Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/64

 40 phase of its intellectual and artistic activity, most promptly and permanently affected by the new influence, that we can best discern its essential nature. The history of modern (i.e. post-classic) Europe affords an admirable illustration in the reception of Christian and antique culture by the barbarian races of the north and north-west. The differences in their attitude towards the new faith and the (to them) new learning are marked, and throw a most vivid light upon their collective psychology.

Again, we can control any deductions drawn from the study of folk literature by an examination of written conscious literature. We can trace the latter back for many centuries, and we find, to confine myself to England, France, and Germany, an extraordinary permanence of certain characteristics, an immediately recognisable national mode of conception and expression. The instrument of comparison between tradition and conscious literature is almost the first that offers itself in any quest after racial characteristics; and comparison is fruitful because in literature, even in its highest and most complex manifestations, there is a continuity, lacking in modern Europe at all events, in such departments of creative thought as religion, philosophy, or law.

Such are the reasons which seem to promise the analyst of British folklore a larger measure of success if he attack the imaginative rather than the practical side of folklore in the endeavour to isolate racial elements. On the other hand, there are certain conditions, failing the existence of which the most careful analysis is likely to prove fruitless. Chief among them is the existence of a vigorous professional literary craft, with the inevitable accompaniment of rigid literary conventions. Thus alone can the collective fancy and wit of the community assume definite shape and form, thus alone are they assured of permanency. Traditional literature, collective in its appeal to the sympathies of the community, reflecting, as it must, collective emotion and