Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/425

 The Folklore in the Legends of the Punjab. 385

selected The Legends of the Panjab for consideration, because I have had better opportunities of analysing that collection than the others, and not because it is the most prolific as to matters which may be usefully taken up by such a company as the Folk-Lore Society.

In making, therefore, the remarks that are to follow, I ask indulgence if the condensation of statement that is forced upon me is found to be very close, and if the statements themselves are sometimes found to be some- what behind the times. But in common with all investiga- tors of popular lore, I have found myself face to face with a third difficulty, viz., the best mode of presentation. If one is strictly scientific and arranges the facts in a severe sequence, one is not only apt to be dull, but also to incor- rectly interpret the subject, which from its very nature hardly admits of a logical treatment. To begin with, the folk are not consistent and their ideas are all hazy and muddled. Consequently the points of folklore are so far from being clearly separable that they are always mixed up with each other. Any given notion is not traceable to a distinct single basis, but strikes its roots in fact into many, and can often be classified indifferently under any one of several heads. The surest way therefore of projecting one- self into the folk-mind — so far as such a process is possible — is, with the aid of a loose and simple general sequence or classification, to take up the various points as they have seemed to grow one out of the other in folk-logic and pro- cesses of thought. This is practically the line that every one who undertakes the exposition of the subject seems to adopt in the end, and I apprehend that it is a procedure that will commend itself to the members of the Folk-Lore Society, which they need hardly be reminded was in its origin and inception a purely literary association.

In order to explain what follows, I should here say that I began to collect the series since partly published as The Legends of the Panjab, somewhat more than twenty years

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