Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/77

 Rh folk-lorist that he forgets the littlenesses and degradations of human life—nay, he accounts for these unpleasant sides of man's history, and in accounting for them he so frequently finds that brutal and bestial actions are the outcome of far from inhuman or unholy motives, that there is ample room left for a liberal view of human history. Surely there is nothing more solemnly awful than to think, as Lumholtz thinks of the Australians, that "they have no traditions; many of them do not even know their father, and any knowledge of earlier generations is out of the question." Put the black patch of oblivion upon our own national and ancestral traditions, and I venture to think that not even the gospel of universal love would replace the loss. But folk-lore restores the Australian black fellow, low down as he is in the scale of human culture, to his place as an inheritor of traditions, and the restoration removes a blot from mankind in general, and hence broadens the outlook which the study of even the most backward races affords to the inquirer. So it is all along the line. Nothing that is trivial or revolting escapes our notice or inquiry; nothing that man has done or thought in his worst moments, or dreamed of in his most insane, is too unholy for a folklorist to investigate; and because we see that each act or thought has a parent act or thought, we find out that however irrational, cruel, and detestable men or tribes of men can be, their acts and beliefs are but a phase in the giant struggle of man for the life to which we have succeeded as our rightful heritage.

It is said that during the present month a worthy magistrate was shocked by the paganism which lurks behind the sport of snap-dragon; but we could, I venture to think, educate him into understanding that there is sometimes more real humanity in a touch of genuine paganism than in some of the platitudes that at present do duty for higher things.