Volume II Part 31 (1/2)

* _Revue des Traditions Populaires_, April 25,1887, p. 186.

We have few opportunities of finding examples of remote American _marchen_ recorded so early as this, and generally the hypothesis of recent borrowing from Europeans, or from Negroes influenced by Europeans, is at least possible, and it would be hard to prove a negative. But the case of the Huarochiri throws doubt on the hypothesis of recent borrowing as the invariable cause of the diffusion of _marchen_ in places beyond the reach of historic India.

The only way (outside of direct evidence) to prove borrowing would be to show that ideas and customs peculiarly Indian (for example) occur in the _marchen_ of people dest.i.tute of these ideas. But it would be hard to ask believers in the Indian theory to exhibit such survivals. In the first place, if _contes_ have been borrowed, it seems that a new ”local colour” was given to them almost at the moment of transference. The Zulu and Kaffir _marchen_ are steeped in Zulu and Kaffir colour, and the life they describe is rich in examples of rather peculiar native rites and ceremonies, seldom if ever essential to the conduct of the tale. Thus, if stories are ”adapted” (like French plays) in the moment of borrowing, it will be cruel to ask supporters of the Indian theory for traces of Indian traits and ideas in European _marchen_. Again, apart from special yet non-essential matters of etiquette (such as the ceremonies with which certain kinsfolk are treated, or the initiation of girls at the marriageable age), the ideas and customs found in marchen are practically universal As has been shown, the super-natural stuff--metamorphosis, equality of man, beasts and things, magic and the like--_is_ universal. Thus little remains that could be fixed on as especially the custom or idea of any one given people. For instance, in certain variants of _Puss in Boots_, Swahili, Avar, Neapolitan, the beast-hero makes it a great point that, when he dies, he is to be _honourably buried_. Now what peoples give beasts honourable burial? We know the cases of ancient Egyptians, Samoans, Arabs and Athenians (in the case, at least, of the wolf), and probably there are many more. Thus even so peculiar an idea or incident as this cannot be proved to belong to a definite region, or to come from any one original centre.*

* See Deulin, Gontes de ma Mire l'Oye, and Reinhold Kohler in Gonzenbach's Siclianische Marchen, No. 65.

By the very nature of the case, therefore, it is difficult for M.

Cosquin and other supporters of the Indian theory to prove the existence of Indian ideas in European marchen. Nor do they establish this point.

They urge that _charity to beasts_ and the _grat.i.tude of beasts_, as contrasted with human lack of grat.i.tude, are Indian, and perhaps Buddhist ideas. Thus the Buddha gave his own living body to a famished tigress. But so, according to Garcila.s.so, were the subjects of the Incas wont to do, and they were not Buddhists. The beasts in marchen, again, are just as often, or even more frequently, helpful to men without any motive of grat.i.tude; nor would it be fair to argue that the notion of grat.i.tude has dropped out, because we find friendly beasts all the world over, totems and manitous, who have never been benefited by man. The favours are all on the side of the totems. It is needless to adduce again the evidence on this topic. M. Cosquin adds that the belief in the equality and interchangeability of attributes and aspect between man and beast is ”une idee bien indienne,” and derived from the doctrine of metempsychosis, ”qui efface la distinction entre l'homme et l'animal, et qui en tout vivant voit un frere”. But it has been demonstrated that this belief in the equality and kins.h.i.+p not only of all animate, but all inanimate nature, is the very basis of Australian, Zuni and all other philosophies of the backward races. No idea can be less peculiar to India; it is universal. Once more, the belief that shape-s.h.i.+fting (metamorphosis) can be achieved by skin-s.h.i.+fting, by donning or doffing the hide of a beast, is no more ”peculiarly Indian” than the other conceptions. Benfey, to be sure, laid stress on this point;* but it is easy to produce examples of skin-s.h.i.+fting and consequent metamorphosis from Roman, North American, Old Scandinavian, Thlinkeet, Slav and Vogul ritual and myths.** There remains only a trace of polygamy in European marchen to speak of specially Indian influence.*** But polygamy is not peculiar to India, nor is monogamy a recent inst.i.tution in Europe.

* Pantschatantra, I 265.

** Marriage of Cupid and Psyche, pp. lx., lxiv., where examples and authorities are given.

*** Cosquin, op. cit, i., x.x.x.

Thus each ”peculiarly Indian” idea supposed to be found in marchen proves to be practically universal. So the whole Indian hypothesis is attacked on every side. _Contes_ are far older than _historic_ India.

Nothing raises even a presumption that they first arose in _prehistoric_ India. They are found in places where they could hardly have travelled from historic India. Their ideas are not peculiarly Indian, and though many reached Europe and Asia in literary form derived from India during the Middle Ages, and were even used as parables in sermons, yet the majority of European folk-tales have few traces of Indian influence.

Some examples of this influence, as when the ”frame-work” of an Oriental collection has acquired popular circulation, will be found in Professor Crane's interesting book, _Italian Popular Tales_, pp. 168, 359. But to admit this is very different from a.s.serting that German _Hausmarchen_ are all derived from ”Indian and Arabian originals, with necessary changes of costume and manners,” which is, apparently, the opinion of some students.

What remains to do is to confess ignorance of the original centre of the _marchen_, and inability to decide dogmatically which stories must have been invented only once for all, and which may have come together by the mere blending of the universal elements of imagination. It is only certain that no limit can be put to a story's power of flight _per ora virum_. It may wander wherever merchants wander, wherever captives are dragged, wherever slaves are sold, wherever the custom of exogamy commands the choice of alien wives. Thus the story flits through the who let race and over the whole world. Wherever human communication is or has been possible, there the story may go, and the s.p.a.ce of time during which the courses of the sea and the paths of the land have been open to story is dateless and unknown. Here the story may dwindle to a fireside tale; there it may become an epic in the mouth of Homer or a novel in the hands of Madame D'Aulnoy or Miss Thackeray. The savage makes the characters beasts or birds; the epic poet or saga-man made them heroic kings, or lovely, baleful sorceresses, daughters of the Sun; the French Countess makes them princesses and countesses. Like its own heroes, the popular story can a.s.sume every shape; like some of them, it has drunk the waters of immortality.*

* A curious essay by Mr. H. E. Warner, on ”The Magical Flight,” urges that there is no plot, but only a fortuitous congeries of story-atoms (Scribner's Magazine, June, 1887).

There is a good deal to be said, in this case, for Mr.

Warner's conclusions.

APPENDIX A. Fontenelle's forgotten common sense

In the opinion of Aristotle, most discoveries and inventions have been made time after time and forgotten again. Aristotle may not have been quite correct in this view; and his remarks, perhaps, chiefly applied to politics, in which every conceivable and inconceivable experiment has doubtless been attempted. In a field of less general interest--namely, the explanation of the absurdities of mythology--the true cause was discovered more than a hundred years ago by a man of great reputation, and then was quietly forgotten. Why did the ancient peoples--above all, the Greeks--tell such extremely gross and irrational stories about their G.o.ds and heroes? That is the riddle of the mythological Sphinx. It was answered briefly, wittily and correctly by Fontenelle; and the answer was neglected, and half a dozen learned but impossible theories have since come in and out of fas.h.i.+on. Only within the last ten years has Fontenelle's idea been, not resuscitated, but rediscovered. The followers of Mr. E. B. Taylor, Mannhardt, Gaidoz, and the rest, do not seem to be aware that they are only repeating the notions of the nephew of Corneille.

The Academician's theory is stated in a short essay, De l'Origine des Fables (OEuvres: Paris, 1758, vol. iii. p.270). We have been so accustomed from childhood, he says, to the absurdities of Greek myth, that we have ceased to be aware that they are absurd. Why are the legends of men and beasts and G.o.ds so incredible and revolting? Why have we ceased to tell such tales? The answer is, that early men were in ”a state of almost inconceivable savagery and ignorance,” and that the Greek myths are inherited from people in that condition. ”Look at the Kaffirs and Iroquois,” says Fontenelle, ”if you wish to know what early men were like; and remember that even the Iroquois and Kaffirs are people with a long past, with knowledge and culture (_politesse_) which the first men did not enjoy.” Now the more ignorant a man is, the more prodigies he supposes himself to behold. Thus the first narratives of the earliest men were full of monstrous things, ”parce qu'ils etoient faits par des gens sujets a voir bien des choses qui n'etaient pas”.

