Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/278

270 story appear with other surroundings and set in other frameworks. Mr. Lang says they have much to do in determining the meaning of the Cupid and Psyche story. It is found that these incidents, apart from the form of the story, have parallels among most of the savage people whose stories have been collected and made known. An examination of them leads Mr. Lang to the conclusion that they form the true basis for working out the meaning of the story, and that their combination into any particular narrative which has happened to be recorded in literature is due to a variety of causes all of which lay outside the subject of the meaning of märchen. In this he is supported by what Captain Temple has recorded of India, where the practice of relating popular traditions is still alive. There the storyteller, having supplied himself with a goodly stock of incidents all well remembered by the people, evinces his skill, not by the relation of time-honoured legends in complete form, but by the various combinations into which he can weave incidents so as to form a thrilling or pleasing narrative. In examining the Cupid and Psyche story of Apuleius, therefore, we are so far as the story-form is concerned merely examining the accidental circumstances which gave it this particular form, and even if these may be granted to arise from the poetic imagination of early Greeks in personifying the lunar cycle we have not advanced much in the history of the story itself. Savages have the same incidents to relate of their own heroes: and Mr. Lang proves that these incidents are explainable by what we know of the customs and ways of savage people. Either the Greeks deliberately borrowed savage ideas wherewith to construct "a lovely myth" or they simply told their own traditions of previous stages of culture. If this be the true way to consider the incidents in the story of Cupid and Psyche we may lose some poetical fancies, but we gain a knowledge of far-off times and of very ancient facts in the childhood of human history.

There will probably be much more written and said upon this subject before it is finally settled, but we venture to think that Mr. Lang's method will in the end be fully recognised as the only one possible to explain adequately the phenomena which meet the student in his inquiry into the origin of folk-tales.