Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/393

Rh de ses discussions sur la théorie du totémisme en général, qui acquerront le plus vite une valeur uniquement historique. Il en reste encore assez d'autres qui conserveront une portée durable, assez au point qu'on s'étonne qu'en une vie en somme courte, un même homme ait pu accumuler tant de faits sans doute, mais aussi exprimer tant de sentiments, d'images, et d'idées et sous autant de formes, depuis la vraie sécheresse scientifique, jusqu'à la polémique la plus vive et jusqu'à la poésie la plus pure.

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The death of Andrew Lang removes one who has played a great part in the recent history of Anthropology and Folklore. No one has done more than he to stimulate general interest in these subjects. His receptiveness for new ideas and his wonderful power of expounding them in a style which was all his own would have been sufficient to give him a prominent place in our science, even if he had done nothing else. We shall all miss his graphic and humorous descriptions of savage and barbarous customs, descriptions in which his insight often laid bare aspects of the subject which were not immediately obvious.

Andrew Lang did much more, however, than merely describe and popularise the work of others; he rendered great services in the regions of constructive thought and of criticism. One of his accomplishments is now so far in the past that we are able to estimate its value with some confidence. He was one of the first to recognise the wrong direction which was being given to the study of human culture by the too exclusive use of philology as a key to its mysteries. At the same time he did much to direct students into the path which since then has been so widely followed, a path illuminated by the central conception of the growth of human institutions out of a fundamental similarity of the human mind throughout the world. How far the path on which Andrew Lang thus did so much to set our footsteps in Myth, Ritual, and Religion will lead us to our goal it is too early to say, but there can be little doubt that it lies more nearly in the right direction than that which was being followed by the philological school.