Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/138

130 you could draw no conclusion from the survivals found in it with regard to the place where it was collected. The last count of my indictment was that folk-tales were folk-literature, and required to be studied by literary and not by anthropological methods.

Mr. Lang did me the honour of replying to these contentions in his preface to Miss Roalfe Cox’s admirable volume of variants of Cinderella. He pointed out that he had not unreservedly denied the possibility of transmission as the cause of similarity in folk-tales, and he was fully aware of their charm and literary attraction. To this I replied in the September number of of last year: that if I had been mistaken in dubbing him Casualist I had erred in company with almost all folk-lorists who had discussed his views, and I mentioned the names of MM. Cosquin, Bédier, Sudre, Krohn. As regards the literary aspects of the folk-tale, I pointed out that it was not a question of appreciation of their literary charm, but of their recognition as products of artistic imagination subject to the laws of imaginative production; it was these laws that had to be investigated rather than the survivals of savage culture which could here and there be discerned in the unnatural incidents in folk-tales.

The curtain rises on the fourth act, and discovers Mr. Lang, not in the most placid of his moods, in the December number of. He gives us an interesting account of the rise and progress of his interest in folk-tales, he reiterates his contention that he has always been burning with secret love for the Transmission Theory, and he points to passages in which he had let drop hints of his deep-seated affection. He suggested that I had made a blunder in including M. Bédier in the list of those who had mistaken him for a casualist; he pointed out his priority over Mr. J. H. Farrer, whom I had associated with him as having recognised the savage element in folk-tales. He then proceeded to discuss certain views I had enunciated with regard to Cinderella: these I propose considering in