Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/152

146 amongst themselves by oral tradition alone a set of customs and ideas so ancient that the oldest literature of Greece and Rome is modern by comparison. To have at last opened the eyes of educated people to the priceless value of popular tradition as evidence of a remote antiquity is the glory of the illustrious Grimm. When, chiefly through the influence of that great scholar, the oral tradition of the people came to be examined, the feature in it which most struck observers was the one I have just indicated, the stamp, namely, which it bears of a dateless antiquity. The reasons for assigning to it an age incomparably greater than that of the literary tradition are mainly two. In the first place, the popular tradition—and under tradition I mean to include popular customs as well as popular beliefs—the popular tradition could not have originated in historical times, because there is nothing in history to account for it. The two great historical influences that have moulded our modern civilisation—the Roman empire and Christianity—have left hardly a trace in the genuine beliefs and customs of the folk. Christianity has slightly changed the nomenclature, and that is all. But, on the other hand—and this is the second reason—if there is nothing in Roman civilisation or the Christian religion to account for the origin of the popular tradition, there is in the customs and ideas of existing savages almost everything that is needed fully to explain and account for it. The resemblance, in fact, between the ideas and customs of our European peasantry and the ideas and customs of savages is so great as almost to amount to identity, and a comparison of the one set of customs with the other goes far towards explaining both. To put it metaphorically, the two sets of customs, the European and the savage, are independent copies of the same original picture; but both copies are somewhat faded through time, and each has preserved some features which the other has lost. Thus they mutually supplement each other, and, taken together, enable us to restore the original with some completeness.