Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/143

Rh resolve themselves into analyses,—quantitative and qualitative,—of tradition. If we consider European culture during the period of some four thousand years during which we can trace it, we note the rise of Christianity and the consequent extension of Christian-Classic culture over the whole European area as the most momentous of the transforming elements which have affected it. The method of the folklorist is akin to that of the chemist: he studies the reactions and new combinations set up by the Christian-Classic ferment in an older body of elements. Scarcely anywhere else are these processes manifested alike with such precision and such complexity as in the formation and evolution of the Grail legends. The Grail cycle offers an almost ideal field for that species of analysis which has to be applied in almost every section of folklore study.

If this is so, it follows that the formative period of Christianity, that in which it was transforming Pagan culture and being modified itself in the process, is of first-rate importance for the folklorist. This period, roughly speaking the first four centuries of our era, produced a very rich literature. Some of it, the canonical writings of Christianity, is of first-rate importance from whatever point of view it be considered, and has always been the object of intense study, but much, perhaps the greater part of the literary output of those four centuries, is from an aesthetic, a philosophic, or a spiritual point of view inferior. The Pagan-Classic portion is, from the necessities of the case, decadent; a considerable section of the Christian portion is, equally from the necessities of the case, puerile; what has survived of amalgams or compromises between the two warring worlds of thought and emotion is for the most part, with equal necessity, an abortion or a still-birth. Such as it is, however, this literature claimed the attention of the Renaissance scholars and their successors almost equally with that of the great Classic period. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, well on into the eighteenth century, there was no hard and fast line drawn in ancient studies between profane and sacred, between Classic and post-Classic. Then specialism set in, the classical scholar divorced himself wholly from theological, the theologian from classical studies; the late Classic period, the period of strife and compromise with Christianity, was