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

x THE OCEAN OF STORY
in precisely that order could be invented more than once.
The familiar example is that given by Cosquin. 1 The hero
seeks to recover a talisman from the villain, who has stolen
it, with the help of his cat and dog : the cat catches a mouse
and makes it put its tail up the nose of the sleeping villain,
who has the talisman in his mouth ; the villain consequently
sneezes or coughs, the talisman drops out and is picked up
by the cat : on the way home the animals quarrel about their
respective shares in the success and the ring is dropped into
the water across which they are swimming at the time, but is
eventually recovered from the belly of a fish. To suppose
that precisely this sequence of incidents could possibly be
invented many times over independently among different
peoples is surely to impose an intolerable strain upon the
possibilities of coincidence.
A story in fact consists of a series of incidents arranged in a
definite order of interest i.e. a plot and it is primarily upon
this arrangement that the attention should be concentrated.
The context indeed is of as fundamental importance as the
nature of the incident itself. It may, of course, be admitted that
it is easier to assent to principles than to put them into practice.
My illustrations have naturally been selected specimens and
the material is usually a good deal less simple to handle.
In the nature of things, stories suffer modification in the
process of transmission. This may be deliberate where the
skill of the professional story-teller or story-writer seeks by
his art to evolve new forms and combinations by selection,
addition or omission, or, in the extreme case, where a Shake-
speare may select from a folk-tale such material as he requires
in order to transmute it in the crucible of his genius. Not less
distorting is the result of oral transmission by the unprofessional
and illiterate, though here the causes are less deliberate
than attributable to faulty memories, false associations of
ideas and sometimes to clumsy efforts to repair an omission
which has become obvious even to the narrator. 2
1
Cosquin, Conies Populaires de Lorraine, i, pp. xi foil.
2
Quite a good example of these defects is the Welsh Gypsy version of
the " Champions," Journal of the Gypsy-Lore Society, 3rd ser., ii, pp. 56-57.
I have quoted some other examples in Folk-Lore, xxxiv, p. 123.