Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/73

Rh Orient and the other in the Fabliaux, he distinguishes between the general idea of the story and the special accessories of it. The former he symbolises by ω, the latter by the letters of the Roman alphabet. He contends that similarity in the general idea does not prove derivation; you can only prove this by identity in some of the minor details. Anybody can hit upon a general idea, he contends, and we need not, therefore, be surprised to find them casually produced all over the world. In other words, as regards general ideas, M. Bédier is quite the casualist, as I ventured to call him, somewhat to his surprise. The most improbable concatenation of events, according to M. Bédier, may occur casually and independently to story-tellers in India and in France in their general outlines. Unless you can show that they agree also in minute detail, you cannot prove their interdependence. If you have two stories which may be symbolised by ω+a+b+c+d, and ω+e+f+g+h, no matter how improbable or complicated ω may be, it has occurred independently to two different minds, because a+b+c+d are not identical with e+f+g+h.

I cannot refrain from expressing my admiration at the ingenious use made of this method of M. Bédier in order to establish his position. He takes all that is common to an Indian and a French story, calls that ω; and naturally what remains differs, and by his method proves his point. While seemingly rigid, nothing can be more elastic than his method. If two accessory details are common to the two stories, what more easy than to contend they are not mere accessories but necessary parts of the general idea? On one occasion (p. 457), M. Bédier naïvely confesses that he could have, if he liked, introduced a detail into his general idea. His ω is a fluid subjective selection, not a rigid objective measure.

But quite apart from the arbitrary character of his test, one may traverse its validity as applied to folklore. It is obviously derived from considerations current in literary criticism, as might have been expected from M. Bédier's training. His method is exactly the process by which literary critics prove the derivation of one species of MSS. from an archetype, or affiliate a translation in one language to its original in another. Minute and unimportant accessories, e.g., the form of a proper name, are just the tests in such cases. But with oral tradition, with transmission in folklore, I would exactly reverse the process and adopt M. Bedier'sBédier's [sic] test as a proof of such transmission.