BOOK II. Erôs and his bride while she is bathing, the myth remains essentially the same; and in this form we see at once the germ of the story of Melusina, who is found by Count Raymund, as Daphnê is found by Apollôn, near running water, and who, like Bhekî or Urvasi, readily consents to marry her human lover on the condition that he shall never attempt to see her on one day of each week. When at length the promise is broken, Raymund sees his beautiful wife in the water, the lower portion of her body being now in the form of a fish. But Melusina did not know that her husband had thus seen her, and, as in Fouque's story of Undine, the catastrophe comes only when Raymund calls her a serpent and bids her depart from his house.1 The idea, common to all these tales, of beings who though united in the closest love may not look upon each other, is but little modified in the story of Erôs and Psychê. The version given by Appuleius is commonly spoken of as an allegory. It deserves the name as much and as little as the Odyssey. Here, as in the tales already referred to, no liquid must come near the mysterious being to whom the love of the mortal husband or wife is given. The old phrase that the sun must die at the sight of water, has retained its hold on the story-tellers of all the Aryan nations; but the version of Appuleius assigns reasons where the earlier Sanskrit myth is content to relate incidents. If like Urvasi Psychê brings about her own punishment, she does so because she is under a doom laid on her by Venus. But Venus is Aphroditê Anadyomenê, the mother, the wife, or the child of the sun; and the notion that the love of the sun for 1 For other versions and variations of this story see Gould, Curious Myths, “Melusina." The same myth is introduced by Sir Walter Scott in his romance of Anne of Geierstein (ch. xi.), whose mother's life depends on a brilliant opal which must not be touched with water. This gem, like many others, is sympathetic. It is, in short, the fatal brand of Meleagros. See also Scott, Border Minstrelsy, introduction to Ballad of Tamlane. The idea of ugliness or unseemliness would naturally come to be connected with Bheki or the Frog. Hence the king's daughter in the German story of the Frog Prince shows no special fancy for the little creature which brings up for her the golden ball (the sun's orb) from the bottom of the well. The ugli ness of Bhekî serves to give point to the beautiful Gaelic legend of Nighean Righ Fo Thuinn, Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands, iii. 404. The maiden (Aph 2 66 roditê) is not, indeed, here described as a frog; but she is a strange-looking ugly creature" with her hair down to her heels, who in vain entreats Fionn and Oisean (Finn and Ossian) to let her come to their fire. Diarmaid, who scruples not to say how hideous he thinks her, is more merciful; but the Loathly Lady (for it is the same myth) becomes as exacting as the little Frog in Grimm's story. She has not been long at the fire when she insists on coming under Diarmaid's plaid. He turns a fold of it between them; and presently he finds by his side "the most beautiful woman that man ever saw.' She is the Dawn-maiden, and she raises for his dwelling that palace of the sun which the Arabian story-teller delights to describe in the tale of Allah-ud-deen. The same being appears as the “foul wight" in Chaucer's tale of the Wife of Bath, Keightley, Fairy Mythology, 323. 2 Max Muller, Chips, ii. 248. EROS AND PSYCHE another must excite her jealousy and anger was one which must sooner or later be imported into the myth. With its introduction the framework of the story was completed; and so the tale ran that Venus charged her son to fill Psychê with the madness which made Titania fall in love with the enchanted Bottom. But Psychê, the dawn with its soft breath, is so beautiful that Erôs (Amor, Cupido) falls in love with her himself, and taking her to a secret cave (the cave of Diktê or of Lyktos), visits her as Purûravas comes to Urvasi. Stirred up by Venus, her sisters tell Psychê that she is wedded to a hideous monster, and at length her curiosity is so roused that, taking a lamp, she gazes upon her lover and beholds before her the perfection of beauty. But a drop of oil falls from her lamp on the sleeping god, and the brief happiness of Psychê is ended. She is left desolate like Purûravas, and like him she must go in search of her lost love. Eôs has looked on Helios, and he has plunged beneath the sea. If she seek him, it must be through the weary hours of the night, amidst many perils and at the cost of vast labour. In every temple Psychê looks for her lover until at last she reaches. the dwelling of Venus, under whose spell he lies like Odysseus in the home of Kirkê or Kalypsô. At