Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/141

Rh Mr. Lang as a casualist pure and simple. We judged him, I imagine, by his acts. Finding him, in his specific treatment of definite tales, paralleling each incident of the tale with a hodge-podge of more or less similar incidents torn from their context in other tales, we could not but regard him as explaining these incidents as he had in so many cases admirably explained isolated customs and myths. Even when, in the case of Puss in Boots, Mr. Lang, as he now informs us, suggested a definite origin for the tale in Arabia, we considered this as only his fun. I, for one, thought he was merely attempting to reduce the theory of transmission to an absurdity. Such are the rewards of writing wittily.

Nor am I sure that Mr. Lang is yet disabused as to the portée of his procedure. He says: “I do believe that many details of story have been, or may have been, independently invented.” Plots, he now allows, if similar, must have been transmitted, but details he still thinks may have been independently invented. Does he mean that similar details in similar plots have been independently invented? I cannot imagine Mr. Lang would hold such a curious position; for it is just the similarity of details which renders it almost impossible that Cinderella, e.g., can have been independently invented in two different places with the mutilated foot incident.

Such a remark, however, as that of Mr. Lang’s, shows clearly to my mind that he has not thought out the details of the problem of diffusion; he has not, as the Germans say, “made earnest with it”, and it was there that my opportunity came in. Non omnes omnia possumus. And Mr. Lang must be contented with having solved only two out of the three main problems of folk-lore research. And here, if the time had arrived when I could, like Mr. Lang, give an autobiography of my interest in the folk-tale, I should have to express my gratitude to Mr. Lang for having attracted me, as he has attracted almost all the readers of the English-speaking world, to an interest in this subject