There are to be found, in all European lands, certain tales which are of a more complex structure than the rest, which appear to have been constructed by a skilled workman, to be artificial productions rather than natural growths. It is only with such stories as these that we have at present to deal. These novelettes or comediettas, as they may be called, of the European common people, differ but little in their essential parts, whether they are recited in the cold north or the balmy south, the rude east or the cultured west. Their openings, it is true, vary with their localities; but in the main body of the tale, not only does the same leading idea pervade all the variants, but also the same sequence of events leads up in almost every case to the same termination. To this class of stories belong nearly all the tales which, under considerably modified forms, have naturalized themselves in the nurseries of Europe. In it are comprised many popular fictions, on the obscurer parts of which a quite insufficient light is thrown by researches among the manners and mythologies of old European heathenism.
It is upon such stories as these that a kindly light beams with the greatest advantage from Asia. Very similar stories have been preserved in the memories of the common people in many parts of Asia, but especially in India. And their leading ideas are perfectly in accordance with the mythology or the moral teaching of the Asiatics who, age after age, have delighted in telling or hearing them. In such cases as these it seems to be not very unreasonable to suppose that the story was originally, if not created, at all events shaped and trimmed in Asia, and thence was afterwards conveyed from lip to lip into Europe. Such universal favourites as Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots may be confidently cited as oriental fictions which have taken possession of European minds. There is a rich store of other popular fictions, which may be left to be accounted for according to the two principal methods of interpretation in vogue. They may be explained as independent developments of mythological germs common to the ancestors of the various Aryan peoples of Europe. Or they may be regarded as embodiments of certain ideas common to savages of all races. It will be sufficient to deal at present with the more limited, but better known class, to which special attention has been called.