Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/426

 384 originally with race. Racial conflict may, it is true, disassociate the two by imposing the speech of the conqueror upon the conquered, but even in this case language furnishes valuable clues to racial grouping, for, where a subject race accepts the speech of its conqueror, it nearly always distorts it. If every historic record in the world were destroyed, a student examining the speech and, let me add, part of the lore of the negro population in America, could reconstruct something not too remote from historic reality. Moreover, these elements of the lore of the folk are, in a very special sense, the products of racial self-consciousness; they cling to, and perpetuate, bodies of belief and legend which require for their formulation and conservation the existence of a definitely-constituted class, priestly or bardic. It is in times of racial stress and shock that these bodies of belief and legend,—the racial mythology, the racial heroic saga,—emerge sharply, and identify themselves most closely with the racial consciousness. It is in the ranks of the class professionally charged with the preservation of myth and saga that the feeling of a distinct national individuality finds its most extreme and durable expression. Where the political chief may consent to temporise and to conciliate, the high priest, the chief bard, the man who has formulated and who embodies the national spirit in its most intense form, is all for a fight to the finish, and for the smiting hip and thigh of the racial foe. These organised classes,—priesthoods, saga-preserving corporations, or what not,—are furthermore gifted with great power of vitality; they survive the social conditions which gave them birth, and they outlive the communities of which they formed a vital organ and drag on their existence, maimed, it is true, and often underground, amid political, economical, and social surroundings which have altered entirely; and to the last gasp they cherish fragments of the lore it was once their glorious function to express and magnify. Considerations such as these have always led me to seek for the remains of what is racially distinctive among the artistic rather than among the practical elements of the lore of the folk.

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