Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/29

 Rh end. To the outsider it may appear that we are studying the jetsam and flotsam, the wreckage of civilisation, things which some boast to have shaken off and relegated to an obscure corner of indifference or contempt, things ridiculed with an air of superciliousness as objects unfit for the more refined taste of our generation and mere waste. But this very study of the waste is, if anything, the most modern of modern achievements. Nothing is indifferent, nothing is unimportant, and appearances deceive. Let me take one single example which has always fascinated me since I have begun to study it more closely. What apparently is more repugnant to the sight and smell and less promising than the black, grimy, sticky tar flowing away from the distillation of coal. It is "waste," or it was "waste" until its unsuspected and marvellous properties were discovered. Take one drop of that tar, spread it over a wide surface, and it will reveal to us a wealth of colour rivalling all the beauties and hues of the rainbow. Is it too much to say that the coal, which is nothing but a kind of temporary transformation of the forests of old, has retained under its black cover all the beauty of the forests, of their flowers and of their bloom, and now, when it has passed through the fire retort, and has been condensed in the black tar, the colours of ancient times come again to light? This is absolutely typical of Folklore and of our Society.

We are collecting these tales and superstitions, these customs and habits, entombed in the minds of the vast masses, and, considered as black coal, we subject them to the fiery process of scientific investigation, and we are crystallising out of that mass again the primary elements of those poetical flowers and of that ancient knowledge which has permeated the world, and the fragrance of which is keeping the human soul fresh whenever it is wafted upon it. That is what our Folk-Lore Society is anxious to do, and it looks for the ready