Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/174

 158 Notes on Ballad Origins.

affected by Perrault's printed versions. But the "folk fancy" of Zulu, Algonkin, Samoyed, and Eskimo narrators is not " incapable of constructing a minutely detailed story." Every folklorist knows that, unless he believes in universal borrowing from India.

(3) " Mr. Lang has never considered the possibility of exportation at a comparatively late period." I shall be happy to consider the theory if anyone will suggest the date and port of " exportation," adding his proofs.

(4) " He has assumed that the Becket legend and the ballad could not have been derived from the same old for- gotten romance."

May I not ask for proof of the existence of such a romance prior to, say, 1300? I am not logically bound to prove that there never was such a romance. And, if Mr. Henderson discovers the romance, he will not necessarily prove that the ballads and the legend and the Mdrchen are derived from it. As Professor Child says, it is " some- what hastily assumed, that when romances and popular ballads have anything in common, priority belongs to the romances."

(5) " He has not realised that the intermixture of the Becket legend with the story of the ballad might have occurred at a comparatively late period." About 1300, the date of the Becket legend, is comparatively late. As Pro- fessor Child says, the ballad, though in some variants "affected by" the Becket legend, "for all that is not derived from the legend." Variants, it may be remarked, occur in Norse, Spanish, and Italian.

Mr. Henderson, of course, may be right, and Professor Child may be wrong. But at present I feel safer in agree- ing with the greatest of authorities rather than with the latest editor of The Border Minstrelsy. When Mr. Henderson adds that my opinion — "frequently the popular ballad comes down in oral tradition side by side with its educated child, the literary romance on the same theme" —