Chapter XXI · THE STORY AS A WHOLE. THE PROBLEM OF ITS PLACE OF ORIGIN. CONCLUSION.

My task draws towards its close. We have now examined the four leading trains of incident as developed in modern folktales belonging to the Perseus cycle. We have found the Supernatural Birth, the Life-token, and the Medusa-witch founded on superstitions common to all mankind and arising in the depths of savagery. The Rescue of Andromeda, on the other hand, appears to be restricted to nations which have attained a certain grade of civilisation, and to spring out of the suppression of human sacrifices to divinities in bestial form.

We have now to return to the story as an artistic whole, and to inquire where and when it originated.

In seeking the origin of the story as a whole it is well to begin with a caution, to which I have alluded in a note to an earlier chapter, namely, that it is dangerous in these matters to assert that a story or a custom is not found outside a given area. Anthropological research is so modern that much material is certain to have already perished unrecorded, and much that still exists as yet is unrecorded, either because it has been overlooked, or because scientific observers have not yet reached it. All assertions or assumptions, therefore, of a negative character must be taken with the limitations imposed by this condition of things. They can only be provisional, for they may, any of them, be upset by further research. Moreover, the mass of anthropological data is already so great, and is growing with such rapidity, that nothing is easier than for a single inquirer, how diligent soever he may be, to overlook facts duly recorded which may be in conflict with his conclusions. To assert, for example, and to base any portion of an argument upon the assertion, that tales of the group under consideration are not found in Hindustan in anything like the shape wherein we find them in Europe, would be to run the risk of having to revise the argument in the face of new discoveries, or of old records which have not been brought to the writer’s knowledge.

But though Ovid may have been ignorant of other versions of the story, it is manifest that others existed. And here it is material to observe that the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda stands in the poet’s account on a very different footing from that of the remaining incidents. Though it is now (perhaps by virtue of the Christian symbolism read into it from early days of Christianity) the incident which first springs into the mind on mention of the name of Perseus, in the Metamorphoses it is a mere episode, not organically connected with the hero’s story. The encounter with Andromeda is represented as fortuitous. It is not led up to by the previous narrative. It affects the after-incidents in no way. The dragon is not even petrified by the Gorgon’s head. On the other hand, the fatal prophecy is the foundation of all the rest of the saga, from which nothing could be omitted (save, it may be, the visit to Atlas) without impairing the natural, the inevitable, development of the legend as an artistic whole. We must infer that the Rescue is an intrusive episode, and that, as in many modern variants, the tale comprised at first only the other two trains of incident, already characterised as the Birth and the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head. The remaining versions current in antiquity, or some of them, probably omitted Andromeda with all her picturesque possibilities; and it may be permitted to conjecture that the story we regard as classical may have been formed by the imperfect fusion of a legend consisting of the Birth and the Quest of the Gorgon’s Head, with one recognised for some reason as kindred, and consisting only of the Birth and the Rescue of Andromeda. The Albanian märchen, related in our opening chapter, may represent the latter by direct transmission, while the sagas involved in Ælian’s allusions—perchance also as known to Herodotus—may have been guiltless of the fight with the Dragon.

The legend in classical literature is the product of a comparatively high stage of civilisation. In proof of this, it is only necessary to refer to the divine gift of weapons. The helmet, the shield of metal, brightly polished as a mirror, the sword, are not the weapons of the unsophisticated savage. They are replaced in a large number of modern variants by the gift of Helpful Animals. Now, everywhere in the lowest planes of culture we find stories of birds, beasts, reptiles, and even insects, talking and acting in human fashion, sometimes hostile, more usually perhaps helpful to man. It would seem as though man, at variance with his fellow-man, and therefore having unintermittent reason to suspect him, beset, too, by the awful supernatural powers of his imagination, turned for sympathy, perforce, and consolation to his fellow-creatures of a different shape, whom he credited with ability to aid him in his need. No line was drawn between nature and that which was beyond or above nature. But while he imagined in his own form the powers whose enmity he dreaded, he sought, of necessity, his allies among those of other forms. He observed their characteristics; he experienced their usefulness in supplying his wants; he felt himself akin to them; out of them he framed totems, and ultimately gods. The modern incident, therefore, of the Helpful Animals cannot be derived from the classical gift of weapons; for not only is it utterly different in character, but it comes up from a deeper depth of barbarism. Thus it constitutes a strong presumption that the stories wherein it occurs, however they may have been modified in the course of ages, are not to be traced back to the classic literary saga. Still less can we venture to assert that they are derived from the local variants of antiquity. They would be likely to owe their origin rather to a tale already common property, than to one merely local. And of the local variants we only know that Perseus was connected in one of them with a fish; whereas the corresponding heroes of modern variants are frequently so connected, while they are never connected with a crustacean, but often with other artificial means of generation, not noticed in any of the hints that have reached us from ancient times.

