All these collections, which reached Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, became very popular, and were used by monks and friars to enliven their sermons as Exempla. Prof. Crane has given a full account of this very curious phenomenon in his erudite edition of the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry (Folk Lore Society, 1890). The Indian stories were also used by the Italian Novellieri, much of Boccaccio and his school being derived from this source. As these again gave material for the Elizabethan Drama, chiefly in W. Painter's Palace of Pleasure, a collection of translated Novelle which I have edited (Lond., 3 vols. 1890), it is not surprising that we can at times trace portions of Shakespeare back to India. It should also be mentioned that one-half of La Fontaine's Fables (Bks. vii.-xii.) are derived from Indian sources. (See Note on No. v.)
In India itself the collection of stories in frames went on and still goes on. Besides those already mentioned there are the stories of Vikram and the Vampire (Vetala), translated among others by the late Sir Richard Burton, and the seventy stories of a parrot (Suka Saptati). The whole of this literature was summed up by Somadeva, c. 1200 a.d. in a huge compilation entitled Katha Sarit Sagara ("Ocean of the Stream of Stories"). Of this work, written in very florid style, Mr. Tawney has produced a translation in two volumes in the Bibliotheca Indica. Unfortunately, there is a Divorce Court atmosphere about the whole book, and my selections from it have been accordingly restricted. (Notes, No. xi.)
So much for a short sketch of Indian folk-tales so far as they have been reduced to writing in the native literature.[2] The Jatakas are probably the oldest collection of such tales in literature, and the greater part of the rest are demonstrably more than a thousand years old. It is certain that much (perhaps one-fifth) of the popular literature of modern Europe is derived from those portions of this large bulk which came west with the Crusades through the medium of Arabs and Jews. In his elaborate Einleitung to the Pantschatantra, the Indian version of the Fables of Bidpai, Prof. Benfey contended with enormous erudition that the majority of folk-tale incidents were to be found in the Bidpai literature. His introduction consisted of over 200 monographs on the spread of Indian tales to Europe. He wrote in 1859, before the great outburst of folk-tale collection in Europe, and he had not thus adequate materials to go about in determining the extent of Indian influence on the popular mind of Europe. But he made it clear that for beast-tales and for drolls, the majority of those current in the mouths of occidental people were derived from Eastern and mainly Indian sources. He was not successful, in my opinion, in tracing the serious fairy tale to India. Few of the tales in the Indian literary collections could be dignified by the name of fairy tales, and it was clear that if these were to be traced to India, an examination of the contemporary folk-tales of the peninsula would have to be attempted.
[2] An admirable and full account of this literature was given by M. A. Barth in Mélusine, t. iv. No. 12, and t. v. No. 1. See also Table i. of Prof. Rhys-Davids' Birth Stories.
The collection of current Indian folk-tales has been the work of the last quarter of a century, a work, even after what has been achieved, still in its initial stages. The credit of having begun the process is due to Miss Frere, who, while her father was Governor of the Bombay Presidency, took down from the lips of her ayah, Anna de Souza, one of a Lingaet family from Goa who had been Christian for three generations, the tales she afterwards published with Mr. Murray in 1868, under the title, "Old Deccan Days, or, Indian Fairy Legends current in Southern India, collected from oral tradition by M. Frere, with an introduction and notes by Sir Bartle Frere." Her example was followed by Miss Stokes in her Indian Fairy Tales (London, Ellis & White, 1880), who took down her tales from two ayahs and a Khitmatgar, all of them Bengalese—the ayahs Hindus, and the man a Mohammedan. Mr. Ralston introduced the volume with some remarks which dealt too much with sun-myths for present-day taste. Another collection from Bengal was that of Lal Behari Day, a Hindu gentleman, in his Folk-Tales of Bengal (London, Macmillan, 1883). The Panjab and the Kashmir then had their turn: Mrs. Steel collected, and Captain (now Major) Temple edited and annotated, their Wideawake Stories (London, Trübner, 1884), stories capitally told and admirably annotated. Captain Temple increased the value of this collection by a remarkable analysis of all the incidents contained in the two hundred Indian folk-tales collected up to this date. It is not too much to say that this analysis marks an onward step in the scientific study of the folk-tale: there is such a thing, derided as it may be. I have throughout the Notes been able to draw attention to Indian parallels by a simple reference to Major Temple's Analysis.
