MYTHS AND FAIRY TALES.

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The great difficulty in the way of a scientific treatment of fairy lore and supernatural tradition lies in the abundance of materials of different kinds and co-ordinate authority at our command. The comparative mythologist may begin his studies at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the chain of popular belief, and in either case, if he is disposed to treat the subject seriously, he will find nearly employment for a lifetime in clearing one portion of the ground for future speculation.  The myth, the saga, and the fairy tale are undoubtedly related, and they stand in the scale of antiquity approximately in the order mentioned; but the descent of one from the other is by no means unbroken, and the common element running through them all, which is what makes them form branches of the same study, only reveals itself to those who are already thoroughly familiar with each in particular. Thus the earliest period of mythological growth with which we are acquainted is that presented by the Vedas and the Zend Avesta, works barely intelligible to scholars who study nothing else, whilst the comparative mythologist can only use them to profit on condition of possessing, in addition, a general knowledge of the earliest sacred books of other nations, and a more minute familiarity with the ethnological considerations which determine the ago and degree of independence belonging to each. The normal or typical course of religious thought amongst the Aryan races, for instance, must be reconstructed before we can assign their right position in the scale of development to the mythology of Greece or Scandinavia; and this can scarcely be done without the help of comparisons derived from the mythology of more backward races, which again entails the inquiry what is religious and primitive, what legendary, and what fantastic in their individual beliefs. Thus one question leads to another, and the answers which would add most to our knowledge, and lead to the most fruitful results, are the last which we can arrive at with any degree of confidence. 

The saga, or heroic legend, standing midway between the myth, which vanishes into the shades of the past, and the fairy tale, which loses itself in the frivolity of the present, is also perforce a study apart: in the first place, because of the exceeding voluminousness of its literature—Iliad, Shah Nameh Nibelungen Lied, Chant de Roland--all the works of what may be called applied mythology, produced in the inevitable chivalrous Middle Ago of each nation ; and [End Page 140] secondly, because each separate legendary cycle has to be submitted to historical criticism, to see that no crumbs of fact are inadvertently left amongst the residuum destined to pass into the mythologic crucible.  The epic or ballad literature which has grown up around the names of Raina, Rustem, Sigurd and Siogfried, Charlemagne, Arthur, Diar and Fionn, or the Cid, must all be taken into account for the secondary period of mythological development ; and in some ways, perhaps, this branch of comparative mythology may be looked upon as the most advanced. Even here, however, it would take the heroic industry of a Grimm to catalogue the substantial results arrived at by all who have laboured independently in this field, which is certainly far too wide to be entered upon in a magazine article ; especially as these heroic legends, just because we seem to know most about them, are of really less interest for the history of thought than the obscure birth of natural religion or the despised utterances of its decrepitude.

We have no intention of entering into such wide questions as the origin of supernatural creeds, or the share which astronomical or metaphysical ideas, theological sentiments, and elemental experiences may have had in their formation. Without going below the surface of things, we find a mass of fiction common to almost the whole human race, and, therefore, we are compelled to suppose, based, in some inscrutable way, upon universal instincts and tendencies, which  modern science must penetrate, or make a shameful confession of incompetence. But the task before the comparative mythologist is not so simple as some professors of the study seem to imagine. It would not be enough to have suggested an interpretation for one set of popular traditions, even though an exhaustive examination of the subject should make it apparent that every other form taken by myth or legend could ultimately be reduced to a derivative of the first.  Comparative philology had only just begun when it was discovered that Sanskrit and Greek were kindred tongues, and that the type of modern European languages could be studied to best advantage in Hindustan.  It remained to be shown, and the process is still in its earliest stages, how, and so far as possible, when and where, the languages which arc now distinct branched off from each other, or from an older parent stem. The laws of linguistic change had to be ascertained, verified in those periods when the historian could check the conclusions of grammar, and then applied, with care and diffidence, to the remoter ages in which philology has no more trustworthy auxiliaries than geology or  the other infant science now under dis­cussion. Granting for a moment--what is doubtful--that all myths were originally solar or elemental, little has been gained until we are in possession of trustworthy data, showing by what laws the extant variations on the primitive theme were produced, and which ideas are peculiar to or characteristic of which nation or group of nations.  The folk lore of one country at different periods, or of different [End Page 141] countries at the same period, ought to be compared, and instead of sinking all that is individual or characteristic in different legendary cycles, until Little Red Riding Hood and Achilles are the same person, a sound analysis would assign a separate place to every detail, however trifling, which was really primitive and irreducible. If materials were collected in this spirit, we should soon be able to assign as distinct a value to the fables told by any set of peasants as to the roots and numerals of their language, in fixing the affinities and history of their ancestors. In such matters guesses and a priori reasoning are worse than useless, because the appearance of complete knowledge discourages research ; and, as Mr. Tylor admirably observes in his " Primitive Culture," after a very plausible " solar " interpretation of the "Song of Sixpence"; "Mere possibility in mythological speculation is now seen to be such a worthless commodity, that every investigator wishes there was not such plenty of it." What may mean anything is that mach nearer meaning nothing ; but as comparative mythology is really a. science with a future, we have to discover, if possible, some "Grimm's law" which may serve to restrain the wanton exercise of explanatory ingenuity. Meanwhile it ought to be a fixed principle that no interpretation, however tempting, should be admitted to more than provisional toleration till some external evidence has been adduced in its support. 

