Popular Tales Part 8

LE PEt.i.t POUCET.

_Hop o' my Thumb._

Perrault's tale of _Le Pet.i.t Poucet_ has nothing but the name in common with the legend of _Le Pet.i.t Poucet_ (our 'Tom Thumb') on which M.

Gaston Paris has written a learned treatise. The Poucet who conducts the Walloon _Chaur-Poce_, our 'Charles's Wain,' merely resembles Hop o' my Thumb in his tiny stature, and little can be gained by a comparison of two personages so unlike in their adventures (Gaston Paris, _Mem. de la Societe de Linguistique_, i. 4, p. 372).

In _Hop o' my Thumb_, as Perrault tells it, there are many traces of extreme antiquity.

The incidents are (1) Design of a distressed father and mother to expose their children in a forest. (2) Discovery and frustration of the scheme by the youngest child, whose clue leads him and his brethren home again.

(3) The same incident, but the clue (scattered crumbs) spoiled by birds.

(4) Arrival of the children at the house of an ogre. They are entertained by his wife, but the ogre discovers them by the smell of human flesh. (5) Hop o' my Thumb s.h.i.+fts the golden crowns of the ogre's children to the heads of his brethren, and the ogre destroys his own family in the dark. (6) Flight of the boys, pursued by the ogre in Seven-Leagued Boots. (7) There is a choice of conclusion. In one (8) Hop o' my Thumb steals the boots of the sleeping ogre, and gets his treasures from the ogre's wife. (9) Hop o' my Thumb steals the boots and by their aid wins court favour. Throughout the tale the skill of an extremely small boy is the subject of admiration.

(1) The opening of the story has nothing supernatural or unusual in it.

During the famines which Racine and Vauban deplored, peasants must often have been tempted to 'lose' their children (Sainte-Beuve, _Port Royal_, vi. 153; _Memoires sur la Vie de Jean Racine_. A Geneve, M.DCCXLVII, pp.

271-3).

(2) The idea of dropping objects which may serve as a guide or 'trail'

is so natural and obvious that it is used in 'paper-chases' every day.

In the Indian story[93] of _Surya Bai_, a handful of grains is scattered, the pearls of a necklace are used in the _Raksha's Palace_, in Grimm (15, _Hansel and Grethel_) white pebbles and crumbs of bread are employed. The Kaffir girl drops ashes[94]. In _Nennilloe Nennella_ (_Pentamerone_, v. 8) the father of the children has pity on them, and makes a trail of ashes. Bran is used on the second journey, but it is eaten by an a.s.s[95].

(4) The children arrive at the house of an ogre, whose wife treats them kindly; the ogre, however, smells them out.

This incident, quite recognisable, is found in Namaqua folklore (Bleek, _Bushman Folk Lore_). A Namaqua woman has married an elephant. To her come her two brothers, whom she hides away. 'Then the Elephant, who had been in the veldt, arrived, and smelling something, rubbed against the house.' His wife persuades him that she has slain and cooked a wether, indeed she does cook a wether, to hide the smell of human flesh.

Compare Perrault, 'L'Ogre flairoit droite et a gauche, disant qu'il sentoit la chair fraiche. Il faut, luy dit sa femme, que ce soit ce veau que je viens d'habiller que vous sentez.' But the ogre, like the blind mother of the Elephant in Namaqua, retains his suspicions. In the Zulu tale of Uzembeni (Callaway, p. 49) there is an ogress very hungry and terrible, who has even tried to eat her own daughters. She comes home, where Uzembeni is concealed, and says, 'My children, in my house here today there is a delicious odour!' As Callaway remarks, this 'Fee-fo-fum' incident recurs in Maori myth, when Maui visits Murri-ranga-whenua, and in the legend of Tawhaki, where the ogre is a submarine ogre (Grey's _Polynes. Myth._ pp. 34, 64). In a more familiar pa.s.sage the Eumenides utter their _fee-fo-fum_ when they smell out Orestes[96].

