Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/71



has attempted an impossible task and done it very well, though with somewhat less of impartiality than could have been wished. He has attempted to prove the negative of the proposition that the Fabliaux are mainly derived from oriental sources. He seems to think that if he has proved this he has given a fatal blow to the theory which derived some of the popular tales of Europe from the Indian Peninsula. For myself, I do not see the sequitur. The Fabliaux might be every one autochthonous products from North France, and yet that would not affect the question whether a certain number of European fairy tales are importations from India. But he has still further narrowed his problem by discussing only the influence of definite literary collections of tales derived from India on the Fabliaux. I do not know against whom he is protesting in this connection. He speaks in his preface apologetically of the opposition he has ventured upon against the opinion of his master, Monsieur Gaston Paris, but he has not even done him the honour of considering his position. Monsieur Paris, as early as 1888, in his admirable Littérature francaise au moyen âge, § 73, has put in a single sentence the substance of that part of Monsieur Bédier's book which deals with the origin of the Fabliaux. "Mais les Fabliaux sont, sauf exception, étrangers à ces grands recueils traduits intégralement d'une langue dans une autre; ils proviennent de la transmission orale et non des livres." Monsieur Bédier might have done his master at least the compliment of discussing the question of this oral transmission.

His book, so far as it is effective, applies only to those who