[86] Gubernatis, Zoolog. Myth. ii. 5.

[87] A Zulu tale in Callaway, pp. 64, 65, is proof that this was once the Zulu custom.

[88] Elton, op. cit. p. 190.

[89] Callaway, p. 121.

[90] Revue Celtique, Jan., Nov. 1878, p. 366.

Riquet à La Houppe.

Riquet of the Tuft.

Of all Perrault's tales Riquet is the least popular. Compared with the stories of Madlle. L'Heritier or of the Comtesse de Murat, even Riquet is short and simple. But it could hardly be told by a nurse, and it would not greatly interest a child. We want to know what became of the plain but lively sister, and she drops out of the narrative unnoticed. The touch of the traditional and popular manner in the story is the love of a woman redeeming the ugliness of a man. In one shape or another, from the Kaffir Bird who made Milk, or Five Heads, to what was probably the original form of Cupid and Psyche, this is the fundamental notion of Beauty and the Beast[91]. But Perrault hints that the miracle was purely 'subjective.' 'Some say that the Princess, reflecting on the perseverance of her lover, and all his good qualities, ceased to see that his body was deformed, and his face ugly.' There is therefore little excuse for examining here the legends of ladies, or lords, who marry a Tick (in Portugal), a Frog (in Scotland and India), a Beaver (in North America), a Pumpkin (in Wallachia), an Iron Stove (in Germany), a Serpent (in Zululand), and so forth. These tales are usually, perhaps, of moral origin, and convey the lesson that no magic can resist kindness. The strange husbands or wives are enchanted into an evil shape, till they meet a lover who will not disdain them. Moral, don't disdain anybody. Some have entertained angels unawares. But this apologue could only have been invented when there was a general belief in powers of enchantment and metamorphosis, a belief always more powerful in proportion to the low culture of the people who entertain it. In the Kaffir tale, where the girl disenchants the Crocodile by licking him (kissing, perhaps, being unfamiliar), the man who comes out of the crocodile skin merely says that the girl's 'power' (her native magical force) is greater than that of 'the enemies of his father's house,' who had enchanted him (Theal, The Bird who made Milk). This idea may and does exist apart from the notion, which so commonly accompanies it, of a taboo, or prohibition on freedom of intercourse between the lover and the lady, either of whom has been disenchanted by the other.

If the original and popular basis of this kind of story was moral, the moral was strangely coloured by the fancy of early men. In Perrault little but the moral, told in a gallant apologue, remains. It may be compared with a Thibetan story, analysed by M. Gaston Paris[92].

[91] Theal's Kaffir Folk Lore, p. 37.

[92] Revue Critique, July, 1874.

Le Petit Poucet.

Hop o' my Thumb.

Perrault's tale of Le Petit Poucet has nothing but the name in common with the legend of Le Petit Poucet (our 'Tom Thumb') on which M. Gaston Paris has written a learned treatise. The Poucet who conducts the Walloon Chaur-Poce, our 'Charles's Wain,' merely resembles Hop o' my Thumb in his tiny stature, and little can be gained by a comparison of two personages so unlike in their adventures (Gaston Paris, Mém. de la Société de Linguistique, i. 4, p. 372).

In Hop o' my Thumb, as Perrault tells it, there are many traces of extreme antiquity.

The incidents are (1) Design of a distressed father and mother to expose their children in a forest. (2) Discovery and frustration of the scheme by the youngest child, whose clue leads him and his brethren home again. (3) The same incident, but the clue (scattered crumbs) spoiled by birds. (4) Arrival of the children at the house of an ogre. They are entertained by his wife, but the ogre discovers them by the smell of human flesh. (5) Hop o' my Thumb shifts the golden crowns of the ogre's children to the heads of his brethren, and the ogre destroys his own family in the dark. (6) Flight of the boys, pursued by the ogre in Seven-Leagued Boots. (7) There is a choice of conclusion. In one (8) Hop o' my Thumb steals the boots of the sleeping ogre, and gets his treasures from the ogre's wife. (9) Hop o' my Thumb steals the boots and by their aid wins court favour. Throughout the tale the skill of an extremely small boy is the subject of admiration.

(1) The opening of the story has nothing supernatural or unusual in it. During the famines which Racine and Vauban deplored, peasants must often have been tempted to 'lose' their children (Sainte-Beuve, Port Royal, vi. 153; Mémoires sur la Vie de Jean Racine. A Genève, M.DCCXLVII, pp. 271-3).

(2) The idea of dropping objects which may serve as a guide or 'trail' is so natural and obvious that it is used in 'paper-chases' every day. In the Indian story[93] of Surya Bai, a handful of grains is scattered, the pearls of a necklace are used in the Raksha's Palace, in Grimm (15, Hänsel and Grethel) white pebbles and crumbs of bread are employed. The Kaffir girl drops ashes[94]. In Nennilloe Nennella (Pentamerone, v. 8) the father of the children has pity on them, and makes a trail of ashes. Bran is used on the second journey, but it is eaten by an ass[95].

(4) The children arrive at the house of an ogre, whose wife treats them kindly; the ogre, however, smells them out.

This incident, quite recognisable, is found in Namaqua Folklore (Bleek, Bushman Folk Lore). A Namaqua woman has married an elephant. To her come her two brothers, whom she hides away. 'Then the Elephant, who had been in the veldt, arrived, and smelling something, rubbed against the house.' His wife persuades him that she has slain and cooked a wether, indeed she does cook a wether, to hide the smell of human flesh.

Compare Perrault, 'L'Ogre flairoit droite et à gauche, disant qu'il sentoit la chair fraîche. Il faut, luy dit sa femme, que ce soit ce veau que je viens d'habiller que vous sentez.' But the ogre, like the blind mother of the Elephant in Namaqua, retains his suspicions. In the Zulu tale of Uzembeni (Callaway, p. 49) there is an ogress very hungry and terrible, who has even tried to eat her own daughters. She comes home, where Uzembeni is concealed, and says, 'My children, in my house here today there is a delicious odour!' As Callaway remarks, this 'Fee-fo-fum' incident recurs in Maori myth, when Maui visits Murri-ranga-whenua, and in the legend of Tawhaki, where the ogre is a submarine ogre (Grey's Polynes. Myth. pp. 34, 64). In a more familiar passage the Eumenides utter their fee-fo-fum when they smell out Orestes[96].

In the extreme north-west of America this world-wide notion meets us again, among the Dènè Hareskins (Petitot, Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest, Paris, 1886, p. 171). The stranger comes to strange people, 'un jeune garçon sort d'une maison et dit, Moi, je sens l'odeur humaine ... ce disant, il humait l'air, et reniflait à la manière d'un limier qui est sur une piste.' In the Aberdeenshire Mally Whuppy, we have the old

Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of some earthly one![97]

The idea of cannibalism, which inspires most of these tales, like the Indian stories of Rakshas, is probably derived from the savage state of general hostility and actual anthropophagy (Die Anthropophagie, Überlebsel im Volksglauben.' Andree, Leipzig, 1887). We know that Basutos have reverted to cannibalism in this century; in Labrador and the wilder Ojibbeway districts, Weendigoes, or men returned to cannibalism, are greatly dreaded (Hind's Explorations in Labrador, i. p. 59). There are some very distressing stories in Kohl (Kitchi Gami, p. 355-359). A prejudice against eating kindred flesh, (as against eating Totems or kindred animals and vegetables,) is common among savages. Hence the wilder South American tribes, says Cieza de Leon, bred children they might lawfully eat from wives of alien stock, the father being reckoned not akin to his children, who follow the maternal line. Thus the great prevalence of cannibalism in European Märchen seems a survival from the savage condition. In savage Märchen, where cannibalism is no less common, it needs little explanation; not that all savages are cannibals, but most live on the frontier of starvation, and have even less scruple than Europeans in the ultimate resort.

(5) Arrived at the ogre's house, Hop o' my Thumb deceives the cannibal, and makes him slay his own children.

This is decidedly a milder form of the incident in which the captive either cooks his captor, or makes the captor devour some of his own family. In Zululand (Callaway, pp. 16-18, Uhlakanyana) we find the former agreeable adventure. Uhlakanyana, trapped by the cannibal, gets the cannibal's mother to play with him at boiling each other. The old lady cries out that she is 'being done,' but the artful lad replies, 'When a man has been thoroughly done, he does not keep crying I am already done. He just says nothing when he is already done.... Now you have become silent; that is the reason why I think you are thoroughly done. You will be eaten by your children.' Callaway justly compares the Gaelic Maol a Chliobain, who got the Giant's mother to take her place in the Giant's game-bag,—with consequences (Campbell, i. 255). In Grimm's Hänsel and Grethel Peggy bakes the ogress. The trick recurs in the Kaffir Hlakanyana[98]. There are two ways of doing this trick in popular tales: either the prisoner is in a sack, and induces another person to take his place (as in the Aberdonian Mally Whuppy, and among the Kaffirs); or they play at cooking each other; or, in some other way, the captive induces the captor to enter the pot or oven, and, naturally, keeps him there. This is the device of the German Grethel and the Zulu Uhlakanyana. The former plan, of the game-bag, prevails among the South Siberian peoples of the Turkish race. Tardanak was caught by a seven-headed monster and put in a bag. He made his way out, and induced the monster's children to take his place. The monster, Jalbagan, then cooked his own children. Perrault wisely makes his ogre a little intoxicated, but he did not carry his mistake so far as to eat his children.

The expedient by which Hop o' my Thumb saves his company, and makes the ogre's children perish, differs from the usual devices of the game-bag and the oven. Hop o' my Thumb exchanges the nightcaps of himself and his brothers for the golden crowns of the ogre's daughters. But even this is not original. In the many Märchen which are melted together into the legend of the Minyan House of Athamas, this idea occurs. According to Hyginus, Themisto, wife of Athamas, wished to destroy the children of her rival Ino. She, therefore, to distinguish the children, bade the nurse dress her children in white night-gowns, and Ino's children in black. But this nurse (so ancient is the central idea of East Lynne) was Ino herself in disguise, and she reversed the directions she had received. Themisto, therefore, murdered her own children in the dusk, as the ogre slew his own daughters. M. Deulin quotes a Catalan tale, in which the boys escape from a cupboard, where they place the daughters of the ogress, and they then sleep in the daughters' bed.

(6) The flight of Hop o' my Thumb and his brethren is usually aided, in Zulu, Kaffir, Iroquois, Samoan, Japanese, Scotch, German, and other tales, by magical objects, which, when thrown behind the fugitives, become lakes, forests, and the like, thus detaining the pursuer. Perrault knows nothing of this. His seven-leagued boots, used by the ogre and stolen by the hero, doubtless are by the same maker as the sandals of Hermes; the goodly sandals, golden, that wax never old (Odyssey, v. 45).

In addition to these shoon, and the shoon of Loki, and the slippers of Poutraka in the Kathasaritsagara (i. 13), we may name the seven-leagued boots in the very rare old Italian rhymed Historia delliombruno, a black-letter tract, which contains one of the earliest representations of these famous articles.

While these main incidents of Hop o' my Thumb are so widely current, the general idea of a small and tricksy being is found frequently, from the Hermes of the Homeric Hymn to the Namaqua Heitsi Eibib, the other Poucet, or Tom Thumb, and the Zulu Uhlakanyana. Extraordinary precocity, even from the day of birth, distinguishes these beings (as Indra and Hermes) in myth. In Märchen it is rather their smallness and astuteness than their youth that commands admiration, though they are often very precocious. The general sense of the humour of 'infant prodigies' is perhaps the origin of these romances.

For a theory of Hop o' my Thumb, in which the forest is the night, the pebbles and crumbs the stars, the ogre the devouring Sun, the ogre's daughters 'the seven Vedic sisters,' and so forth, the curious may consult M. Hyacinthe Husson, M. André Lefèvre, or M. Frédérick Dillaye's Contes de Charles Perrault (Paris, 1880).

[93] Old Deccan Days.

[94] Theal, p. 113.

[95] The remainder of the story in the Pentamerone is entirely different. There is no ogre, and there are sea-faring adventures.

[96] Eumenides, 244.

[97] Compare L'Oiseau Vert. Cosquin, Contes de Lorraine, i. 103.

[98] Theal, p. 93.

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.


Illustration: Charles Perrault