Part 4

That is to say, King Henry had translated into English a collection of fables and _contes_ attributed to AEsop, and Marie rendered the English into French. Now AEsop certainly did not write the story of _The Three Wishes_. The text before Marie was probably a mere congeries of tales and fables, some of the set usually attributed to AEsop, some from various other sources. The Latin version, the model of the English version, was that assigned to a certain, or uncertain Romulus, whom Marie, in her preface, calls an emperor. Probably he borrowed from Phaedrus, though he boasts that he rendered his fables out of the Greek. M. de Roquefort thinks he did not flourish before the eleventh or twelfth century[39]. Who was _li rois Henris_ who turned the fables into Marie's English text? She lived under our Henry III. Perhaps conjecture may prefer Henry Beauclerk, our Henry I.

In any case Marie manifestly did render the fables, or some of the fables, in _Le dit d'Ysopet_ out of English. The presence of English words in her French seems to raise a strong presumption in favour of the truth of the assertion. One of these English words occurs in her form of _The Three Wishes_ (Fable xxiv), called _Dou Vilain qui prist un Folet_, also _Des Troiz Oremens_, or _Du Vileins et de sa Fame_. A Vilein captured a Folet (fairy or brownie?) who granted him Three Wishes. The _Folet_ resembles the tree-bogle of the _Pantschatantra_. The vilein gave two wishes to his wife. Long they lived without using the wishes. One day, when they had a marrow bone for dinner, and found it difficult to extract the marrow, the wife wished that her husband had--

'tel bec came li plereit E cum li Huite cox aveit.'

The Huite cox is an English word, woodcock, in disguise. The husband, in a rage, wished his wife a woodcock's beak also, and there they sat, each with a very long bill, and two wishes wasted. There Marie leaves them--

'Deus Oremanz unt ja perduz Que nus n'en est a bien venuz,'

'with two wishes lost, and no good gained thereby.' Manifestly the third wish was expended in a restoration of human noses to each of them. The moral is that ill befalls them--

'qui trop creient autrui parole.'

We naturally wonder whether this version was borrowed from one or other shape of _Syntipas_. If it was, did the change come in the Latin handling of it, or in the English? Or is it not possible that the version worked on by Marie had a _popular_ origin, whether derived by oral transmission from some popular Indian shape of the story, which had filtered through to the West, or the child of native Teutonic wit? There seems to be no certain criterion in a case like this. Certainly no mediaeval wag was likely to alter, out of modesty, the form of the tale in _Syntipas_ and its derivatives, though Marie would not have rhymed that offensive _conte_ if she had met with it in the English collection. Unluckily one is not acquainted with any version of _The Three Wishes_ among backward and remote races, American or African. If such a version were known (and it may, of course, exist), we might argue that the tale was 'universally human.' There is nothing in it, as told in _Pantschatantra_, to make it seem essentially and peculiarly Indian, and incapable of having been invented elsewhere.

A fourteenth-century version (quoted by M. Deulin from _Fabliaux et Contes_ published by St. Meon, vol. iv. p. 386) amplifies all that is least refined in _Sendabar_ and in _Sindibad_. St. Martin grants the wishes, there are four of them, and nobody is one penny the better. With Philippe de Vigneules (1505-1514, the seventy-eighth of his hundred _Nouvelles_), God grants three wishes to a wedded pair. The woman wishes a new leg for her pot, the man wishes her _le pied au ventre_, and then wishes it back again. M. Deulin found this form in living popular tradition, at Leuze in Hainaut.

The _Souhaits_ of La Fontaine (_Fables_, vii. 6) has this peculiarity, that the giver of the wishes, as in Marie de France and in _Sindibad_, is a Follet or brownie, or familiar spirit, obliged to leave his friends. He offers them three wishes; first, they ask for wealth and are embarrassed by their riches, then for a restoration of their mediocrity, then for wisdom.

