occasions each personified some aspect of interest of 19thcentury England. The eldest and the youngest indeed were both in their different ways keen sportsmen. All by artistic study, travel, culture, and wealth had made themselves first-rate judges of æsthetic production in all its branches from painting and sculpture to pottery. All, too, as country gentlemen and landlords, personally looked after the homes of their workmen as well as the model farms and dairies on their estates. These beneficent activities and interests were shared by them with their cousin and brother-in-law. Baron Ferdinand of Vienna had married Baron Lionel's daughter Eveline. After her death his Buckinghamshire house, Waddesdon Park, was managed by his sister. The creative power of wealth could scarcely show itself more picturesquely than in the conversion of some barren, treeless acres, half a dozen miles from Aylesbury, into a well-wooded park, famous for its chestnuts, all of which had been brought from their original homes often at a considerable distance and in one or two instances even from beyond seas. The week-end Waddesdon parties during the 'eighties were not only the most brilliant and agreeable gatherings, but were also of real and lasting socio-political importance. Here, as at Mr and Mrs Henry Oppenheim's dinners beneath the Bruton Street roof that was once Lord Granville's, Lord Randolph Churchill and Lord Hartington made up their differences and, together with Mr Chamberlain, one of the most regular guests at both places, arranged the Unionist combinations in view of Mr Gladstone's expected surrender to Irish Nationalism.

England is not the only country where the Rothschild hospitalities are handed down from generation to generation in the classic pages of the Almanach des Gourmands.' Nowhere else, however, has the family or the race to which it belongs risen to a position so conspicuous or powerful, or one so variously and reciprocally serviceable to itself, and even to the Empire in whose metropolis Nathan Rothschild planted it one hundred and eighteen years ago. The London blend of La Haute Finance, La Haute Politique, and La Haute Cuisine has been and remains unique. Time alone can show whether in the new order of things, now rising, this amalgamation can

be maintained, or can unite itself with the same vast resources and, consequently, power as in the past. The Rothschild millions during past years often ministered after a fashion not advertised in print to national prosperity by subsidising banks and supporting or strengthening enterprises like mines, factories, and mills. Operations like those belong probably altogether to the past. The process of European reconstruction after the war may revive the old appeals of Ambassadors and Chancellors to St Swithin's Lane, but, until lately, since the epochs already reviewed and the earlier years of the present century, the various European States had so improved their position as to be in little need of an international relieving officer. A banking house like that whose fortunes have now been recounted, encounters to-day a competition whose germs were only discernible after the house of Rothschild had existed for more than a quarter of a century. In 1834 the London and Westminster Banking Company was established. Two years afterwards came the London and County Bank, to be amalgamated with the former at a much later date. Other developments of the same sort soon followed. At the present time the issue of foreign loans is recognised as the legitimate business of the great joint-stock companies, which have shot out from their London centre branches into all the chief capitals abroad. At the same time the family riches remain so stupendous that by merely sitting still and doing nothing, its members command the means for decisive action in any financial stroke suggested by the changing opportunities of international affairs.

T. H. S. ESCOTT.

Art. 11.-THE INTERPRETATION OF SURVIVALS.

Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law. By Sir J. G. Frazer. Three vols. London: Macmillan and Co., 1918. 37s. 6d. net.

THE original meaning of the word 'folk-lore' is tolerably clear. When Mr William Thoms in 1846 designated under this title a new field of research, and subsequently helped to found the Folk-Lore Society in order to exploit it, he had in mind, more or less exclusively, the traditional culture of the European peasant. For him, and for those who worked with him, such rustic folk-lore is essentially a form of primitive culture, differentiated from other forms by the fact that, through contact with a high civilisation, the old-world institutions are in a general state of decay. And there is much truth in this view. The folk is out of keeping with modern conditions. It is not to be found in cities. A new country, such as a British colony, is without it. Again, the vehicle of its ideas is an oral tradition. The folk as such is unlettered, and hence ceases to be itself when the board school and the newspaper invade its haunts. Books and book-learning being almost unknown to it, it relies for guidance in the daily round on neighbourly example and word-of-mouth communication. The mass of such examples and communications forms the lore of the folk, its social heritage of wisdom.