If we turn to Table B, relating to the Gift of Weapons, we find results not very different. Out of a total number of seventy-two stories, twenty-two (or thirty per cent.) represent the Weapons as congenital. These are all from Central Europe, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Sicily, Spain and Portugal, including the story from Quilimane; and they all belong to the Perseus group. Then we have twelve, or, if we add the Lithuanian tale in which the Weapons are taken from an uninhabited house, thirteen variants, or eighteen per cent., in which the Weapons are obtained from conquered foes. None of these thirteen stories contain any other of the four chief trains of incident than the Rescue of Andromeda. They are more widely spread than the former, ranging from the west of Ireland to Lithuania and the Levant. There are next seven instances (just under ten per cent.) in which the Weapon is forged to order or bought by the hero. Of these, three come from Scotland, one from Brittany, one is Basque, one is found in the island of Syra, and one in Georgia. Lastly, we have ten cases in which the Weapons are given by a mysterious person without any consideration, two in which they are given to redeem stolen eyes, five in which they are given out of gratitude, two in payment for services rendered or in exchange, and one in which they are given by a fish: in all, twenty cases, or not quite twenty-eight per cent.

Hitherto we have not reached any very definite results in our quest. In Tables A and B I have exhibited the distribution of the stories containing either the Helpful Animals or the Magical Weapons. If these tables establish anything, it is that the greater number of the modern members of the Perseus group are independent of the classical legend. In an overwhelmingly large proportion of cases the Helpful Animals and the Magical Weapons are obtained in some other than the classical way, and usually they are congenital. In the tables account is taken not only of stories including two or more of the chief incidents, and therefore reckoned as properly members of the cycle, but also of those which only contain the incident of the Rescue of Andromeda. If we reckon the former alone, the proportion is greatly increased. The total number of cases in Tables A and B respectively will then be reduced to 65 and 39; while of these, the cases in which the Helpful Animals and the Weapons are respectively congenital will be 42 and 22, or 65 and 56 per cent. Both the Helpful Animals and the Weapons are indeed subordinate incidents in the story; but they are incidents, especially when congenital, which are important enough to influence its entire development. The stories in which horses, dogs, and lances are congenital with the heroes cannot be derived from the classical legend; and although some of the ancient variants are known to connect a fish with the demi-god, Perseus, we have no means of ascertaining whether anything corresponding to these animals and weapons was included in any of them.

We need not, however, conclude that everywhere the legends and songs concerning Saint George embodied the saga of Hermione rather than that of Andromeda. The generally accepted ecclesiastical version laid the scene of the conflict at a town of Libya, which would assuredly point to the latter; while the local traditions whereof the martial saint is hero indicate anything but descent from a story told of so famous a city as Troy. Nor must we leave out of view the probability that in antiquity, as in modern times, beside the sagas fitted with names of heroes and of places, there was current a variety of märchen, similar in plot, and to some extent in detail, ready to be adapted to any names which might happen to lay hold of the popular fancy. Such might easily infect the legend of Saint George while it was taking shape among the folk, and as yet no version had acquired preponderant authority, and thus form variants either of local, or, if fortune smiled upon them, of more than local, acceptance.

But this christianised saga was not quite the only form of the Rescue story known during the Middle Ages. Cuchulainn’s fight with the Fomori was told as early as the legend of Saint George, if not indeed earlier. I have already noted its remarkable resemblance to the corresponding incident in märchen of the Herdsman type—a highly specialised type, differing considerably from any form of the classical story, and peculiar to the west of Europe. We have no direct evidence as to the date when the stories of the Herdsman type arose; but it will be recollected that there is reason to think the type belongs to the Celto-Iberian race, and therefore is of prehistoric age. Nor will the reader fail to note that the Rescue of Devorgoil from the Fomori appears to be an offshoot of the same type, that it is found among one of the branches of the same Celto-Iberian race, and that it is one of the oldest—nay, perhaps, the oldest—post-classical variant in Europe of the Perseus group. All these considerations make for its independence of the classical tale; and their cumulative weight may fairly be called decisive.