'C'est un tresor qui n'embarrasse point.'

La Fontaine's source is obscure; had he known _Syntipas_, he might (or might not) have introduced the story among his _Contes_. Perhaps it was too rude even for that unabashed collection.

As for Perrault, he probably drew from a popular tradition his _Aune de Boudin_. Collin de Plancy (_OEuvres Choisies de Ch. Perrault_, Paris, 1826, 240) gives a curious rustic version. Three brothers dance with the Fairies, who offer them a wish apiece. The eldest, as heir of the paternal property, wants no more, but, as wish he must, asks that their calf may cure the colic of every invalid who seizes it by the tail. (How manifestly Indian in origin is this introduction of the sacred beast whose tail is grasped by the pious Hindoo in his latest hours!) The youngest brother wishes the horns of cow and calf on his brother's head, the second wishes a bull's head on his brother's shoulders, and the Fairies make these wild wishes of none avail.

Manifestly the fundamental idea is capable of infinite transformations, literary or popular: a good example is the play of _Le Bucheron_, by Guichard and Philidor, acted in 1763.

The story has no connection with the three successful wishes by aid of which the devil is defeated in a number of popular tales belonging to a different cycle. All these are inspired, however, by the great god Wunsch, who presides over Wishing Gates.

'Would I could wish my wishes all to rest, And know to wish the wish that should be best,

says Clough, better inspired than Perrault's _Bucheron_.

[Footnote 34: _Selected Essays_, i. 504.]

[Footnote 35: Benfey, ii. 341.]

[Footnote 36: See _Poesies de Marie de France, Poete Anglo-Normande du xiiie Siecle_, vol. ii. p. 140. Paris, 1820.]

[Footnote 37: Benfey, _Pantschatantra_, ii. 341.]

[Footnote 38: Comparetti, _Book of Sindibad_, p. 3. Benfey, _Pantschatantra_, i. 38.]

[Footnote 39: _Poesies de Marie de France_, vol. ii. p. 53.]

LA BELLE AU BOIS DORMANT.

_The Sleeping Beauty._

The idea of a life which passes ages in a secular sleep is as old as the myth of Endymion. But it would be difficult to name any classical legend which closely corresponds with the story of the Sleeping Beauty. The first incident of importance is connected with the very widely spread belief in the Fates, or Moirai, or Hathors (in Ancient Egypt), or fairies, who come to the bedside of Althaea, or of the Egyptian Queen, or to the christening of the child in _La Belle au Bois Dormant_, and predict the fortunes of the newly born. In an Egyptian papyrus of the Twentieth Dynasty there is a tale, beginning, just like Perrault's, with the grief of a king and queen, who have no child, or at least no son. Instead of going _a toutes les Eaux du monde_, they appeal to the gods, who hear their prayers, and the queen gives birth to a little boy. Beside his cradle the Hathors announce that he shall perish by a crocodile, a serpent, or a dog. The story, in Egyptian, now turns into one of the common myths as to the impossibility of evading Destiny[40]. In Perrault's _Conte_, of course, fairies take the place of the Fates from whom perhaps _Fee_ is derived. When the fairies have met comes in another old incident--one of them, like Discord at the wedding of Peleus, has not been invited, and she prophesies the death of the Princess. This is commuted, by a friendly fay, into a sleep of a hundred years: the sleep to be caused, as the death was to have been, by a prick from a spindle. The efforts of the royal family to evade the doom by proscribing spindles are as futile as usual in these cases. The Princess and all her people fall asleep, and the story enters the cycle of which Brynhild's wooing, in the _Volsung's Saga_, is the heroic type. Brynhild is thus described by the singing wood-peckers,--

'Soft on the fell A shield-may sleepeth, The lime-trees' red plague Playing about her. The sleep-thorn set Odin Into that maiden For her choosing in war The one he willed not.'

