s entered into literature, the problem is to
ascertain how far the literary variations we meet with may have been
influenced by pre-existing traditional tales formed upon similar lines.
In general, however, it may be safely said of Fairy Tales (with which we
are more immediately concerned) that the argument in favour of their
propagation from a single centre lacks support. The incidents of which
they are composed are based upon ideas not peculiar to any one people,
ideas familiar to savages everywhere, and only slowly modified and
transformed as savagery gives way to barbarism, and barbarism to modern
civilization and scientific knowledge of the material phenomena of the
universe. The ideas referred to are expressed by races in the lower
culture both in belief and in custom. And many of the tales which now
amuse our children appear to have grown out of myths believed in the
most matter-of-fact way by our remote forefathers; while others enshrine
relics of long-forgotten customs and modes of tribal organization.

There is one habit of thought familiar to savage tribes that to us,
trained through long centuries of progressive knowledge, seems in the
highest degree absurd and even incomprehensible. As a matter of
every-day practice we cannot, if we would, go back to that infantine
state of mind which regards not only our fellow men and women, but all
objects animate and inanimate around us, as instinct with a
consciousness, a personality akin to our own. This, however, is the
savage philosophy of things. To a large proportion of human beings at
the present day beasts and birds, trees and plants, the sea, the
mountains, the wind, the sun, the moon, the clouds and the stars, day
and night, the heaven and the earth, are alive and possessed of the
passions and the cunning and the will they feel within themselves. The
only difference is that these things are vastly cleverer and more
powerful than men. Hence they are to be dreaded, to be appeased--if
possible, to be outwitted--even, sometimes, to be punished. We may
observe this childish habit of thought in our nurseries to-day when one
of our little ones accidentally runs against the table, and forthwith
turns round to beat the senseless wood as if it had voluntarily and
maliciously caused his pain; or when another, looking wistfully out of
window, adjures the rain in the old rhyme:

"Rain, rain, go away!
Come again another day!"

Poets, too, and orators in their lof