Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/122

 86 The Casual Theory of our worthy opponents assumes the chance medley of clashing incidents coming together, and forming everywhere the same plot. Mr. Lang and Mr. Hartland take a plot of a European folk-tale, with five or six incidents, A, B, C, D, and E, and point out that incident A is found in Samoa, incident B in Peru, incident C in China, and so on; and think they have proved that the whole series is universally human, and has chanced to have come together in that particular order in all the places where it is nowadays to be found. Mr. Lang, as an Oxford man, cannot be expected to know anything about the doctrine of probabilities, and that the chances against such an order of incidents occurring twice casually are greater than the odds of my bowling out Dr. Grace first ball. Besides which, the order is no casual one. In a good fairy-tale we find incident knit to each in a way to show that there has been an artistic, very often a poetic, spirit at play in the building up the plot.

There is my last quarrel with the casualists like Mr. Lang and Mr. Hartland. Mr. Hartland one can forgive, for he is a lawyer; but that Mr. Lang, of all persons, should fail to feel that many folk-tales are masterpieces of constructive literary art, surprises me, I must confess. Is it for nothing that the order of incidents that go to make Cinderella have entranced some 300 millions of minds for as long probably as we can trace? The fairy-tales have, indeed, the largest circulation of any conservative tale in the world, and they do not owe that distinction to a mere chance. Each of the well-known ones is a gem of literary art. Shall we despise them because they are short? We place the Greek coin or gem on the same level as the Greek statue or pediment. Need we think nothing of them because their authorship cannot be traced? Homer is but a nominis umbra, most of the Hebrew scriptures are anonymous, the Scotch ballads lack initials at the end. But as we feel that this and these and those were in each case the outcome of one creative outburst, so those little gems of romantic narration known and endeared to us as "fairy tales" were invented once and for all time from the heart and brain of a true literary artist. To seek, if not to find, the native country of that benefactor of his race is the true problem of Diffusion.