Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/156

148 as those of folk-fancy) requires separate investigation, but I do not start with a prejudice against European origin. I will not assert that Mr. Jacobs really has any such prejudice, but he sometimes writes as if he had—a matter of loyalty, I fancy, to allies who, in this respect, are more dogmatic and less scientific than he is.

The bearing of recent speculation respecting the original home of the Aryans upon this question seems hardly to have been duly appreciated. When M. Cosquin, arguing against the Aryan mythology detritus theory of folk-tales, asked if the Aryans had brought sets of the Bibliothèque bleue with them from the slopes of the Hindoo Koosh, the gibe was a shrewd one, and it told; but it loses point if the Aryans have always been in Europe. The burden of proof is now thrown upon the advocates of external influence.

I will now turn from the general to the special ground of difference between Mr. Jacobs and myself, from the origin and development of European folk-lore at large to the origin and development of the Cinderella story group in particular. To come at once to close quarters, I will, for argument’s sake, accept Mr. Jacobs’s summary of the ur-Cinderella, contenting myself with italicising the incident—fairy aid. To my mind the inclusion of this incident gives away his entire case. Two theories are in presence: the one, let us call it the upward-evolution theory, urges that the rude archaic form of the supernatural aid given to the heroine—dead mother reincarnated in an animal—put off its primitive rudeness and assumed the, comparatively, more civilised form of the fairy godmother; the other, the downward-evolution theory, claims that within the last two centuries the fairy godmother has been turned into an animal mother, owing to the intrusion of another story type according to Mr. Jacobs, or to the archaicising instinct of the folk according to Prof Newell. The probability of the first theory is, I should have said, as one hundred to one. Out of