Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/48

34 have climbed, the landmarks of the successive stages through which we have passed, to reach our present level, a level to which others have yet to ascend.

The preference of savage to European folklore has also, as it seems to me, affected the progress of anthropology among classical students. The classical scholar, standing amazed before the spectacle of a civilization such as in some respects has never since been equalled, recoils from a comparison between the philosophers, the poets, the legislators, the empire-builders, to whom he looks up with veneration, and the half-naked savages of Australia or New Guinea. But to compare their actions with such "last infirmities of noble minds" as Lord Bacon "salving the weapon and not the wound," or Dr. Johnson touching every post as he passed, might not seem to them so bizarre and irreverent.

Yet what body, what organization in England, outside our own, takes more than a passing cognizance of such matters? Much is being done in the way of direct study of the rudimentary culture of the lower races, little in the study of the folk-learning of the more advanced. Yet the latter, as I have tried to show, is needful in the best interests of the former.

And herein lies the answer to the question with which I set out:—How can the Folk-Lore Society justify its continued existence? What is now its proper sphere. This field of labour is ours to go in and occupy. No one disputes it with us. Let us enter in and possess it.

Hitherto we have generalized, have taken up work now in this direction and now in that. "The pages of Folk-Lore" as one of the Council remarked the other day, "are strewn with the débris of abandoned projects." This is inevitable in the vague and formless period of beginnings. Experiments must be tried, and attempts be made, now in this direction, now in that. Some will prove failures; some, too successful, will be taken up by others better equipped