Thus, the folk itself, being as it were, in a state of survival throughout Europe, it was natural to regard its lore as made up of survivals. To use the metaphor that had wide currency from the first, folk-lore was but a heap of fossils. Correspondingly, then, the science of folk-lore was defined as the study of survivals, a palæontology of human culture. But the results of such a method of interpretation have not proved wholly satisfactory. The scientific interest is one-sided. Fossilhunting has been overdone. Owing to this bias there has been failure to discriminate between the old and the merely old-fashioned, the chronologically and the typologically primitive. Hence the need is felt for a revised method of folk-lore study. This must treat folk-lore not as so much dead matter, but as the outcome of an

organic process, namely, of an existing or recently existing folk-life. If this folk-life be studied as a whole, change and movement are in evidence everywhere. If the old be conserved, it is likewise readapted and transformed; nor is the new altogether rejected, though it is so created or assimilated as normally to wear the semblance of the old.

To take an example. A charm for removing warts may, apparently, resemble a piece of savage magic. Yet comparisons based simply on its form will not tell us how old it is, nor whence it comes. It may have been improvised yesterday by some latter-day medicine-man of the country-side, half leech and half wizard. It may be a degraded scrap of scientific medicine, perhaps mediæval, or perhaps, if it belong to what is known as the southern tradition, going right back by way of the Arabs to Hippocrates himself. Or, again, it may be part of the northern tradition and embody the rude notions of ancestral Danes or Saxons. Meanwhile, whatever be its origin, it is likely to conform to a general pattern such as the mind of the folk abidingly approves. In order to explain it, therefore, psychological, no less than historical, conditions must be taken into account. Moreover, the former lend themselves to observation; whereas the latter are mostly matters of inference, shading off by degrees into bare conjecture.

It must next be asked what folk-lore means for Sir James Frazer, in his capacity of Biblical critic. Clearly the term is used in an extended sense that carries us beyond the peasant-culture of Europe. Indeed, a general definition is provided in his Preface that assigns it a connotation so wide as almost to be vague. Folk-lore, he says, 'in the broadest sense of the word may be said to embrace the whole body of a people's traditionary beliefs and customs, so far as these appear to be due to the collective action of the multitude and cannot be traced to the individual influence of great men.' It would be easy to carp at this generous conception of the subject. Are we to gather that the folk is society minus its leaders, and that folk-lore and biography are henceforth to divide the field of history between them? But history certainly has these two sides, whatever we are going to call them; and perhaps all that Sir James

Frazer wishes to indicate is that in a general way his present work relates to the one side rather than to the other. Nay, we might venture to pursue this line of thought a little further on our own account. Just as there is a psychology of the crowd, so there might be a psychology of what Sir James Frazer would call the multitude or, less happily, the folk. The crowd is a temporary and casual assemblage of human beings. As such it exhibits peculiar activities and impulses that have been described and analysed with some success. So too, then, the multitude, being a permanent crowd, as it were, and one that can perpetuate its collective tendencies in the form of a tradition, displays a special type of behaviour such as is well worth studying apart. Or, since the multitude, as thus understood, though it stands for a universal aspect of human society, is by no means so prominent a feature in one social context as in another, it might be more profitable to institute a series of studies devoted, as one might say, to leading

cases.

In this direction something has already been achieved. M. Lévy-Bruhl, for instance, in his well-known book, Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures,' deals with the collective mind or mentality' of the savage tribe. Mr Graham Wallas, again, in his 'Human Nature in Politics,' has examined the proletariat of the modern state from the same point of view. But the folk, in the ordinary sense of the peasantry, though it provides a prerogative instance of the kind required, has hitherto been almost ignored by the student of social psychology. Despite the vast mass of detailed evidence that lies ready to hand, there has never yet been attempted a comprehensive description of the mental life of the folk at our doors, much less a general analysis that brings out how and why it is so markedly gregarious in its distinctive manifestations. If this were to be done, the piecemeal method of dealing with folklore as a scrap-heap of cultural fossils would presumably go by the board once for all. In so far, then, as Sir James Frazer's definition of folk-lore foreshadows a better way of dealing with subjects of the kind, namely, one that regards tradition as the live expression of a collective consciousness, it is heartily to be welcomed;