Major Temple has not alone himself collected: he has been the cause that many others have collected. In the pages of the Indian Antiquary, edited by him, there have appeared from time to time folk-tales collected from all parts of India. Some of these have been issued separately. Sets of tales from Southern India, collected by the Pandit Natesa Sastri, have been issued under the title Folk-Lore of Southern India, three fascicules of which have been recently re-issued by Mrs. Kingscote under the title, Tales of the Sun (W. H. Allen, 1891): it would have been well if the identity of the two works had been clearly explained. The largest addition to our knowledge of the Indian folk-tale that has been made since Wideawake Stories is that contained in Mr. Knowles' Folk-Tales of Kashmir (Trübner's Oriental Library, 1887), sixty-three stories, some of great length. These, with Mr. Campbell's Santal Tales (1892); Ramaswami Raju's Indian Fables (London, Sonnenschein, n.d.); M. Thornhill, Indian Fairy Tales (London, 1889); and E. J. Robinson, Tales of S. India (1885), together with those contained in books of travel like Thornton's Bannu or Smeaton's Karens of Burmah bring up the list of printed Indian folk-tales to over 350—a respectable total indeed, but a mere drop in the ocean of the stream of stories that must exist in such a huge population as that of India: the Central Provinces in particular are practically unexplored. There are doubtless many collections still unpublished. Col. Lewin has large numbers, besides the few published in his Lushai Grammar; and Mr. M. L. Dames has a number of Baluchi tales which I have been privileged to use. Altogether, India now ranks among the best represented countries for printed folk-tales, coming only after Russia (1500), Germany (1200), Italy and France (1000 each.)[3] Counting the ancient with the modern, India has probably some 600 to 700 folk-tales printed and translated in accessible form. There should be enough material to determine the vexed question of the relations between the European and the Indian collections.
[3] Finland boasts of 12,000, but most of these lie unprinted among the archives of the Helsingfors Literary Society.
This question has taken a new departure with the researches of M. Emanuel Cosquin in his Contes populaires de Lorraine (Paris, 1886, 2e tirage, 1890), undoubtedly the most important contribution to the scientific study of the folk-tale since the Grimms. M. Cosquin gives in the annotations to the eighty-four tales which he has collected in Lorraine a mass of information as to the various forms which the tales take in other countries of Europe and in the East. In my opinion, the work he has done for the European folk-tale is even more valuable than the conclusions he draws from it as to the relations with India. He has taken up the work which Wilhelm Grimm dropped in 1859, and shown from the huge accumulations of folk-tales that have appeared during the last thirty years that there is a common fund of folk-tales which every country of Europe without exception possesses, though this does not of course preclude them from possessing others that are not shared by the rest. M. Cosquin further contends that the whole of these have come from the East, ultimately from India, not by literary transmission, as Benfey contended, but by oral transmission. He has certainly shown that very many of the most striking incidents common to European folk-tales are also to be found in Eastern mährchen. What, however, he has failed to show is that some of these may not have been carried out to the Eastern world by Europeans. Borrowing tales is a mutual process, and when Indian meets European, European meets Indian; which borrowed from which, is a question which we have very few criteria to decide. It should be added that Mr W. A. Clouston has in England collected with exemplary industry a large number of parallels between Indian and European folk-tale incidents in his Popular Tales and Fictions (Edinburgh, 2 vols., 1887) and Book of Noodles (London, 1888). Mr Clouston has not openly expressed his conviction that all folk-tales are Indian in origin: he prefers to convince us non vi sed sæpe cadendo. He has certainly made out a good case for tracing all European drolls, or comic folk-tales, from the East.
With the fairy tale strictly so called—i.e., the serious folk-tale of romantic adventure—I am more doubtful. It is mainly a modern product in India as in Europe, so far as literary evidence goes. The vast bulk of the Jatakas does not contain a single example worthy the name, nor does the Bidpai literature. Some of Somadeva's tales, however, approach the nature of fairy tales, but there are several Celtic tales which can be traced to an earlier date than his (1200 a.d.) and are equally near to fairy tales. Yet it is dangerous to trust to mere non-appearance in literature as proof of non-existence among the folk. To take our own tales here in England, there is not a single instance of a reference to Jack and the Beanstalk for the last three hundred years, yet it is undoubtedly a true folk-tale. And it is indeed remarkable how many of the formulæ of fairy tales have been found of recent years in India. Thus, the Magic Fiddle, found among the Santals by Mr. Campbell in two variants (see Notes on vi.), contains the germ idea of the wide-spread story represented in Great Britain by the ballad of Binnorie (see English Fairy Tales, No. ix.). Similarly, Mr. Knowles' collection has added considerably to the number of Indian variants of European "formulæ" beyond those noted by M. Cosquin.
It is still more striking as regards incidents. In a paper read before the Folk-Lore Congress of 1891, and reprinted in the Transactions, pp. 76 seq., I have drawn up a list of some 630 incidents found in common among European folk-tales (including drolls). Of these, I reckon that about 250 have been already found among Indian folk-tales, and the number is increased by each new collection that is made or printed. The moral of this is, that India belongs to a group of peoples who have a common store of stories; India belongs to Europe for purposes of comparative folk-tales.