Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/244

218 true tale is the recital of a series of events, grouped in a given way, which if expanded might become a novel, if curtailed, a moral maxim.

I know I am treading dangerous ground in trying to define a thing whose very charm is want of definition, trying to press into the limit of space and time what is boundless and infinite. But one must start somewhere, and better start from a half-truth than from none at all.

The individual element in the origin of a tale has already been pointed out by others. One man must first tell a tale. This is taken up by others, and enlarged or assimilated. The question of the transmission is another moot point; that is, if we admit only one centre for the origin of one or more tales, and not independent origins of one and the same tale. This is for me out of question. The identity between the various tales even in distant countries is not the result of mere chance. It would be a miracle of the highest order to find such a similarity or identity between the intellectual products of various nations, limited wholly and solely to so complex a thing as a tale with a number of incidents. In everything else there is profound disparity; only in the tale there should be identity, and this not due to extraneous circumstances! There are things which men with theories will swallow without looking too closely at them; I decline to make the experiment or to follow the example.

I am asking myself. How have I come to know a great number of tales in my youth? Born and bred in the East, I had greater facilities of coming in contact with the most varied elements of the populace than those given by the artificial and highly secluded form of education in the civilized world of the West. I had thus the opportunity of growing up under the same influences, to which the nations of the West had been exposed during the period of personal intercourse of a primitive, slow, and more enduring character. The nurse from Hungary, and the housemaid from Wallachia, the Albanian with his sweetmeats, and the