Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/35

 Presidential Address. 23

of the generation, degeneration, and regeneration of culture mostly remains to be written. We hear a great deal in these days about culture-contact as it operates amongst savages. But has anyone yet been at pains to describe the effects on the folk at home of culture-contact as between class and class, — to tell us, for instance, exactly how board- school education is assimilated by the mind of the peasant.'* When the folklorist has done this for us, we shall then have some chance of appreciating what culture-contact among savages means from the inside. So long as we examine such a process merely from the outside, as Dr. Rivers apparently would have us do, for all our stir we shall mainly be marking time.

Let me show by means of an example how the stud\- of the psychology of transformism ought to begin at home. We have folk-dances, folk-songs, and folk-dramas with us still ; whether in a state of survival or revival, it hardly matters for my argument. The sympathetic study "of these has of late made considerable progress among us, more especially after educated people had made the discovery that a method of acquiring insight into their nature was actually to take a hand in them, — to dance, sing, or act them as the case might be. I would not go so far as to say that such a method will enable us, if we are educated, not to say sophisticated, persons, to recover the full feel of the thing as it is for the relatively simple-minded peasant. At the risk of paradox, however, I would venture to suggest that, for psychological purposes, this is the right wa}' to begin. One should first give oneself the benefit of the experience so far as it can be reconstituted with the help of the traditional actions and words ; and then may proceed to the observation of the peasant's behaviour in the like case, so as to infer as best one can how allowance is to be made for the necessary differences in the accompanying frame of mind. It is perhaps rather late in the day for us to overtake the ceremonial mood, even when aided by the