Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/315

 Correspondence. 297

chosen for exposure be some point of action or grouping of characters ; photographs of detail can be taken afterwards. In the absence of a camera, I have known a quick-sketching pencil, with notes for subsequent completion of the picture or pictures, to achieve an excellent pictorial record.

T. Fairman Ordish. H.M. Patent Office,

Southampton Buildings, London.

The Collection of Folklore.

{Supra, p. 226.)

I cannot help expressing my surprise at the little attention which is paid to the collection of the folklore of our own country. It appears to be assumed by everybody that there is nothing to collect. Mr. Craigie writes to that effect in his admirable paper on the Danish collector, Kristensen.^ My experience is entirely opposed to this view. It is not the want of material, but the want of collectors that we have to contend with. It is so much easier, and so much pleasanter, to theorise than to collect ! I felt at Castleton last summer that I was merely on the fringe of a great subject, and that with more time and opportunities I might have done much. I beheve that ballads, even in a fragmentary form, are rare. Folktales are much commoner, but as a rule very much worn down. That is probably owing to the spread of popular education, and to the diffusion of cheap newspapers. But \vhen you come to the customs and beliefs which form the stock-in- trade, as it were, of the collector, the material is yet abundant. For instance, there is a great variety of Christmas mumming- customs which nobody has ever attended to.~ I am trying to do something in the way of collecting them myself, but I feel that it is a big undertaking for one man. To do it as it ought to be done, I should have to go into a hundred villages, and write down all that the mummers do and say. But this kind of work, even when imperfect, seems to me to be more useful, and more likely

' Folk- Lore, ix., 194. ^ [But see preceding Letter. — Ed.]