In the extreme north-west of America this world-wide notion meets us again, among the Dene Hareskins (Pet.i.tot, _Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest_, Paris, 1886, p. 171). The stranger comes to strange people, 'un jeune garcon sort d'une maison et dit, Moi, je sens l'odeur humaine ... ce disant, il humait l'air, et reniflait a la maniere d'un limier qui est sur une piste.' In the Aberdeens.h.i.+re _Mally Whuppy_, we have the old

Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of some earthly one![97]

The idea of cannibalism, which inspires most of these tales, like the Indian stories of _Rakshas_, is probably derived from the savage state of general hostility and actual anthropophagy (_Die Anthropophagie_, uberlebsel im Volksglauben.' Andree, Leipzig, 1887). We know that Basutos have reverted to cannibalism in this century; in Labrador and the wilder Ojibbeway districts, Weendigoes, or men returned to cannibalism, are greatly dreaded (Hind's _Explorations in Labrador_, i.

p. 59). There are some very distressing stories in Kohl (_Kitchi Gami_, p. 355-359). A prejudice against eating kindred flesh, (as against eating Totems or kindred animals and vegetables,) is common among savages. Hence the wilder South American tribes, says Cieza de Leon, bred children they might lawfully eat from wives of alien stock, the father being reckoned not akin to his children, who follow the maternal line. Thus the great prevalence of cannibalism in European _Marchen_ seems a survival from the savage condition. In savage _Marchen_, where cannibalism is no less common, it needs little explanation; not that all savages are cannibals, but most live on the frontier of starvation, and have even less scruple than Europeans in the ultimate resort.

(5) Arrived at the ogre's house, Hop o' my Thumb deceives the cannibal, and makes him slay his own children.

This is decidedly a milder form of the incident in which the captive either cooks his captor, or makes the captor devour some of his own family. In Zululand (Callaway, pp. 16-18, _Uhlakanyana_) we find the former agreeable adventure. Uhlakanyana, trapped by the cannibal, gets the cannibal's mother to play with him at boiling each other. The old lady cries out that she is 'being done,' but the artful lad replies, 'When a man has been thoroughly done, he does not keep crying I am already done. He just says nothing when he is already done.... Now you have become silent; that is the reason why I think you are thoroughly done. You will be eaten by your children.' Callaway justly compares the Gaelic Maol a Chliobain, who got the Giant's mother to take her place in the Giant's game-bag,--with consequences (Campbell, i. 255). In Grimm's _Hansel and Grethel_ Peggy bakes the ogress. The trick recurs in the Kaffir _Hlakanyana_[98]. There are two ways of doing this trick in popular tales: either the prisoner is in a sack, and induces another person to take his place (as in the Aberdonian _Mally Whuppy_, and among the Kaffirs); or they play at cooking each other; or, in some other way, the captive induces the captor to enter the pot or oven, and, naturally, keeps him there. This is the device of the German Grethel and the Zulu Uhlakanyana. The former plan, of the game-bag, prevails among the South Siberian peoples of the Turkish race. Tardanak was caught by a seven-headed monster and put in a bag. He made his way out, and induced the monster's children to take his place. The monster, Jalbagan, then cooked his own children. Perrault wisely makes his ogre a little intoxicated, but he did not carry his mistake so far as to _eat_ his children.

The expedient by which Hop o' my Thumb saves his company, and makes the ogre's children perish, differs from the usual devices of the game-bag and the oven. Hop o' my Thumb exchanges the nightcaps of himself and his brothers for the golden crowns of the ogre's daughters. But even this is not original. In the many _Marchen_ which are melted together into the legend of the Minyan House of Athamas, this idea occurs. According to Hyginus, Themisto, wife of Athamas, wished to destroy the children of her rival Ino. She, therefore, to distinguish the children, bade the nurse dress her children in white night-gowns, and Ino's children in black. But this nurse (so ancient is the central idea of _East Lynne_) was Ino herself in disguise, and she reversed the directions she had received. Themisto, therefore, murdered her own children in the dusk, as the ogre slew his own daughters. M. Deulin quotes a Catalan tale, in which the boys escape from a cupboard, where they place the daughters of the ogress, and they then sleep in the daughters' bed.

