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

FOREWORD xvii
attributed to a natural enthusiasm for discovering as manylinks
as possible with the ancient world and a lack of reflec-
tion upon the methods actually being used to achieve this
purpose. For instance we are habitually told that Pygmalion
may be equated with the story, which is almost certainly of
Oriental origin, of The Carpenter, the Tailor and the Man of
God, when actually the two stories have nothing in common
except the idea that a female statue may come to life and
be loved by
tinually being
its fashioner or fashioners. 1
Again, we are con-
told that because an isolated incident is to
be found in classical story, therefore the whole series of
incidents of which it forms part in modern folk-tales must
have existed in a now lost form in classical antiquity. Before
making these very large assumptions, it is surely wiser to
study the facts as they are, rather than as we would have
them to be. The actual position, which I have briefly
sketched elsewhere, 2 is simply this. While isolated incidents
which form part of modern European folk-tales are to be
found with some frequency in classical mythology, they
are found almost invariably in a different context, and,
contrary to the general belief, the number of cases where
the parallel extends to any considerable combination of
incidents (some such there are : I think, for example,
of Polyphemus or Polyidus and the Snakes) is surprisingly
few.
The quest for the Original Home of the Fairy Story may
be left for the Wise Men of Gotham to undertake when they
are finished with hedging the cuckoo. It is contrary alike to
common sense and to experience to suppose that the storytelling
faculty has been limited to any one locality, race or
people, and the oral circulation of tales must always have been
mainly by exchange a fact which many a field-worker in a
not unexploited area has had reason to regret, as he laboriously
reaps the harvest of what in many cases his predecessors at
the same task have sown. Further, it would not be difficult
to show that there exist stories which have a quite limited
1 See p. xiw 1 , Vol. VI, pp. 264, 275, and Folk-Lore, xxiii, p. 487.
2 In a short essay on "Greek and Roman Folklore" in the American
Series, Our Debt to Greece and Rome, now in the press.
vol. vni.
b