The Great Team of English Folklorists

IN A PERIOD ROUGHLY BOUNDED by 1870 and I9IO, England witnessed a vigorous activity in folklore. Within these years the first folklore society in the world was formed; the first folklore journal was issued, and filled with brilliant articles; collectors' handbooks were compiled, and systematic county collections were undertaken; folk materials hidden in magazine files, chapbooks, and similar antiquarian sources were located and reprinted; an International Folklore Congress was held at London in I891, dominated by the English scholars; and a steady outpour of theoretical and controversial treatises wrestled with the problems of the new science. Yet in spite of these accomplishments, we hear little today about the English school. The continental folklorists, from the Germans to the Finns, and the contemporary Irish collectors, chiefly receive our deference. This is all the more surprising since the work of the English group alone offers no language barrier, since American folklore derives in good part from Anglo-Saxon elements, and since in any language the English achievement would merit ungrudging praise. Several reasons may explain this neglect. Since none of the leading folklorists had university affiliations, no opportunity arose for them to offer courses in folklore and train students to carry on their work. Today the Victorian gentleman of leisure and humanistic interests is a disappearing English type, as a result of two world wars. In the United States the emphasis on folk song, thanks to the fieldwork of Cecil Sharp and the scholarship of Child, have obscured the studies in folk narrative. The English influence has been damaged by disparagements of the doctrine of survivals and its technique of reasoning by analogies between peasants and savages. But the English school should not be identified solely with a now discredited hypothesis, nor should their attachment to that hypothesis be overstressed. In discussing the science of folklore, Hartland pointedly says, decline to be limited to survivals, or to archaic beliefs and customs . . . I contend that Tradition is always being created anew, and that traditions of modern origin wherever found are as much within our province as ancient ones.' And he cites the attraction of floating tales to modern personalities like Mary Queen of Scots and Oliver Cromwell

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• William Alexander Clouston (1843–96), folklorist

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