no reason for supposing that India before the dawn of history was their source.
The reasons for which India has been regarded as a great centre and fountain-head of popular stories are, on the other hand, excellent, if the theory is sufficiently limited. The cause is vera causa. Märchen certainly did set out from mediæval India, and reached mediæval Europe and Asia in abundance. Not to speak of oral communications in the great movements, missions, and migrations, Tartar, crusading, commercial, and Buddhistic—in all of which there must have been "swopping of stories"—it is certain that Western literature was actually invaded by the contes which had won a way into the literature of India.[1] These are facts beyond doubt, but these facts must not be made the basis of too wide an inference. Though so many stories have demonstrably been borrowed from India in the historical period, it is no less certain that many existed in Europe before their introduction. Again, as has been ably argued by a writer in the Athenæum (April 23, 1887), the literary versions of the tales probably had but a limited influence on the popular narrators, the village gossips and grandmothers. Thus no collection of published tales has ever been more popular than that of Charles Perrault, which for many years has been published not only in cheap books, but in cheaper broadsheets. Yet M. Sébillot and other French collectors gather from the
- ↑ Cosquin, op. cit., I. xv., xxiv,; Max Müller, "The Migrations of Fables," Selected Essays, vol. ii., Appendix; Benfey, Pantschatantra; Comparetti, Introduction to Book of Sindibad, English translation of the Folk-Lore Society.
