Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/278

 240 Reviews.

Greek the Romani word bakht, fortune, and borrowed from it paramisi, story, and about a hundred more terms. From the Balkan peninsula they have spread since 141 7, or possibly earlier, to Silesia, Norway, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Brazil, and the countries between, everywhere probably disseminating the folk-tales they started with and those they picked up by the way, and everywhere probably adding to their store." With this theory a priori 1 have no quarrel. I have always regarded the inlirchen as the product of a stage of culture rather than of a particular race, and my chief objection to the " Indian " theory is its assumption, lacking all apparent justification, that a particular people have a monopoly of the tale-inventing faculty. At all events, as I have repeatedly urged, if such a monopoly is to be assumed, give it to those peoples which have carried the art of story-telling to its highest perfection, and not to the people of India, who have in the main shown a grotesque incapacity for the art of narrative. Is it not suggestive in this connection that the Gypsies starting from India with a hypothetical store of tales, yet, when they reach Greek-speaking lands, borrow the Greek word parajnisi {-jrapanvQia), story?

The Gypsies have lived and still, for the most part, live in that stage of culture favourable to the production and reception of mdrchen ; they chiefly come in contact with such classes of the various European communities among which they have sojourned as are likewise, more or less, in what may be styled the folk-store stage. I should quite expect them to be tellers of and listeners to mdrchen. I have thus no prejudice against Mr. Groome's theory ; and within limits, which I shall indicate, I believe it to be valid, and that he is right in assigning much of the give-and-take of the European folk-tale market to the Gypsy broker. Where, I fancy, I should differ from him is in regarding European folk-tale community as something very old, in fact pre-historic (to employ that much abused word in its proper sense), and, in essentials, independent of the Gypsies or of any other of the historic modes of dissemination which have been put forward. In especial, Mr. Groome's facts leave upon my mind the impression that the Gypsy has been more potent as a disseminator than as an originator, and that so far as these islands are concerned he has picked up more than he brought. I shall confine myself to this aspect of his case.