Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/529

 Revieivs. 505

to the requirements of the general reatier, the serious student may also derive no little benefit from so excellent a piece of honest work.

The order of exposition pursued by Mr. Miles is so far one with the natural order of discovery that he leads us on from the nearer and better-known facts relating to the Christian festival to those remoter and obscurer usages of the pre-Christian past implied in a thousand odd and apparently functionless accom- paniments of the Christian season. Perhaps the folklorist, in his eagerness to regale himself with his beloved 'survivals,' may be inclined to skip the previous course consisting of hymns and carols, church offices and decorations, nativity plays, and so forth. But this, as his wiser second thoughts will inform him, would be a very unscientific thing to do. The analogy so often drawn between a piece of antiquated custom and a fossil is quite beside the mark. The fossil is dead ; but an existing custom of however venerable an aspect is invariably alive, in the sense that the folk somehow find it worth while, to keep it up. Sound method, there- fore, enjoins that we start from current values. I'he spirit of the present, especially under conditions of low, that is to say lowly, culture, is instinct, because continuous, with the spirit of the immemorial past ; Christian and pagan, living faith and sur- vival, — ^just like so many other such disjunctives to be met with in anthropology, logical and prelogical, animistic and pre- animistic, or what not, — stand for abstractions, useful in their way, yet corresponding to no hard-and-fast division of things, but at most to a distinction of aspects which, though they may gain or lose in relative predominance, hold good to some extent of the march of human life from start to finish.

For instance, in the Island of Guernsey, the good people believe that at midnight on Christmas Eve the cattle kneel in their stalls; and, again, that in the wells the water turns into wine, — nay, into blood, the Sark folk solemnly declare. Those wlio have sought to pry into the mystery have had reason to regret their want of faith, having perished miserably.^ Are these beliefs to be classed as survivals, as relics of paganism? I think that

' Miss E. F. Carey, Gnenisey Folklore^ pp. 34-5 ;, cf. the presenl work, p. 234.