Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/453

 Rh we can learn, been held of all peoples and from immemorial antiquity.

Correlate these broad groupings of historic fact with the record of literature. This, in its earliest forms, is wholly mythic and heroic; it has a common fund of personages and situations which are differentiated chiefly by association with the origin and fortunes of small, strongly individualised communities. The vital power of this literature had well-nigh faded away by the time Christianity established itself, though it lived on as a subject of literary or academic exercise. During the first seven or eight centuries of Christianity mythico-heroic literature disappears. The classic form died away owing to the divorce between the highest thought and fancy of dying paganism and the conceptions upon which the older literature was based; the barbaric forms could not attain to expression so long as the strife between the invaders and the Empire was engaging all the energies of both sides. They emerged as soon as the compromise in Church and State had finally been settled, and then proved to be essentially of the same character as the mythico-heroic literature of classic and oriental antiquity. Mingling with the scattered remnants of this latter that had survived the shocks of the invasion period, mingling with and influenced by Christian legendary romance, they formed the staple of the highest literary art so long as the feudal state of society lasted. With the waning of feudalism, with the advent of the modern State, mediaeval romance waned also, gradually deserted as it was by the best imaginative and creative thought and fancy of the race.

The agreement between the historic and the literary record is perfect down to a comparatively recent period. Then, apparently without originating cause, an immense mass of popular literature, mythic and heroic in its essence, clad in comparatively novel form, comes to light. This phenomenon it is that has led to the false theory I have endeavoured to combat; observed of late, it must, so it is