Part 6

The failure of the only Indian _Puss in Boots_ we know to establish a theory of an Indian origin, does not, of course, prove a negative. We can only say that puss certainly did not come from India to Europe by the ordinary literary vehicles, and that, when he is found in India, he does not preach what is called the essentially Buddhist doctrine of the ingratitude of man and the gratitude of beasts.

There remains, however, an Eastern form of the tale, an African version, which is of morality all compact. This is the Swahili version from Zanzibar, and it is printed as _Sultan Darai_, in Dr. Steere's _Swahili Tales, as told by Natives of Zanzibar_ (Bell and Daldy, London, 1870). If a tale first arose where it is now found to exist with most moral, with most didactic purpose, then _Puss in Boots_ is either Arab or Negro, or a piece in which Negroes and Arabs have collaborated. For nowhere is the _conte_ so purposeful as among the Swahilis, who are by definition 'men of mixed Negro and Arab origin.' There may be Central African elements in the Swahili tales, for most of them have 'sung parts,' almost unintelligible even to the singers. 'I suppose,' says Dr. Steere, 'they have been brought down from the interior by the slaves, and perhaps corrupted by them as they gradually forgot their own language.' Thus Central Africa may have contributed to the Swahili stories, but the Swahili _Puss in Boots_, as it at present exists, has been deeply modified by Mussulman ideas.

_Sultan Darai_, the Swahili _Puss in Boots_, really contains two tales. The first is about a wicked step-mother; the second begins when the hero, losing his wife and other kinsfolk, takes to vicious courses, and becomes so poor that he passes his time scratching for grains of millet on the common dustheap. While thus scratching he finds a piece of money, with which he buys a gazelle. The gazelle has pity on him, and startles him by saying so: 'Almighty God is able to do all things, to make me to speak, and others more than I.' The story comes, therefore, through narrators who marvel, as in the fairy world nobody does marvel, at the miracle of a speaking beast.

The gazelle, intent on helping the man, finds a splendid diamond, which he takes to the sultan, just as puss took the game, as 'a present from Sultan Darai.' The sultan is much pleased; the gazelle proposes that he shall give his daughter to Sultan Darai, and then comes the old trick of pretending the master has been stripped by robbers, 'even to his loin-cloth.' The gazelle carries fine raiment to his master, and, as in the French popular and traditional form, bids him speak as little as may be. The marriage is celebrated, and the gazelle goes off, and kills a great seven-headed snake, which, as in Russia, is the owner of a rich house. The snake, as he travels, is accompanied (as in the Kaffir story of _Five Heads_) by a storm of wind, like that which used to shake the 'medicine lodges' of the North American Indians, puzzling the missionaries. The snake, like the ogre in all _Hop o' My Thumb_ tales, smells out the gazelle, but is defeated by that victorious animal. The gazelle brings home his master, Sultan Darai, and the Princess to the snake's house, where they live in great wealth and comfort.

Now comes in the moral: the gazelle falls sick, Sultan Darai refuses to see it, orders coarse food to be offered it; treats his poor benefactor, in short, with all the arrogant contempt of an ungrateful beggar suddenly enriched. As the ill-used cat says in the _Pentamerone_--

De riche appauvri Dieu te gard' Et de croquant passe richard!

Finally the gazelle dies of sorrow, and Sultan Darai dreams that he is scratching on his old dustheap. He wakens and finds himself there, as naked and wretched as ever, while his wife is wafted to her father's house at home.

The moral is obvious, and the story is told in a very touching manner, moreover all the world takes the side of the gazelle, and it is _mourned with a public funeral_.

Here, then, in Zanzibar we have decidedly the most serious and purposeful form of _Puss in Boots_. It is worth noting that the animal hero is _not_ the Rabbit who is the usual hero in Zanzibar as he is in Uncle Remus's tales. It is also worth noticing that a certain tribe of Southern Arabians do, as a matter of fact, honour all dead gazelles with seven days of public mourning. 'Ibn al-Moghawir,' says Prof. Robertson-Smith, in _Kinship in Early Arabia_ (p. 195), 'speaks of a South Arab tribe called Beni Harith or Acarib, among whom if a dead gazelle was found, it was solemnly buried, and the whole tribe mourned for it seven days.... The gazelle supplies a name to a clan of the Azd, the Zabyan.' Prof. Robertson-Smith adds (p. 204), 'And so when we find a whole clan mourning over a dead gazelle, we can hardly but conclude that when this habit was first formed, they thought that they were of the gazelle-stock' or Totem kindred.

