More particularly I became convinced
that much of the folk-lore of the world is but an exaggerated account of
events that really happened, and I was especially drawn to consider the
stories of the fairies, the good folk of the Celtic races. Here I
thought I could detect the fringe of embroidery and exaggeration, the
fantastic guise, the little people dressed in green and gold sporting in
the flowers, and I thought I saw a distinct analogy between the name
given to this race (supposed to be imaginary) and the description of
their appearance and manners. Just as our remote ancestors called the
dreaded beings "fair" and "good" precisely because they dreaded them, so
they had dressed them up in charming forms, knowing the truth to be the
very reverse. Literature, too, had gone early to work, and had lent a
powerful hand in the transformation, so that the playful elves of
Shakespeare are already far removed from the true original, and the real
horror is disguised in a form of prankish mischief. But in the older
tales, the stories that used to make men cross themselves as they sat
round the burning logs, we tread a different stage; I saw a widely
opposed spirit in certain histories of children and of men and women who
vanished strangely from the earth. They would be seen by a peasant in
the fields walking towards some green and rounded hillock, and seen no
more on earth; and there are stories of mothers who have left a child
quietly sleeping with the cottage door rudely barred with a piece of
wood, and have returned, not to find the plump and rosy little Saxon,
but a thin and wizened creature, with sallow skin and black piercing
eyes, the child of another race. Then, again, there were myths darker
still; the dread of witch and wizard, the lurid evil of the Sabbath, and
the hint of demons who mingled with the daughters of men. And just as we
have turned the terrible "fair folk" into a company of benignant, if
freakish, elves, so we have hidden from us the black foulness of the
witch and her companions under a popular _diablerie_ of old women and
broomsticks and a comic cat with tail on end. So the Greeks called the
hideous furies benevolent ladies, and thus the northern nations have
followed their example. I pursued my investigations, stealing odd hours
from other and more imperative labors, and I asked myself the question:
Supposing these traditions to be true, who were the demons who are
reported to have attended the Sabbaths? I need not say that I laid aside
what I may call the supernatural hypothesis of the middle ages, and came
to the conclusion that fairies and devils were of one and the same race
and origin; invention, no doubt, and the Gothic fancy of old days had
done much in the way of exaggeration and distortion; yet I firmly
believed that beneath all this imagery there was a black background of
truth. As for some of the alleged wonders, I hesitated. While I should
be very loth to receive any one specific instance of modern spiritualism
as containing even a grain of the genuine, yet I was not wholly prepared
to deny that human flesh may now and then, once perhaps in ten million
cases, be the veil of powers which seem magical to us; powers which, so
far from proceeding from the heights and leading men thither, are in
reality survivals from the depths of being. The amoeba and the snail
have powers which we do not possess; and I thought it possible that the
theory of reversion might explain many things which seem wholly
inexplicable. Thus stood my position; I saw good reason to believe that
much of the tradition, a vast deal of the earliest and uncorrupted
tradition of the so-called fairies, represented solid fact, and I
thought that the purely supernatural element in these traditions, was to
be accounted for on the hypothesis that a race which had fallen out of
the grand march of evolution might have retained, as a survival, certain
powers which would be to us wholly miraculous. Such was my theory as it
stood conceived in my mind; and working with, this in view, I seemed to
gather confirmation from every side, from the spoils of a tumulus or a
barrow, from a local paper reporting an antiquarian meeting in the
country, and from general literature of all kinds. Amongst other
instances, I remember being struck by the phrase "articulate-speaking
men" in Homer, as if the writer knew or had heard of men whose speech
was so rude that it could hardly be termed articulate; and on my
hypothesis of a race who had lagged far behind the rest, I could easily
conceive that such a folk would speak a jargon but little removed from
the inarticulate noises of brute-beasts. Thus I stood, satisfied that my conjecture was at all events not far
removed from fact, when a chance paragraph in a small country print one
day arrested my attention. It was a short account of what was to all
appearance the usual sordid tragedy of the village; a young girl
unaccountably missing, and evil rumor blatant and busy with her
reputation. Yet I could read between the lines that all this scandal was
purely hypothetical, and in all probability invented to account for what
was in any other manner unaccountable. A flight to London or Liverpool,
or an undiscovered body lying with a weight about its neck in the foul
depths of a woodland pool, of perhaps murder,--such were the theories of
the wretched girl's neighbors. But as I idly scanned the paragraph, a
flash of thought passed through me with the violence of an electric
shock: What if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still
survived, still remained haunting wild places, and barren hills, and now
and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and
unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain. I have
said that the thought came with violence; and indeed I drew in my breath
sharply, and clung with both hands to my elbow-chair, in a strange
confusion of horror and elation. It was as if one of my _confrères_ of
physical science, roaming in a quiet English wood, had been suddenly
stricken aghast by the presence of the slimy and loathsome terror of the
ichthyosaurus, the original of the stories of the awful worms killed by
valorous knights, or had seen the sun darkened by the pterodactyl, the
dragon of tradition. Yet as a resolute explorer of knowledge, the
thought of such a discovery threw me into a passion of joy, and I cut
out the slip from the paper, and put it in a drawer in my old bureau,
resolved that it should be but the first piece in a collection of the
strangest significance. I sat long that evening dreaming of the
conclusions I should establish, nor did cooler reflection at first dash
my confidence. Yet as I began to put the case fairly, I saw that I might
be building on an unstable foundation; the facts might possibly be in
accordance with local opinion; and I regarded the affair with a mood of
some reserve.