Folk Tales Every Child Should Know | Page 2

while a funeral is passing, we are recalling old superstitions or beliefs, a vanished world in which our remote forefathers lived.
We do not realize how much of this vanished world still survives in our language, our talk, our books, our sculpture and pictures. The plays of Shakespeare are full of reference to the fancies and beliefs of the English people in his time or in the times not long before him. If we could understand all these references as we read, we should find ourselves in a world as different from the England of to-day as England is from Austria, and among a people whose ideas and language we should find it hard to understand.
In those early days there were no magazines or newspapers, and for the people as contrasted with the scholars there were no books. The most learned men were ignorant of things which intelligent children know to-day; only a very few men and women could read or write; and all kinds of beliefs about animals, birds, witches, fairies, giants, and the magical qualities of herbs and stones flourished like weeds in a neglected garden. There came into existence an immense mass of misinformation about all manner of things; some of it very stupid, much of it very poetic and interesting. Below the region of exact knowledge accessible to men of education, lay a region of popular fancies, ideas, proverbs, and superstitions in which the great mass of men and women lived, and which was a kind of invisible playground for children. Much of the popular belief about animals and the world was touched with imagination and was full of suggestions, illustrations, and pictorial figures which the poets were quick to use. When the king says to Cranmer in "Henry VIII:" "Come, come, my lord, you'd spare your spoons," he was thinking of the old custom of giving children at christenings silver or gilt spoons with handles shaped to represent the figures of the Apostles. Rich people gave twelve of the "apostles' spoons;" people of more moderate means gave three or four, or only one with the figure of the saint after whom the child was named. On Lord Mayor's Day in London, which came in November and is still celebrated, though shorn of much of its ancient splendour, the Lord Mayor's fool, as part of the festivities, jumped into a great bowl of custard, and this is what Ben Jonson had in mind when he wrote:
"He may, perchance, in tail of a sheriff's dinner, Skip with a rime o' the table, from near nothing, And take his almain leap into a custard, Shall make my lady Maydress and her sisters, Laugh all their hoods over their shoulders."
It was once widely believed that a stone of magical, medicinal qualities was set in the toad's head, and so Shakespeare wrote:
"Sweet are the uses of adversity; Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in its head."
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is the most wonderful fairy story in the world, but Shakespeare did not create it out of hand; he found the fairy part of it in the traditions of the country people. One of his most intelligent students says: "He founded his elfin world on the prettiest of the people's traditions, and has clothed it in the ever-living flower of his own exuberant fancy."
This immense mass of belief, superstition, fancy, is called folk-lore and is to be found in all parts of the world. These fancies or faiths or superstitions were often distorted with stories, and side by side with folk-lore grew up the folk-tales, of which there are so many that a man might spend his whole life writing them down. They were not made as modern stories are often made, by men who think out carefully what they are to say, arrange the different parts so that they go together like the parts of a house or of a machine, and write them with careful selection of words so as to make the story vivid and interesting.
The folk-tales were not written out; many of them grew out of single incidents or little inventions of fancy, and became longer and larger as they passed from one story-teller to another and were retold generation after generation.
Men love stories, and for very good reasons, as has been pointed out in introductions to other volumes in this series; and the more quick and original the imagination of a race, the more interesting and varied will be its stories. From the earliest times, long before books were made, the people of many countries were eagerly listening to the men and women who could tell thrilling or humorous tales, as in these later days they read the novels of the writers who know how to tell a story so as