I mentioned just now that the comparison of the Greek and Indian fables first drew the attention of scholars to transmission as a possible explanation of the similarity of stories. Accordingly, we should expect to find the most obvious and striking resemblances among variants of fables. This is a subject that has engaged the attention of Mr. Joseph Jacobs, and has led to the most valuable contribution, not merely to the controversy, but to the study of folk-tales, which has been made during the year 1889.
The occasion of this contribution is a reprint in a sumptuous form of Caxton’s version of Æsop’s Fables, to which Mr. Jacobs has prefixed, in a separate volume, an introduction containing an account of the development of the fables down to the end of the Middle Ages. In truly scientific manner the history is traced backwards, showing, step by step, the changes, growth, and accretions in the course of centuries. This, of course, is a purely literary history; but literary history is important, because it is on this that the advocates of the borrowing theory rely for the bulk of their facts. The result of Mr. Jacobs’ inquiries is to establish the literary descent of the fable, on the one hand from Greece, where it received its first great impulse by its application to political uses during the epoch of the tyrants, when free speech was dangerous, and on the other hand from India, where Buddha and his early followers adapted the beast-tale to teach ethical lessons. I need not refer here to the many ingenious and probable conjectures, and to the patient analyses which have cleared up a number of difficult problems in the course of this brilliant essay. The question that chiefly interests us now is whether the true inference is a generalisation to be extended to all classes of tales. Are we to believe that all classes of tales are derived by literary, or partly by literary and partly by oral, channels from their original home among the Hindoo Aryans in Sanskrit times? The learned author does not admit that this follows from his investigations. He insists, and rightly insists, that “the fable is a highly
