Page:Cinderella, Roalfe Cox.djvu/18

 xiv first: consequently the youngest must be the successful hero. I have endeavoured to reverse the process in the History of Prince Prigio. On the other hand, I still incline to believe that the prohibitions on naming or seeing the bride, with the supernatural sanction of punishment for infringing the taboo, account for the central incidents in stories like Cupid and Psyche. If this be admitted, it points to a very remote origin of the tale, in an ancient stratum of custom, obsolete in Europe. This, in itself, is a curious little piece of human history. Again, the setting of a man to do dangerous feats, before he can win his bride, is a matter of known custom. In heroic Greece, a bride was usually bought, as now among the Zulus, by a price of oxen. But a man might make the accomplishment of difficult feats the price of his daughter's hand; such feats are the winning of the oxen of Iphiclus, the sowing of the dragon's teeth. The result of all these considerations would be that tales were first told when the incidents in them, so astonishing to a civilised mind, were matters of ordinary belief and custom, when beasts might act like men, when there were nuptial taboos, when magic and cannibalism were prevalent. The incidents would no more startle people in fiction then, than a duel, a stolen child, a discovered will, startle novel-readers now. But, as Sainte-Beuve says, had we inherited no fairy-tales, and started to tell nursery-tales in full civilisation, the incidents of Puss in Boots would not have been invented.

That is all my theory: the tales are of immense antiquity, and date from a period of wild fancy, like that in which the more backward races are still or were yesterday.

I have disclaimed any theory about the original Home, or the diffusion of the tales. I have frequently shown the many ways in which a tale, once conceived, might be diffused or transmitted. It might be carried by women, compelled, by the law of exogamy, to marry into an alien group. It might be carried by slaves all across Africa, and, in old times, to America. A slave of Javan might tell a Greek tale among Phœnicians or Assyrians. Soldiers of Alexander might carry them to Egypt. A viking expedition of early Greeks in Egypt, such as Odysseus describes (Odyssey, xiv,