Sigurd is bidden to awaken her, and this he does, rending her mail with his magic sword. But the rest of the tragic story does not correspond with _La Belle au Bois Dormant_. Perrault's tale has its closest companion in Grimm's _Little Briar Rose_ (90), which lacks the conclusion about the wicked mother-in-law. Her conduct, again, recurs in various tales quite unlike _La Belle_ in general plot. The incident of the sleep-thorn, or something analogous, occurs in _Surya Bai_ (_Old Deccan Days_), where a prick from the poisoned nail of a demon acts as the soporific. To carry poison under the nail is one of the devices of the Voudou or Obi man in Hayti. Surya Bai, when wakened and married by a Rajah, is the victim of the jealousy, not of an ogress mother-in-law, but of another wife, and _that_ story glides into a form of the Egyptian tale _The Two Brothers_ (Maspero, i.). The sleep-thorn, or poisoned nail, takes again in Germany the shape of the poisoned comb. _Snow-white_ is wounded therewith by the jealousy of a beautiful step-mother, with a yet fairer step-daughter (Grimm, 53). In mediaeval romances, as in _Perceforest_, an incident is introduced whereby the sleeping maid becomes a mother. Lucina, Themis, and Venus take the part of the Fairies, Fates, or Hathors. In the Neapolitan _Pentamerone_ the incident of the girl becoming a mother in her sleep is repeated. The father (as in _Surya Bai_) is a married man, and the girl, Thalia, suffers from the jealousy of the first wife, as Surya Bai does. The first wife wants to eat Thalia's children, _a diverses sauces_, which greatly resembles Perrault's _sauce Robert_. The children of Thalia are named Sun and Moon, while those of the Sleeping Beauty are L'Aurore et Le Jour. The jealous wife is punished, like the Ogre mother-in-law[41].

While the idea of a long sleep may possibly have been derived from the repose of Nature in winter, it seems useless to try to interpret _La Belle au Bois Dormant_ as a Nature myth throughout. The story, like all _contes_, is a patchwork of incidents, which recur elsewhere in different combinations. Even the names Le Jour and L'Aurore only appear in such late and literary forms as the _Pentamerone_, where they are mixed up with Thalia, clearly a fanciful name for the mother, as fanciful as that of the sleeping Zellandine, who marries the god Mars in _Perceforest_. As an example of the length to which some mythologists will go, may be mentioned M. Andre Lefevre's discovery that Poufle, the dog of the Sleeping Beauty, is the Vedic Sarama in search of the Dawn.

[Footnote 40: Maspero, _Contes Egyptiens_, p. 33.]

[Footnote 41: _Contes de Ma Mere L'Oye_, p. 157.]

LE PETIT CHAPERON ROUGE[42].

_Little Red Riding Hood._

Perrault has not concealed the moral which he thought obvious in this brief narrative. There are wolves--

'_Qui suivent les jeunes Demoiselles Jusques dans les maisons, jusques dans les Ruelles!_'

Racine, in an early letter, admits that he himself has been one of these wolves.

'Il faut etre regulier avec les Reguliers, comme j'ai ete loup avec vous, et avec les autres loups, vos comperes.[43]'

But the nurses from whom Perrault or his little boy heard _Le petit Chaperon Rouge_ had probably no such moral ideas as these. They _may_ have hinted at the undesirable practice of loitering when one is sent on an errand, but the punishment is out of all proportion to the offence. As it stands, the tale is merely meant to waken a child's terror and pity, and probably the narrator ends it by making a pounce, in the character of Wolf, _c'est pour te manger_, at the little listener. This was the correct 'business' in our old Scotch nurseries, when we were told _The Cattie sits in the Kiln-Ring Spinning_.

'By cam' a cattie and ate it a' up my loesome, Loesome Lady! And sae will I you--worrie, worrie, gnash, gnash, Said she, said she!'

'The old nurse's imitation of the _gnash_, _gnash_, which she played off upon the youngest urchin lying in her lap, was electric' (Chambers, _Popular Rhymes of Scotland_, 1842, p. 54).

