually became a popular imagination.

This last illustration brings me to what I regard as the most interesting phase of this question—the popular recollections of real people, continuing long after those people ceased to exist. Nor is this theme rendered less interesting by the consideration that the features of such people may have become distorted and indistinct through lapse of time; until, like the "glass castles", they may seem, at the first glance, impossibilities or myths. But for their peculiarities, also, a reasonable explanation may be attainable. What folk-lore says of such real, or hypothetically real, people may require much sifting before the grain can be separated from the chaff The popular memory is far from perfect, and real events and real people are not always faithfully remembered by ignorant castes or nations. For example, we know that Columbus and his contemporaries appeared to the natives of the West Indies as supernatural beings, armed with strange power, and borne thither from the sky, or out of the ocean, in their white-winged vessels. Had this intercourse been only temporary, and America not again visited by Europeans until the present century, we should probably