Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/121

 That, however, is not the opinion of the dominant school of folk-talists (it is not a worse word than folk-lorist) in this country. As you know, both the genial President of our Congress, and the erudite Chairman of our Section, are inclined to think that this coming together of the same incidents, in the same order, and making the same plot, just chances to be so; if it were, there is nothing more to say, and there is no science of the folk-tale. We others have, at any rate, the fun of guessing where the tale first arose, and the pleasure of inventing hypotheses more or less ingenious as to how the stories spread. Our friendly opponents have to seek in the folk-tale an interest quite other than the folktale had herself. They love her, so to speak, for her money, the anthropologist coin which she may be made to yield if pressed close enough. Those who think with me love the fairy-tale for her own sake.

It must be remembered, besides, that the problem of folk-tale diffusion cannot be regarded as isolated. There are several other products of the folk-fancy that show the same similarity in widely-parted regions, and in their case the possibility of independent origin is scarcely to be thought of as a possible solution. Thus recent research on the ballad-literature of Europe, which presents exactly the same phenomena as European folk-tales, is tending in the direction of postulating a single centre of dispersion, the north of France, for the whole literature: that is, at any rate, the opinion of such authorities as Count Nigra and M. Gaston Paris. Still more remarkable results of the same nature have been arrived at with regard to the game-rhymes of European children. Here we have a double criterion; we have the same fantastic games accompanied by precisely similar nursery-rhymes, occurring in such distant quarters as England and Catalonia. Thus, Mr. W. W. Newell reckons that of thirty-eight Catalonian games described in Maspons' well-known book, no less than twenty-five exist in England, identical as to the games themselves, similar with regard to the accompanying rhymes. It is impossible that such identity should occur casually by the independent invention of both games and rhymes in England and Spain respectively. And if this is the case with such peculiar products as game-rhymes, why should it be necessary to assume that the resemblances in folk-tales occur casually?