PRIVATE HISTORY OF THE 'JUMPING FROG' STORY
Five or six years ago a lady from Finland asked me to tell her a storyin our Negro dialect, so that she could get an idea of what that varietyof speech was like. I told her one of Hopkinson Smith's Negro stories,and gave her a copy of 'Harper's Monthly' containing it. She translatedit for a Swedish newspaper, but by an oversight named me as the authorof it instead of Smith. I was very sorry for that, because I got a goodlashing in the Swedish press, which would have fallen to his share butfor that mistake; for it was shown that Boccaccio had told that verystory, in his curt and meagre fashion, five hundred years before Smithtook hold of it and made a good and tellable thing out of it.
I have always been sorry for Smith. But my own turn has come now. A fewweeks ago Professor Van Dyke, of Princeton, asked this question:
'Do you know how old your "Jumping Frog" story is?'
And I answered:
'Yes--forty-five years. The thing happened in Calaveras County, in thespring of 1849.'
'No; it happened earlier--a couple of thousand years earlier; it is aGreek story.'
I was astonished--and hurt. I said:
'I am willing to be a literary thief if it has been so ordained; Iam even willing to be caught robbing the ancient dead alongside ofHopkinson Smith, for he is my friend and a good fellow, and I thinkwould be as honest as any one if he could do it without occasioningremark; but I am not willing to antedate his crimes by fifteen hundredyears. I must ask you to knock off part of that.'
But the professor was not chaffing: he was in earnest, and could notabate a century. He offered to get the book and send it to me and theCambridge text-book containing the English translation also. I thoughtI would like the translation best, because Greek makes me tired. January30th he sent me the English version, and I will presently insert it inthis article. It is my 'Jumping Frog' tale in every essential. It is notstrung out as I have strung it out, but it is all there.
To me this is very curious and interesting. Curious for several reasons.For instance:
I heard the story told by a man who was not telling it to his hearers asa thing new to them, but as a thing which they had witnessed and wouldremember. He was a dull person, and ignorant; he had no gift as astory-teller, and no invention; in his mouth this episode was merelyhistory--history and statistics; and the gravest sort of history,too; he was entirely serious, for he was dealing with what to him wereaustere facts, and they interested him solely because they were facts;he was drawing on his memory, not his mind; he saw no humour in histale, neither did his listeners; neither he nor they ever smiled orlaughed; in my time I have not attended a more solemn conference. To himand to his fellow gold-miners there were just two things in the storythat were worth considering. One was the smartness of its hero, JimSmiley, in taking the stranger in with a loaded frog; and the other wasSmiley's deep knowledge of a frog's nature--for he knew (as the narratorasserted and the listeners conceded) that a frog likes shot and isalways ready to eat it. Those men discussed those two points, and thoseonly. They were hearty in their admiration of them, and none of theparty was aware that a first-rate story had been told in a first-rateway, and that it was brimful of a quality whose presence they neversuspected--humour.
Now, then, the interesting question is, did the frog episode happen inAngel's Camp in the spring of '49, as told in my hearing that day in thefall of 1865? I am perfectly sure that it did. I am also sure that itsduplicate happened in Boeotia a couple of thousand years ago. I think itmust be a case of history actually repeating itself, and not a case ofa good story floating down the ages and surviving because too good to beallowed to perish.
I would now like to have the reader examine the Greek story and thestory told by the dull and solemn Californian, and observe how exactlyalike they are in essentials.