If _Little Red Riding Hood_ ended, in all variants, where it ends in Perrault, we might dismiss it, with the remark that the _machinery_ of the story is derived from 'the times when beasts spoke,' or were believed to be capable of speaking. But it is well known that in the German form, _Little Red Cap_ (Grimm 26), the tale by no means ends with the triumph of the wolf. Little Red Cap and her grandmother are resuscitated, 'the wolf it was that died.' This may either have been the original end, omitted by Perrault because it was too wildly impossible for the nurseries of the time of Louis XIV, or children may have insisted on having the story 'turn out well.' In either case the German _Maerchen_ preserves one of the most widely spread mythical incidents in the world,--the reappearance of living people out of the monster that has devoured them.

In literature, this incident first meets us in the myth of Cronus (Hesiod, _Theog._ 497; Pausanias, x. 24), where Cronus disgorges his swallowed children alive, after gulping up the stone in swaddling bands which he had taken for Zeus, his youngest infant. He had previously dined on a young foal that he was assured his wife had just borne, when, in reality, the child was Poseidon. In this adventure Cronus united the mistake of the ogress mother-in-law, in _La Belle au Bois Dormant_, who ate the kid in place of the Sleeping Beauty's boy, the adventure of the king who hears his wife has borne a beast-child, and the adventure of the Wolf who disgorges his prey alive. The local fancy of Arne in Arcadia had combined all these ideas of _Maerchen_ into one divine myth (Pausan. viii. 8, 2). It would be superfluous to enumerate here all the savage and civilised stories of beings first swallowed and then disgorged alive. A fabulous monster Kwai Hemm is the swallower in Bushman story. The Iqong qongqo takes the _role_ among the Kaffirs. There are some five examples in Callaway's _Zulu Nursery Tales_. _Night_ is the swallower in Melanesia (Codrington, _Journal Anthrop. Inst._ Feb. 1881), while the Sun swallows the stars in a Piute myth. It is quite possible that a savage theory of Night swallowing and restoring Light, or of the Sun swallowing the stars, is the origin of the conception[44]. The Australians tell it in a shape not unlike Grimm's. The Eagle met the Moon and offered him some Kangaroo meat. The Moon ate up the Kangaroo, and then swallowed the Eagle. The wives of the Eagle met the Moon, who asked them the way to a spring. As he stooped to drink, they cut him open with a stone tomahawk, and extracted the Eagle, who came alive again[45]. In Germany it was with a pair of scissors that the Wolf was cut up, and he was then stuffed with stones (as in Grimm 5, _The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids_). The stones kill him in _Little Red Cap_; in the German tale, their weight drags him into the well, where he, like the Australian Moon, wants to drink after his banquet. In Pomerania a ghost takes the Wolf's _role_, the stones are felt to be rather 'heavy' by the ghost, and the child escapes[46].

The whole story has been compared by M. Husson to the adventure of Vartika, whom the Asvins rescue from the throat of a wolf. Little Red Riding Hood thus becomes the Dawn. Vartika is a bird, the Quail, 'i.e. the returning bird. But as a being delivered by the Asvins, the representatives of Day and Night, Vartika can only be the returning Dawn, delivered from the mouth of the wolf, i. e. the dark night[47].'

It is hard to see why the Night, as one of the Asvins, should deliver the Dawn from the Night, as the Wolf. On the identification of the Asvins with this or that aspect of Light and Darkness, Muir may be consulted. 'This allegorical interpretation seems unlikely to be correct, as it is difficult to suppose that the phenomena in question should have been alluded to under such a variety of names and circumstances.' (_Sanskrit Texts_, v. 248. Prof. Goldstuecker thinks the Asvins are themselves the crepuscular mingling of light and dark, which, in the other theory, is the struggle of quail and wolf, _op. cit._ v. 257. M. Bergaigne supposes that the Asvins are deities of dawn, _La Religion Vedique_, ii. 431.)

