The ocean of story, being C.H. Tawney's translation of Somadeva's ...

vi
THE OCEAN OF STORY
East and the West are matters which I am not competent
to handle.
Perhaps the most useful contribution which I can offer
will be to make no pretence of writing an introduction in a
strict sense to the contents of this particular volume but
rather to raise one or two general questions with regard to
the methods of the study of marchen. It is not impossible
that a well-informed onlooker may form as clear an idea of
the run of the game as many of the actual players, and
at worst it will do no harm to state opinions which may
provoke the more fruitful discussion of those with greater
knowledge
of the facts.
It is probably true of all forms of inquiry, the method of
which is comparative, that the initial enthusiasm for noticing
resemblances outruns discretion. At any rate in the case of
marchen it may be thought that the time has now come
when differences should receive as considered attention as
similarities, and that analysis should no longer neglect one of
its two principal instruments. If it is legitimate and may
be profitable to record resemblances, it is very important
to distinguish as far as the evidence permits between the
categories of similarity and identity.
Some apparent similarities may be due purely to accident.
Thus on p. 149 the flight of Indra and the gods reminded
Tawney of Ovid, Metamorphoses, v, 321-331. As a literary
coincidence the analogy is correct, but here its interest ends.
For Ovid's account of the flight of the Greek gods into Egypt
is not a piece of genuine Greek mythology at all, but the
artificial product of the relatively late and learned identifica-
tion of Egyptian deities as alternative forms of the Olympian
gods of Greece. A literary coincidence may remind us that
a certain Spartan, having plucked a nightingale of its feathers,
regarded its "
exiguous corpse, and remarked : Thou art a
voice and nothing more." 1 The idea is the same as that of :
" Cuckoo, shall I call thee bird or but a wandering voice ? "
Shall we then solemnly maintain that Wordsworth owed his
inspiration to the Apophthegmata Laconica ? But if not,
is it
1
[Plutarch] Apophthegmata Laconica, xv, 233a : * a)va rv tis 0-