Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/554

 CORRESPONDENCE.

In the history of any given study there occur moments when circumstances seem, as it were, to call a halt, and bid the student survey the distance travelled, to sum up gains and losses, and estimate alike the ground traversed, and the point attained.

To Arthurian scholars the untimely death of one whose name has so long, and so honourably, been associated with these studies offers such a halting-place, and it has seemed to me, as one who for upwards of twenty years had been closely connected with Alfred Nutt in those studies in which he took so deep and unselfish an interest, that it would be well for us to look a little more closely at the work which he achieved in these special fields, and appreciate more accurately the debt which English scholarship owes to him.

In a letter which I received a short time ago from Dr. Nitze, a review of whose study on The Fisher King was one of the last contributions from Mr. Nutt's pen, the impression made by his work abroad was thus summarized: "It is a great loss to scholarship. Mr. Nutt had an excellent trainings an accurate method, and a sense of style," The testimony voices, I think, the opinion even of those who felt unable to accept the conclusions to which he came.

To my mind the great value of Mr. Nutt's work has been his appreciation of the fact that the progress of Arthurian romance has been along the road of evolution, that direct literary invention has played but a secondary part in the growth of this wonderful body of romance, and that the study of folklore might, therefore, aid us