Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/92

84 written chiefly in reply to Mr. Andrew Lang, it constitutes a powerful statement of the Disseminationist position. Mr. Jacobs insists on the artistic whole which a folk-tale forms, while M. Cosquin examines some analogous stories under the microscope, and finds minute and unexpected coincidences. Both arguments converge upon the necessity that the narrative, say, of Perseus or Cinderella, had a specific origin in a definite locality, if not in the brain of some one conscious artist, and thence spread through the world. Mr. Newell introduces a further limitation. He is of opinion that märchen with all their magic, all their cruelty, all their absurdities, originated among civilised nations, or at least were diffused from them to uncivilised, and not vice versâ. The example he has made the text of his paper is an English variant of a well-known type of Swan-maiden stories; and it is specially valuable as the only English variant known. It is printed for the first time in the Congress Report, "obtained from a member of a highly intelligent family in Massachusetts, in which it has been traditional." Mr. Newell, its discoverer, traces it back to the Hindu mythology, where, he says, it "seems clear and simple ; in other parts of the world it appears as a narrative subject to obscurity, and not in close connection with national ideas." Naturally, however, he finds a difficulty with the variant made known to us by Dr. Turner in his book on Samoa. This variant is not only unusually complete, but is "highly characteristic in form and scenery", and, moreover, is in ballad form, consisting of no fewer than twenty-six stanzas. Yet Mr. Newell concludes "that this ballad must have been inspired by a tale recently imported from Europe". Must it? Samoa was discovered by the Dutch in 1722. It was next visited by the French in 1768, and again in 1787. A quarrel with the natives by the expedition under La Perouse in the latter year caused the island to be shunned as the abode of treacherous savages for nearly fifty years, though it was