of the dead debtor, has disappeared; yet in every case the rest of the plot has remained unimpaired. The more complicated the variant, the better able is the investigator to place its kinship to other variants, provided that he has the requisite material and the patience to follow up the clues that every such labyrinth affords.
The most striking facts of general import to the study of folk-narrative that have developed in the course of this prolonged consideration of The Grateful Dead may be briefly summarized in conclusion. It has been shown once again that the story has an organic life of its own, whether it comes from the East or the West, whether it be founded upon some fact of social custom or belief, or on the imaginings of a moralist of antiquity.[1] Once started, it will go its way through divers lands and ages, yet retain unaltered the essential features of its plot. Call it story-skeleton, or better, living organism, it always keeps its structural integrity, no matter whether told as a pious legend or a conte à rire. Of no less importance than this is the fact that whatever serious changes take place in its form are not fortuitous, mere whimsical alterations due to the fancy of story-tellers, but are due to capabilities of expansion or combination in the plot itself. Whenever two themes with points of resemblance or contact come into the same region, they are in the long run pretty certain to unite, each retaining its individuality, but merging in the other. This principle is well illustrated in the history of The Grateful Dead. The marriages of stories seem never to be merely for convenience, except in the hands of conscious writers, but to be the result of attraction and real compatibility. That, I take it, is why and how narratives develop.
Were it necessary to justify such studies as the present,
- ↑ See the author's study, "Forerunners, Congeners, and Derivatives of the Eustace Legend" in Publ. Mod. Lang. Ass. xix. 335-448.
