Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/17

Rh works of the poets, historians, philosophers, and particularly the lesser writers of classical times, are innumerable notices of myth, tradition, and superstition, which when put together show clearly enough a sub-stratum of folk-lore residing among the people which no poet had worked up into the lore of the cultured. The Apollo of the cultured and of the poets was different from the Apollo of the people: it is true we know both from literary sources; but the literature which tells us of the one is the greatest epic ever woven by man, the literature which tells us of the other, putting on one side purely historical works like those of Pausanias, is contained in the epigrams and sneers, or in the accidental notings of the satirist, in the haphazard allusions of the poets and dramatists, and in the discussions of the philosophers when philosophy was just beginning to throw off the spell of poetry and art. This is not a literary origin, therefore—it is the unintentional mention by literature of folk-lore. The way that literature treats folk-lore is thus clearly shown. It poetises it into a system, or it treats it with derision; neither of which processes are operative in the traditional treatment of folk-lore, where details are attended to with scrupulous exactness, and formulas are repeated in the accepted manner, because variation would be a fatal blemish.

I have said that the anthropological method of studying folk-lore must be proved by its results in showing that all branches tend in the same direction. This direction, so far as we have gone at present, is that folk-lore contains the survivals of the oldest and rudest culture of man. An example of the manner in which one branch of folk-lore complements or supplements another—an example conspicuous by its lucid reasoning—is Mr. Hartland's Lady Godiva study given to us last session. This really adds a chapter to Mr. Frazer's Agricultural Myth and Custom. It is an additional brick in the building-up of the unrecorded history of the past from folk-lore. And when one