The author of "Mythology of the Aryan Nations" sometimes offends against this rule, at least to the extent of withholding the confirmatory proof which, perhaps, may be in his possession. One example will be enough of this tantalizing habit, common to most elementalists, of taking for granted without comment what would be very instructive indeed if only it were true. Everybody knows the story of the boy who wanted to learn to shiver, which, in the version given by Grimm, ends comically, with a maid-servant's pouring a pail of water from the brook, with all its slimy inmates, over him. According to Mr. Cox, the stupid boy is no more able to shiver than the sun," and only learns "when Helios plunges into the sea as Endymion." Now, it would be rash to say that this catastrophe is not primitive, because the serious and the grotesque often mingle in these stories in a way that baffles calculation; but when we have to choose between Mr. Cox's supposition that the vivid sensible images of an elaborate allegory have been preserved for eight or ten centuries after its significance was lost, and the more obvious view, that some matter-of-fact German dame did not like a story without an ending, there are arguments on both sides which ought to be expressed. There is no doubt that fairy tales are occasionally distorted by wanton, that is, meaningless inventions; and the Germans have been a reading people so long that the value of oral tradition is less with them than in almost any other country. Still, the intrusive elements can generally be detected by a comparison of the dominant idea, [End Page 145] which constitutes the core and centre of the myth, with the co-ordinate forms taken by it in different countries. Now in Grimm's story there are, as it were, true motives--the humorous notion of a person wishing to acquire by art a power which those who possess it would gladly dispense with, and a cluster of adventures typical of absolute fearlessness. Too much importance roust not be attached to the word  "gruseln," which is by no means essential to the story, for in many versions the youth sets forth, "das Furchte‑mich zu lernen," because lie so often hears people say, "I'm afraid," and does not know what they mean. 0f course the sun may be conceived as fearless as well as hot, but the story in its most complete shape is met with in comparatively few of the excellent collections of popular tales which have been made of late years in all parts of Europe ; and the nearest parallel to the ending, on which Mr. Cox builds so much, is that offered by stories of a very different type, where the princess, who has been enamoured of a wicked magician, is disenchanted when her husband has plunged her thrice into a tub of water, from which she rises the first time as a raven, the second time as a dove, and at lust in her proper shape. Of course this may be taken as a story of solar infidelity with the sexes reversed, but we may, just as well suppose a reference to the rite of baptism, for the tub of water in Andersen and a German version from the Hartz district, is wanting in old Eastern forms of the tale. 

We find the story at full in Sicily in the fairy tales collected from oral tradition by Fraulein Gonzenbach, where the hero is chiefly remarkable for not being afraid of churchyards and corpses, while the tone of the story seems to imply that such extreme don't-care-ishness is almost irreligious. Grimm knows of no modern French equivalent; but the legend had taken this turn in the romances about Richard sans Peur, current as late as the seventeenth century, and certainly as early as the thirteenth. Here it is the devils who are piqued by Richard's reputation for fearlessness, and try in a variety of ways to take him unawares. One evil spirit assumes the shape of a baby, which Richard finds in a wood, and grows up into a girl on purpose that it may marry him, pretend to die, and frighten him as he is watching by the corpse. Brudemort (so the sprite is called) is disappointed in this deep-laid plot, and after several other failures, the powers of darkness abandon their attempts, and Richard and his ex-spouse remain the best of friends. We may observe, parentheti­cally, that the episode of a corpse which rises, vampire-like, to devour the watchers, is found again in some recently published Venetian fairy tales, and no doubt belongs to a time when the duty of watching by the dead was held to be both necessary, as, according to Apuleius in Thessaly, and dangerous, as when all these tests of courage were invented. The story was onto known in Tyrol, as Zingerle, who professes to follow his authorities literally, speaks in a short tale [End Page 146] called "Die weisse Geis" of a poacher, “der das Furchten nicht gelernt hatte," but the incidents are generally vulgarised into mere ghost stories, with a local habitation, in which, moreover, the dreadnought adventurer gets the worst of it at the hands of the spirits. We may perhaps also connect the Lithuanian story of a wager between the devil, Perkunas (the Lithuanian god), and a carpenter, as to which should succeed in frightening the other two, but the details arc dissimilar. In “Campbell's" Tales of the Western Highlands," we have the adventures of the fearless hero, but without the previously expressed wish to learn what fear is, and joined to another group of stories by the hero's triumph over the devil, here called the Mischief, who is decoyed into a bag and belaboured by threshers and blacksmiths. Some of the same incidents are met with in Arnason's " Icelandic Tales," and feint reminiscences may be recognised in Chambers's " Nursery Rhymes of Scotland." But, on the whole, it seems as if the " learning to shiver " was not the popular part of the legend, and there is certainly a refinement about the idea which may account for its dropping out of the common fireside version. In China, however, we find it again stripped of all irrelevant incidents : a king (in Stanislas Julien's " Avadanas ") has heard of Misfortune, and wishes to know what she is like; lie offers one hundred thousand pieces of gold for the privilege of making her acquaintance, and in return she ravages his country and reduces him to misery. Here the moral is obvious; but the germ of the apologise mast have been a popular saying or anecdote, like the legendary basis of the stories in the "Gesta Romanorum," a work to which the “Avadanas” bear the strongest resemblance, in the perverse ingenuity with which they extract sweetness from the strong, and edification from the most unpromising myths. But to return to Grimm and Mr. Cox : the conclusion of the bucket of cold water is by no means general in the stories which resemble each other in their remaining features. If the myth is to be solar, the version to be preferred is certainly one in which the princess pushes her unreasonable bridegroom off a bridge into the water; but the number, as well as the character of the different variations, seems rather to point to falsification or invention. Of all the attempts to manufacture an end for a story which, to our thinking, requires none, the worst is certainly one of Grimm's variants, which makes the hero take fright at the firing of a cannon; and perhaps the best a northern version, in which his head is cut off, and then put on hind part before, an operation which might easily upset the strongest nerves. It would be tedious to follow out the analysis of the different proofs of courage given in all these stories, though a strictly scientific treatment demands that we should distinguish them into three groups, according as they are most akin to the common heroic type of exploit, to the prudent wit of the valiant tailor, or to the humorous and sometimes malignant [End Page 147] blundering of the popular fool. We have said enough to show that the solar character of any part of the legend remains to be estab­lished, and that the weight of presumption is decidedly against such a character for the whole of its late German form. 

