Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress/Presidential Address

FOLK-LORE CONGRESS.


THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS.



Ladies and Gentlemen,—We are met to begin, for Folk-lorists will not say to "inaugurate", the second Folk Lore Congress. The honour of having to welcome you is to me embarrassing in more ways than one. I feel that, among so many students, far more learned and more specially devoted to our topic, I am but an amateur, and again, that on the matters of which I am least ignorant 1 have said, many times, at least all that I know. Leaving this personal apology, one may be asked what is the purpose of our congress. The cynic will say that we, like all congresses, want to advertise, if not ourselves, at least our objects; or, if he be more polite, that we want to keep our objects before the public. And so we do. In these studies of ours every one may help us; from the mother who observes the self-developed manners and the curious instincts of her children, to the clergyman who can record the superstitions of his flock, or the rural usages that survive from a dateless antiquity. Folk-lore, as we shall see, is very much like that study of man which the poet recommends to mankind; it is a study to which every one who keeps his eyes open can contribute. For example, I lately had the pleasure of meeting a young lady who, unconsciously, was the very muse of Folk-lore, and perpetuated all the mental habits which we attribute to early if not to primitive man. When she met a flock of sheep she said, "September 12, 1891, "and this she repeated thrice for luck. On encountering a number of cows she remarked whether they divided on the road, or all took one side. Thence she drew auguries of prosperous or evil fortune. If she found a crow's feather in the fields she stuck it erect in the grass, and wished a wish. Old pieces of iron she carefully threw over her left shoulder, and when this is done in London streets it must be performed with caution, for it is unlucky to hit a citizen in the eye. She kissed her hand to the new moon. If there were three candles alight, she blew one out, not from motives of economy, but because three lighted candles arow are unlucky. She was perturbed by winding-sheets in a candle; she tried to count nine stars on nine consecutive nights—a thing difficult to do in this cloudy climate; spilt salt greatly exercised her mind, though, unlike another Folk-lorist, she did not spill the claret over it. She was retentive of old superstitions, and to new ones her intellect was as hospitable as the Pantheon of the Romans. One could not have a better example of the early mental habit which finds omens in all things, as in the flight of birds, especially magpies—in fact she was a survival or proof of how, in the midst of an incredulous civilisation, the instinct of superstition may linger in full force. We can all observe this ancient and long-enduring vein of human nature, which would survive religion if religion perished, and if all priesthoods fell, and all temples, would suffice to build up altars and rituals anew. Our congress, therefore, may help to suggest to people that they are living among mental phenomena well worth noting, and, in some cases, well worth recording. We can tell the world that it has in itself and around it the materials of a study at least as interesting as botany or geology. The materials of geology or botany we must seek in fields, and mountains, and road-metal; the materials of Folk-lore, of popular and primeval belief, we can find wherever there are human beings. It is also our part to show the conclusions, as wide as human fate and human fortunes, to which our perusal of the facts may guide us. And thus we may win a few new disciples to Folk-lore, and, I sincerely trust, a few more subscribers to the Folk-lore Society. To keep all this before the public is, let us frankly admit, the object of the congress. We also want to see each other's faces as we read each other's works, and to enjoy some personal discussion of matters in which there is much diversity of opinion. Probably we shall squabble; I hope we shall do so with humour and good humour. There may be solar mythologists here, or persons who believe in the white Archaian races, who gave their rosy daughters, and with them laws, to black, red, brown, and yellow peoples. These views do not recommend themselves to my own reasoning faculties; my notions do not recommend themselves to the solar mythologists and the Archaian whites, but that is no reason why we should not discuss them in a friendly spirit, and take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne. A congress has a perfect right to any social enjoyments within its reach, and if any one can sing folk-songs, or dance the beggar's dance to please us, like Paupakeewis in Hiawatha, I trust that the opportunity and the desire to oblige may not be absent. There is no use in confounding each other for our theories of customs or myths, and, in the acerbity of their bickers, our fathers, the old antiquarians, taught us what to avoid.

After these few prefatory remarks on the purpose of the congress I may endeavour to explain what we mean or, at all events, what I mean, by Folk-lore. When the word was first introduced, by Mr. Thoms, it meant little, perhaps, but the observing and recording of various superstitions, stories, customs, proverbs, songs, fables, and so forth. But the science has gradually increased its scope, till it has, taken almost all human life for its province. Indeed if any one asks how and where Folk-lore differs from anthropology, I am rather at a loss for a reply. When antiquarians such as our own old Aubrey began to examine rural usages and superstitions, like the maypole and the harvest home, they saw—they could hardly help seeing—that the practices of the folk, of the peasant class everywhere, were remains of Gentilism or heathenism. The Puritans knew this very well, and if they hated the Maypole in the Strand, it was because they knew it to be at least as old as Troy, whose fate, as we know, it has shared.

