ANCIENT STORIES.

North Otago Times, 3 September 1910, Page 1 (Supplement)

ANCIENT STORIES.

PRE-HISTORIO GOSSIP. HOW THEY ARE REPEATED. It is .a matter for wonder how few stories there are in the world. In all the ages that man has existed, with so many hard-working imaginations embellishing 'facts, the possible, credible, enjoyable stories constructed are a scanty army. I This has recently been emphasised by Mr. Andrew Lang, and there is no higher authority on story-telling. ! "I have been told in, a smoking-room a very terrible tale about a respectable family in Blankshire; a tale which ,the narrator thoroughly believed in as a contemporary anecdote of private life. I said, 'That is the plot of Horace Walpole's play, "The Mysterious Mother," and Walpole got it from Howell's Letters, written in "the time of-Charles 1., and Howell igot it from—' But here the other man said, 'I don't care; these things keep on happening in families. History repeats itself.'" It is not', as Mr, Lang justly adds, history, but myth which keeps repeating itself. A vast deal of the gossip which is the current coin of our day is but the fabliaux, the jests of centuries pa ft, The other day we had a very modern novel, the plot of which was a new version of a tale told by La IFontaine, who took it out of Ovid, who took it from the Greek, Just the same sort of ancestry can be traced for our kindly little anecdotes of old Mr. B, and young Mrs. A, The plot is in the air, or, if you prefer it, it is somewhere in the subconscious strata of our minds, It occurs to someone or other how neatly it will fit particular characters. And immediately 'to them it is fitted. The most strenuous, gossip-mon-gers are not people with a peculiar talent for invention. They live by memory and a sense of stage effect. You will be wise, even when you are injured, not 'to treat them too seriouely or too harshly. The proper reply to scandal is, "Dear, me, how stale ! Don't you remember? Precisely the same tale is told of Nebuchadnezer and his first wife. It's all in the cuneiform tablets. You don't read cuneiform? Well, you'll find an English version in Strene."—''Daily Telegraph.",