It is quite possible that all these things are mere coincidences. Certainly we shall not argue, because the most moral form of _Puss in Boots_ gives us a gazelle in place of a cat, and because a certain Arab clan mourns gazelles, while the gazelle hero is found in the story of a half-Arab race, that, therefore, the Swahili gazelle story is the original form of _Puss in Boots_, and that from Arabia the tale has been carried into Russia, Scandinavia, Italy, India, and France, often leaving its moral behind it, and always exchanging its gazelle for some other beast-hero.

This kind of reasoning is only too common, when the object is to show that India was the birthplace of any widely diffused popular fiction. In India, people argue, this or that tale has a moral. Among Celts and Kamschatkans it has _no_ moral. But certain stories did undeniably come from India in literary works, like the stories of Sindibad. Therefore this or that story also came from India, dropping its moral on the way. Did we like this sort of syllogism, we might boldly assert that _Puss in_ _Boots_ was originally a heroic myth of an Arab tribe with a gazelle for Totem. But we like not this kind of syllogism. The purpose of this study of _Puss in Boots_ is to show that, even when a tale has probably been invented but once, in one place, and has thence spread over a great part of the world, the difficulty of finding the original centre is perhaps insuperable. At any time a fresh discovery may be made. Puss _may_ turn up in some hitherto unread manuscript of an old missionary among Mexicans or Peruvians[66].

[Footnote 52: George Cruikshank had also turned _Hop o' My Thumb_ and _Cinderella_ into temperance tracts. See Cruikshank's _Fairy Library_, G. Bell and Sons.]

[Footnote 53: The French version is in M. Charles Deulin's _Contes du Roi Gambrinus_. The German (Grimm, 64) omits the story of the exchanges, but ends like _Jean Gogue_. The Zulu is in Dr. Callaway's _Inzinganekwane_, pp. 38-40.]

[Footnote 54: _Wide-awake Stories._ A collection of tales told by little children, between sunset and sunrise, in the Punjaub and Kashmir. Steel and Temple, London, 1884, p. 26.]

[Footnote 55: Andree, _Die Anthropophagie_, 'Ueberlebsel im Volksglauben.' Leipzig, 1887.]

[Footnote 56: _Causeries du Lundi_, December 29, 1851.]

[Footnote 57: _Schol. ad. Theog._ 885.]

[Footnote 58: Thorpe's _Palace with Pillars of Gold_.]

[Footnote 59: Dasent's _Lord Peter_.]

[Footnote 60: _Piacevoli Notti_, xi. 1, Venice, 1562. Crane's _Italian Popular Tales_, p. 348.]

[Footnote 61: Pitre, No. 188; Crane, p. 127. Gonzenbach, 65, _Conte Piro_. In Gonzenbach, the man does not kill the fox, which pretends to be dead, and is bilked of its promised reward, a grand funeral.]

[Footnote 62: Lou Compaire Gatet, 'Father Cat,' _Revue des Langues Romanes_, iii. 396. See Deulin, _Contes de Ma Mere L'Oye_, p. 205.]

[Footnote 63: _Boukoutchi Khan_, translated into German by Schiefner. _Memoires de l'Academie de St. Petersbourg_, 1873. With Dr. Koehler's Notes.]

[Footnote 64: Gubernatis. _Zoological Mythology_, ii. 136. Quoting Afanassieff, iv. 11. Compare a similar snake in Swahili.]

[Footnote 65: _Pantschatantra_, i. 222.]

[Footnote 66: The work of M. Cosquin's referred to throughout is his valuable _Contes de Lorraine_, Paris, 1886. A crowd of _Puss in Boots_ stories are referred to by Dr. Koehler in Gonzenbach's _Sicilianische Maerchen_, ii. 243 (Leipzig, 1870). They are Finnish, Bulgarian, Russian, and South Siberian. The Swahili and Hindu versions appear to have been unknown, in 1870, to Dr. Koehler. In 1883, Mr. Ralston, who takes the Buddhist side, did not know the Indian version (_Nineteenth Century_, Jan. 1883).]

LES FEES.

