Next to the Saga of King Olaf, without doubt the most beautiful and successful of the Tales of a Wayside Inn, is that of King Robert of Sicily. The legend is of a remote antiquity, has passed through various modifications and recastings, and, after having lain by in forgotten tomes, has been vivified once more by the poetic breath of Longfellow, and popularised again. It is singular to trace the history of certain favourite tales; they seem to be endowed with an inherent vitality, which cannot be stamped out. Born far back in the early history of man, they have asserted at once a sway over the imagination and feelings; have been translated from their original birth-soil to foreign climes, and have undergone changes and adaptations to suit the habits and requirements of the new people amongst whom they have taken root. Political disturbances cannot obliterate them; war sweeps over the land they have adopted, famine devastates it, pestilence decimates its inhabitants, and for a while the ancient tales hide their heads, only to crop up again green and fresh when the springtide of prosperity returns.
Sometimes a venerable myth disappears for an exceptionally long period, and its vitality is, we suppose, extinguished. But though ages roll by, if it have in it the real essential power of development and assimilation, it is only waiting for its time to start a fresh career, full of concentrated vigour. Like the ear of wheat in the hand of the mummy, it has lain by, wrapped in cere-cloths, without giving token of germ, till the moment of its liberation has arrived, when, falling on good ground, it brings forth a hundredfold.
Such was the history of Fouque’s exquisite romance, Undine. It was a very ancient tale, but it had been forgotten. The German poet found it in the dead hand of the whimsical pedant, Theophrastus Paracelsus, swathed in barbarous Latin. He writes:—“I ceased not to study an old edition of my speechmonger, which fell to me at an auction, and that carefully. Even his receipts I read through in order, just as they had been showered into the text, still continuing in the firm expectation that from every line something wonderfully magical might float up to me, and strike the understanding. Single sparks, here and there darting up, confirmed my hopes, and drew me deeper into the mines beneath ... then, at last, as a pearl of soft radiance, there sparkled towards me, from out its rough-edged shell—Undine.” And he tells us how that his story has been translated into French, Italian, English, Russian, and Polish. The mummy wheat was soon multiplied.
The legend of King Robert of Sicily, which the American poet has rescued from oblivion, is one of those few which can be traced with rare precision through its various changes, and tracked to the country where it originated. It is instructive to note how in one form, it did service in the cause of one religion, and how, in another form, it pointed a striking moral in behalf of an entirely different creed.
Two methods of procedure lie open to us in the examination of this story, analysis and synthesis. We might trace the legend back from the form in which it is known to the modern public, by sure stages, to the ultimate atoms out of which it is developed, or we might take the original germ, and follow it in its expanding and varying forms, till it has assumed its present shape in the pages of the Tales of a Wayside Inn.
We shall adopt the latter method, as the most suitable in this peculiar instance.
In the Pantschatantra, a Sanscrit collection of popular tales, the date of the compilation of which is uncertain, but that of the tales is unquestionably earlier than the Christian era, is the following story:
“In the town of Liavati, lived a king, called Mukunda. One day he saw a hunchback performing such comical actions that he invited him to become an inmate of his palace, and, as his court fool, to divert him in his hours of idleness and depression. The king was so taken up with this droll rascal, that his prime minister was seriously displeased, and he said, in reproof, to his master—
‘Far flies rumour with three pairs of ears.’
To which the king laughingly replied—