CONCLUSION.
The study of Perrault's tales which we have made serves to illustrate the problems and difficulties of the subject in general. It has been seen that similar and analogous contes are found among most peoples, ancient and modern. When the resemblances are only in detached ideas and incidents, for example, the introduction of rational and loquacious beasts, or of magical powers, the difficulty of accounting for the diffusion of such notions is comparatively slight. All the backward peoples of the world believe in magic, and in the common nature of men, beasts, and things. The real problem is to explain the coincidence in plot of stories found in ancient Egypt, in Peru, in North America, and South Africa, as well as in Europe. In a few words it is possible to sketch the various theories of the origin and diffusion of legends like these.
I. According to what may be called the Aryan theory (advocated by Grimm, M. André Lefèvre, Von Hahn, and several English writers), the stories are peculiar to peoples who speak languages of the Aryan family. These peoples, in some very remote age, before they left their original seats, developed a copious mythology, based mainly on observation of natural phenomena, Dawn, Thunder, Wind, Night, and the like. This mythology was rendered possible by a 'disease of language,' owing to which statements about phenomena came to appear like statements about imaginary persons, and so grew into myths. Märchen, or popular tales, are the débris, or detritus, or youngest form of those myths, worn by constant passing from mouth to mouth. The partisans of this theory often maintain that the borrowing of tales by one people from another is, if not an impossible, at least a very rare process.
II. The next hypothesis may be called the Indian theory. The chief partisan of this theory was Benfey, the translator and commentator of the Pantschatantra. In France M. Cosquin, author of Contes Populaires de Lorraine, is the leading representative. According to the Indian theory, the original centre and fountain of popular tales is India, and from India of the historic period the legends were diffused over Europe, Asia, and Africa. Oral tradition, during the great national movements and migrations, and missions,—the Mongol conquests, the crusades, the Buddhist enterprises, and in course of trade and commerce, diffused the tales. They were also in various translations,—Persian, Arabic, Greek,—of Indian literary collections like the Pantschatantra and the Hitopadesa, brought to the knowledge of mediæval Europe. Preachers even used the tales as parables or 'examples' in the pulpit, and by all those means the stories found their way about the world. It is admitted that the discovery of contes in Egypt, at a date when nothing is known of India, is a difficulty in the way of this theory, as we are not able to show that those contes came from India, nor that India borrowed them from Egypt. The presence of the tales in America is explained as the consequence of importations from Europe, since the discovery of the New World by Columbus.
Neither of these theories, neither the Aryan nor the Indian, is quite satisfactory. The former depends on a doctrine about the 'disease of language' not universally accepted. Again, it entirely fails to account for the presence of the contes (which, ex hypothesi, were not borrowed) among non-Aryan peoples. The second, or Indian theory, correctly states that many stories were introduced into Europe, Asia, and Africa from India, in the middle ages, but brings no proof that contes could only have been invented in India, first of all. Nor does it account for the stories which were old in Egypt, and even mixed up with the national mythology of Egypt, before we knew anything about India at all, nor for the Märchen of Homeric Greece. Again it is not shown that the ideas in the contes are peculiar to India; almost the only example adduced is the gratitude of beasts. But this notion might occur to any mind, anywhere, which regarded the beasts as on the same intellectual and moral level as humanity. Moreover, a few examples have been found of Märchen among American races, for example, in early Peru, where there is no reason to believe that they were introduced by the Spaniards[99].
In place of these hypotheses, we do not propose to substitute any general theory. It is certain that the best-known popular tales were current in Egypt under Ramses II, and that many of them were known to Homer, and are introduced, or are alluded to, in the Odyssey. But it is impossible to argue that the birthplace of a tale is the country where it is first found in a literary shape. The stories must have been current in the popular mouth long before they won their way into written literature, on tablets of clay or on papyrus. They are certainly not of literary invention. If they were developed in one place, history gives us no information as to the region or the date of their birth. Again, we cannot pretend to know how far, given the ideas, the stories might be evolved independently in different centres. It is difficult to set a limit to chance and coincidence, and modern importation. The whole question of the importation of stories into savage countries by civilised peoples has not been studied properly. We can hardly suppose that the Zulus borrowed their copious and most characteristic store of Märchen, in plot and incident resembling the Märchen of Europe, from Dutch or English settlers. On the other hand, certain Algonkin tales recently published by Mr. Leland bear manifest marks of French influence.
Left thus in the dark without historical information as to the 'cradle' of Märchen, without clear and copious knowledge as to recent borrowing from European traders and settlers, and without the power of setting limits to the possibility of coincidence, we are unable to give any general answer to the sphinx of popular tales. We only know for certain that there is practically no limit to the chances of transmission in the remote past of the race. Wherever man, woman, or child can go, there a tale may go, and may find a new home. Any drifted and wandering canoe, any captured alien wife, any stolen slave passed from hand to hand in commerce or war, may carry a Märchen. These processes of transmission have been going on, practically, ever since man was man. Thus it is even more difficult to limit the possibilities of transmission than the chances of coincidence. But the chances of coincidence also are numerous. The ideas and situations of popular tales are all afloat, everywhere, in the imaginations of early and of pre-scientific men. Who can tell how often they might casually unite in similar wholes, independently combined?
[99] Rites of the Yncas, Francisco de Avila. Hakluyt Society.
