Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/30

 20 ago there was a discussion—initiated, I think, by Mr. Stead—on the question, What are the best hundred books? If I rightly remember, Mr. Ruskin was for excluding Gibbon from the list; and the reason he gave was that he did not care to let his mind dwell on the "decline and fall" of anything. Just so my mind would draw cold comfort, I am afraid, from a pure pathology of institutions; and the thought that these were primarily the institutions of my own country could but serve to make me the more depressed. Even if survival be taken—wrongly, as I believe—to imply as such a moribund condition, revival, clearly, does nothing of the kind; nor can this cognate topic be neglected by us without being false to the facts as we find them.

It is true that this important subject of revival tends, perhaps, to be a little unpopular in folklore circles. Some prefer antiquities such as are only fit for a glass case. The genuine article for them is broken beyond the hope, or rather danger, of repair. They can appreciate a ruin, but hardly the standing edifice, however ancient and however tenderly restored. So it comes about that they construe the notion of degeneration in an inverted sense—topsy-turvywise. This may even, perhaps, be called the folklorist's fallacy. It is, however, by no means confined to our branch of anthropology. Thus I have heard an alltoo-enthusiastic totemist define a god as a degraded totem. Renovation, on this view, spells destruction. The rule that ghosts must not walk is applied to survivals. Let a stake be driven through them at the cross-roads rather than that they should thus unconscionably resurrect. More especially is it resented if revival lift the obsolescent custom to a higher plane of culture. Not only is it unseemly on the part of the unquiet spirit; it is snobbish into the bargain. But it will be urged that I misrepresent the attitude of the folklorist by ignoring his scientific motive. Since his one aim is to reconstruct the original