_Toads and Diamonds._

The origin of this little story is so manifestly moral, that there is little need to discuss it. A good younger sister behaves kindly to a poor old woman, who, being a fairy, turns all her words into flowers and diamonds. The wicked elder sister treats the fairy with despite: _her_ words become toads and serpents, and the younger marries a king's son.

The preference shown to the youngest child is discussed in the note on Cinderella. M. Deulin asks whether _Toads and Pearls_ is connected with the legend of Latona (Leto) and the peasants whom she changed into frogs, for refusing to allow her to drink[67]. Latona really wished to bathe her children, and the two narratives have probably no connection, though rudeness is punished in both. Nor is there a closer connection with the tales in which tears (like the tears of Wainamoinen in the _Kalewala_) change into pearls. It is an obvious criticism that the elder girl should have met the fairy first; she was not likely to behave so rudely when she knew that politeness would be rewarded. The natural order of events occurs in Grimm's _Golden Goose_ (64), where the eldest and the second son refuse to let the old man taste their cake and wine. Here, as in a tale brought by M. Deulin from French Flanders, the polite youngest son, by virtue of a Golden Goose, makes a very serious princess laugh, and wins her for his wife. Turning on a similar moral conception Grimm's _Mother Holle_ (24) is infinitely better than _Les Fees_. The younger daughter drops her shuttle down a well; she is sent after it, and reaches a land where apples speak and say, 'Shake us, we are all ripe.' She does all she is asked to do, and makes Mother Holle's feather-bed so well that the feathers (snow-flakes) fly about the world. She goes home covered with golden wages, and her elder sister follows her, but not her example. She insults the apples, is lazy at Mother Holle's, and is sent home covered with pitch. Grimm gives many variants. Mlle. L'Heritier amplifies the tale in her _Bigarrures_ (1696). The story begins to be more exciting, when it is combined, as commonly happens, with that of the substituted bride. It is odd enough that the Kaffirs have the incident of the good and bad girl, the bad girl laughs at the trees, as in Grimm's she mocks the apples (Theal, _Kaffir Folklore_, p. 49). This tale (in which there is no miracle of uttering toads or pearls) diverges into that of the _Snake Husband_, a rude _Beauty and the Beast_. The Zulus again have the story of the substituted bride ('Ukcombekcantsini,' Callaway's _Nursery Tales of the Zulus_, Natal, 1868). The idea recurs in Theal's Kaffir Collection (p. 136); in both cases the substituted bride is a beast. In Scotland the story of the _Black Bull o' Norroway_ contains the incident of the substituted bride. The Kaffirs, in _The Wonderful Horns_, have a large part of that story, but without the substituted bride, who, in Europe, occasionally attaches herself as a sequel to _Toads and Diamonds_. This is illustrated especially in Grimm's _Three Dwarfs in the Wood_ (13), where the good girl's speech is made literally golden. The bad girl, who speaks toads, marries the king's son who loves the good girl. Fragments of verse, in which the good girl tries to warn her husband, resemble those in the _Black Bull o' Norroway_. The tale is complicated by the metamorphosis of the true bride (no great change her lover would say) into 'a little duck.' She regains her shape when a sword is swung over her. The bad girl is tortured like Regulus. This is _Bushy-bride_ in Dasent's _Tales from the Norse_.

There seems to be no reason why the adventure of the good and bad sisters should merge in the formula of the substituted bride, more than in the adventure of the princess accused of bearing bestial children, or in any other. Probably Perrault felt this, and, having made his moral point, was content to do without the sequel.

_Les Fees_ is interesting then, first, as an example of a moral idea illustrated in tales even in South Africa, and, secondly (in its longer and more usual form), as an example of the manner in which any story may glide into any other. All the incidents of popular tales, like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, may be shaken into a practically limitless number of combinations.

[Footnote 67: Antoninus Liberalis, xxxv.]

CENDRILLON.

_Cinderella._

The story of Cinderella (_Cendrillon_, _Cucendron_, _Cendreusette_, _Sainte Rosette_) is one of the most curious in the history of _Maerchen_. Here we can distinctly see how the taste and judgment of Perrault altered an old and barbarous detail, and there, perhaps, we find the remains of a very ancient custom.

There are two points in _Cinderella_, and her cousin _Peau d'Ane_, particularly worth notice. First, there is the process by which the agency of a _Fairy Godmother_ has been substituted for that of a _friendly beast_, usually a connection by blood-kindred of the hero or heroine. Secondly, there is the favouritism shown, in many versions, to the _youngest child_, and the custom which allots to this child a place by the hearth or in the cinders (_Cucendron_).