Where's Troy, and where's the May pole in the Strand?

The Puritans were conscious that much Pagan custom had been tolerated by the Church, and had survived, not only in ecclesiastical usage, but in popular festivals. The folk, the people, had changed the names of the objects of its worship, had saints in place of Gods, but had not given up the festival of May night, nor ceased to revere, under new titles, the nereids or the lares, the fairies or the browny. All these survivals the Puritans attacked and the old antiquarians obsei-ved, comparing early English customs with the manners of Greece and Rome. In these studies lay the origin of our modern Folk-lore, now far wider in scope, and better equipped with knowledge of many tales ancient and modern. For example, Acosta found in Peru rites which at once resembled those of the Church, those of our own harvest homes, and those of the Eleusinian mysteries and the practices of the Greek Thesmophoria. The earlier observers explained such coincidences in various ways. They thought that the devil in America deliberately parodied the ceremonial and doctrine of the Church. Or they thought that the lost tribes of Israel, in their wanderings, had carried all over the world the ritual of Judaism. At the end of the seventeenth century, Spencer, the master of C. C. C. Cambridge, reached a theory more like our own. He saw that the Jewish ritual was not an original pattern, from which heathen ritual was perverted, but was, as I have elsewhere said, a divinely licensed version of, or selection from, the religious uses of Eastern peoples in general. We have now expanded this idea, and find in the Jewish ritual a monotheistic and expurgated example of rites common, not to Semitic or Eastern peoples only, but common to all races everywhere which have reached a certain level of civilisation. Sacrifice, expiation, communion of the people with their God, laws of ceremonial, uncleanness, prohibitions from certain acts and certain foods, the tabernacle, and the rest, we find them, practically, in solution everywhere; in Judaism we find them codified, as it were, and committed, as a body of rules, to writing and to the care of a priestly class. Now the theory which I advance here in the case of certain rites, may be employed in all the provinces of traditional custom, belief, and even literature. The Greeks, like Herodotus and Aristotle, were struck by the coincidences of custom, festival, sacrifice, and hymn, among Hellenes and Barbarians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Scythians. Aristotle himself could see that Greece had inherited, developed, and purified barbaric beliefs and usages, and myths; that the common stock was the same everywhere, and was only modified by the peculiarities of race. The modern learning has acquired fresh information, and has found that the myths and beliefs and customs of African, Australian, American, and insular races correspond with those of the ancient classical races. Further, we have learned that ideas, habits, myths, similar to those of the ancient world and of remote barbaric peoples unknown to the ancient world, endure still among the folk, the more stationary, the more uncultivated classes of modern Europe, among Lincolnshire hinds, Highland crofters, peasants of France, Italy, Germany, Russia. Now Folk-lore approaches the whole topic of these singular harmonies and coincidences from the side of the folk, of the unlearned rural classes in civilised Europe. We have turned the method of mythology, for instance, upside down. The old manner was to begin with the cultivated and literary myths, as we find them in Ovid, or Apollodorus, or Pausanias, and to regard modern rural rites and legends and beliefs as modified descendants of these traditions. But the method of Folk-lore is to study these rural customs and notions as survivals, relics enduring from a mental condition of antiquity far higher than that of Hterary Rome or Greece. We do not say that, as a rule, this harvest rite, or vernal custom, or story filtered out of Ovid dovi'n into the peasant class. Rather we say that, as a rule, Ovid is describing and decorating some rural customs or tale which is infinitely older than his day, and which may be, and often is, shared with Roman agriculturists by the peasants of France and England, and also by natives of lands undiscovered by the civilised races of the old world. The method of Folk-lore rests on the hypothesis of a vast common stock of usage, opinion, and myth, everywhere developed alike, by the natural operation of early human thought. This stock, or much of it, is everywhere retained by the unprogressive, uneducated class, while the priests and poets and legislators of civilisation select from it, and turn customs into law, magic into ritual, story into epic, popular singing measures into stately metres, and vague floating belief into definite religious doctrine.

Thus, briefly to give examples, the world-wide custom of the blood-feud becomes the basis of the Athenian law of homicide. The savage magic which is believed to fertilise the fields becomes the basis of the Attic Thesmophoria, or of the Eleusinian legend and mysteries. The rural festivities of Attica become the basis of the Greek drama. The brief singing measures of the popular song become the basis of the hexameter. The sacrifice of the sacred animal of the kindred becomes a great source of Greek ritual. The world-wide märchen of the blinded giant, the returned husband, the lad with the miraculously skilled companions, are developed into the Odyssey and the Argonautica.

