Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/467

Rh his adventures and achievements, his imagination, working upon the story, and having as a background existing customs and relations of fact, with which only he is familiar, must inevitably effect material, though unconscious, changes; and he will be subject to continual temptation to magnify the actions of the ancestor with whom he identifies himself, and diminish or misrepresent those of others, thus distorting the supposed facts out of all trustworthy apposition. Influences such as these prolonged for generations put out of court every pretension to accuracy, and leave only the most modified and provisional confidence in the general course of the story. The "compensating advantage," therefore, for the want of written records, appears to be something like a minus quantity.

The same objections apply with equal force to traditions preserved by a privileged class. The household bard has every motive to exalt the deeds of his chief, or of that chief's ancestors or family; the wandering bard changes his tune with every court or house, or every village he visits. The oral chroniclers of a court cannot fail to amplify the deeds that add lustre to their monarch and his line, and to be silent on those that do not redound to his glory. Priests must magnify their office and the greatness of the divinities whose servants and exponents they are. In more civilized communities monks, as we know, have encouraged apocryphal stories, or even invented them, for the honour of their house or of their order, and the equally important material benefit they naturally reap from them. Local patriotism and local jealousies, unsanctified by such sacred motives have often done as much. It is in human nature, and we cannot suppose that oral tradition will betray no taint of humanity. Those who have had experience in extracting truth in a court of justice, or weighing historical evidence consigned to the comparative safe custody of written documents, will be the last to underestimate this human element.