Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/387

 ANDREW LANG: FOLKLORIST AND CRITIC.

It is hard to speak about Andrew Lang in a few words. As a writer and thinker he is exceedingly many-sided. Besides, I knew him as a friend, and as a correspondent from whom brilliant notes flew off hke sparks from a smith's anvil. And he was likewise an integral part of Oxford,—at any rate, of what may be called the larger Oxford. If I may be allowed to indulge in personal reminiscence, when I first came up to Balliol, in 1885, Andrew Lang was very much before our eyes. I do not think that I was myself fortunate enough to meet him at the Master's, where so many of the personalities of the day were to be encountered. But every one of my generation delighted in his literary work, and especially in his poetry. Surely his poetry is, taken at the level of the lighter verse, of the very best quality, and deserving of even more fame than it has won. But for me in particular Custom and Myth, which was not long out, was a signpost pointing down a path which I have pursued pleasantly ever since. It is to the credit of my college tutors that they both suggested the reading of the book, and tolerated anthropological allusions in the weekly Greats' essays. By the time I was ready to take my degree, anthropology might be said to have established itself somewhere within the broad penumbra of Literæ Humaniores. Of course the constructive work of our Professor of Anthropology, Tylor, helped largely towards this end. But Andrew Lang helped hardly less. As Plato says, young men love, like puppy dogs, to tear everything to pieces. Consequently our juvenile sympathies were all with Andrew Lang in his fight with Max Müller. Unworthy no less than worthy reasons were, I daresay, at the bottom of our partisanship, for those were the last days of the predominance of Comparative Philology amongst