Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/37

 Rh and fine arts, the so-called humaner letters, together with the other recreations and amenities of the social life? Are they not to be reckoned among the luxuries of the leisured class? The folk must be content to live; they cannot, in the Aristotelian sense, live well. Is it not, then, a sign of loss of value past cure if, at their level of penurious existence, a once helpful observance be relegated to the charge of an unpractical interest—if, in short, they merely sing about what they used to do?

Now it has already been admitted that in the underworld of folklore the prevailing movement is downhill. It may well be, then, that the process just described—it might perhaps be termed depragmatization—is on the whole suggestive of decline. That the institution should first of all disappear; that the associated belief should thereupon persist for a while as a floating superstition; and that, finally, all that remains of either institution or belief should be some memory of it preserved in story: all this represents a familiar mode of cultural degeneration. But it is only fair to remember that, whereas institutions are easily upset, beliefs die hard; and are perhaps secretly biding their time in order that later they may reclothe themselves in an institutional form. For example, we have forcibly put down thuggism and suttee in India, as also twin-murder, the poison-ordeal, and the smelling-out of witches in Africa; but who knows whether, if European control were removed, such barbarities would be found to have lost their appeal? Once more, oral tradition, even when it has come to treat former institutions and beliefs mainly as material for wonder-tales, is capable of keeping alive for ages those germinal ideas and sentiments out of which a whole culture may be reproduced. More especially is this so if the inheritors of the lore differ in language and race from the governing stock; and, in any case, whereas the dominant peoples usually make good learners—the