mporary and indeed limited in time. In different
groups also the moral standards are unequal at the same time, and the
mores are on different levels. There is a wider limit now for romances
and dramas in France than in English-speaking countries. The cases which
now interest us are those of long and wide currency, which the mores
have firmly established according to current standards, even though
moralists may have inveighed against them sometimes, as the same class
now sometimes denounces all dancing.

The cases here to be noticed are further illustrations of the fact that
the mores can make anything right, and can protect anything from
condemnation, in addition to those in the last two chapters.

+614. Literature and drama in ethology.+ Poetry, drama, and literary
fiction are useful to ethology in one or the other of two ways: (1) they
reveal facts of the mores; (2) they show the longings and ideals of the
group,--in short, what the people like and wish for. The second division
includes mythology, fairy tales, and extravaganzas. The taste for them,
if it exists, is a feature of the mores, but in fact such a taste is
hardly ever popular. It is a product of culture. Myths, legends,
proverbs, fables, riddles, etc., are popular products.

+615. Public amusements of the uncivilized. Reversion to archaic,
"natural" ways.+ We find in savage life, almost universally unless the
group has been crushed by conquest or misfortune, festivals, games,
dances, and orgies, which are often celebrated with masks and dramatic
action. The motives are fidelity to the traditions of ancestors,
entertainment, sex excitement, war enthusiasm, and occult influence in
aid of the food quest. The dramatic representation of sex attraction and
of the ways of animals is often intensely graphic, and it gives great
pleasure to the spectators. An occult effect, to bring about what is
desired in war or the chase by enacting it in a dance or play, involves
demonism, the existing form of religion. Therefore religion, dramatic
dances, music, songs, emotional suggestion, and sex stimulation are
intertwined from low barbarism or savagery. Experience of the perils and
pains of sexual excess and overpopulation force the development of
folkways of restraint, which are customary and conventional regulations
of primary natural impulses. At the recurring points of time at which
the festivals are held there is often a reversion from the moral status
created by the l