Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/59

 that globe there in the distance?” That is to say, it obviously means the cap of darkness spreading over the eastern region of the sky after sunset. And seeing that the next three days are but brief and fleeting apparitions, it maintains its individuality throughout, and then, as the days go on lengthening, crumbles away, vanishes and collapses altogether. The result, therefore, of this investigation is as follows: (1) The primitive epic fairy story consisted of five parts—A prelude of a year; the three months of winter, and a week with a few days appended. (2) This fairy story was hatched on that degree of latitude within the Arctic circle where the sun remains continuously below the horizon in winter for just six weeks. (8) It was hatched in a region where some very special formations of cloud cumulus occurred during one week, and, in fact, the first week in March; probably a region where exists a wide extent of lakes and perhaps rivers.

When we reflect upon this reconstituted Arctic fairy story, we find to our amazement that it lies at the root of the three most celebrated and popular forms of our European literature—the Epic poem, the Greek and modern drama, the latter with its five acts being based upon the analysis of the Greek drama, and the three-volume novel. As to the epic poem, the Iliad and Odyssey are the two perfect types, and conform so completely to the annual solar myth as to have induced competent writers to believe them to be altogether allegorical—myths of the dawn or what not. All other modern European epics are merely imitations of them. In the drama the first act is the annual prelude, the next three develop the action, and the fifth gives the final solution—exactly as in the annual solar myth. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are indeed forms of fairy stories. We may cite for example “All’s well that ends well,” closely dramatized from Boccaccio, whose story most likely is but an elaborated European form of Kalidasa’s masterpiece, the Indian drama, “Sakuntala, or the Lost Ring,” itself obviously drawn from the annual solar myth; “The Taming of the Shrew,” also dramatized, if I mistake not, from Boccaccio, who was probably indebted to the Venetian popular fairy story, Casa Cuccagna, itself a version of the Slovenian, “The Golden Spinneress.” How appropriate, too, to lay the scene of the fairy drama, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Athens in the time of Theseus, to indicate what our modern learned are only just beginning to realize, that Greek myths, North and Central European fairy stories, Jewish and Christian superstitions, and Hindoo creeds and mythologies are all but parts and parcels of one aftd the same thing. The first half of “Cymbeline,” again, is taken from Boccaccio’s story of the Merchant of Genova, and this has its counterpart in various Venetian fairy stories, the closest being The Three Waiters and the Golden Apple (El pomo d’oro), which in its turn is derived from the Polish legend of the Shepherd’s Pipe. In form, again, “King Lear” is a pure and simple annual solar myth containing all the principal elements. But it is needless to insist further upon what is so obvious. In the three-volume novel—we moderns are such busy folk—the three winter months, the months of action of the Epic fairy story, have alone gone to form the new literary variant. In Blackmore’s highly artistic “Lorna Doone,” we have, however, an anti-climax, corresponding to the seven days ab the end of The Three Citrons. Probably the host of unhappy scribblers who furnish our half-educated reading public with that feeble literary pabulum, the three-volume novel, which is supposed to give a picture of modern life, is quite unconscious that the optimistic fatality which compels it to marry off its heroes and heroines at the end of the story is due to the permanent disappear-