Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/420

It is interesting to pass from Prof. Zimmer to Prof. Rhys. No two scholars could be well more unlike in certain respects; both are equally penetrating and suggestive, in both, not infrequently, their very ingenuity makes them bad guides for the layman. The German, as he himself says, has a horror of the mazy whirlings of comparative mythology; no one threads these mazes with greater boldness or delight than the Welshman. The German is anxious to place every text, and every line of every text, and every word of every line, in its precise historical environment; it is often impossible to glean from the Welshman any opinion concerning the origin and date of composition of the text upon which he relies. It cannot be denied that by the historical method alone can we ultimately hope to gain a clear and orderly view of Celtic mythic literature as a whole, but when we have reached that view it will be found, I believe, that Prof Rhys has often penetrated to the heart of the subject by a process that looks like guess-work, chiefly because the results only, and not the steps, are exhibited to us. In the Oxford professor's Arthurian Studies the defects of his method are more apparent than in any other of his works. In his Hibbert Lectures he relied largely upon the early Irish sagas and upon the non-Arthurian Mabinogion, which bring their archaic credentials, so to say, with them; in the present volume he uses the Arthurian Welsh tales, the sixth-thirteenth century Welsh poetry, and the Welsh triadic literature. Discussion is still rife respecting the origin and nature of these three groups of texts; the least, it would seem, we had a right to expect from perhaps the only man who can give a sound guess at what much of the early Welsh poetry means, is that he should state a working theory respecting this and the other literature upon which he bases his arguments. As if to complete the reader's dissatisfaction, he is told in the preface that "many things would have been handled differently had Prof Zimmer's studies appeared earlier". What things? Possibly some of the points