Thus on every side the method of Folk-lore sho's us mankind first developing in mass, and without the traceable agency of individuals (though that must have been at work), a great body of ideas, customs, legends, beliefs. Then, as society advances and ranks are discriminated, the genius of individuals selects from the mass, from the common stock, and polishes, improves, fixes, stereotypes, brings to perfection certain elements in the universal treasure. Here it is that the influence of race and of genius comes in.

The great races, as of the Aryan speaking and Semitic peoples, are races in which genius is common, and the general level is high. Such a race has its codes, its creeds, its epics, its drama, which the less fortunate races lack. But the fond, the basis, is common to humanity. Meanwhile, till quite recently, even in the higher races, the folk, the people, the untaught, have gone on living on the old stock, using the old treasure, secretly revering the dispossessed ghosts and fairies, amusing the leisure of the winter evenings with the old stories handed down from grandmother to mother, to child, through all the generations. These very stories exist, though the folk know it not, in another form, refined by the genius of poets. In time, and occasionally, they will filter back among the people. But, on the whole, till now, the folk have prolonged the ancient life, as it was in customs and belief long before Homer sang, long before the Hebrew legislation was codified and promulgated.

This is a broad general view of the theory of Folk-lore, a rule to the working of which there are doubtless many exceptions. For example, philosophers have tried to show that in religion all begins, as usual, with the folk, all starts from the ghosts which they saw, or thought they saw, while early theological genius and mature speculation select from these ghosts till, by the survival of the fittest, the fittest ghost becomes a god. I shall not throw the apple of theological discord among the Congress, and shall merely confess that this theory does not, as far as I have gone, seem to me to be justified by facts. Among the very rudest peoples whom I have tried to study, the God is already in existence, as well as the ghosts, already makes for righteousness, and promises future punishment and reward. How the idea came there, among these very backward, but far from really primitive people, I cannot presume to guess, believing that here all research is but baseless conjecture. Certainly, among the most remote, secluded, and undeveloped ancestors of the folk I seem to find, as a rule, both ghosts and God, but whether one idea is prior to the other, and if so which, I have discovered no positive evidence.

I have tried to state the theory of Folk-lore as I understand it. I consider that man, as far as we can discern him in the dark backward and abysm of Time, was always man, always rational and inquisitive, always in search of a reason in the universe, always endeavouring to realise the worlds in which he moved about. But I presume man to have been nearly as credulous as he was inquisitive, and, above all, ready to explain everything by false analogies, and to regard all movement and energy as analogous to that life of which he was conscious within himself Thus to him the whole world seemed peopled with animated and personal agencies, which gradually were discriminated into ghosts, fairies, lares, nymphs, river and hill spirits, special gods of sky, sun, earth, wind, departmental deities presiding over various energies, and so forth. About himself, as about the world, he was ignorant and credulous. False analogy, the doctrine of sympathies, the belief in spirits that had and in spirits that had not been men, these things, with perhaps an inkling of hypnotism, produced the faith in magic. Magic once believed in the world became a topsy-turvy place, in which metamorphoses and necromancy and actual conversation with the beasts became probable in man's fiction and possible in man's life. A painful life it seems to us, or to some of us, in which any old woman or medicine man might blast the crops, cause tempest, inflict ill luck and disease, could turn you into a rabbit or a rook, could cause bogies to haunt your cave, or molest your path, a life in which any stone or stick might possess extra-natural powers, and be the home of a beneficent or malignant spirit. A terrible existence that of our ancestors, and yet, without it where would our poetry be, our Greek legends, even our fairy tales? Those fathers of ours, if they led this life, and if they took it seriously, were martyrs to our poetical enjoyment. Had the pagan not been nurtured in that creed forlorn, we could not have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, nor hear Triton blow his wreathed horn. The stars, but for the ignorant confusions of our fathers, might be masses of incandescent gas, or whatever they are, but they could not have been named with the names of Ariadne and Cassiopeia, nor could Orion have watched the Bear, nor should we known the rainy Hyades, and the sweet influences of the Pleiads. Ignorance, false analogy, fear, were the origin of that poetry in which we have the happier part of our being. Say the sun is incandescent gas, and you help us little with your sane knowledge, for we neither made it nor can we mend it. But believe in your insane ignorance that the sun is a living man, and Apollo speeds down from it like the bronze pouring from the furnace, in all the glory of his godhood. Great are the gains of ignorance and of untutored conjecture. Had mankind always been a thing of school boards and primers, we could not even divert a child with Red Riding Hood and The Sleeping Beauty and Hop-o'-My-Thumb. We should look on the rainbow and be ignorant of Iris, the Messenger, and of the Bow of the Covenant, set in the heavens.

Thus, as in a hundred other ways, the mental condition of our most distant ancestors has turned to our profit. He trembled that we might rejoice; he was ignorant for our happiness. And after all he was probably as happy as we are; it is not saying much.

