Page:Cinderella, Roalfe Cox.djvu/13

 Rh helps the recognition: the foes are punished. Which of the ideas is peculiarly Indian?

Then (p. 91) we have the "indeterminate" form of Madras. It begins with a girl whose lips drop gems (Les Fées in Perrault). Her life is in a necklace. (Separable Life: familiar everywhere, as in ancient Egypt, Maspero, Contes Egyptiens.) Lost shoe, as in Rhodopis, in Herodotus. Owner found, then jealousy of prince's first wife, and no more of Cinderella here, but plenty of other popular incidents. The third case is not more valuable for our purpose.

If India preserves no more than this, why are we to look for the origin of the story in India? The shoe occurs in Annam (p. 28) absolutely involved in a mass of other données, some familiar in Cupid and Psyche, some in all tales of Grateful Beasts; the Revenge is that of Thyestes, and of Gudrun on Atli. Armenia (p. 4) mixes up "Little Brother and Little Sister" (Grimm) with a mass of casual incidents, as of heroine inside fish; the story is a hotch-potch of story formulæ. The other Asiatic versions are of the Peau d'Âne variety. If India be the centre, why have we so few Indian examples; why, in lands relatively near India, is the tale so corrupted from the type which we have chosen; how do we know that the tale was not carried into India?

If we look at Europe, there is always the chance that a book so popular as Perrault's suggested the form which the tale has taken. Our only standard, as far as I can see, is archaism, the presence of elements more barbaric than Perrault offers. Such elements are unlikely to have been added to Perrault; more probably he, or earlier French taste, discarded them. In 3 (p. 2), from the Riviera, we see Perrault's Fairy Godmother mixed up with a more archaic form in a foolish way: perhaps there is here an infusion from the literary version.

One method we might use, we might examine the tale in the form which it assumes among the most primitive peoples. From America Miss Cox only cites examples of Brazil, Chili, and the West Indies: in all of which European importation is probable or certain.