Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/55

 Rh In the further observations I propose to make upon the dissemination theory, I shall try to trench as little as possible on the papers we hope to listen to, but perhaps it will be unavoidable to anticipate in some degree the course of the discussion. My apology must be that this address was written in fact before I saw the programme of the session, and my engagements, unfortunately, did not permit of my recasting it afterwards.

The first observation to be made upon the dissemination theory is obviously that, even supposing the contention that a story is only invented once be true, to track any story to its place of origin must be a matter of extreme difficulty, because in a very large number of cases, if not in the vast majority, the diffusion must have taken place in times so remote, or in circumstances of such barbarism, that no trustworthy record of the transmission was possible. Of course, I do not forget that, on the one hand, modern criticism has resources which have been the means of achieving splendid and unexpected results in dealing with internal evidence, and, on the other hand, external evidence of transmission is sometimes available, as in the case of many of the stories of The Seven Wise Masters, whose genealogy we can trace from book to book and from land to land.

But stories transmitted from book to book are no longer traditional, and therefore they are out of our range. True, they may descend again from literature into tradition; and when it is shown that this has happened, the literary links in the pedigree become once more of interest to us. Such descent, however, like oral transmission, is only possible where a story finds in the culture of the "folk" an environment favourable to its preservation and propagation. The well-known Maori story of The Children of Heaven and Earth could never become a folk-tale among our English peasantry. There is nothing in their state of civilisation which responds to the ideas it contains; and, consequently, there is no soil in which it could take root. If, then, a wandering story, thus finding an appropriate soil and climate, settle down and flourish, it follows that the ideas it expresses correspond to those current among the "folk" of its new home. Does it speak of magic? The thought must be already familiar, or it will find no acceptance by a fresh audience. If, though the thought be familiar, the details of the processes are strange, these will be changed into such as are