He builds up a
detailed and careful argument, for which I must refer readers to his
book, to prove that the Scottish Highlands and Ireland have received
their folk-lore both from "Aryan and Non-Aryan sources," and that in the
Highlands there is more non-Aryan influence and more non-Aryan blood
than in Ireland. He argues that nothing is more improbable than that all
folk-tales are Aryan, as has sometimes been supposed, and sums up as
follows:--
"They bear the stamp of the genius of more than one race. The pure and
placid but often cold imagination of the Aryan has been at work on some.
In others we trace the more picturesque fancy, the fierceness and
sensuality, the greater sense of artistic elegance belonging to races
whom the Aryan, in spite of his occasional faults of hardness and
coarseness, has, on the whole, left behind him. But as the greatest
results in the realm of the highest art have always been achieved in the
case of certain blends of Aryan with other blood, I should hardly deem
it extravagant if it were asserted that in the humbler regions of the
folk-tale we might trace the working of the same law. The process which
has gone on may in part have been as follows:--Every race which has
acquired very definite characteristics must have been for a long time
isolated. The Aryans during their period of isolation probably developed
many of their folk-germs into their larger myths, owing to the greater
constructiveness of their imagination, and thus, in a way, they used up
part of their material.
Pages:
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562