      The study of these fragmentary remains of what was once mytho­logy  may follow either of two directions without falling into the snare of over hasty generalisations. Contemporary fairy tales, in other words, may be investigated either secundum esse or secundum fieri, critically, in connection with their natural sense, and logical antecedents, by the analysis of their actual elements, or historically in relation to their date, origin, and present external form. The only serious attempt, so far as we are aware, which has been made in the first of these directions, is due to Johann Georg von Hahn, who has endeavoured to classify the modern Greek and Albanian fairy tales collected by himself.  The principal fault to be found with his arrangement is that he seems to have been guided rather too much by such accidental features as the relationship of the characters, or the presence of particular incidents which are not an essential part of the framework of the story.  It would be ungrateful to complain, when he has made so promising a beginning, that he has not gone further and tried to group together those stories which were origi­nally akin in meaning as well as those which have a present resemblance; if this were done, the masses of fiction, in which three sons, and seven daughters, and twelve brothers, kings, princesses, quadrupeds, and strange carnivora mixed together till the reader's brain turns giddy, might be reduced to a manageable number of types, each of which might then, if the needful learning and patience were forthcoming, be carried back to the idea which presided over its birth 4,000 years ago in central Asia, or longer ago still, when all the nameless nations of flint chippers had a common language and habitation.

      The inquiry into the number and nature o£ the fixed mythical ideas which underlie the Protean forms of legendary fiction would carry us too far; it will be enough to suggest that the tenacity of popular memory for such things is, perhaps, assisted by the inarticulate, ideal conscience of the race ; so that frivolous, or it may be immoral, narratives are tolerated for the higher meaning which, perhaps, they never knowingly had, and yet can never have been quite without, because its idea, in the Platonic sense, was existing all the time, and only awaiting recognition to become a reality.  Behind the coarse and material language of early myths there hides not only the sentiment which this rather parodies than expresses, but all the consequences and developments which may follow from its nature as well. This is the true and primitive “possibility,” the meaning which is not the less real for being latent and, as it were, optional.  In interpreting the first and vaguest hints at future myths and legends, [End Page 148] it is especially desirable to remember this elasticity of early speculative thought, or we shall be apt to do injustice to the wisdom of our ancestors. At first sight the discrepancies between the most authoritative translations of some Vedic hymns seem hopelessly discouraging, but when several accomplished contemporaries are in doubt as to how they shall render an imaginative phrase, may we not suppose that its authors were content without defining and restricting too accurately that sense, out of many, which they assigned to it? We know how difficult it is to get a definition from children, and there is an intellectual period in which the word means the thing, the whole thing, nothing but the thing, and therewith an end, or rather a beginning, to all the dreams and discoveries of realism, since the nature of things is that which first shows man the infinite, and so leads him to shelter behind limitations.

      Amongst so much that is doubtful, it is a comfort to be able to speak positively as to the first abstract idea which found literary expression in what the Avesta calls " the Aryan home." It was the idea of Cow. And as the myths derived from this fertile and comprehensive conception arc comparatively simple and familiar, we cannot do better than follow them through their later modifications, which are both interesting in themselves, and may serve as an example of the way in which we should like to see more difficult mythological problems considered. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. The Arab's standard of comparison is his camel, the Persian's his horse, and when the mind is much taken up with cows; cows naturally supply the favourite figures of speech. That cow was a familiar idea to the 'Vedic Indians is seen in such phrases as : Release Vasishtha Icing, like a thief who has :feasted on stolen oxen ; " and though Cacus and Vala are not exactly incarnations, as Professor II. Ii. Wilson put it, of the local Donald Bean Lean, they certainly presuppose his existence. But the attention paid to this mythical episode of the capture of the heavenly cows by the powers of darkness and drought, has been rather unfairly withheld from other more characteristic, and especially more fertile variations on the original metaphor. The myth of Vala scarcely lived to receive a distinct objective form ; and that of Cacus, an old wife's tale without pictorial plausibility or philosophical insight, died out with classical mythology, and left no successors, unless we please to connect it with a not uncommon introduction to Bluebeard stories and some others, in which hero or heroine set forth, like Saul in search of his father's asses, to recover some domestic animal that has been lost or stolen.

