THE FOLK-LORE OF THE COUNTY COURT.
“To those athirst the whole world seems
A spring of water in their dreams.”
From the Arabic.
Being snowed up in a library, well stocked with modern scientific folk-lore, I began a serious study of the subject. I started with enthusiasm. I saw myself propounding a new theory for every variant text, and pictured myself triumphantly riding through the otherworld on the Ossianic cycle. After a few days of it, however, I found that, wonderful as the science was, it was not made for me. I ran into a thick German fog, I got mixed up with sagzug and märchen, I failed to appreciate the true differences between those holy men, Zimmer and Rohde, and I wandered aimlessly among parallels and analogues of varying age and provenance. When I emerged from the German fog I found myself staggering about a bleak Irish moor in company with a fellow named Cormac—or was it Finn? We were studying the Dinnshenchas, or playing with an Agallamh or looking for a Leprechaun. It was worse than political economy, or logic, or the lost tribes. The fiscal problem is merriment compared to folk-lore. I finished my holiday with Trollope and have put folk-lore on my index expurgatorius.
One thing, however, haunts me still. I seem to have escaped from the learned confusions of this dismal science with a belief that the world is certainly not progressing. They took a lot of trouble at school to persuade me that the world kept going round. Since I have dipped into folk-lore I find this to be only part of the truth. The fact seems to be that the world does nothing else but go round and round and round, reiterating its old ideas in a very tiresome way indeed. The things we do and gossip and preach about to-day are much the same as the things they worried over in the ages of caves and mammoths and flint implements. I feel sorry that I cannot explore folk-lore further, for there are evidently great possibilities in it. But folk-lore is like collecting stamps, or keeping gold-fish or guinea-pigs. It is a “fancy,” and if you don’t fancy it you cannot be of the “fancy.” The slang of the science is too difficult for most of us, and if you cannot master the technical terms of a game, how can you hope to play it? Even football would be dull if you had no elementary conception of “off-side,” and it is easier to get “off-side” at folk-lore than it is at football. Then these scientists are so solemn. Euclid has his pictures and occasionally admits that things are absurd; but the smiles of folk-lore are in the otherworld, and even their ghosts do not appear to the latter-day student.
I should never have troubled further about folk-lore had not I met one of its greatest professors. To him I unburdened myself and told my trouble. “Folk-lore books,” he explained, “are not made to read. They are written to amuse the writer. You write about folk-lore—then you will begin to enjoy it.” I remembered that Lord Foppington held similar views when he said: “To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one’s self with the forced product of another man’s brain. Now, I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.” An idea held in common by a peer and a professor must be precious indeed.
I modestly murmured that I knew nothing about folk-lore. To which the Professor encouragingly remarked that I should “approach the subject with an open mind.” “There is one royal road to success,” he said, as we parted, “have a theory of your own, and whatever happens, stick to it.”