Taking the first incident, the appearance in Perrault of a Fairy Godmother in place of a _friendly beast_, we may remark that this kind of change is always characteristic of the promotion of a story. Just as Indian 'aboriginal' tribes cashier their beast-ancestors ('Totems') in favour of a human ancestor of a similar name, when they rise in civilisation, so the _roles_ which are filled by beasts in savage _Maerchen_ come to be assigned to men and women in the _contes_ of more cultivated people[68]. In Cinderella, however, the friendly beast holds its own more or less in nearly all European versions, except in those actually derived from Perrault. In every shape of the story known to us, the beast is a _domesticated animal_. Thus it will not be surprising if no native version is found in America, where animals, except dogs, were scarcely domesticated at all before the arrival of Europeans.

In examining the incident of the friendly and protecting beast, it may be well to begin with a remote and barbarous version, that of the Kaffirs. Here, as in other cases, we may find one situation in a familiar story divorced from those which, as a general rule, are in its company. Theorists may argue either that the Kaffirs borrowed from Europeans one or two incidents out of a popular form of _Cinderella_, or that they happen to make use of an opinion common to most early peoples, the belief, namely, in the superhuman powers of friendly beast-protectors. As to borrowing, Europeans and Kaffirs have been in contact, though not very closely, for two hundred years. No one, however, would explain the Kaffir custom of daubing the body with white clay, in the initiatory rites, as derived from the similar practice of the ancient Greeks[69]. Among the neighbouring Zulus, Dr. Callaway found that _Maerchen_ were the special property of the most conservative class,--the old women. 'It is not common to meet with a man who is willing to speak of them in any other way than as something which he has some dim recollection of having heard his grandmother relate[70].' Whether the traditional lore of savage grandmothers is likely to have been borrowed from Dutch or English settlers is a question that may be left to the reader.

The tale in which the friendly beast of European folklore occurs among the Kaffirs is _The Wonderful Horns_[71]. As among the Santals (an 'aboriginal' hilltribe of India) we have a hero, not a heroine. 'There was once a boy whose mother that bore him was dead, and who was ill-treated by his other mothers,' the Kaffirs being polygamous. He rode off on an ox given him by his father. The ox fought a bull and won. Food was supplied out of his right horn, and the 'leavings' (as in the _Black Bull o'Norroway_) were put into the left horn. In another fight the ox was killed, but his horns continued to be a magical source of supplies. A new mantle and handsome ornaments came out of them, and by virtue of this fairy splendour he won and wedded a very beautiful girl.

Here, it may be said, there is nothing of _Cendrillon_, except that rich garments, miraculously furnished, help to make a marriage; and that the person thus aided was the victim of a stepmother. No doubt this is not much, but we might sum up _Cendrillon_ thus. The victim of a stepmother makes a great marriage by dint of goodly garments supernaturally provided.

In _Cendrillon_ the _recognition_ (anagnorisis) makes a great part of the interest. There is no anagnorisis in the Kaffir legend, which is very short, being either truncated or undeveloped.

Let us now turn to the Santals, a remote and shy non-Aryan hill-tribe of India. Here we find the anagnorisis, but in a form not only disappointing but almost cynical[72].

In the Santal story we have the cruel Stepmother, the hero,--not a heroine, but a boy,--the protecting and friendly Cow, the attempt to kill the Cow, the Flight, the great good-fortune of the hero, the Princess who falls in love with a lock of his hair, which is to play the part of Cinderella's glass slipper in the anagnorisis, and, finally, a cynically devised accident, by which the beauty of the hair is destroyed, and the hero's chance of pleasing the princess perishes. It will be noticed that the use of a lock of hair floating down a river, to be fallen in love with and help the _denouement_, is found, first, in the Egyptian _conte_ of the _Two Brothers_, written down in the reign of Ramses II., fourteen hundred years before our era.

In that story, too, the hero has a friendly cow, which warns him when he is in danger of being murdered. But the Egyptian story has no other connection with _Cendrillon_[73]. The device of a floating lock of hair is not uncommon in Bengali _Maerchen_.

