Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/12

4 tors towards the expense, all come from our own Society; for a member of our Council, whom I am not at liberty to name, expressed to me, not many weeks since, his desire to assist by substantial money-aid exactly the same plan that Mr. Lamont urged forty years ago.

But although none of the work of folk-lore has been accomplished in the systematic manner which I have just sketched, much of what has been done falls in a natural sort of way into the ideal plan now proposed—nay, it suggests the plan. And what has been accomplished is quite sufficient at all events to indicate to the student certain landmarks which are fairly well fixed, in spite of the different methods and different theories of folk-lorists; and to these landmarks I would chiefly direct your attention to-night.

Of course, we all approach our study with a kind of bias in favour of some particular view, and my own bias is pretty generally known. I believe that folk-lore supplies or the countries of Europe the anthropological data corresponding to what is being collected so assiduously from people who are still in the savage and barbarous stage of culture. I believe that the sanction upon which folk-lore depends—namely, tradition—is a vera causa for its antiquity. I believe that everything that owes its existence to tradition should be classed as folk-lore, whether belief, usage, or custom; and that each of these sections should be studied not separately, as if they had no connection with each other, but together, as the results of one common cause in human history.

But with this bias it is easy to see that the first important landmark is the influence exerted on traditional belief and usage by Christianity. We see clearly enough that the heroes and heroines of our folk-tales are certainly not Christians, and Christianity is scarcely represented even nominally in tales, except those occurring in Slavonic countries and in Spain. But these exceptions can be accounted for, I think, by facts which at once pronounce