Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/72

62 follow Benfey in tracing all popular tales and drolls to the great Indian collections, especially the fables of Bidpay; and who are they at the present day? Certainly not Monsieur Gaston Paris, as the sentence above quoted is sufficient proof. Certainly not Monsieur Cosquin, whose chief merit has been to supplement the theory of Benfey with a large induction of the specific resemblance between the oral literature of Europe and India. If I may venture to join myself to these names, I may point out that I expressly limited the influence of the oriental collections to some one-tenth of European fairy tales in my introduction to the earliest English version of the Fables of Bidpay (London, 1888), page xxxiv. So far then as Monsieur Bédier has been successful in his attack, he has come rather late into the field and merely mangles the corpse of a dead theory. The question whether the Fabliaux owe their rise to the introduction of oriental stories through oral transmission by the Crusaders in the twelfth century has not even been touched upon by Monsieur Bédier; yet this is the exact form in which M. Gaston Paris has posed the question.

And yet curiously enough Monsieur Bédier in principle accepts the main thesis which has led so many of us to accept an Indian origin for some of the fabliaux, most, if not all of the drolls, and some of the fairy-tales. The resemblances in tales, he grants, which extend beyond two or three general traits must be due to borrowing.

Again, Monsieur Bédier accepts a principle on which we have of recent years so much insisted in the Folklore Society: the priority of publication does not prove origin. But Monsieur Bédier, by a one-sided proceeding applies this latter principle only in favour of this negative thesis. If tales are shown to have been written down at an earlier date in India than in Europe, he argues, fairly enough, that this fact alone could not prove Indian origin. But when tales exist in European popular literature at an earlier date than in India, he refuses to consider the question for an Indian origin at all. By this means he removes from the situation the whole body of Indian popular literature collected in this century; though in many cases these can be proved to have been current among the people for at least over a thousand years.

But M. Bédier's most ingenious method of proving his case is a formal criterion of derivation, which at first sight seems to have all the rigidity and accuracy of a scientific instrument. Having to discuss the resemblances between two stories, one told in the