Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/41

Rh kindness might well induce me to give way to spiritual pride; but I try to keep myself humble by reflecting that the proverb about not swapping horses when in the middle of the stream might be applied with almost equal force to a humbler beast of burden.

As for what I have to say to-night, I must apologize for once more introducing the well-worn topic of the war. The fact is that I cannot get my thoughts away from the subject, much as I could wish to do so. Even, then, at the risk of repeating myself, I must out with that which I find it in my heart to say; and, for your part, you must bear with me if I am more than usually tedious. After all, man is on his trial to-day; and we, as students of man, cannot remain indifferent to the great moral issue that is at stake, namely, whether man is at heart a brute or not.

Before embarking on my theme, however, let me refer very briefly and inadequately to the great loss that has befallen this Society in the death of Sir John Rhys, for many years our Vice-President. He was a personal friend of mine. Indeed, our respective colleges face each other across a narrow street; and he was always ready to let me drop in upon him for a chat. I used to regard him not merely as a mine of information concerning the manifold questions with which our science deals—though of course he was that—but rather as an incarnation of the very spirit of folklore. He himself came of the folk, having been born and bred in a countryside that almost literally bordered on fairyland. Moreover, a thorough knowledge of his native idiom gave him a sure clue to the psychology of his own people, so that even the twilight depths of the racial consciousness were revealed to him. Thus, as a man of science, he could work from the heart of his subject outwards. The soul of the matter could not escape him, or he would have had to escape from his own soul. About details, however, he might change his mind constantly, and, in fact, did so; for his sense of proportion, being determined by an abiding