admitted that on the whole a great deal more sinks, than is ever destined to rise, in status-value. The downward way threatens utter extinction; and the history of culture bears witness to an unremitting bustle of spring-cleaning, such as leads not only to the abandonment of worn-out devices, but also, as Dr. Rivers has shown, to the untimely loss of useful arts.[1] Indeed, it may be roundly assumed that every denizen of the poorhouse of folklore has seen better days. This is true even when—as, perhaps, is not so often as we are ready to suppose—a custom of the folk can be proved to be a genuine survival of savage times. In that case it certainly had a lesser distance to fall; but, inasmuch as it once formed part of a dominant culture, it has at least to this extent lost caste. Meanwhile, it is by attending carefully to the facts of transvaluation that we are likely to overcome the sluggard tendency to refer folklore in the mass either to a pre-existent savage condition, or, worse still, to the abiding savage instinct of the crowd. As is well known to the medievalist, a great many of the tales and fables, the proverbs, the prognostics, the leechcraft prescriptions, and so forth, in vogue to-day among the folk are but the debased product of yesterday’s official wisdom.[2]
The opposite process which Dieterich has termed “revolution from below,”[3] though not so general and consequently not so obvious, must none the less be given its due. It is especially apt to occur in conjunction with what the same writer calls “revolution from without.” An invading people, let us suppose, which possesses a higher culture, or a culture that is at any rate secure in its predominancy, engages more or less consciously in a policy of race-amalgamation. Being in a position to pick and choose, it can dignify certain elements of the local
- ↑ Fest krijt t. E. Westermarck, 109 f.
- ↑ Cf. Miss Burne in Folk-Lore, xxii. 28; and Dr. Gaster, ib. xxv, 136.
- ↑ Cf. Folk-Lore, xxiv. 141.