From the Santals let us turn to another race, not so remote, but still non-Aryan, the Finns[74]. That the Santals borrow _Maerchen_ from their Hinduised aboriginal neighbours is not certain, but is perfectly possible and even probable. Though some theorists have denied that races borrow nursery tales from each other, it is certain that Loennrot, writing to Schiefner in 1855, mentions a Finnish fisher who, meeting Russian and Swedish fishers, 'swopped stories' with them when stormy weather made it impossible to put to sea[75]. No doubt similar borrowings have always been going on when the peasantry on the frontiers met their neighbours, and where Kaffirs have taken Hottentot wives, or Sidonians have carried off Greek children as captives, in fact, all through the national and tribal meetings of the world[76].

_The Wonderful Birch_ (Emmy Schreck, ix.) is a form of _Cinderella_ from Russian Carelia. The story has a singularly dramatic and original opening. A man and his wife had but one daughter, and one Sheep. The Sheep wandered away, the woman sought him in the woods, and she met a witchwife. The witchwife turned the woman into the semblance of the Sheep, and herself took the semblance of the woman. She went to the woman's house, where the husband thought he was welcoming his own wife and the sheep that was lost. The new and strange stepmother demanded the death of the Sheep, which was the real mother of the heroine. Warned by the Sheep, a black sheep, the daughter did not taste of her flesh, but gathered and buried the bones and fragments. Thence grew a beautiful birch tree. The man and the witchwife went to court, the witchwife leaving the girl to accomplish impossible tasks. The voice of the dead mother from the grave below the birch bade the girl break a twig from the tree, and therewith accomplish the tasks. Then out of the earth came beautiful raiment (as in _Peau d'Ane_), and the girl dressed, and went to court. The Prince falls in love with her, and detects her by means of her ring, which takes the part of the slipper. Then comes in the frequent formula of a false bride substituted by the witchwife, a number of trials, and the punishment of the witch.

Here, then, the friendly beast is but the Mother surviving in two shapes, first as a sheep, then as a tree, exactly the idea of the ancient Egyptian story of the _Two Brothers_, where Bitiou first becomes a bull, and then a persea tree[77]. In Finnish the Cinderella plot is fully developed. A similar tale, still with the beast in place of the Fairy Godmother, is quoted by Mr. Ralston from the Servian (_Vuk Karajich_, No. 32). Three maidens were spinning near a cleft in the ground, when an old man warned them not to let their spindles fall into the cleft, or their mother would be changed into a cow. Mara's spindle fell in, and the mother instantly shared the fate of Io. Mara tended the cow that had been her mother lovingly, but the father married again, and the new wife drove Mara to dwell among the cinders (_pepel_), hence she was called _Pepelluga_, cinderwench[78]. The cruel Servian stepmother had the cow slain, but not before it had warned Mara to eat none of the kindred flesh[79], and to bury the bones in the ashes of the hearth. From these bones sprang two white doves, which supplied Mara with splendid raiment, and, finally, won for her the hand of the prince, after the usual incidents of the lost slipper, the attempt to substitute the stepmother's ugly daughter, and the warning of the fowls, 'Ki erike, the right maiden is under the trough.'

In a modern Greek variant (Hahn, ii.), the Mother (not in vaccine form) is eaten by her daughters, except the youngest, who refuses the hideous meal. The dead woman magically aids the youngest from her tomb, and the rest follows as usual, the slipper playing its accustomed part.

In Gaelic a persecuted stepdaughter is aided by a Ram. The Ram is killed, his bones are buried by his _protegee_, he comes to life again, but is lame, for his bones were not all collected, and he plays the part of Fairy Godmother[80].

Turning from the Gaelic to the Lowland Scotch, we find _Rashin Coatie_ as a name under which either _Peau d'Ane_ or _Cendrillon_ may be narrated. We discovered Cendrillon as _Rashin Coatie_, in Morayshire[81]. Here a Queen does not become a _cow_, indeed, but dies, and leaves to her daughter a _Red Calf_, which aids her, till it is slain by a cruel stepmother.

The dead calfy said

_Tak me up, bane by bane And pit me aneth yon grey stane,_

and whatever you want, come and seek it frae me, and I will give you it.

The usual adventures of Cinderella ensue, the birds denouncing the False Bride, whose foot is pinched to make it fit the 'beautiful satin slipper' of the heroine.

In most of these versions the heroine is aided by a beast, and even when that beast is dead, it continues helpful, in one case actually coming to life again, like the ox in the South African _Maerchen_[82].