Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/174

 146 Ethnological Data in Folklore.

for racial discrimination in folklore, I was guided by observa- tion of man in the civilised stage. We belong to this stage, and we can check our surmises concerning it by the study of facts which are still living, whereas we can only recover the dead or decaying psychology which animates folklore by the free exercise of hypotheses which are necessarily highly speculative. It seems to me more scientific to reason from that we know, and can observe, to that which we can only surmise than to adopt the opposite method. I turn to the English race as we know it, a race which has assumed its characteristic features, its distinctive indi- viduality, since man passed out of the folklore and entered into the civilised stage. Our race has elaborated neither a philosophy nor an artistic presentment of life ; it has elaborated a strongly defined system of institutions, rooted doubtless in Teutonic custom of immemorial age, but developed as by no other Teutonic people ; it has likewise brought forth a great poetic interpretation of life and nature, rooted, it may be, in the archaic fancy of Celts and Teutons, influenced, undoubtedly, by Classic, Oriental, and neo-Latin art, yet in its outcome neither Celtic nor Teutonic, neither Hellenic nor Hebrew, neither French nor Italian, but specifically and distinctively English. And if we would seek the quintessential idiosyncrasy of the Englishman, that which constitutes him a type of mankind apart and distinct, it is, so I hold, to his poesy and not to his institutions that we must turn.

The Greek of 1000 B.C. shared, practically, with many other groups of men speaking kindred Aryan tongues, a body of civil and religious institutions. He likewise pos- sessed in the Homeric poems an imaginative rendering of the life led by the race, of its animating ideals and concep- tions. In the course of ages his civil institutions changed ; his mythology became unintelligible or absurd to him ; his attitude towards the practical and speculative aspects of life varied to the utmost possibility of variation. But the