Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/43

 Presidential Address. 31

secondary importance to have determined the origins of the masonic rite, — how one feature was borrowed from this quarter, while another supervened from that. The soul of the process must be seized before such archaeological gossip can be made to exhibit the all-pervading movement of genuine history. In short, to be a folklorist worthy of the name you must first have undergone initiation amongst the folk, must have become one of them inwardly and in the spirit. Then the rest will be added unto you ; the continuity of the present with the past will be revealed ; you will be able to cast backward without losing the sense of the live process ; and, for all your antiquarianism, you will not become a bore.

There are other ways in which it might be shown that folklore can give to the anthropology of savages as much, or more, than it receives. Thus, in order to acquire field- methods based on sound psychological principles for use amongst peoples of the lower culture, the student can do no better than practise first on the folk at his gate. How break through, for instance, the characteristic reticence of the peasant .■^ As Mrs. Wright has recently shown us in her delightful book Rustic Speech and Folk- Lore, the key to unlock his seemingly quite inarticulate thoughts is an intimate acquaintance with his dialect. Nay, his inmost feelings are bound up with the traditional words and turns of expression ; so that you hold his heart-strings in \-our hands, if only you control the forms of his speech. If, then, you would persuade the even more evasive savage to share his secrets with you, you will have done well to have graduated beforehand in the school of conversational experience which folklore-hunting provides. And, as I have tried all along to show, folklore-hunting means far more than the compilation of curious oddments. It means the study of the life of the folk, the acquisition, based on friendly converse, of insight into their mind and character. If he have this inward-seeking method and temper, the