Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/155

Rh and statements, drawn indiscriminately from early or late tradition, from legend and myth and history, from sources Roman, Gallic, Welsh or Cumbrian, ancient, mediaeval and late Irish ; the literature and memorials of some sixteen centuries of Irish history, alike from the pre-Christian and Christian strata of thought, being heaped together without, as a rule, the least effort being made towards historical perspective or the application of any principle whatever of historical development.

Far be it from me to suggest that the deductions drawn from this glittering wealth of material cast up upon the shore of tradition are always wrong; they are doubtless frequently right, for there is a wonderful continuity in Gaelic beliefs and modes of thought; but in the long run, a wrong method is more disastrous than any number of wrong inferences, for it vitiates the whole of the conclusions; and the method here criticised I think to be radically and vitally wrong.

Much of the brilliant writing even of such foremost authorities on Celtic subjects as M. D'Arbois de Jubainville and Professor Rhys, the two scholars to whom perhaps more than to all others we owe the spread of a more general interest and intelligence in matters relating to our own early traditions and literature, suffers from this method of handling. Not that such writers are entirely to be blamed. The collection of material must precede its systematisation, and when the earlier attempts were made to construct some sort of reasonable history of Celtic thought and tradition, such pioneer writers as these found themselves confronted with an almost overwhelming mass of hitherto little-used material which it was impossible at once to reduce to order. Materials.—Now, what are the materials with which we have to deal in studying so-called 'Celtic' subjects, accepting the word in its popular sense as applying to the memorials of Gaul, ancient Britain, and Ireland?