Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/42

 32 present war. Besides, the moral of the present discourse is that our interest must not be restricted to the retrograde movements of the cultural life. We must get over our prejudice against revival as a tampering with our museum specimens; and may even assist, as only those who have knowledge of the facts can do effectively, in the rehabilitation of the simple life, so that it shall be homely, and yet not boorish. The nation can afford to recapture something of its primitive innocence. Two-thirds of education, it is said, are completed in the nursery. So let a nursery of the mind be created for the people out of the aesthetic tradition of the folk, which can be so readapted that all, whether hand-workers or brain-workers, may find nurture therein, as children are taught by playing.

Now our educational experts tell us that more science is the need of the time. It may be so; but more science must not mean less literature. Physical science by itself would but make us the slaves of a world-machine. We need letters also to keep us humane. The thinking and reasoning powers must not be cultivated at the expense of the emotions; and, whereas the former are exercised on abstractions, the latter develop only in association with concretes. These concretes are but symbols; the intrinsic or original meaning of any one of them is as nothing in comparison with its value as a rallying-point of the associations whereby a sentiment is sustained. Bunting is bunting, but the flag is a nation's pride and hope. But associations are of slow growth. The symbols of a people cannot be replaced suddenly, any more than stately trees can be replaced by saplings. Indeed, wholesale deforestation may be the prelude to utter ruin of the land. Thus in the garden of literature it is well to deal tenderly with venerable timber, though it stand, not in tidy rows, but wherever nature planted it. Even so, then, let us be tender with the old themes embodied in our national folklore. Here, despite a certain litter of dead wood, is