Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/229

Rh natives. The East Jutlander is more prosperous, and more taken up with his material welfare, better educated, but at the same time more superficial in character than his western neighbour. His feelings are not very sensitive, his will is somewhat weak, and his personality is seldom a strongly-marked one. Society and its amusements, politics and their excitement, are the spheres in which he finds himself most at home. In short, the East Jutlander is the product of a fairly prosperous agricultural district. The western side of the peninsula, with its great lonely moors and its long sandy beaches, has produced a very different stamp of people. The West Jutlander has altogether a deeper character, accompanied by a more melancholy and meditative turn of mind. If he has troubles, he does not go to his neighbour (supposing he has one within a mile or two) and try to forget them in conversation or card-playing; he rather sits at home and broods over them. He has more of an internal world than his eastern neighbour. The creations of fancy are more real to him, in the same way as they are more real to children; and he is thus far more adapted for preserving and handing on the complex body of traditions, beliefs, and observances that we sum up under the name of folklore. This same bent of character, however, has also made him more susceptible to religious influences, and the latter tendency is a natural enemy of the former.

"Some people have been surprised," says Kristensen, "that the 'Inner Mission' made such progress in the west of Jutland; but the explanation of this lies in the distinction I have just drawn. Where there are now many pietists there were formerly many who preserved our folklore, and especially our ballads; and nothing in our own time has done so much injury to these as the religious revival, just because it appeals to similar mental interests. I look with no favourable eye on this tendency, because it distorts or destroys what I regard as the most sacred possession of our people, and tramples with iron heel on what ought to be loved and fostered."