Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/132

 114 Reviews.

female suffrage, as whether Jack Topper or Jenny Draggleskirt sits in Parliament and intones amen to the decision of the Panjandrums that be, is utterly indifferent.

For us English folklorists this report is comfortable reading. Justice is rendered to our work and to that of our American cousins with a large and cordial generosity that the present writer, at least, can only acknowledge with an uneasy blush. I do not think I am the least attentive reader of Folk-Lore^ yet I confess that the import and value of certain contributions to its pages have been made clearer to me by Dr. Krauss' brief but pregnant commendations.

Questions of method and principle occupy Dr. Krauss very largely. With most of what he urges I am in full accord. But there are matters of disagreement, and as, like all first-rate talkers. Dr. Krauss is only happy when one disagrees with him, I will pick out one. In defining the respective relations of folklore and other branches of historical resource. Dr. Krauss discusses at length the question of language and race. Polemising vigorously against the older school of comparative philologists and the identification of race and speech, Dr. Krauss, in my opinion, goes, as is the mode of the day, far too much to the other extreme. He seems to imply that speech — a mere instruvient of culture, he styles it — is an altogether secondary element in the total mass of a racial culture. Facts do not, I think, justify this conclusion. The very instance he gives is dead against it. Etruscans, Gauls, and Keltiberians, he says, were Romanised and lost their native forms of speech, but they did not therefore abandon their racial essence, they did not become Romans. Now to me, on the contrary, it seems obvious that, differ among themselves as they may, modern Frenchmen, North Italians, and Spaniards possess in common features that clearly mark them off from the Teutonic or Slavonic racial groups, and that these features are largely due to their possession of a common culture speech basis. Why should the Irishman differ so profoundly from the Frenchman ? There is little difference between them from the physico-anthropological point of view ; in both cases there exists a pre-Aryan substratum modified firstly by a Celto-Aryan, secondly by a Teutono-Aryan immigration. But the one has retained a Celtic instrument of culture, the other has borrowed and independently developed a Latin instrument of culture. Here too, contrary to what com.