Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/132

100 It is scarcely necessary to go further. If we do, we shall only be confronted by the same astonishing parallelism which is exhibited by the several versions of the stories already cited. The hypothesis of conscious borrowing is either superfluous or dangerous. It is unnecessary, if adduced to explain the distant or vague resemblances in one story, while they who so apply it admit that it cannot account for the far more striking points of likeness seen in many others. It is dangerous because it may lead us to infer an amount of intercourse between the separated Aryan tribes for which we shall vainly seek any actual evidence. It is inadequate, because in a vast number of instances the point to be, explained is not a similarity of ideas, but a substantial identity in the method of working them out, extending to the most unexpected devices and the subtlest turns of thought and expression. That the great mass of popular tradition has been thus imported from the East into the West, or from the West into the East, has never been maintained ; and any such theory would rest on the assumption that the folk-lore of a country may be created by a few scholars sitting over their books, and deliberately determining the form in which their stories shall be presented to the people. It would be safer to affirm, and easier to prove, that no popular stories have thus found their way from learned men to the common people The ear of the people has in all ages been deaf to the charming of the scholars, charm they never so wisely. Bookmen may, if they please, take up and adapt the stories of the people ; but the legend of "the Carter, the Dog, and the Sparrow" would never have found Its way into the nurseries of German peasants if written by Grimm himself in imitation of some other Aryan tale. The importation of one or two stories by means of written books is therefore a matter of very slight moment, so long as it is admitted that legends, displaying the most astonishing parallelism in the most distant countries of Europe and Asia, cannot be traced to any intercourse of the tribes subsequent to their dispersion from a common home. We thus have before us a vast mass of myths, fables, legends, stories, or by what- ever name they are to be called, some in a form not much advanced beyond the proverbial saying which was their kernel, others existing apparently only as nursery tales, others containing the germs of the great epics of the Eastern and the Western world. All these may be placed together in one class, as springing from phrases which at first denoted physical phenomena ; and enough has perhaps been already said to show that this class includes a very large proportion of strictly popular stories which seem at first sight to be in no way connected with epical mythology. There remain the comparatively few stories