Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/14

6 Unfortunately, Dr. Caster's paper on the Holy Grail legend has not yet been published, so I do not know with precision what the exact effect his theory has upon the general theory of folk-lore. But I think it comes to this— that folk-lore is modern, or rather historical in origin, and represents the culture of the few when at last it has penetrated to the masses, I shall leave Mr. Nutt to do battle on his own ground, and turn to Professor Crane's valuable book which he has just edited for the Society. He there points out how the mediæval clergy used "exempla" in their sermons, and that these exempla, in the shape of fables, apologues, and stories, have an important bearing upon the question of the diffusion of popular tales. So they have. But then we must ask what class of tales? Certainly not the kind of tales we find in Campbell's Highland Tales, nor Grimm's German stories, nor Kennedy's Irish stories. But because Jacques de Vitry, Etienne de Bourbon, and others were shrewd enough to use fabliaux vulgares to push home their religious teaching to the "vulgares", it does not prove a literary origin for the fabliaux—rather to me it proves the reverse.

We have an almost parallel state of things going on now. My friend, Mr. Jacobs, wishes to put into the hands of reading English children a collection of English traditional tales. He finds them too incomplete or too rude in their traditional form, so he "eliminates a malodorous and un-English skunk" from one tale, "removes the incident of the Giant dragging the lady along by her hair" from another tale, "reduces" the dialect of such a tale as Tom Tit Tot, "inserts incidents in the flight, and expands the conclusion" in another tale, turns ballads into prose, and tells us of all these gay doings in his notes. I am sure my friend, Mr. Jacobs, will forgive me for using his production as a literary artist to push home my argument as a folk-lorist. These tales will be read, not told; read by the children who are brought up on bright and well-pictured