We are not, however, left to seek all over the world for the place of origin of either of these two modes of awakening the sleeping deliverer. We are shut up in each case to a fairly defined area within which the detail is found, and within which, therefore, it probably originated. Something of the sort meets us in the case of the Impostor and the Tokens. If we extend our view to include stories which comprise the Rescue of Andromeda alone of the four cardinal incidents of the Perseus group, we appear to find some geographical connection in the tokens. Teeth, for example, are the tokens in Hungary and Oldenburg, ears in the Caucasus and Armenia, mutilations of the hero’s person in the Western Highlands. But we have no such guide where tongues are the tokens; for their distribution, in Europe at all events, is as wide as the story itself. In like manner, if we glance over the other tables, or turn to the distribution of the various types of the story as distinguished in the earlier chapters of this work, we can undoubtedly find geographical limits for many, both of types and of details. To discuss them individually after the examples already given would be tedious; nor would it lead to any more assured result. There are a few cases, like that of the Scented Locks, where we think we can with tolerable certainty trace an accessory back to its source. Even in such cases, however, we have no decisive evidence, as in literary questions, to fix the exact provenience. The peculiarities of a manuscript are not quite parallel with those of a tale. We cannot be positive that the incident in the Cambodian story is derived from the Egyptian. We can only say that its form is later in civilisation, and therefore perhaps in time. For aught we know the incident in the Egyptian märchen may in its turn be derived from an earlier one, which may be the common parent of the incident in the tale of The Two Brothers and in the Cambodian variant of the Perseus group. There is no record which will enable us to pronounce with entire confidence an opinion on the point. Much more then in examples, like those of the Deliverer’s Sleep, where the form discloses no difference in civilisation or in manners, we are at a loss to say whence the detail has come. We can put boundaries within which it has probably arisen; but we have no means of tracing it from Syra to Nubia, or from Nubia to Syra, from Bosnia to Georgia, or from Armenia to Bulgaria. The form of the savage idea may have been imported, as M. Cosquin says, already specialised; but imported whence, imported whither? Those are questions too hard for us with our present means of knowledge. And what is true of the detail is true of the type. We cannot say, in more than a few isolated cases, whether a type has been evolved from another type, either by development or decay. The modern types of the story, we can indeed say, have not been derived from the classical type. It is possible that they may have been derived from some local variant of ancient Greece or the Red Sea shores, of which we have no more than hints in classical writers. It is, at least, equally possible that they and the local variants and the classic legend all alike owe their origin to a common ancestor. Nor can we assign to the modern types any order of precedence among themselves.

Our difficulty in solving these problems arises not merely, or chiefly, from the want of records; still more does it issue from the conditions of oral transmission. Narrative tradition is fluid and changeable. It may be run into any mould, and from one mould to another with equal ease. To change the figure, its constituents are, like chemical elements, found in combinations which are sometimes comparatively stable, at other times tending to change and the formation of new combinations. The permanence of the new combinations depends upon the stability and isolation of the culture-conditions, upon the ability of the storytellers and the customs which bind them, now encouraging invention, and anon imprisoning them with the chains of verbal, if not literal, accuracy. This is not the place to consider the conditions of conservation and of variation. Enough here to draw attention to the reason of the difficulty which lies in the path of him who would trace a folktale to its source.

The truth is that when we speak of a märchen as an artistic whole, we must be careful to guard ourselves against conveying a false impression. Like every human work, there is, of course, a sense in which it is true so to speak of it. Every tale-teller is more or less of an artist, and every tale he tells is a work of art. It is formed of his recollections of other tales told by other tellers, joined and cemented together as best he can by the aid of his own invention. A plot is composed of incidents cohering sometimes more firmly, sometimes less. Often the tale-teller forgets one, patches the story with another from his stock, or inserts an additional incident at pleasure. The new element thus introduced may or may not unite with the old. The character of the tale will be modified, and may be entirely changed, by the substitution or addition. As with the incidents, so with the accessories. Every time the tale is passed through the memory it is exposed to the risk of variation, not only in its main lines, but also, and still more, in its details. Hence we can speak of the story embodied in the Perseus cycle as an abstract ideal whole with even less propriety than we can, by eliminating individual peculiarities from the entire series of pictures of the Annunciation, or the Marriage of the Virgin, from the earliest to the latest, speak of the scene they present with so many variations as one abstract ideal whole. The mediæval painters and the painters of the Renascence developed and modified the traditional scene as they would, or as their skill and circumstances dictated. But the limitations of the limner’s art preserved a certain unity amid all changes. The art of the story-teller is not thus circumscribed. He can run on from one subject to another, as his memory or his imagination may prompt, for the purpose of giving pleasure. He unites the incidents of the Life-token, the Rescue of Andromeda, and the Slaughter of the Gorgon, with that of the Fatal Bird whose flesh gives wealth or exalts its eater to kingship; or he unwinds from the Supernatural Birth the tangled skein of a Bluebeard story. But, save in rare examples, it is impossible to predicate the order of succession, or to say why this line of development has been followed rather than that.

