proving that. We are all prone to adopt, unconsciously, that form of reasoning, "du moins si j'en juge par la confusion regnant dans beaucoup d'esprits", as M. Cosquin says. There is a point at which the sequence and combination of incidents into a plot can only have been made once, and that point is reached wherever a tale like Cupid and Psyche exactly follows the arrangement of Apuleius. But other tales, retaining its peculiar central situation, do not present its sequence of plot. In the case of certain remote and backward peoples, their tale of this kind, to my thinking, may be of independent origin, while I do not and did not deny that they may have borrowed and altered it. In fact, I decline to dogmatise.[1]
Mr. Jacobs is my next critic. He insists that to study survivals in the tale is not to study the tale. I suppose I have "studied the tale", more or less. My reason for writing on it was to show that the peculiarities of the tale could be accounted for without the use of Mr. Max Müller's solar theory: this was a late performance, like the rest of the world, I first read the tale for pleasure. Mr. Jacobs likens me to one who, in future ages, should study The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, to learn the properties of hansom cabs, and argue that the story was written to illustrate these. The mystery of Mr. Jacobs' vein of humour! However, it is true that I do regard some märchen "as a species of Tendenz Roman," stories with a purpose, or capable of being used, at least, to point a moral. There is no mistake about the moral in the tales where charity or courtesy are denied by the first and second adventurer, who fail, granted by the third, who succeeds. Perrault notices, perhaps exaggerates this truth. Now, I can conceive that, when some young bride objected to the irrational taboo, then a taboo story—the awful results of breaking a taboo—was told to her: that is not out of human nature. Mr. Jacobs admits that savage customs and ideas do "obviously" occur in fairy-tales, but these are " not the essence of the story". The "obviousness" was not so manifest, I am conceited enough to say, before it was set
- ↑ I may have caused confusion by saying "the tale" of Cupid and Psyche, in Introduction to Custom and Myth. I should have said "the essential incident in the tale".
