Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/33

 Rh to think of every morsel of folklore as subject to continual process. Such process is ultimately intelligible only in the light of the cultural life as a whole. On the other hand, the student of folklore has a special standpoint of his own that constrains him to regard the general culture-movement from one side—the under-side, as it were. His business is to observe the pivoting that takes place at his end of the shifting scale of values. He watches custom, belief, and story as they fluctuate in importance within this lower hemisphere; whereas what happens to them when they have passed beyond his horizon is the concern of another enquirer, namely, the historian of civilization in its more restricted sense. In a civilized country folklore begins where "clerk-lore" ends. As soon as the art of writing is well-established, the lettered and the relatively or wholly unlettered classes tend to follow different traditions in regard to all matters of culture. Even if we extend the notion of folklore so far as to attribute it likewise to peoples that are without a literature, the same criterion holds. For here a like distinction may be drawn between the traditions that severally depend on organized and on unorganized folk-memory; such organization being seen in the schooling of the novices at the initiation, the mnemonic exercises of bards and other official remembrancers, the insistence on verbal exactness in religious and legal formularies, and so on.

This view of folklore as belonging to an underworld suggests one of the two main heads under which the modes of cultural transvaluation may conveniently be classed. This first type of movement may be called change of standing, or, if a technical term be required, metataxis. It is, so to speak, a vertical process. The unfashionable bit of furniture is cast out of the parlour and goes downstairs to fill a corner of the kitchen or of the children's play-room. Or, conversely, there is remigration upstairs The Chippendale masterpiece emerges from the depths to oust in turn some Victorian eyesore. Now it must be