her bidding she accomplishes some hard and degrading tasks, under which she must have died but for the love of Erôs, who, though invisible, still consoled and cheered. her. By his aid she at last made her peace with Venus, and becoming immortal, was united with her lover for ever. Of all these incidents not one has been invented by Appuleius; and all that can be said is that he has weakened rather than strengthened the beauty of the myth by adapting it to the taste of a thoroughly artificial age. Having taken up a story which had not yet been brought within the charmed circle of epic or lyric poetry, he has received credit for an originality to which the familiar tale of Beauty and the Beast, with which it is substantially identical, may lay an equal claim.1 The hypothesis is scarcely necessary, Skies. 217 CHAP. II. BOOK The search of the the Sun. The idea which underlies these tales runs through a large class of legends, which carry us into almost every Aryan land and make the hypothesis of conscious borrowing or importation as perilous as we Dawn for have seen it to be in the story of the Master Thief. In almost all these legends the youngest and most beautiful of three (sometimes of twelve) daughters is married or given up to some unsightly being or monster, or to some one whom she is led to suppose hideous or repulsive. In some instances, as in the common English nursery tale, the enchantment is ended when the maiden confesses her love for the disguised being in his unsightly shape:1 in the version which Appuleius followed, the maiden has a lover who is marvellously beautiful, but whose beauty she has never seen. In all cases, however, there are jealous sisters or a jealous mother who insist that the lover is hideous, and incite her to look upon him while he is asleep. Thus goaded on, she disregards the warnings in each case given that such curiosity cannot be indulged without causing grievous disaster, and in each case the sleeping lover is awakened by a drop of oil or tallow from the torch or lamp in the maiden's hand, and instantly vanishes or is transformed, generally into a bird which tells her that she must wander in search of him through many weary years, and do the bidding of some harsh mistress into whose power her fatal curiosity has brought her. In some versions, as in that of Appuleius, this mistress is the mother of the lost lover.2 Then follow the years of wandering and toil, which can be brought to an end only by the achievement of tasks, generally three in number, each utterly beyond human powers. In these tasks the maiden is aided by brute creatures whom she has befriended in their moment of need, and who perform for her that which she could not possibly accomplish herself. The completion of the ordeal is followed by the happy union of the maiden with her lover. The Search of the Sun for the Dawn. It is scarcely necessary to say that there is perhaps no one feature in these stories which does not reappear in the tales told of Boots, or the youngest son, in his search for the enchanted princess who has The converse of this incident is found in the legend of the Loathly Lady. See also Fouqué's Sintram. 2 In Grimm's Story of the Twelve Brothers she is the mother of the king who marries the dawn-maiden, i.e. she is Venus. She reappears as his second wife in the tales of The Little Brother and Sister, of the Six Swans, who fly away like the children of Nephelê, and of Little Snow White. The Little Brother and Sister (Phrixos and Hellê) are seen again in the story of Hansel and Grethel. These two come in the end to a pond (Hellespontos); but the maiden who represents Hellê is more fortunate than the daughter of Athamas. In the Gaelic story of The Chest, Campbell, ii. 4, she disguises herself as a gillie in order to search for her lost lover. This story contains also the myth of the judgment of Portia in the Merchant of Venice, ib. 6, 13. THE MINISTERS OF EROS AND PSYCHÊ. been torn away from him, or whom after a long toil he is to win as his bride. It could not be otherwise, when the stories turn in the one case on the search of the dawn for the sun, in the other on the search of the sun for the dawn. As we might expect in popular tales, the images drawn from myths of the day and night are mingled with notions supplied by myths of summer and winter. The search is always in comparative gloom or in darkness. Either it is Odysseus journeying homeward among grievous perils, clad in beggar's raiment, or it is Orpheus seeking Eurydikê in the awful regions of Hades. The toil or the battle which precedes the victory is common to all the traditions, whether epical or popular; but in the wildest forms of Aryan folk-lore the machinery of the most complicated tales can be broken up into its original