Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/37

 Presidential Address. 25

that movement, that forward thrust, in the cultural history of the aborigines which the merely book-learned are so apt to miss altogether ? There is no greater fallacy than to regard this or any other type of savagery as something that, having long ceased to grow, has somehow persisted as a fossil. Anyone who brings experience gained in the field of folklore to bear on the dances, songs, and dramas of Australia will find that, despite the difference in externals, the inward process of transformism is much the same. We recognise a similar alternation and rivalry between the religious and aesthetic interests, between deference to tradi- tion and the spirit of improvisation, between form that tolerates a degenerated matter and matter calling for a renovated form. The sacred dance hardly distinguishable in its modes from the profane corrobborree, the inspired inventor of variations on a traditional theme, the words that keep their place though turned to nonsense, the assimi- lation of one type of ceremony by another so that, for instance, echoes of totemic solemnities find their way into the ritual of initiation, — all these manifestations of the spirit of eternal change have their parallels in our own folklore, and by its aid may be referred to their ultimate springs and sources, which lie within the human mind.

"I shall perhaps be told that modern anthropology is perfectly aware that it is necessary to construe such a culture as that of native Australia as instinct with compli- cated movement rather than as if it were rigid and all of a piece ; but that this end is only to be achieved by treating Australian culture as a separate ethnological deposit, and dividing up this deposit into strata, the order of which will tell us how development proceeded. Now I am far from denying that such a method would be helpful if the facts proved sufficiently amenable thereto. I have my doubts, however, if it is likely to prove a success in regard to Australia, when so many practical difficulties are seen to impede its fruitful application nearer home. For what has