These considerations lead us far enough from Perrault into 'worlds not realised.' Vartika (who, in these theories, answers to _Le Petit Chaperon Rouge_) has been compared by Mr. Max Mueller, not only to the returning Dawn, but to the returning year, _Vertumnus_. He notes that the Greek word for quail is _ortyx_, that Apollo and Artemis were born in Ortygia, an old name of Delos, and that 'here is a real traditional chain.' But 'it would be a bold assertion to say that the story of _Red Riding Hood_ was really a metamorphosis of an ancient story of the rosy-fingered Eos, or the Vedic Eos with her red horses, and that the two ends, Ushas and Rothkaeppchen, are really held together by an unbroken traditional chain.'

We shall leave the courage of this opinion to M. Husson, merely observing that, as a matter of fact, Dawn is _not_ swallowed by Night. Sunset (which is red) is so swallowed, but then sunset is not 'a young maiden carrying messages,' like Red Riding Hood and Ushas. To be sure, the convenient Wolf is regarded by mythologists as 'a representative of the sun or of the night,' at will. He 'doubles the part,' and 'is the useful Wolf,' as the veteran Blenkinsopp, in _Pendennis_, was called 'The useful Blenkinsopp.'

[Footnote 42: _Contes de Charles Perrault_, Paris, _s. a._ p. lxiv. Perrault's love of refining is not idle in _Le Chaperon Rouge_. In the _popular_ versions, in Brittany and the Nievre, the wolf puts the grandmother in the pot, and her blood in bottles, and makes the unconscious child eat and drink her ancestress! The cock or the robin redbreast warns her in vain, and she is swallowed. (_Melusine_, May 5, 1887.)]

[Footnote 43: A. M. de la Fontaine, a Usez, le ii. Nov. 1661.]

[Footnote 44: Tylor, _Prim. Cult._ i. 338.]

[Footnote 45: Brough Smyth, _Natives of Victoria_, i. p. 432.]

[Footnote 46: Grimm, Note on 5.]

[Footnote 47: Max Mueller's _Selected Essays_, i. 565.]

LA BARBE BLEUE.

_Blue Beard._

The story of Blue Beard, as told by Perrault, is, of all his collection, the most apt to move pity and terror. It has also least of the supernatural. Here are no talking beasts, no fairies, nor ogres. Only the enchanted key is _fee_, or _wakan_ as the Algonkins say, that is, possesses magical properties. In all else the story is a drama of daily and even of contemporary life, for Blue Beard has the gilded coaches and embroidered furniture of the seventeenth century, and his wife's brothers hold commissions in the dragoons and musketeers. The story relies for its interest on the curiosity of the wife (the moral motive), on the vision of the slain women, and on the suspense of waiting while Sister Anne watches from the tower. These simple materials, admirably handled, make up the terrible story of _Blue Beard_.

Attempts have been made to find for _Blue Beard_ an historical foundation. M. Collin de Plancy mentions a theory that the hero was a seigneur of the house of Beaumanoir (_OEuvres Choisies de Ch. Perrault_, p. 40, Paris, 1826). Others have fancied that Blue Beard was a popular version of the deeds of Gilles de Retz, the too celebrated monster of mediaeval history, or of a more or less mythical Breton prince of the sixth century, Cormorus or Comorre, who married Sainte Trophime or Triphime, and killed her, as he had killed his other wives, when she was about to become a mother. She was restored to life by St. Gildas[48]. If there is a trace of the _Blue Beard_ story in the legend of the Saint, it does not follow that the legend is the source of the story. The _Maerchen_ of _Peau d'Ane_ has been absorbed into the legend of Sainte Dipne or Dympne, and the names of saints, like the names of gods and heroes in older faiths, had the power of attracting _Maerchen_ into their cycle.