Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/242

234 many-minded, while often it does not know its own mind. That is its present-day aspect when it has nothing to do but to hear and remember. But I am more concerned to come to close quarters with the Folk regarded as originator. For the matter of that, everything must have originated among the Folk, including language, ars conservatrix omnium artium. Yet when we come to realise what we mean by saying a custom, a tale, a myth arose from the Folk, I fear we must come to the conclusion that the said Folk is a fraud, a delusion, a myth. These be bold words to utter in the presence of this honourable assembly of folk-lorists; but, as usual with bold words, they admit of explanation in a parliamentary sense.

Let us try to realise in imagination what must have happened when, for the first time, the saying was uttered that was afterwards to become a proverb, or a tale that was destined to be a folk- or fairy-tale, was first told. Was it the Folk that said the one or told the other? Did the collective Folk assembled in folk-moot simultaneously shout, "When the wine's in, the wit's out", or "Penny wise, pound foolish"? No, it was some bucolic wit, already the chartered libertine of his social circle, who first raised hearty guffaws by those homely pieces of wisdom. The proverbial description of a proverb, "The wisdom of many, the wit of one", recognises that truth. George Eliot in Adam Bede records the process. Mrs. Poyser—her own stepmother, it is said—described Mr. Craig, the Scotch gardener, as "welly like the cock that thinks the sun rose to hear him crow". Later on in the book Parson Irwine refers to the phrase, and calls it as good as Æsop. Production by the local wit, appreciation by the local circle, record by the social observer—of such is the making of proverbs.

Can it have been much different with the initial production of folk-tales? Can we imagine the Folk inventing Cinderella or Puss-in-Boots, or any of the innumerable novelettes of the nursery? The process is unthinkable.