      But to the ancient Aryans the cow was much more than a domestic animal. To the followers of Zoroaster, converts to agriculture and " the settled life," the earth itself is the great archetypal cow, cut up and offered as a sacrifice, while from its members all things living [End Page 149] proceeded ; the natural world is Geus arva the soul of the cow, cut up by the plough for the use of men. The early Dova worshippers, on the other hand, who retained their pastoral habits longer, never gave up the imagery of the dairy, even when they had ceased to draw all their support from its produce.  The famous “churning of the ocean " is an instance of this--a legend which seems always to call up a smile on European lips, though really it is not easy to see what image of the mysteries of creation could be better than the familiar, unintelligible process by which the solid evolves itself from the fluid, and the sacrificial butter “comes.”  Yet older phrases address the “Beautiful Aswins, sowing barley with the plough and milking food for man."  And when the progress of agriculture has made the state of the harvest an all-important consideration, the heavy rain-clouds become the cows, which Indra drives back “that the brilliant waters may flow freely for man."  Beyond this point the metaphor falls a prey to confusion.  “The Maruts” lead about the powerful horse to make it rain ; they milk the thundering unceasing spring," while the same hymn talks of the " tall bulls of hoaven, the manly ones of Rudra. . . . scattering raindrops, of awful shape, like giants."  At this conjuncture the myth ought to come into being, a conception which is not allegorical, because it commands belief, nor an article of religion, because all know that it has to be understood in a transcen­dental sense.  The Indian mind was too speculative for this objective phase of mythologising to reach anything like the development which it did in Greece, but this once they seem to have gone so far towards personifying the vessel from whence the fertilising showers proceed, that the cows of heaven seem almost to become real mythological entities, not vague metaphors for dawns or days or raindrops, but personages, as distinct from all this as the Hermes of the Homeric hymn is from the whistling wind.

      The idea of cow is not exhausted with its mythological rendering.  A legendary, pseudo-historical belief identifies the fertile land of India with the wonder‑working cow that kindled such dire passions in the celestial minds of King Visvamitra and the holy Vasishtha. Here we see the transitional character of the heroic or saga period; for these worthies belong half to solar mythology, half to playful fairy‑tale, and between the two we have to find room for the historical possibility that a Kshatriya champion tried to secularise the established church, and did for a time appropriate the prerogatives of the Brahman class, which, however, almost deserved its subsequent triumph by its skill in putting a good face on defeat. The territorial sense of the cow of plenty is the one on which we are least disposed to dwell. A mere figure of speech does not deserve to be treated with the same respect as a myth in process of being made or remade, and the wonderful cow of the sage introduces us to the tertiary period of popular lore.  She is, in fact, the prototype of all those magically productive animals [End Page 150] or talismans which, in later fairy tales servo to satisfy the vulgar human craving after omelettes made without eggs, and blooming conclusions derived from barren premisses, though it is quite possible that the original framers of the myth intended a serious allusion to the rich and inscrutable vital powers of nature. That the cow is to be understood as the sun seems scarcely likely from the tone of the story in the " Ramayana," which is, moreover, old enough to reach back to the time when cows were still connected with the idea of fertilizing moisture. Fire and water are the two original good principles, and the Indra, whose chief function it is to bring back the rain-clouds, is only conceived as the sun because it is natural to distinguish between the actor and the object of an action; otherwise Indra might with perfect propriety be looked upon as himself the god of the heavenly streams. Vasishtha's cow has equally various properties, and perhaps the safest way is to consider her as a great image of natura naturans, who supplies, as occasion demands, a feast and presents for Icing Visvamitra and all his hosts, or an endless succession of warriors to resist the profane attempt to capture her by earthly might.

