Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/87

Rh genie, to whose form distance gives the outline of a hare. In spite of the long ears which we see in those images sold in the streets, T'u Erh Ye must not be considered a member of the animal pentalogy which we discussed in these columns some weeks ago. The mid-autumn festival is free both of animal worship and animal superstition."

Fairy Tales.—Children appear, as indeed they naturally should, to be the soundest of all folk-lorists, for they show an instinctive preference for the oldest, and, mythologically speaking, the purest form of the fairy-tale—the tale without a moral. Everybody knows that as soon as the narrator of a nursery-story "stoops to truth," and attempts to "moralize his song," no natural and healthy-minded child, no child who is worth his salt (and that is saying a good deal, for children require very little salt), will have the song at any price. Its infancy, in fact, is in sympathy with the infancy of the race, when morals (of all sorts) were regarded as a strange an unintelligible excrescence upon human life. Nothing, in fact, appears to me to mark the legitimate and uncorrupted descent of a modern fairy-tale from a piece of immemorial folk-lore more unmistakably than the fact of its tacitly concluding, in the words of a lamented humorist, with an "As for the moral, it's what you please." In a recent interesting lecture, Mr. Lang discussed the question whether one of the most famous, and perhaps the most delightful, of our nursery stories was or was not originally told for the moral's sake; and whether, consequently, the modern form beloved of every child, in which there is no moral, is or is not to be regarded as a degenerate version. Now Mr. Lang, a student of folk-lore comme il y en a peu, has doubtless thoroughly studied the genealogy of his "Puss in Boots," and if he is of opinion (though I rather gather from his language that he is not) that the oldest form of this particular story is the form with a moral, I should hesitate, as an inexpert in such matters, to maintain the contrary. But I should venture to maintain, as a general rule, that where any folk-tale exists in two forms—a moralized and an unmoralized one —the presumption of superior antiquity is strongly on the side of the latter. In addition to the general presumption, it is much less easy to comprehend the process by which a moral could drop out of a story