Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/260

 232 Review.

December 1881, on the work of Paulin Paris, found occasion to point out the need for folklore in these studies. About the same time a Russian and a Finnish scholar were working at Russian and Finnish beast stories (Kolmatschevsky, 1882; Krohn, 1888, 1891). In 1892 M. Sudre published his Sources dti Roman de Renart^ a book which is compared by Gaston Paris to Jeanroy on Lyric Poetry^ Bedier on the Fabliaux, and Langlois on the Roman de la Rose. It is to that family that M. Foulet's work belongs — twenty years after — and many readers in England who have drawn instruction and delight from the older French books on the Middle Ages will be glad to find the study still flourishing, the traditions of philological industry and literary grace so well preserved as here they are. M. Foulet stands to Gaston Paris and the folklorists very much as Paulin Paris stood with regard to Jacob Grimm's Reinhart. Grimm believed in an original ideal Beast Epic ; Paulin Paris met this diffusive essence with the sharp particulars of Aesop's fables, and the cloud vanished. But the particular positive written fables were not enough to account for all the matter of Reynard the Fox. The traditional beast stories came and asked for consideration ; the result was that something not unlike the cloudy ideal epic came to shape itself again ; only for Gaston Paris and others who agree with him it is not an epicoixho. Fox — it is not an epic at all, it is only a number of current stories. It is not always easy to explain how the folklore theory differs from Grimm. M. Sudre sometimes speaks of Vestoire {de Renard) not, indeed, exactly as a traditional oral epic, but as a traditional group of stories to which new adventures might be added. It looks as if the difference between the older theory (Grimm) and the later (Sudre) were simply that Grimm thought of his folklore as organic — a coherent epic plot — whereas the later folklorists are content with incoherence. M. Foulet is inclined to sweep away all folklore together ; we may be allowed in this Society to think that he is a little too peremptory. He is too impatient, and too openly shows that he does not want to believe in folklore. Uncle Remus, it may be, is derived from Reynard the Fox ; and the Dutch settlers in Africa may, as M. Foulet suggests (p. 558), have introduced Reynard to the Hottentots. But, even supposing all this, we do not imagine