      The wonder-working possessions, which are connected with the sun in his narrower and literal sense, are of scarcely inferior antiquity, and may generally be recognised by their aggressive or destructive qualities, whilst the equivalent of the more peaceful benefactions of the cow are stones or other talismans, which coin money and whatever else is required out of nothing, instead of (like the golden goose, &c.) producing it by the idealisation of some natural process. Such perhaps is Sintamani, Indra's jewel, produced, like so many other valuables, at the churning of the ocean ; such is certainly the jewel Syamantaka, which was worn by the sun himself, who, on taking it off, appears like a dwarfish copper-coloured man; in Vishnu Purana he gives the jewel to Satrajit, and it yields twelve loads of gold daily, besides bringing good fortune in other respects; but a chaste and virtuous life are indispensable to its possessor, who will otherwise meet with a violent death. Parallels in the fairy tales of all nations are simply innumerable, but later on it became usual to divide the magical qualities amongst three separate articles ; and here, again, we must distinguish two co-ordinate forms of the myth. In one the hero acquires (generally by treachery) three things by the help of which he accomplishes the adventure on which ho is engaged; two of these are almost always the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness, but the third varies. In Somadeva's fairy tales (eleventh century, but the materials, of course, much older) it is a staff which creates whatever you draw with it (" Indra with the rays of the morning gives sense to the senseless and to the formless form "); ,in the myth of Perseus, where the properties of the helmet of Hades and the shoes are also neglected, it is a wallet, which, perhaps, like that in a modern Hungarian tale, may have been valuable because it would hold what- [End Page 151] ever was put into it (including Gorgons) without being inconveniently full, though such things serve more commonly to supply inexhaustible bread and butter. In '1 Jack the Giant‑killer," and perhaps in the corrected form of the legend, the third gift is the sword of sharpness, which frequently occurs by itself, and sometimes includes the virtues of all the rest, like a wonder-sword, that satisfied every wish, given by a Rakshasi to Indrasena, which was somehow connected with the life of its possessor, who swoons when it is broken. The shoes sometimes transport their owner to the desired locality without even the formality of flying ; but a wishing-cloak, in a Wallachian story, brings him next morning where he wished to be the night before, so that he travels through all the hours of darkness. Hahn asks if this is a solar allusion, and the mythological character of all these treasures is sufficiently apparent.

      The other story of three gifts, which is a great favourite in modern Europe, is of a less heroic cast. A poor man receives, as a reward for his charity, a table-cloth which covers itself with a splendid feast whenever it is unfolded, a gold-producing animal, and a cudgel which lays on of itself, and so recovers the two other things stolen by a fraudulent innkeeper, or guilefully acquired by a princess; in the latter case, however, instead of the cudgel, nose-elongating apples are the instrument of vengeance. There is not much to be said about the table-cloth, except that it is the last and sadly degenerate representative of Yasishtha's cow. But the golden ass or sheep has an affinity for swindling stories of another type, which, if Hermes be the original clever thief, is mythologically as it should be, though the cynical disintegration of early tradition must have proceeded very fir before the golden showers which the wind offers for sale are contemptuously rejected as so much common rain, while the flocks and herds of heaven reflected in the lake are openly treated as an illusion. With the cudgel we can return to the ages of faith. A volume of Esthonian fairy tales, translated into German from Kreuzwald's collection, is very interesting as showing the way in which a people, that has scarcely outgrown the mythological age, keeps revising its traditions and bringing them back into harmony with the prevailing system of natural philosophy. Here we have wishing-shoes, and a hat which enables the wearer to see everything, natural and supernatural, and even to read thought (the light of day ?), but the stick undoubtedly transports us at once into the skies. When it is waved through the air 'everything melts before it ; rocks, mountains, and bad spirits disappear, '1 for it is even stronger than Pickne's arrow, the thunderbolt." Scarcely less plain is the chapeau fulminant of the Slavonic fairy tales collected by M. Chodzko, chiefly for the sake of the traces of Yedic mythology and religion to be found in them. Here we have a productive table-cloth, a girdle that turns to a sheet of water, a cudgel (which is obviously de trop), and a hat which shoots of its own accord in every direction; this the author connects with [End Page 152] the wonderful weapons of llama ("Ramayana," xxx.) in the description of which matter and spirit seem inextricably mixed, or rather convertible ; and the Lithuanian tale is certainly very magical, and retains a primitive ring even in the French translation.

      All these stories of talismans with a more or less remote mythological origin must be distinguished from the " wishing " fairy tales, and from those in which the fates delight in enriching the stupid or idle hero in spite of the blundering way in which he misuses their gifts. M. Chodzko is most probably right in deriving these tales from the faintly-remembered Indian traditions of the virtue of inaction on the one hand, and the powers of the ascetic will on the other. The Rishis, who acquire by force of penance the power of reducing their enemies to ashes by a look-nay, even the dreadful Visvamitra, whose austerities could call new stars and new gods into being, are near relations of the good little girls in Sicilian or Albanian fairy tales who " pray " themselves out of the difficulties in which they are placed by cruel step-mothers. The choice of the idle, good-for-nothing hero as the favourite of fortune--in the North he is generally stupid, and in the South a spendthrift besides,is no doubt also in part the expression of a sense that the goddess is blind; but this very fatalism is just what encourages inaction, and on the principle that everything comes right to him who can wait, the despised hero goes on waiting till circumstances are too strong for him, and throw him forcibly into the arms of fortune. Scarcely any of the secondary causes which are suggested in different legends to explain his exaltation, appear to be primitive, though the ono in Basile's " Pentamerone " (early seventeenth century) may perhaps be old. The poor younger brother is turned out of doors and takes shelter at a lonely inn. He finds twelve men seated round the table, and in answer to their remarks on the stormy weather, he expresses himself with great propriety on the advantages of change and variety in the seasons. One of the youths then reflects upon the month of March, a blustering, ungenial fellow, for whom, at least, them is nothing to be said. The hero, on the contrary praises him eloquently, he takes away the winter, brings in the spring, and is, apparently, one of the most valuable and indis­pensable of months. Upon this the young man, who is himself of course the month of March, presents his apologist with a wishing-casket, while the envious brother, who comes a little later, gets a flail in answer to his uncivil speeches. The appearance of the months as mythological personages, which is common in the Slavonic tales, is rather a sign of genuineness, but the notion that fair words are a cheap and profitable investment is of no date in particular. To praise an ugly tree or a muddy fountain is a piece of advice often given in fairy tales, while in Indian poetry the regular way of invoking the assistance of a god is to praise him for the benefits he has not, as yet, begun to confer.

