Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/133

 Reviews. 115

monly obtains, the difference is as marked between the " folk," the less cultured portions of the two communities, as it is between the cultured portions. It is impossible for a com- munity to possess any individuality and not to stamp it upon its most frequently used instrument of culture, its speech ; impossible too that the individual form thus given to the instrument should not in its turn react upon the further development of the culture. Consider the case of the United States. The Briton is a mixed animal, but the North American far more so ; the added mixture of new bloods, the novel climatic, economic, social conditions all tend to modify the British type in the United States. Against this modifying tendency there fights the immensely powerful influence of a common instrument of culture. But that instrument itself is being modified ; a new species of English is being elaborated. Let but the process be accelerated, and a century may see the constitution of a type differing as much from its EngUsh original as does the French, or German, or Slavonic. Again, it seems to me wholly incorrect to urge that it is comparatively indifferent what speech a community uses. For upwards of two centuries the English race expressed itself, mainly, in an alien form of speech, in French. The literature thus created can, I beUeve, be distinguished from that of the purely French wTiters of the time; novel and fruitful elements were introduced by it into the body of French culture. None the less it is certain that this Anglo-French literature bears but a slight relation either to the older Anglo-Saxon literature or to that which arose when the English constitution had absorbed the foreign elements, and, rejecting the alien, developed a national, an English form. Chaucer would have been a man of genius had he lived in the twelfth instead of in the fourteenth century, but he would not have been the English Chaucer ; the foreign instrument would have influenced his achievement. As regards " folk " lore in especial, almost exclusively traditional as it is, how can it be contended that speech is unimportant ? Memory attaches to the well-known sound as well as to well-known content ; let but the sound which recalls the sense perish, and three-fourths of what would be recalled perishes with it.

I could, to borrow a phrase of the author's, go on gossipping about his book till Doomsday and three weeks beyond. I have said enough I trust to send many readers to its pages.

Alfred Nutt.