Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/25

Rh of Prof. Max Müller by so daring an adventure. But the study of customs and institutions (except in the one case of marriage) has kept within very limited lines, and in Europe it cannot free itself from the influences of ancient Rome. Sir Henry Maine's masterly treatises have scarcely begun their work before the fabric is rudely torn down, and once more we are bid to keep within the meshes of chronological data, and take care to avoid the conclusions of comparative methods. Why should this be?

My answer is, that the neglect in studying institutions from their folk-lore aspect is primarily the fault of the folk-lorist, who has not hitherto avowedly and openly claimed customs and institutions as part and parcel of his subject-matter. The method has been to pick out a fragment of myth, a form of ritual, or a superstition, and to compare them with their fellows in savage life without one thought of the setting in which they are embedded.

But myth, ritual, and superstition make up part of the lives of savages only when they are embedded in the institutions which surround those lives, and the myth, ritual, and superstition in folk-lore corresponding to the savage original was once embedded in similar institutions. The people of Africa, says Mr. MacDonald, worship not so much individually as in villages or communities. This remark holds good of nearly all primitive peoples, and it helps us to understand an observation long ago made by an English writer on the manorial tenant—an observation which is more strictly true than is generally supposed: "His religion is a part of his copyhold." When the jurist talks to us, in highly technical language, of lords, freeholders, villeins, and serfs, we must bear in mind that, at any rate, these villeins and serfs belonged to a social institution, one element of which was religion—a religion which we are studying as folk-lore, while the jurist is studying manor-rolls and land-tenures as customary law, the elements of both studies, however, being derived from the same source. Some interesting researches I have lately been making into