      The traditional form of simply “wishing” things into existence [End Page 153] does not last long in popular tradition, though “Wunsch” in Germany had a narrow escape of deification, and the other lines of thought which we have indicated arc not, of course, always kept distinct. Thus in the common and always wonderful story of the fish, there seems to be very little of the quasi‑religious clement, and what might be mythology looks almost more like the remains of a comparatively late superstition. The story is an especial favourite in the East of Europe, where the power of wishing bestowed by the fish is connected with magical formulas such as 1° By the first word of God and the second of the fish," or '1 At the pike's command and at my request," but it is told also in modern Greece, and is given in the “Pentamerone " (3), together with the still more remarkable incident of an enchanted fish whose inside contained palaces and gardens and all sorts of wonderful treasures, according to the injured princess accidentally swallowed by him. `the latter trait can scarcely be anything but Indian ;whether in the other story we have the Fish-Sun, or some other hind of divinity, is a question on which we can scarcely venture to enter, for it would be more inexhaustible oven than that of cows. In Germany the fish only appears in connection with the moral tale of the fisherman and his wife, whose wishes grew with indulgence till their impiety was punished by a return to their original poverty. In some versions, but unfortunately for the solar aspect of the fish, not in all, the request which calls down judgment is that the old man and his wife, who are already emperor and empress, may be able to make rain and sunshine like the " Herr Gott " himself.

      Nearly all the more familiar legends of the nursery might be followed in this way, and at much greater length, through all their successive modifications, back to the physical or moral conception which first inspired them, and to which, all things considered, they keep so strangely faithful. A volume might be written on younger brothers, from Thraetona Joseph and Perdiccas, to the hero who with us has, unfortunately, got the name of Boots. The false wife o£ modern fury tales has to be traced, if we can, to the shadow‑bride whom Saranyu left in the arms of Vivasvat. The Cupid and Psyche formula, with the half-akin Bluebeard tales, has more variations than any, and almost all have some fresh point of interest for the mythologist. Then there is the giant with no heart in his body, of whose legend our "Jack and the Beanstalk " is a part. There is " The Man born to be Kin" who still flourishes in the nursery ; them is "Cinderella," or rather 11 Peau d'Ane," with her three mythological dresses, about which Grimm has not a word to say; there is "fuss in Boots," sometimes a fox, and in Africa a 0gazelle; there is the myth of the gifted servants, Grimm's "Sechse durch die Welt," which turned to allegory in Scandinavia; there arc the common dragonkilling stories, with their comic parody--these, and dozens of others [End Page 154] are still familiarly told in nearly all the countries of Europe, and, to all ;appearance, of Asia as well, to say nothing of gleanings in Africa, America, and Polynesia ; and it is obvious at a glance that they must have much to teach, both about the migrations of the different nations which tell them, and still mono about the wanderings of the ideas presupposed in them.  Its has been already remarked, the external history and transmission of fairy tales forms a separate subject, and it is one to be avoided if possible, because most of the arguments in support of the alternative theories are of a general, that is to say, an unsatisfactory character, while some of the views propounded by learned Germans arc absolutely extravagant, so much so that we can scarcely imagine them to have been meant to apply to fairy tales proper, Kinder Mahrehen, as distinguished from the realistic fiction current amongst adults.

      With regard to compositions of this class (rudimentary romance, not decayed religion.), the doctrine of direct, and, as it were, acci­dental, transmission wihin historic times is not so incredible in itself, though we have our doubts whether very extensive results are to be hoped for from it ; for, in the first place, a great many mediaeval romances, since dramatised, were only rationalised and distorted fairy tales ; and, in the second place, the jests and anecdotes which have plainly always been of the earth, earthy, are nevertheless in many cases as widely diffused as if they were solar.  The story, for instance, of patient Griselda is a perfect psychological puzzle till we discover its origin in the confusion of two, or perhaps three, legendary types ; namely, the wife whose children are taken from her by some superior power in consequence of an act of disobedience like Psyche's, the wife whose children are changed for puppy-dogs by a jealous mother-in-law or sisters, and stories of the " Proud Princess " or " Hakon Grizzlebeard " order, in which the husband has some reason for trying his wife's fortitude.  It is not so easy to say what Portia, and Imogen were originally, but they still live in the Western    Highlands (Campbell, 18), in company with ancient fairy elements, while the latter, and Helena (of All's Well that Ends Well) are at home in India.  Not to multiply instances, we will only mention the story of the grateful corpse (" Tales of the Western Highlands," 32),   which is as old as Tobit, was very popular in France under the name of " Jean de Calais," and in Germany as " Der Gute Gerhard," under which title it has boon separately treated by Simrock, with abundant learning and rather superabundant mythologising.

