William Alexander Clouston , folklorist: introduction and bibliography

Folklore, Dec, 2004 by Gareth Whittaker

This was clearly Clouston's approach throughout his writings--to display parallels, in extended quotations or summaries, and to let the readers draw whatever conclusions they felt were warranted. In this way he brought together a virtually unparalleled corpus of analogues and story and motif comparisons in a manner that was at once both scholarly and entertaining. [4] His books, therefore, are relatively theory-free and this is true also of his minor writings presented in the bibliography that follows this article. I say relatively theory-free because his books and notes, where they were not built around Eastern works such as The Bakhtyar Nama (1883), The Book of Sindibad (1884), and the Arabian Nights (1886, 1887), were only selections, and therefore, as Christine Goldberg has pointed out (Goldberg 2002, X), his choice of examples, due to his wide knowledge of Eastern literature, could be said to have been biased in favour of stories that he knew had Eastern, rather than Western, origins. This might also have given the impression, wrongly or rightly, that all European folktales were descended from Eastern originals, if only because so many of those that he discussed were indeed so derived.

Criticism of Clouston's methods was present in his own day and continued into the second half of the last century. Joseph Jacobs stated:

   At first sight it seems to argue a wide spread for a story to see it
   quoted from "Anvari-Suhaili," "Hitopadesa," "Directorium vite
   humane," "Panchatantra," "Exemplario," "Stephanite I Ichnelate," ...
   and so on. Mr. Clouston especially is fond of ringing these changes
   (Popular Tales, pass.) ... All these are but one book, and ... they
   cannot be counted over and over again as proving the popularity of
   each story (Jacobs 1888, xxxv). [5]

But it is absurd to suggest that Clouston did not know the relations between these books (Clouston 1887, vol. 1, 8, 57 and 263; 1887, vol. 2, 39 and 181-3; 2002, li, lxxx, 115, 288 and 372-3), and there is no evidence that he tried to deceive. More recently, Francis Lee Utley, while referring to Popular Tales and Fictions as a pioneer study of tales, talked about Clouston's "folkloristic sins," his "confusion of tale types and motifs," and his "casual methods." The essence of his criticisms seems to be that Clouston "slip(s) from one tale type to another on the wings of a single motif," and that he is not "careful, when pleading genetic relationship between two widely separated parallels, to trace complexes of motifs rather than single motifs, however central they may be to the main story" (Utley 1964, 605; 1976, 170; 1978, 12).

These charges would have more relevance if Clouston had in fact made large genetic claims for the single incident parallels he pointed to, rather than being content to leave that to his readers; or if he was not very much aware, as were most of the "Great Team," long before the type and motif distinctions had been articulated, of what Utley calls "the basic axiom of international folktale science." This, he says, is the proposition "that the tale can be shown to have been diffused and not independently created, because it is complex and coherent enough to make independent origins unlikely" (Utley 1964, 605). Indeed, on the rare occasions when Clouston gestures toward a conclusion based on his parallels, it is to express surprise that anyone might claim that stories with so many striking resemblances were independently conceived. For instance, in a review of E. S. Hartland's The Science of Fairy Tales he stated: