The citizen. (Frederick City, Md.) 1895-1923, 1910-05-27

IN the fairy tale. When we think of
the stories that are not true (here we
may discard political stories as a
theme too painfully we marvel why
there are so many of them, and why
they naturally fall into certain
marked classes, which are found al
most everywhere all over the world .
M. Van Gennep has recently devoted
a book to this subject, La Forma-
ton des Legendes" (Flammarion) ,
but neither he nor any man has
solved the mystery, while 1 do not
pretend to be the Oedipus Of this rid
die of the Sphinx. How do stories
grow, and how are they diffused. and
how are they modified? l have been
told, in a smoking room, a very ter
rible tale about respected family in
Blankshire; tale which the narrator
thoroughly believed in as a contem-
porary anecdote of private life. 1
said, THAT is the plot of Horace Wal
poles play, The Mysterious Mother;'
and Walpole got it from Howell's Let
tiers, written in the time of Charles
l., and Howell got it from'-but here
the other man, dreading the lecture
to which he was obviously doomed
(for I was getting into Comparetti's
essay on Oedipus), said, I don't care;
these things keep on happening in
families. History repeats ITSELF But
he begged the question; myth, not
history, repeats itself.
In another case the story was about
a contemporary young lady, and I
was again so pedantic as to observe
that the anecdote was told by Gram
mont about la belle Stuart, who was
so cruel to Charles II. 1t may or
may not have been true about lady
as remarkable for her simplicity as
for her beauty, but in the new case
the yarn was certainly false. In
early boyhood was told very comic
story about leading drunkard in a
country place, but later 1 found it,
word for word, in the French of
Beroalde de Verville, who was face
tious in the sixteenth century. In
deed, l know but one tale of this
kind which is dated; it could not
have been told before the Apocrypha
was cut out of the Bible by the Puri-
tans, and was due to Cavalier wit.
There are learned legends, too, be-
lieved in by the wise, such as the
story that, in remote times, kings
were regularly put to death at given
period, annually, triennially, or with
a run of nine years, and so on. We
are actually told that the King of
Cnossos in Crete, when the town was
as civilized as Brixton, was butchered
in cave every nine years. The cave
has been dug out and the soil has
been sifted, but neither royal nor any
human bones have been found, only
bones of oxen, goats and deer. That
does not prove much either way, but
there is absolutely no reason for the
belief, which rests on a statement of
Homer, to the effect that the mythical
King Mimos reigned-and then fol-
lows an adjective which nobody can
translate, but which is taken, by
friends of the legend, to mean ''by
periods of nine years." or "for nine
years" About the cave not a word
is said. Another example of implicit
belief was the remark made by a
scientific character that the King of
Tyre, in Ezekiel's time, was burned
annually. For proof he cited Eze-
kiel, 2S:14, Thou hast walked up
and down in the midst of the stones
of fire." This hardly proved the case,
as the king seems to have been none
the worse. But "the stones of fire"
are merely the precious stones "in
Eden, the garden of God," sard, to-
paz, beryl, diamond; there are ten Of
them, mentioned in the previous
verse, and in verse seventeen the
king, for his misdeeds, is to be
elected from his earthly paradise of
prosperity. In fact, as evidence for
this learned legend, know but one
case in which barbaric king had to
immediate himself at the end of twelve
years, and as he was a subject king,
with suzerain over him ESQ the old
Portuguese traveller says who tells
the tale), one may suspect that rea-
sens of state caused this violent form
Of approximation. No independent
prince would have stood it.
NJ. Van Gennep thinks that all or
most of our romantic stories, such as
Faust, Reynard the Fox, the fables,
from Aesop downward, the Jataka or
fables of the Buddha, Cinderella,
polyphemus the one-eyed, are uncon-
ecious thefts from the folktales of
the world in general. The process
was this, he supposes: the tales, say,
Cinderella, we're originally current
stories by no one in particular, told
from mouth to mouth. Then they
were taken up by literary narrators
and published. Then they descended
on the people again, and were so scat
tered that there are more than four
hundred versions of Cinderella found
among races so illiterate as the Sac-
tails in India and in scores of other
remote tribes. The versions have
been collected and published by Miss
Coke.
Here I must differ from M. Van
Gennep. The literary tale of Cinder-
ella. fairy godmother, dance at court,
glass slipper and all, was published
by Charles Perrault at the very end