      The amount of direct evidence which we shall demand in support of the importation of any particular legend will depend on our sense of the antecedent improbability of such modes of transmission; and it is with some hesitation that we venture to cast a doubt upon the conclusions of Professor Max Muller's admirable study of La Fontaine's milkmaid and her Oriental cousins. Yet there certainly does seem to [End Page 155] be a gap just at the most critical point in the chain of derivation. The author shows us the bodily original of " La Laitiere et le Pot au Lait " in a work of the thirteenth century, called the " Dialogus Creaturarum optime Moralizatus;" she reappears in Don Juan 'Manuel's "Conde Lucanor," a century later; and Rabelais mentions her familiarly and, as it were, proverbially. Now the story of the Brahman and the ,jar of honey, which lie breaks while correcting in imagination the son who was to be born when he was rich enough to take a wife, did not come into Europe, it is agreed, before the Greek translation of fables from the '° Panchatantra " by Symeon Seth, called `° Ichnelates and Stephanites," which was not published till the seventeenth century, and cannot have been very widely known in the Middle Ages on account of its language. The work which did become popular, as the " Directorium Humanae Vitae," belongs to the same century as that assigned to the " Dialogue Creaturarum," so that there is no time for us to suppose the story to have modified itself by degrees. But modification is almost too mild an expression for the transformation it has undergone, which is the more striking when we contrast it with the accuracy, not to say servility, of the avowed translations. In these the sex and culling of the Brahman are left unchanged, though to Western ears it must have seemed incongruous for a hermit to be dreaming about a wife and children. If the author of our version had only wished to smooth away this difficulty, it would have been enough to make Perette's family a thing of the future; in which case La 1' ontaine would have avoided the redundant severity of making her both lose her milk and run the risk of being thrashed besides. In point of feet, the Indian equivalent of “Don't count your chickens before they are hatched” is “Don't educate your children before they are born,” and, from this point of view, the story of the jar of honey claims kindred with that of the wise family to which one came to woo. None of the semi-Gothamitc stories are more widely spread than this of the girl who falls to weeping at the thought of the accident that may happen to the child who may be born if she marries the man who is meanwhile waiting for something to drink. Such traits are always open to the suspicion of having had, perhaps, originally a grave satirical purpose. The poets of Persia and Scandinavia think nothing of adjourning a vendetta to the third generation; Hreidmar and I' eridun console the widow of a murdered hero in the same terms : " If you have a daughter instead of a son, give her a husband, and her son shell avenge you." This exaggerated foresight, and the general habit of being too clever by half, are just the hind of things on which popular wit delights to exercise itself; and it is, to say the least of it, possible that its expression in the fable of the milkmaid may have Lad an independent existence in the West. A modern Greek story has preserved the first or commercial calculation part of the fable. A man named [End Page 156] Penteklimas finds a peascod, and resolves to sow the peas in it; but, instead of doing so, he carries it about with him, and calculates how much money he will have when the peas have multiplied several hundred and thousandfold, and finally bespeaks two hundred vessels to contain his future wealth. The end is that he marries a princess on credit, and finds a treasure by accident; but whether " Ichnelates and Stephanites " have anything to do with his adventures is a question we should prefer to leave open.

      An instance of quite undoubted transmission, given by Professor Muller in the same article (Contemporary Review, July, 1870), shows that the inner significance and application of a legend are as much exposed to variation as the circumstances of the narrative. The wellknown medieval allegory, which represents the perilous position of man, who, fleeing one danger, falls into another, and finds the protection to which he trusted about to fail and hurl him into worse destruction still, seems as if it must always have had the direct spiritual moral assigned to it in "Barlaam and Josaphat " and the Buddhist original of that work. But, on the contrary, the oldest, and to all appearance the favourite, application of the allegory is to the sin of celibacy. The men hanging downwards by a tree, at the roots of which mice are gnawing, are the ancestors of a person who has neglected to provide himself with a wife and children, so that his family is threatened with extinction. The tree, there can be little doubt, is older than both the social and the ascetic allegory, being, in fact, twin brother of the ash, Yggdrasil, with the branches that drop honey, and one root over the mouth of hell, at which Hwergelmir and Nidhoggr are ever gnawing. Certainly we cannot suppose Buddhist influence in the Edda, but we should be glad to know what was meant by the parable, if the primaeval man hung perilously from the great world-tree before Odin and Buddha were dreamt of, for it must have been something very different from a rebuke of old bachelors, or a sermon on religious detachment from earthly pleasures.

