a
certain extent, for, as it stood, the tale was a succession of
successful falsehoods--a _clever_ lesson in lying, a system of
_imposture_ rewarded by the greatest worldly advantages. A _useful_
lesson, truly, to be impressed upon the minds of children.' So Mr.
Cruikshank made the tale didactic, showing how the Marquis de Carabas
was the real heir, 'kep' out of his own' by the landgrabbing ogre, and
how puss was a gamekeeper metamorphosed into a cat as a punishment for
his repining disposition. This performance of Mr. Cruikshank was
denounced by Mr. Dickens in _Household Words_ as a 'fraud on the
fairies,' and 'the intrusion of a whole hog of unwieldy dimensions into
the fairy flower-garden[52].'

The Master-Cat probably never made any child a rogue, but no doubt his
conduct was flagrantly immoral. And this brings us to one of the
problems of the science of nursery tales. When we find a story told by
some peoples _with_ a moral, and by other peoples _without_ a moral, are
we to suppose that the tale was originally narrated for the moral's
sake, and that the forms in which there is _no_ moral are degenerate and
altered versions? For example, the Zulus, the Germans, the French, and
the Hindoos have all a nursery tale in which someone, by a series of
lucky accidents and exchanges, goes on making good bargains, and rising
from poverty to wealth. In French Flanders this is the tale of _Jean
Gogue_; in Grimm it is _The Golden Goose_; in Zulu it is part of the
adventures of the Hermes of Zulu myth, Uhlakanyana. In two of these the
hero possesses some trifling article which is injured, and people give
him something better in exchange, till, like Jean Gogue, for example, he
marries the king's daughter[53]. Now these tales have no moral. The hero
is thought neither better nor worse of because of his series of
exchanges. But in modern Hindostan the story _has_ a moral. The rat,
whose series of exchanges at last win him a king's daughter, is held up
to contempt as a warning to bargain-hunters. He is not happy with his
bride, but escapes, leaving his tail, half his hair, and a large piece
of his skin behind him, howling with pain, and vowing that 'never,
never, never again would he make a bargain[54].' Here then is a tale
told with a moral, and _for_ the moral in India, but with no moral in
Zululand and France. Are we to suppose that India was the original
source of the narrative, that it was a parable invented for the moral's
sa