Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/96

 CORRESPONDENCE.

History, Tradition, and Historic Myth. (Vol. xii., p. 467.)

I MUST have succeeded singularly well in darkening my meaning when my friend Mr. Rouse could read into my letter the belief "that all traditions should be discarded as worthless." To a life-long defender of the value of tradition such an accusation is, to say the least, surprising. But I am reassured by noticing that in one respect at least Mr. Rouse has completely misapprehended my argument. I was urging, it may be recollected, that Professor Ridgeway before making the large use he did of certain Greek traditions should, as an indispensable preliminary, have examined them critically. To drive home the plea that as there is faggot and faggot, so there is tradition and tradition, I instanced one famous set of traditions of which we know the origin and history, and which we know to be baseless. Such an instance, I argued, should make us cautious in dealing with traditions of which we do not know the origin and history. Mr. Rouse tells me that my examples are "not parallel to the Greek tradition." Of course they are not. If they were there would have been no necessity for my adducing them ; they were not adduced as parallels, but to enforce the claim for a particular critical method.

As an expert in Greek literature as well as in Greek archaeology. Professor Ridgeway can only be judged by experts. I should not be presumptuous enough to attempt such a judgment. But I cannot help noticing that experts in Greek literature {e.g. Mr. Monro in his recently published edition of the Odyssey) make precisely the same kind of objections to his use of certain Greek traditions as had immediately suggested themselves to me ; and that an expert in Greek archaeology like Mr. Myres, {see his