(6) The flight of Hop o' my Thumb and his brethren is usually aided, in Zulu, Kaffir, Iroquois, Samoan, j.a.panese, Scotch, German, and other tales, by magical objects, which, when thrown behind the fugitives, become lakes, forests, and the like, thus detaining the pursuer.

Perrault knows nothing of this. His seven-leagued boots, used by the ogre and stolen by the hero, doubtless are by the same maker as the sandals of Hermes; the goodly sandals, golden, that wax never old (_Odyssey_, v. 45).

In addition to these shoon, and the shoon of Loki, and the slippers of Poutraka in the _Kathasaritsagara_ (i. 13), we may name the seven-leagued boots in the very rare old Italian rhymed _Historia delliombruno_, a black-letter tract, which contains one of the earliest representations of these famous articles.

While these main incidents of Hop o' my Thumb are so widely current, the general idea of a small and tricksy being is found frequently, from the Hermes of the Homeric Hymn to the Namaqua Heitsi Eibib, the other _Poucet_, or Tom Thumb, and the Zulu Uhlakanyana. Extraordinary precocity, even from the day of birth, distinguishes these beings (as Indra and Hermes) in _myth_. In _Marchen_ it is rather their smallness and astuteness than their youth that commands admiration, though they are often very precocious. The general sense of the humour of 'infant prodigies' is perhaps the origin of these romances.

For a theory of _Hop o' my Thumb_, in which the forest is the night, the pebbles and crumbs the stars, the ogre the devouring Sun, the ogre's daughters 'the seven Vedic sisters,' and so forth, the curious may consult M. Hyacinthe Husson, M. Andre Lefevre, or M. Frederick Dillaye's _Contes de Charles Perrault_ (Paris, 1880).

[Footnote 93: _Old Deccan Days._]

[Footnote 94: Theal, p. 113.]

[Footnote 95: The remainder of the story in the _Pentamerone_ is entirely different. There is no ogre, and there are sea-faring adventures.]

[Footnote 96: _Eumenides_, 244.]

[Footnote 97: Compare _L'Oiseau Vert_. Cosquin, _Contes de Lorraine_, i.

103.]

[Footnote 98: Theal, p. 93.]

CONCLUSION.

The study of Perrault's tales which we have made serves to ill.u.s.trate the problems and difficulties of the subject in general. It has been seen that similar and a.n.a.logous _contes_ are found among most peoples, ancient and modern. When the resemblances are only in detached ideas and incidents, for example, the introduction of rational and loquacious beasts, or of magical powers, the difficulty of accounting for the diffusion of such notions is comparatively slight. All the backward peoples of the world believe in magic, and in the common nature of men, beasts, and things. The real problem is to explain the coincidence in _plot_ of stories found in ancient Egypt, in Peru, in North America, and South Africa, as well as in Europe. In a few words it is possible to sketch the various theories of the origin and diffusion of legends like these.

I. According to what may be called the Aryan theory (advocated by Grimm, M. Andre Lefevre, Von Hahn, and several English writers), the stories are peculiar to peoples who speak languages of the Aryan family. These peoples, in some very remote age, before they left their original seats, developed a copious mythology, based mainly on observation of natural phenomena, Dawn, Thunder, Wind, Night, and the like. This mythology was rendered possible by a 'disease of language,' owing to which statements about phenomena came to appear like statements about imaginary persons, and so grew into myths. _Marchen_, or popular tales, are the _debris_, or _detritus_, or youngest form of those myths, worn by constant pa.s.sing from mouth to mouth. The partisans of this theory often maintain that the borrowing of tales by one people from another is, if not an impossible, at least a very rare process.

