petent ethnologists as Franz Boas, Elsie Clews Parsons, and others.
Simply because we are considering Negro folk lore, we do not say that it is superior to other folk material, nor even that it is as great as any other folk literature; but we do insist that all folk material, in order to be appraised justly, must be read and considered in the light of those values which go to make up great folk literature. Briefly stated, these values are:
1. Lack of the self-conscious element found in ordinary literature.
2. Nearness to nature.
3. Universal appeal.
Search the body of Negro folk literature and you will find these characteristics dominant. To the African, as one writer puts it, “All nature is alive, anthropomorphized as it were, replete with intelligences; the whispering, tinkling, hissing, booming, muttering, zooming around him are full of mysterious hints and suggestions.” Out of this primitive intimacy of the mind with nature come those naïve personifications of the rabbits, foxes and wolves, terrapins and turtles, buzzards and eagles which make the animal lore of the world. Many tales ascribed to lands far away find parallels in Negro stories bearing indubitable traces of African origin; opening out into the great question of common or separate origin. Fundamentally, as Lang points out, they prove the common ancestry of man, both with regard to his mental and cultural inheritance. Whichever way the question is solved, the physical contacts of common origins or the psychological similarities of common capacity and endowment, it is essentially the same fundamental point in the end—human kinship and universality. Yet there is much that is distinctively African in animal lore, and of a quality not usually conceded. The African proverb, in its terseness and pith, the shrewd moralisms of the fables, the peculiar whimsicality and turn to the imagination in many of the tales, are notably outstanding. Clive Bell to the contrary, it is by their intelligence, their profound and abstract underlying conceptions, that they possess a peculiar touch and originality that