The method of Folk-lore, as has been seen, rests on an hypothesis, namely, that all peoples have passed through a mental condition so fanciful, so darkened, so incongruous, so inconsistent with the scientific habit that to the scientific it seems insane. I am often asked, supposing your views are correct, how did mankind come to be so foolish? Was mankind ever insane? one is asked. Certainly not; he had always the germ of the scientific habit, was always eager rerum cognoscere causas, but he was ignorant, indolent, and easily satisfied with a theory. How did he come to believe in ghosts? people inquire, and why did he not believe in some other kind of ghost? Really, except on the hypothesis that there is a ghost, or something very like one, I don't know. I can only repose on facts. People were not all mad two hundred years ago, but they believed as firmly in witchcraft as a Solomon islander does to-day, and the English witch's spells were even as those of the Solomon islander. The belief rested on false analogies, the theory of sympathies, and the credence in disembodied spirits. The facts are absolutely undeniable, and the frame of mind to which witchcraft seemed credible and omens were things to be averted everywhere survives. You will never make mankind scientific, and even men of science, like Ixion, have embraced agreeable shadows and disembodied mediums. We have conceived these follies because "it is our nature to", as the hymn says. Further explanation belongs to the psychologist, not to the Folk-lorist. If ignorance, conjecture, and credulity be insanity in the persons of our ancestors, deliravimus omnes.

The unity, the harmony of the human beliefs, and even the close resemblances of popular myths and stories among all peoples, are among the most curious discoveries of folk-lore. Now, as to custom and belief, we may expect to find them nearly identical in essentials everywhere, because they spring from similar needs, occasions, and a past of similar mental conditions. But, as to the resemblances of myths and stories, from the Cape to Baffin's Bay, from Peru to the Soudan, we shall doubtless have the matter discussed at later meetings. I myself am inclined to attribute the resemblances, partly to identity of ideas and beliefs, partly to transmission, either modern, or in the course of pre-historic war and commerce. A story could wander as far as mankind wanders, even before Ouida was read from Tangiers to Tobolsk. All this, however, is likely to be discussed. Folk-lorists who think that we neglect ethnology, that we take mankind to be, essentially, too much of the same pattern everywhere, will also have their say. I do not myself believe that some one centre of ideas and myths, India or Central Asia, can be discovered, do not believe that some one gifted people carried everywhere the seeds of all knowledge, of all institutions, and even the plots of all stories. The germs have been everywhere, I fancy, and everywhere alike, the speciality of Race contributes the final form. All peoples, for example, have a myth (or memory) of a Deluge, only the Jewish race gives it the final monotheistic form in which we know it best. Many peoples, as the Chinese, have the tale of the Returned Husband and the Faithful Wife, only the Greek race gave it the final shape, in the Odyssey. Many peoples, from the Turks to the Iroquois, have the story of the Dead Wife Restored, only Greece shaped the given matter into the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Many races have carved images, only Greece freed Art, and brought her to perfection. In perfecting, not in inventing, lies the special gift of special races, or so it seems to myself.

Let me say a final word for the attraction and charm of our study. Call it Anthropology, call it Folk-lore, the science of Man in his institutions and beliefs is full of lessons and of enjoyment. We stand on a height and look backwards on the movement of the Race, we see the wilderness whence it comes, the few straggling paths, that wander, that converge, that are lost in the oA, or in the bush, or meet to become the road, and the beaten highway, and the railway track. We see the path go by caves and rude shelters, by desolate regions and inhospitable, by kraal and village and city. Verily, we may say, "He led us by a path which we knew not." The world has been taught and trained, but not as we would have trained it. Ends have been won, which were never foreseen, but not by the means which we would have chosen. The path is partly clear behind us; it is dark as a wolf's mouth in front of our feet. But we must follow, and, as the Stoic says, if we turn cowards, and refuse to follow, we must follow still.




Mr. C. G. Leland said he was struck very favourably with the extremely catholic and liberal tone of the address. As their association grew larger various opinions would be developed with regard to folk-lore, and some allowance must be always made for differences of opinion. It was in consequence of not taking cognizance of that fact that the Oriental Congress, of which he was a member, came to grief The great object of folk-lore was to come to the truth and to get at the inner life of history. Folk-lore was to history what colour was to design. They had to bring out of the past not merely the history of battles, but the story of the inner life that illuminated and coloured history. They must, however, during the course of these congresses, mutually consider each other's failings and weakness. He proposed a vote of thanks to the President for his admirable address.

Mr. Charles Ploix, of Paris, seconded the motion, which was carried by acclamation.

Mr. Andrew Lang acknowledged the compliment in appropriate terms.