Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/297



N the first rule of this Society its object is defined as the preservation and publication of popular traditions, superstitions, old customs, and other allied matters. To such objects the work of this and kindred societies is necessarily limited. They can do but little in the way of collecting materials; they can do much in giving collectors encouragement, in securing a permanent place for their results, and in supplying means of intercourse between isolated workers in a common field. For the material which it is desired to preserve needs delicate handling. It eludes the grasp of those who seek it in official garb and magnify their office. A Royal Commission may be empowered to record the whereabouts of ancient monuments and to protect them from the hand of the restorer and the ploughshare of the peasant, but the immaterial and ofttimes more venerable relics of bygone customs, traditions, and beliefs, are not to be thus secured. The illiterate who are their custodians will show their treasures only where some common base of sympathy is established; and whilst there remains a story to be taken down, a superstition or outlying custom to be noted, we shall continue dependent upon the curiosity, the circumspection, and the enthusiasm, unmixed with bias, of the individual. That the collectors of folk-lore have not always suspected the importance of the material which they gather with such zeal and patience is not without advantage. We are all too apt to see the thing for which we look; to find, like the Empress Helena in her search for the True Cross, that for which we seek. We may, with no intentional bias, pass the matter received through the prism of our preconceived notions or theories of mythology and history; so that when the collector is of the curious species