II. The next hypothesis may be called the Indian theory. The chief partisan of this theory was Benfey, the translator and commentator of the _Pantschatantra_. In France M. Cosquin, author of _Contes Populaires de Lorraine_, is the leading representative. According to the Indian theory, the original centre and fountain of popular tales is India, and from India of the historic period the legends were diffused over Europe, Asia, and Africa. Oral tradition, during the great national movements and migrations, and missions,--the Mongol conquests, the crusades, the Buddhist enterprises, and in course of trade and commerce, diffused the tales. They were also in various translations,--Persian, Arabic, Greek,--of Indian literary collections like the _Pantschatantra_ and the _Hitopadesa_, brought to the knowledge of mediaeval Europe. Preachers even used the tales as parables or 'examples' in the pulpit, and by all those means the stories found their way about the world. It is admitted that the discovery of _contes_ in Egypt, at a date when nothing is known of India, is a difficulty in the way of this theory, as we are not able to show that those _contes_ came from India, nor that India borrowed them from Egypt. The presence of the tales in America is explained as the consequence of importations from Europe, since the discovery of the New World by Columbus.

Neither of these theories, neither the Aryan nor the Indian, is quite satisfactory. The former depends on a doctrine about the 'disease of language' not universally accepted. Again, it entirely fails to account for the presence of the _contes_ (which, _ex hypothesi_, were not _borrowed_) among non-Aryan peoples. The second, or Indian theory, correctly states that many stories were introduced into Europe, Asia, and Africa from India, in the middle ages, but brings no proof that _contes_ could only have been invented in India, first of all. Nor does it account for the stories which were old in Egypt, and even mixed up with the national mythology of Egypt, before we knew anything about India at all, nor for the _Marchen_ of Homeric Greece. Again it is not shown that the _ideas_ in the _contes_ are peculiar to India; almost the only example adduced is the _grat.i.tude of beasts_. But this notion might occur to any mind, anywhere, which regarded the beasts as on the same intellectual and moral level as humanity. Moreover, a few examples have been found of _Marchen_ among American races, for example, in early Peru, where there is no reason to believe that they were introduced by the Spaniards[99].

In place of these hypotheses, we do not propose to subst.i.tute any general theory. It is certain that the best-known popular tales were current in Egypt under Ramses II, and that many of them were known to Homer, and are introduced, or are alluded to, in the _Odyssey_. But it is impossible to argue that the birthplace of a tale is the country where it is first found in a literary shape. The stories must have been current in the popular mouth long before they won their way into written literature, on tablets of clay or on papyrus. They are certainly not of literary invention. If they were developed in one place, history gives us no information as to the region or the date of their birth. Again, we cannot pretend to know how far, given the ideas, the stories might be evolved independently in different centres. It is difficult to set a limit to chance and coincidence, and modern importation. The whole question of the importation of stories into savage countries by civilised peoples has not been studied properly. We can hardly suppose that the Zulus borrowed their copious and most characteristic store of _Marchen_, in plot and incident resembling the _Marchen_ of Europe, from Dutch or English settlers. On the other hand, certain Algonkin tales recently published by Mr. Leland bear manifest marks of French influence.

Left thus in the dark without historical information as to the 'cradle'

of _Marchen_, without clear and copious knowledge as to _recent_ borrowing from European traders and settlers, and without the power of setting limits to the possibility of _coincidence_, we are unable to give any general answer to the sphinx of popular tales. We only know for certain that there is practically no limit to the chances of transmission in the remote past of the race. Wherever man, woman, or child can go, there a tale may go, and may find a new home. Any drifted and wandering canoe, any captured alien wife, any stolen slave pa.s.sed from hand to hand in commerce or war, may carry a _Marchen_. These processes of transmission have been going on, practically, ever since man was man. Thus it is even more difficult to limit the possibilities of transmission than the chances of coincidence. But the chances of coincidence also are numerous. The _ideas_ and _situations_ of popular tales are all afloat, everywhere, in the imaginations of early and of pre-scientific men. Who can tell how often they might casually unite in similar wholes, independently combined?

[Footnote 99: _Rites of the Yncas_, Francisco de Avila. Hakluyt Society.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Charles Perrault.]

HISTOIRES

OU

CONTES DU TEMPS Pa.s.se.

_Avec des Moralitez._

A PARIS,

Chez CLAUDE BARBIN, sur le second Peron de la Sainte-Chapelle, au Palais.