The story of Perseus opens a thousand vistas to the student. In these pages we have been content to follow only a few of them, though there is not one but would have led us upon enchanted ground. It remains to gather up in a few words the results of our inquiry. After reviewing and illustrating the principal types of the story, we took its four leading incidents and sought for their distribution in other combinations, or alone, and for their sources and meaning. The Supernatural Birth we found related in various forms, not merely for amusement, but as sober fact, over so large an area of the world as to justify the belief that it was universal. Every nation has its heroes; and in the popular mind the mightier the hero, the greater the need for providing him with a worthy entrance upon his mortal existence. Nay more. We found that the abnormal means of impregnation, to which the heroes of the stories we examined owed their birth, were, and still are, actually held capable of causing a similar result; therefore were, and are, prescribed for, and used by, women who desire children and are unable to obtain them in the natural way.

The Life-token presented other problems. Both in tale and in custom it is not less generally known than the former incident. Its virtue is derived from the belief that it is part of the substance of the personage whose welfare it indicates. It is the converse and essential correlative of the External Soul. At this point it became necessary, for the elucidation of the idea at the root of both the External Soul and the Life-token, to enter upon a discussion whose length I trust the reader will hold fully excused by the importance of the subject; for it involved nothing less than the savage conception of life in its relation to personality: a conception that permeates savage society; a conception without which it is impossible to understand savage institutions or savage customs; indeed, a conception that underlies much of our modern civilisation, and from which the most sacred act of Christian worship derives its meaning and its virtue.

Like the Supernatural Birth and the Life-token, the Medusa-witch is widely famous, and the superstition out of which the incident of her slaughter—at all events in its classical form—springs is universal. It is that of the Evil Eye. Recent works by other writers rendered it needless to examine this superstition at length.

The incident of the Rescue of Andromeda, though celebrated throughout a large part of the Old World, is more limited in its range than the others. It is based on the change of a horrible custom which has not everywhere been practised, and where it has been practised has not everywhere passed away in such circumstances as to leave behind it the possibility of a Rescue myth. It is therefore the youngest of the four chief incidents of the tale. This limitation of range of the Rescue incident restricts the area within which to seek for the birthplace of the tale as a whole. The search has been interesting; but while it has produced some substantial results, it has failed in its main object. On the causes of failure I have already sufficiently dwelt.

Yet the inquiry has not been wholly in vain, even in regard to storyology pure and simple. We have seen that the classical form of a tale distributed throughout a large part of the Old World owed its peculiar features to the fact of its entrance into the higher literature of the race at a period of relatively advanced civilisation: a traditional selection had been established against the ruder forms of the saga. That ruder forms existed is evident from the hints and allusions preserved by classical writers. The classical form, in spite of its acceptance and of its literary handling by some of the authors of antiquity most widely read, affected to a very slight extent the versions current in tradition. The latter go back in very few instances to the classical form; they frequently contain important incidents—not mere episodes, but incidents of the fibre of the narrative—such as that of the Helpful Beasts, far more barbarous than the classical story; while they are further distinguished by the remarkable peculiarity that they have preserved the cardinal incident of the Life-token, which in the classical saga is entirely wanting. We are bound, therefore, to postulate the existence in Greece, in an earlier and more barbarous age than that which was familiar with the legend in its classical shape, of a folktale substantially similar to that recovered in the last hundred years from all parts of the area I have described. For if the modern form of the tale be not derived from the legend as found in classical literature, neither can it be ascribed to derivation in post-classical days from the special story-store of India. On the contrary, so far as derivation on either side is considered necessary, we are compelled to treat the variants from India and Further India as derivatives, and not as sources. To establish, if not with mathematical, at least with reasonable certainty, the prehistoric age of a famous märchen, as well as the fact that the lower and ruder forms are not killed out by the higher literary forms, but survive them, and to circumscribe the native region of the tale by the limits of Europe, south-western Asia, and northern Africa, may be considered worth the pains spent in the investigation.

I have written of the Legend of Perseus with no polemical object. Yet, valuing the science of folklore, as I do, chiefly for the light it throws on the mental constitution of mankind and the genesis of ideas and of institutions, I cannot hide from myself the important bearing that some of the subjects dealt with in these pages may have upon matters of Christian controversy. Our illustrations of the Supernatural Birth have been drawn entirely from certain forms of the story, to the exclusion of other forms which, interesting as they are in themselves, were for our purpose irrelevant. But sufficient has been said to raise questions which may be summarily stated thus:—If these legends be universal, if they must be rejected in every case but one as the product of an inevitable tendency of human imagination, then why not in that one case also? Assuredly that one case can be regarded as exceptional, only if it stand upon historical evidence totally different in kind from the others, and of inevitable cogency. But can any one who sits down (as it is the duty at least of every educated man to do) calmly and, so far as he can, with scrupulous impartiality to weigh the evidence, say that the testimony of ecclesiastical tradition, or even of our Gospels, is different in kind from, or of greater cogency than, that which we reject, without hesitation, in the case of Sákyamuni, or of Alexander the Great? About ecclesiastical tradition I need say nothing. The records in the two Gospels which bear the names of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke are, carefully considered, irreconcilable. Both Gospels are now admitted to be secondary documents. It is hardly claimed for either of them that it was written less than sixty years after the event. It is by no means certain that they were in existence, as we now have them, when Justin Martyr wrote in the middle of the second century. Outside them there is no record, no unambiguous allusion even, that can be dated within one hundred and ten years of the Birth, and then only if we admit the genuineness of the questionable Epistles of Saint Ignatius, and the earliest possible date for his very doubtful journey. Is this the testimony on which belief in so amazing an event can be safely built?

Our researches into sacramental beliefs and practices, and the ideas underlying them, must have suggested once and again the central rite of Christianity. The institution of the Eucharist is not an event of the same supernatural character as the Birth is alleged to be. Yet if the difficulties of testimony be smaller, those of interpretation are even greater. That sacramental superstitions were rife as well in Judæa as elsewhere in the time of Jesus Christ is certain, though our information concerning them is still lamentably deficient. The influence of the Mysteries upon Christianity has been hitherto little studied. But it is manifest that we cannot appreciate the intention of the rite, or understand the course of its history, without a more extended knowledge of these things.

Doubt is often a more imperative duty than belief. Nor is it the less a duty because it is painful. To the priest, everywhere and in all time, it is the gravest of sins; for the corporate interest of a priesthood adds strength to the sincere belief of the individual, a belief usually founded upon complete ignorance of all but his own side of the question. Priests, therefore, always favour the growth of beliefs of which they are the centre, so leading men deeper and deeper into the slough of superstition. Pleading that it is safer to believe too much than too little, they are not content with a ready-made creed, imperfectly verified, if verified at all. Their inclination and interest alike tend to its enlargement by continual additions, whose only test is consonance with the emotions awakened by something previously accepted. They cannot away with reason, with patient inquiry, and the judicial temper. They seek to prejudice the question before it be tried. Hence they conspire with reactionary statesmen to obtain, or to keep, the control of education. This treachery against civilisation, against the public weal, against truth itself, may succeed for a moment; but only to evoke a retribution which will be strictly measured by its success. It is no light thing to divorce the intellect of a nation from its religion; it is disastrous to attempt to coop the intellect within the bounds of a religion which have become too strait for it.

But abhorrent as doubt and inquiry may be to the priest, they are the means whereby we have gradually reached a more correct and adequate view of the universe, and of human history, than was formerly imposed in the name of divine revelation. He who seeks truth by such means bears a more devoted allegiance to himself and to humanity than he who, for the sake of safety or of ease, flings himself into the lap of a priesthood, which professes to assure to him in the next world eternal salvation, and can certainly bestow upon him, in this, comfort and social consideration and freedom from petty parochial persecution. He will recognise it as a duty to withhold his assent from dogmas, even though the most solemn articles of the Christian faith, until in the open court of reason his objections have been answered and his difficulties solved by sounder arguments and a deeper historical and scientific knowledge than have yet been applied by apologists to the issues.

[The End]