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

xvi
THE OCEAN OF STORY
and West. I am inclined, too, to agree with Mr Penzer 1
the acquisition of the " Magical Articles " by gift
that
is character-
istically Western and their acquisition by fraud Oriental,
and again should explain the existence of this apparently
original difference by supposing that the idea of the " Magical
Articles " was independently invented both in the East and
in the West.
My main contention then is that a story may be regarded
as a kind of composite pattern of coloured bricks. Individual
bricks considered by themselves are almost worthless for our
particular purpose of tracing the history of the design. The
whole point is the relation of the bricks to each other, and in
our analysis the smallest effective unit must be an integral
piece of the pattern.
I pass next to another instance of what seems to me to be
faulty argument. We will suppose that we have before us
a story of which the design may be analysed into the parts
A, B, C and D, each of which is sufficiently distinctive to
satisfy our requirements. We then succeed in finding separate
analogues to some or even to all of A B C and D in the
stories of another area, but in every case they are set in a
different context. We are surely not then entitled to say
that the story A + B + C + D belongs to both areas. Thus
even if Cosquin is able to quote parallels to separate incidents
in The Herdsman as occurring in different contexts in Avar
or Indian stories, we shall not conclude that the story is
necessarily Oriental in origin. Although the grounds upon
which Hartland claims a Celtic origin for this particular
variety of the group represented by Grimm, Nos. 60, 85, 123,
be doubted that
136, appear to be insufficient, it can hardly
its 2
distribution is definitely European.
That nearly all the methods of argument which we have
branded as vicious have been applied to the study
of the relation
of European folk-tales to classical mythology may be
1 See Vol. I, pp. 25-29 ; and Journal of the Gypsy-Lore Society, 3rd ser.,
iii, p. 151.
2
Cosquin, Contes Pop. de Lorraine, No. 43, vol. ii, pp. 93-97 ; Bolte und
Polivka, op. cit., iii, p. 113w4 ; Hartland, Legend of Perseus, iii, pp. 3-10; and
my note in Journal of the Gypsy-Lore Society, 3rd ser., iv, pp. 157-158.