Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/153

Rh of the anthropology of civilised races”. Ay, there’s the rub. Our President is interested in the folk-tale because of the information he can extract from it as to man’s primitive customs, institutions, and beliefs. Similarly, Mr. Hartland, in his Chairman’s Address at the Congress, confessed that his chief interest in folk-lore in general, and folk-tales in particular, was on account of the information they contained as to the beliefs of our ancestors. Exactly so. These gentlemen, as I have put it previously, are fortune-hunters, who seek to get as much anthropological wealth out of the folk-tale as they can; I and a few others love her for herself alone. And out of this love springs my protest against their use as corpora vilia for the anthropologist, and generally I protest against the practice of regarding folk-lore as solely so much material for anthropology, so much contribution to the study of institutions and their evolution.

What has attracted some of us to the study of folk-lore has been of a two-fold character. In the first place, it is the last corner of knowledge which still remains comparatively unexplored, and so offers most promise of prizes to the successful investigator. There has been the hope that by going back to our nurse’s or our mother’s knee we may find the secret of human destinies. But above and beyond this folk-lore appeals to all that which goes to make romance: the myth, the saga, the legend, combine with the mysterious lore of the unseen which lies at the root of what we term superstition. This is the part of folk-lore which attracts me, and, I fancy, the majority of the members of the Folk-lore Society. The institutional side of the study leaves us cold, and we cannot get up much enthusiasm for those primitive county councils known as folk-moots.

I claim to be an anthropologist also. But my anthropology includes likewise the study of the evolution of man’s artistic nature. I would study Man the poet and the dreamer, as well as the man of the flint chip or the