Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/66

 56 long step in advance; and nine or ten years' subsequent experience has taken us beyond even that. Some people are said to prefer being in a minority. If there are such people, I am not one of them. Yet I look back with satisfaction on a vote which I gave in the Council when the initial chapter of the Handbook was under discussion, and I found myself alone, or almost alone, in objecting to the definition of folklore as there proposed, namely: "The comparison and identification of the survivals of archaic beliefs, customs, and traditions in modern ages." The Handbook itself, when published, justified, as I venture to think, my criticism and my vote, for the logical implications of the definition were silently set aside in the manner of treatment. I do not recall this from any personal reason, but as an illustration of the growth, the inevitable growth, of our conception of folklore. I say "the inevitable growth," because it was inevitable that, when folklore came to be studied scientifically by a number of students, it would be found impossible to confine the view primarily to the fragmentary relics of earlier stages of culture cropping out here and there in the midst of modern European civilisation, and to use the larger, more varied, and still living products of savagery and barbarism all over the rest of the world as mere illustrations to explain them. We were bound to take a wider view, for the illustrations themselves required to be explained. We were bound to begin at the other end by a careful study of savage life and custom as a whole. Thus only was it possible to understand the folklore of Europe; thus only could we see it in its true perspective, in its real relations with the immense and complex history of humanity.

But this was not simply to take a more scientific view of folklore; it was not simply to cast away the swaddling clothes that enwound the infancy of the study. In abandoning the last traces of dilettantism wherein all science begins, in attaining that insight which perceives that between