Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/423

Rh of the folk, its output in story, legend, song, and saying, that had attracted most attention. Of the basic works of the new science, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Deutsche Mythologie on its literary side, and the Deutsche Sagen had hundreds of readers and disciples to every one of the Deutsche Weisthümer. But the lore of the folk, from this point of view, has close connection with the subject-matter of philology and mythology; little wonder if the students of all three were guided by the same dominating conceptions.

Again advancing knowledge broke down the conception and shifted the point of view. The Aryan unity was transcended, yet still the kinship of the lore of the folk manifested itself. German and English scholars alike brought in a rich garner of facts from outside the Aryan area; English scholars first sought to determine the import of these facts, and first essayed, in recent times, to treat the lore of the folk from a cultural rather than from a historico-racial standpoint. The significance of a similar attempt made in the previous century became then apparent. This attempt had been made, as was natural, in France, for the French intelligence may be defined as algebraic in essence,—it perceives facts stripped of their contingent and accidental properties, and conceives of them schematically. By nature the French mind is synthetic, and was thus well fitted to consider the elements of the lore of the folk apart from their local manifestations, and to work them into a philosophical scheme. It was the cultural psychology of the lore of the folk that Fontenelle and De Brosses had in view, and not, like Herder, a racial psychology. Their syntheses failed, like his, because, like his, they were premature and were based upon fragmentary and imperfectly analysed material. Whereas Herder inspired and strengthened his own and the succeeding generation of folklorists, the work of the French scholars lay infertile for over a century. It was necessary that the science of folklore should first constitute itself upon a local, a racial basis, before its universally human elements could be appreciated at their true value.

The new tendency in folklore study which began to manifest itself in the sixties of last century was strengthened by the labours of Mannhardt. With him the stress was shifted from the artistic