Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/154

122 different order of things; it is no longer possible to explain away an historical fact by an allegorical interpretation, or, on the other hand, to read allegory into history, nor can we reckon as prophetical statements that are made after the event. This change of view is, I need not add here, a much larger matter than even the more careful investigation of documents and the attempt to decide the comparative age of different manuscripts, important as this department is; it involves the consideration of the weight of authority that is to be attached to each different writer, the investigation of the conditions under which he wrote, the influences to which he was subjected, the state of intellectual development of the people and nations amongst whom he lived, and by whom he must inevitably have been influenced; the intention he had in view, and the persons for whom he wrote. It includes the effort to disentangle primitive myth from later beliefs, to separate myth and allegory from history, to consider on their merits the observations of native writers regarding their own traditions from within, and the observations of other peoples, possibly in a quite different stage of progress, from without. It is something separate from, and of far more importance than, the correct or incorrect statement of facts, it is an effort after a better or more scientific method of thought. Facts and even theories, wrongly stated, are certain to be sooner or later set right; but it is more difficult to correct a wrong method of investigation or deduction. It goes to the root of every study that we take in hand.

Now, in the study of Celtic tradition the methods of historical or literary criticism have not always been sufficiently applied. We are frequently presented, whatever be the immediate topic under consideration, with a perfectly bewildering mass of allusions, examples,