Each of my inquiries in turn led me back to the individuals concerned, to the human beings themselves. What were their homes, their ambitions, thoughts, beliefs? What guidance do they give to those who wish to serve them? I groped my way blindly and acquired knowledge only in a negative sense by a series of failures. I gleaned two general precepts from my investigations. They were these: It is useless to try and help the lives of a community without consulting the individuals whom you hope to benefit, and that to benefit the life conditions of men does not necessarily benefit the life conditions of women, although their interests may be apparently identical as to social grade, locality, religious and other beliefs.
After a series of barren experiments, I stumbled by chance on a piece of social radium, a regenerative agency that bore good fruit and that contained an element of spontaneous joy most refreshing compared to the oppressive straight-jackets of national or private philanthropists. I heard of the revival of folk songs and dances. I went to see and hear them. The first performance opened the door for me into a new paradise. The Esperance Club of working girls had been the means of bringing to life researches of antiquarian musical students. This club had evidently been for many years an unusually successful social enterprise, but the discovery of a lost treasure in the shape of traditional songs and dances gave it a new inspiration. Both words and tunes of the songs have come, generation after generation, from the heart of the English folk. Each generation, each individual who has sung them, has added or omitted some little touch, so that in these songs, which have been mostly collected from old men and women over eighty years of age, is expressed the very soul of English national sentiment. The same with the dances. They were traditional in families or localities, they had been handed down from father to son, and were as truly folk dances as the songs were folk songs. Songs and dances alike are full of life on the land and love of the land, of flowers, animals and crops, of the daily lives of men, women and children. Dramatic, tragic and comic incidents find spontaneous expression, and every one of them tells of a vigorous and mainly joyous existence. The girls of this club learnt the Morris dance first from two Oxfordshire countrymen. Both the dances and songs were acquired easily “by a sort of spiritual sixth sense,” as if the rhythm and meaning of them were latent in their being and were easily re-awakened. The girls not only learnt quickly, but were inspired to teach others, young girls of seventeen and eighteen showing an amazing facility and power of organisation in this matter. One of these came, at my eager request, to teach in our village, and, after one week, men, women and children were alive with these friendly, joy-giving, native arts. The following year a girl teacher came to us again with renewed success.