To a writer now dead, and then first met, I am specially bound in gratitude—­the late Mr. J. F. M’Lennan.  Mr. M’Lennan had the most acute and ingenious of minds which I have encountered.  His writings on early marriage and early religion were revelations which led on to others.  The topic of folklore, and the development of custom and myths, is not generally attractive, to be sure.  Only a few people seem interested in that spectacle, so full of surprises—­the development of all human institutions, from fairy tales to democracy.  In beholding it we learn how we owe all things, humanly speaking, to the people and to genius.  The natural people, the folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual:  and genius has selected from the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance, myth into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery into gorgeous ritual.  The world has been educated, but not as man would have trained and taught it.  “He led us by a way we knew not,” led, and is leading us, we know not whither; we follow in fear.

The student of this lore can look back and see the long trodden way behind him, the winding tracks through marsh and forest and over burning sands.  He sees the caves, the camps, the villages, the towns where the race has tarried, for shorter times or longer, strange places many of them, and strangely haunted, desolate dwellings and inhospitable.  But the scarce visible tracks converge at last on the beaten ways, the ways to that city whither mankind is wandering, and which it may never win.  We have a foreboding of a purpose which we know not, a sense as of will, working, as we would not have worked, to a hidden end.

This is the lesson, I think, of what we call folklore or anthropology, which to many seems trivial, to many seems dull.  It may become the most attractive and serious of the sciences; certainly it is rich in strange curiosities, like those mystic stones which were fingered and arrayed by the pupils in that allegory of Novalis.  I am not likely to regret the accident which brought me up on fairy tales, and the inquisitiveness which led me to examine the other fragments of antiquity.  But the poetry and the significance of them are apt to be hidden by the enormous crowd of details.  Only late we find the true meaning of what seems like a mass of fantastic, savage eccentricities.  I very well remember the moment when it occurred to me, soon after taking my degree, that the usual ideas about some of these matters were the reverse of the truth, that the common theory had to be inverted.  The notion was “in the air,” it had already flashed on Mannhardt, probably, but, like the White Knight in “Alice,” I claimed it for “my own invention.”