Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/277

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this country from America, spent a year at Oxford under the guidance of Sir John Rhys, and then travelled in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany, penetrating later into the Celtic fringe of Cornwall and Man, visiting in every case the most remote parts, and collecting from cottagers and wanderers tales, dreams, legends, and traditions. The material so gathered he has arranged under the headings of the different countries, each division being pre- faced by an introduction written by a representative folklorist from the country under consideration. Thus we have brought together a considerable mass of folk-legend, some of it new, and a series of brief pronouncements on the subject of fairies by Dr. Douglas Hyde, M. Anatole Le Braz, Sir John Rhys, Dr. Carmichael, Mr. Henry Jenner, and Miss Sophie Morrison, for which, quite apart from any conclusions or theories by the author himself, we have to thank him. All this is solid gain.

The arrangement of the book into countries, though probably the best that could be devised, has the corresponding disadvantage of breaking up material that, if placed side by side, would have helped to elucidate the subject, and has, we think, prevented the author himself from seeing as clearly as he otherwise might have done certain points of connection which would have helped to determine his conclusions. It must have been disappointing to him to find that, out of his six chief authorities, only two, Mr. Jenner and Miss Morrison, and these tentatively, confess to any sort of personal fairy belief, though all are ready enough to chronicle the fairy faith of others. Like the author himself, the remaining two agree to a small residue of belief when the major portions of the testimony have been explained away. Personally, I think that, in the case of his peasant contributors, an even larger margin of deduction must be made for the effects of solitude, and of reflec- tion and imagination moving in very limited circles, for the strength of tradition, and for the results of special kinds of landscape upon the mind. It is undoubted that certain types of scenery produce certain kinds of character and temperament; in Ireland or the wilder parts of Gaelic Scotland the soft dreamy atmosphere, the moving cloudland, the perpetual mist, induce a spectral feeling; the difficulty is not to see fairies, it is to help seeing them, crowding in multitudes, as the Gael sees them, on every thorn-bush, or