Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/104

72 BOOK 1. and Her- niotimos.

But the story of the nautch-girl is only one incident in a larger drama. The bird of the German tale is a common sparrow ; the of Vicranr^ parrot which brings about the death of Champa Ranee is nothing less than the Maharaja Vicram, who has received from the god of wisdom the power of transporting his soul into any other body, while by an antidote he keeps his own body from corruption. And here we are brought to a parallelism which cannot be accounted for on any theory of mediaeval importation. The story of Vicram is essen- tially the story of Hermotimos of Klazomenai, whose soul wanders at will through space, while his body remains undecayed at home, until his wife, tired out by his repeated desertions, burns his body while he is away, and thus effectually prevents his resuming his proper form. A popular Deccan tale, which is also told by Pliny and Lucian, must have existed, if only in a rudimentary state, while Greeks and Hindus still lived as a single people. But a genuine humour, of which we have litde more than a faint germ in the Greek legend, runs through the Hindu story. In both the wife is vexed by the frequent absence of her husband : but the real fun of the Deccan

which are not to be found in those of Germany and Scandinavia, and which are not repeated in Celtic traditions. In each case the story is the same, yet not the same, and the main question becomes one rather of historical than of philological evidence. The substantial identity of the tales is indisputable ; and if the fact be that these stories were in the possession of Germans and Norwegians, Irishmen and Scottish Highlanders, long before any systematic attempt was made to commit to writing and publish the folklore of Europe, the further conclusion is also involved that these stories do not owe their diffusion to book-learning ; and assuredly the commercial intercourse which would ac- count for them implies an amount and a frequency of communication beyond that of the most stirring and enter- prising nations of the present day. Mr. Campbell, in his invaluable collection of ropttlar Tales of the West High- lands, dismisses the hypothesis as wholly untenal)le. Of the notion that these Highland traditions may have sprung up since the publication of Grimm's and Dasent's collections of German and Norse tales, he asserts that a manuscript lent to him by the translator proves that the stories were known in .Scotland before these transla- tions were made public (vol. i. p. xlvi. ), and adds, reasonably enough, that " when all the narrators agree in saying that they have known these stories all their lives, and when the variation is so marked, the resemblance is rather to be attributed to common origin than to books" {ib. xlviii.). More definitely he asserts, "After working for a year and weighing all the evidence that has come in my way, I have come to agree with those who hold that popular tales are generally pure traditions " (ib. 227). The care with which he has examined the large bodies of Celtic traditions, gives his judgement the greatest weight, and fully justifies his conclusion that " popular tales are woven together in a network which seems to pervade the world, and to be fastened to everything in it. Tradition, books, history, and mythology hang together ; no sooner has the net been freed from one snag, and a mesh gained, than another mesh is discovereti ; and so, unless many hands combine, the net and the con- tents will never be brought to shore " {ib. 229). It is not a little startling to find that the so-called classical mytho- logy of the Greeks, in which the myth of Psyche was supposed to be almost the only popular tale accidentally pre- served to us, contains the germs, and more than the germs, of nearly every story in the popular traditions of Ger- many, Norway, India, and Scotland.