Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/63

 Rh transmit itself. If there is such a thing as racial expression, as a mode of conceiving and representing the thoughts and imaginings which arise from the contact of man's mind with the outer world, common to bodies of men linked together by ties of kinship and polity, it should surely make itself felt in their artistic creations, designed as these are to please, and dependent upon their success in this respect for their power to reach a wide circle and a later posterity.

Again, both early speculation and early artistry involve and require the establishment of a professional class—the magician-priest in the one case, the bard-historian in the other. But the invariable tendency of the priestly class is to stereotype teaching and practice, and thereby to remove them as much as possible from the new influences to which the ever-changing conditions of humanity subject them This tendency is condoned, nay, even commended, on account of the practical issues at stake. Sensible men—and man in the folklore stage is infinitely more common-sensible than his civilised descendant—will not allow even such a master-passion as the love of change to interfere with rites upon which depends, as they believe, the welfare of the community. But no such imperative sanction restrains the creations of artistry from obeying the universal law of change. Conservative as may be the singer story-teller class, it is bound to answer to new impulses, alien influences, far more readily than does the priestly class. The latter as a rule resist change to the last, and either perish or suffer degradation, the former adapt themselves and their conventions to altered conditions; the mythico-heroic romance of the primitive races lives on, transfigured and enriched, whereas its mythology and ritual disappear at the approach of a new and higher type of creed.

Now one of the readiest means for diagnosing the mental and moral consciousness of a race is supplied by its attitude towards an alien and higher culture, and it is in the