Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/139

Rh connection with the criticisms of Mr. Nutt on the same subject.

I do not think that my part in the fifth act, at which we have now arrived, need be a long one, since the issues have gradually narrowed themselves to personal ones, which are always difficult and dangerous to handle. Let me at once dismiss a couple of these about which I myself was at least partly in the wrong. In referring to M. Bédier, I called him a Casualist, and spoke of him as referring to Mr. Lang as his master. Both these statements taken by themselves are, I still contend, strictly accurate. The whole tendency of M. Bédier’s book is casualistic, and as in his account of the Anthropological School, so ably headed by Dr. Tylor and Mr. Lang, M. Bédier writes in full sympathy, it is not stretching a point to speak of Mr. Lang as his master in this regard. But it was misleading to couple the two statements so closely as to leave the impression that M. Bédier was adopting Mr. Lang’s views as to transmission, for, inconsistently enough, the French savant, while contending that the similarities between the Fabliaux and certain Indian folk-tales were entirely casual, rebukes Mr. Lang, as Mr. Lang himself points out, for being a casualist. I would, however, point out that this error of mine had no misleading effect; for I was simply quoting M. Bédier as one of those who regarded Mr. Lang as a casualist. That point was merely strengthened when it is shown that he even rebukes his master for his casualism.

Then with regard to Mr. Farrer, whom I had mentioned as having pointed to the savage element in folk-tales, as I thought, previously to Mr. Lang, though I was far from suggesting that Mr. Lang owed anything to Mr. Farrer in this regard. In his reply, our late President referred me to an article he had written so long ago as May 1873 in The Fortnightly Review in which he had laid stress upon this side of folk-lore research. It is doubtless a grievous sin to confess that I had never read this article of