Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/246

210 direction, anthropology was almost exclusively in the hands of men originally trained in the study of natural sciences, and this determined the standpoint from which the phenomena of anthropology were viewed. Exactness of description on the one hand, the establishment of broad evolutionary principles on the other, were the guiding thoughts of students. The history of culture as a historical and truly psychological phenomenon was a thought that remained to be developed.

"Mr. Newell's interests were aroused from entirely different points of view. His studies in the histories of literature and folklore enabled him to perceive at a glance the historical elements in primitive culture, more particularly in the field of primitive lore and art, and to see that the gulf between the mental life of primitive man and civilized man, or between the mental life of races, that many students had constructed, had no existence in reality. His own artistic temper which permitted him to feel with the poet, and his human sympathy which led him to follow up the gradual spread of artistic productions among the people, together with his fund of historic knowledge, enabled him to see things that had been hidden from the eyes of anthropologists.

"To understand him aright, we must also not forget the broad humanitarian basis of his scientific interests. If it had been only the knowledge of remarkable forms of beliefs of foreign races, he might have been an interested spectator, but he would hardly have thrown as much energy into the work of inspiring students with the necessity of saving the vanishing remains of such beliefs, and of recording what still exists in full vigour. The strongest appeal to his sympathies lay in the light shed upon the fundamental values of culture by a close study of beliefs, customs, tales, and arts, of foreign races; in the ability given by this study of appreciating the strength and weaknesses of our own culture, and in its tendency to correct the overbearing self-sufficiency of modern civilization.

"He never formulated his views in writing; but in animated discussions the analogies between primitive lore and that of Europe, the need of applying well-grounded principles developed in literary research, the necessity of viewing many expressions of primitive thought as the artistic or philosophic expression