This condition answers, in Mr. Tylor's system, to the confusion the savage makes between dreams and facts, and to the hallucinations which beset him when he does not get his regular meals. Here, then, we have a groundwork of irresponsible fancy.

The next step is this: even the rudest men are curious, and ask ”the reason why” of phenomena. ”II y a eu de la philosophie meme dans ces siecles grossiers;” and this rude philosophy ”greatly contributed to the origin of myths ”. Men looked for causes of things. ”'Whence comes this river?' asked the reflective man of those ages--a queer philosopher, yet one who might have been a Descartes did he live to-day. After long meditation, he concluded that some one had always to keep filling the source whence the stream springs. And whence came the water? Our philosopher did not consider so curiously. He had evolved the myth of a water-nymph or naiad, and there he stopped. The characteristic of these mythical explanations--as of all philosophies, past, present and to come--was that they were limited by human experience. Early man's experience showed him that effects were produced by conscious, sentient, personal causes like himself. He sprang to the conclusion that all hidden causes were also persons. These persons are the _dramatis personae_ of myth. It was a person who caused thunder, with a hammer or a mace; or it was a bird whose wings produced the din.

”From this rough philosophy which prevailed in the early ages were born the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses”--deities made not only in the likeness of man, but of savage man as he, in his ignorance and superst.i.tion, conceived himself to be. Fontenelle might have added that those fancied personal causes who became G.o.ds were also fas.h.i.+oned in the likeness of the beasts, whom early man regarded as his equals or superiors. But he neglects this point. He correctly remarks that the G.o.ds of myth appear immoral to us because they were devised by men whose morality was all unlike ours--who prized justice less than power, especially (he might have added) magical power. As morality ripened into self-consciousness, the G.o.ds improved with the improvement of men; and ”the G.o.ds known to Cicero are much better than those known to Homer, because better philosophers have had a hand at their making”. Moreover, in the earliest speculations an imaginative and hair-brained philosophy explained all that seemed extraordinary in nature; while the sphere of philosophy was filled by fanciful narratives about facts. The constellations called the Bears were accounted for as metamorphosed men and women. Indeed, ”all the metamorphoses are the physical philosophy of these early times,”

which accounted for every fact by what we now calletiological nature-myths. Even the peculiarities of birds and beasts were thus explained. The partridge flies low because Daedalus (who had seen his son Icarus perish through a lofty flight) was changed into a partridge.

This habit of mind, which finds a story for the solution of every problem, survives, Fontenelle remarks, in what we now call folk-lore--popular tradition. Thus, the elder tree is said to have borne as good berries as the vine does till Judas Iscariot hanged himself from its branches. This story must be later than Christianity; but it is precisely identical in character with those ancient metamorphoses which Ovid collected. The kind of fancy that produced these and other prodigious myths is not peculiar, Fontenelle maintains, to Eastern peoples. ”It is common to all men,” at a certain mental stage--”in the tropics or in the regions of eternal ice.” Thus the world-wide similarities of myths are, on the whole, the consequence of a worldwide uniformity of intellectual development.

Fontenelle hints at his proof of this theory. He compares the myths of America with those of Greece, and shows that distance in s.p.a.ce and difference of race do not hinder Peruvians and Athenians from being ”in the same tale”. ”For the Greeks, with all their intelligence, did not, in their beginnings, think more rationally than the savages of America, who were also, apparently, a rather primitive people (_a.s.sez nouveau_).”

He concludes that the Americans might have become as sensible as the Greeks if they had been allowed the leisure.

With an exception in the Israelites, Fontenelle decides that all nations made the astounding part of their myths while they were savages, and retained them from custom and religious conservatism. But myths were also borrowed and interchanged between Phoenicia, Egypt and Greece. Further, Greek misunderstandings of the meanings of Phoenician and other foreign words gave rise to myths. Finally, myths were supposed to contain treasures of antique mysterious wisdom; and mythology was explained by systems which themselves are only myths, stories told by the learned to themselves and to the public.