parts. In northern countries especially, the powers of frost, snow, and cold, must be conquered before Phoibos can really win Daphnê, or Psychê recover Erôs. Hence there are mountains of glass (glaciers) to be scaled, huge castles of ice to be thrown down, or myriads of icebergs or boulders to be removed. In these tasks the youth or the maiden is aided by bears, wolves, or foxes, by ducks, swans, eagles, or by ants, the Myrmidons of Achilleus; but all these are names under which the old mythical language spoke of the clouds or the winds, or of the light which conquers the darkness. The bear appears in the myth of the seven shiners as well as in that of Arkas and Kallistô, the wolf in the stories of Phoibos Lykeios, of Lykâôn, and the Myrmidons. The clouds assume the forms of eagles and swans alike in Eastern or Western traditions. The eagles bear Sûrya Bai on their wings through the heaven, and the swans, or white cirri clouds, are seen in all the stories which tell of Swan maidens and the knights who woo and win them. These creatures, who are as devoted to the youth or the maiden as the Myrmidons are to Achilleus, speedily remove the mighty heaps of grain, stones, or ice, and leave the battle-ground clear for their joyous meeting. In the German story of the White Snake, the flesh of which, like the serpents of Iamos and the heart of Hogni in the Volsung tale, imparts to him who eats it a knowledge of the language of birds, the labour falls on the lover, while the This search is well described in the Gaelic story of Nighean Righ Fo Thuinn, where the hero Diarmaid loses his wife, as Raymund of Toulouse is separated from Melusina, because he breaks the compact made with her. The search goes as in the other stories, but an odd turn is given to it at the end by making Diarmaid take a dislike to the maiden whom he rescues in the 219 CHAP. II. II. BOOK maiden plays the part of Aphroditê in the legend of Psychê. The animals here befriended by the trusty servant, who is Erôs, or Boots, or Odysseus, or a thousand others, are fishes, ants, and ravensnames which carry us to the fish or frog sun, to the Myrmidons and the clouds; and the tasks are the recovery of a ring,' the picking-up of some bags of millet seed, and the finding of the apple of life (the sun's orb). The first is accomplished by the fishes, one of which, as in the story of Polykrates, brings the ring in its mouth, the second by the ants, and the third by the ravens. Origin of these myths. That these tales, of which the most familiar type for English children is that of Beauty and the Beast, have been borrowed directly from the apologue of Appuleius, no one probably will venture to maintain. With as little likelihood can it be said that they were suggested by the Vedic myth of Urvasi and Purûravas. Their relationship to the latter is precisely that of the Latin and Greek dialects to the ancient Sanskrit; and thus they must be placed in the class of organic myths. They spring up on all soils from the seed which the Aryan tribes carried away with them when they left their common home, and every variation may therefore be noted as exhibiting the power of growth inherent in the old mythical ideas. In few cases is there even a plausible ground for saying that any one tale is copied or consciously adopted from another; in none is there any necessity for the assumption. The Teutonic nurse was as little conscious that the Frog Prince and Boots were one and the same person, as the grandams of the Punjab were that Bhekî was but another form of Urvasî. As an example of the measure in which the myth, retaining still the essential idea, may become modified, we may take the tale of the Soaring Lark. In this story, the maiden knows that the being who, like Heraklês with the lion's skin on his back, is during the day a lion is at night a man, but no ray of light must fall upon him while he is in his human shape. At her entreaty, however, he goes to the bridal feast of the elder sister, where a single ray of light streams in upon him through a chink in a door made of unseasoned wood, and the maiden entering the room finds a dove, which says that for seven years he must fly about in the world, but that at every seventh mile he will let fall a drop of blood 1 Compare also the Gaelic story of Mac Iain Direach, Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands, ii. 359. 2 Grimm. With these legends may be compared the story of Tulisa (a tale which in Professor Benfey's opinion is very ancient), obtained from a washer woman at Benares, and published in the Asiatic Journal. See also the tales in the Pentameron of Basil, 15, 19, 445 and Hahn's Greek and Albanian Tales. A complete analysis of the fable of Appuleius is given in Friedlauter's Sit tengeschichte Koms. |