      The picturesqueness of this bit of traditional description is probably what has kept it alive through so many attempts to “improve” it; for it is not the sort of thing which would be reinvented if once lost, while the uncertainty of its application would tend to weaken its hold on the popular memory. That it has been remembered we see, and we cannot, therefore, wonder at the longevity of riddles, jests, puzzles, and other jeux d’esprit which are made on purpose for verbal repetition. Even in England the recitation of fairy tales with careful and literal accuracy seems to have lasted down into the present century, for a Somersetshire woman, in telling a story to Keightley, the author of "hairy Mythology," ended with the phrase, " And I came away "—a formula to which she attached no meaning, and only repeated because she had been told it so herself, but which [End Page 157] is the exact equivalent of the discontented or sceptical phrases with which Norwegian, Sicilian, or Hungarian peasants break the descent from fairyland to the hardships of life. Phrases liko this, and nursery rhymes--the more meaningless the better--are invaluable in enabling us to estimate the probable length of time during which a tradition will remain pure, both before and after its meaning has been forgotten. Of course, even the nursery rhymes had a meaning in the first instance, and numerical jingles like the English doggerel beginning—

                  “Two Monkeys tied to a clog,

                  With a gaping widemouthed waddling frog,”

are treated very seriously indeed in Persian and Sanskrit literature. In the Mahabharata the contest between the royal bard and the child Ashtavakra consists in capping verses of this sort. They proceed alternately. There is but one Yama, Agni and Indra are two, and so on up to twelve Rudras and twelve Adityas. Then it is the bard's turn, and he begins,” Half a month has thirteen days, the wide earth has thirteen islands," but could not get any further, so the other took it up; Vishnu walked for thirteen days, and there are thirteen chief rhythms in the Vedas." There is something of the same formal gymnastic look in a conflict of dark philosophic sayings held in the reign of Bahram Gour, and perhaps even in the arguments by which (according to Firdusi) the Crown. Prince Khesra converted his father Khobad from the errors of the communistic heresiarch Mazdek (who, by the way, seems to have been a remarkable man, and quite thirteen centuries in advance of his supposed age--sixth century, A.D.). And Firdusi himself is the hero of a somewhat similar legend. The notion of scolding matches, in which it is important to have the last word, is very common, the devil being generally the defeated respondent. Dialogues of this kind, or the still better known "causation" tales, like the old woman whose pig would not go to market, are our safest guides, both in what concerns the migration of fables, and in ascertaining which incidents and ideas are most welcome and congenial to the unsophisticated mind.

            With writers belonging to the sophisticated classes it is always doubtful whether a sentimental archaism or the reproduction of a legendary trait is deliberate or accidental. When Amyas Leigh breaks the crown of his pedagogue with a slate, are we to think of Herakles and his tutor Linus ? It is impossible not to do so as we read. But did Mr. Kingsley ? If not, we shall scarcely find a better instance of the indestructibility of fiction, unless we look in Dumas, who cannot be suspected of indulging in this kind of classical ingenuity. The ease with which Louis XIV. could be exalted into a solar hero has often been remarked upon, and it certainly looks as if fate rather than chance had been at work in applying to him and Mademoiselle La Valliere the very common incident of three girls who [End Page 158] are overheard wishing for three lovers. In a modern Greek fairy tale (Hahn, 9), the eldest of three sisters wishes to marry the kin's cook, the second his treasurer, and the youngest says that if the king's son will marry her, she will bear him three children like the sun, moon, and morning star. The same story occurs in the English translation of Arnason's "Icelandic Tales," and it would be easier to count the collections in which it is wanting, than those which give it in one shape or another. In Dumas' "Vicomte de Bragelonne " two of the maids of honour are expressing their admiration for two of the king's courtiers, and ask Louise for her opinion, which is, that those must be blind who, in the king's presence, can see any one but himself. The conversation is overheard by the parties interested, and this is the beginning of the king's passion. Most probably Dramas, who acted on the principle of taking his goods wherever he found them, had some recollection of having heard an incident of the kind related, and thought it was appropriate to the character of a monarch too illustrious to be conceived as malting love himself. In the same way any other mythological idea, when it has once been expressed in terms of human passion or incident, is liable to be supplanted by the literal sense of the tale. The sign and the thing signified change places so often that it is not easy to be very certain which was which in the days of the first literary creations. Even the well-worn solar romance of all the heroes who "love and ride away" may suggest a doubt which is the most certain, that the sun rises and sets every day the whole world over, or that in every country upon which he rises and sets men will be found to love, betray, and die a glorious or a miserable death. To go out in fire and smoke scarcely proves more as to a heavenly origin. The' seventh article of advice given by Brynhild to Sigurd runs, in Simrock's translation—

                        “Mehr frommt Fechten als in Feuer aufgehen

                        Mit Hof und Halle.”

In war, fire and sword are very real alternatives, as we have been only too lately reminded. When the enemies of a hero are afraid of meeting his irresistible steel, they surround and smoke him, and as he refuses to surrender, Burnt Njal and the Nibelungs have as grand a funeral pyre as Herakles. We see that, as early as the Edda, the use of such weapons was not considered chivalrous, and in the abortive attempt at a similar catastrophe in the Mahabharata, the plot is altogether treacherous.

            It would be easy to multiply cases where internal evidence is suspicious, and apparent coincidence misleading ; but it is time to bring these discursive remarks to an end, with the hope that any unsound interpretations they may contain will be forgiven for the sake of the undoubtedly just conclusion to which they are meant to lead : that in Comparative Mythology, as elsewhere, a grain of fact is worth a pound of theory.

                                                                                                            H. Lawrenny.

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