THE FOLK-LORE OF ROME.*
WE don't know that we have much excuse to offer—the title of this book alone, connected as it is with those "Spanish Patrailas " and "Sagas from the Far East," ought to have saved it from such an association—but yet as we read and read, one passage alone from a well-known poem of Mr. Browning's would force itself upon our notice, and quite against our will we recalled that "friend wearing out his eyes and slighting the stupid joys of sense,"—
" In patient hope that, ten years hence, Somewhat completer he may see His list of lepidopterto."
Mr. Bask can undoubtedly reply, with the triumphant naturalist, "There were my beetles to collect "; and beetles are wonderful things, if you understand them ; and so is folk-lore without question, and utterly meaningless as much which is given here may appear to the mind of the ordinary reader, we concede that Mr. Busk's "Notes" are worthy full attention. Yet except for the collector of such stories, who makes the subject his special pursuit, we do not think this book repays the years of trouble it has cost the author. There is a sense throughout of the inadequacy of the result to the labour involved. We are far from wishing to speak lightly of the study of Folk-lore in general, or from even seeming to imply that the present work has no intrinsic merit. Folk-lore as such is not only an interesting, but most worthy study, involving results which may, at least in some aspects, be held worthy the devotion of a life-time, and it is rather Mr. Busk's misfortune than his fault that his present collection is not equal to others with which it may be compared. Clearly this was in some sort the opinion of those from whom Mr. Bask derived most of his information, for he tells us it was with the greatest difficulty that he persuaded people to own 'to a knowledge of bond fide fairy tales, or to believe he " could be serious in wishing to listen to such childish non- sense." "But suppose you had a child to amuse," I would say at last, "I am sure you would sometimes tell it a marvellous story." " Ah, a creatura, yes! But I haven't the face to tell such nonsense to your signoria." And this feeling is at the'root of the inadequacy of these stories. They represent so little to the people themselves, that almost all that gives them point in the corresponding stories as told in other lands has been quite un- consciously eliminated from them. Mr. Busk himself is struck with the almost complete absence of stories of heroism and chivalry. "There is none," he says, "of the high-souled mettle which comes out so strong in Hungarian, Gaelic, and Spanish traditions in many of the Teutonic and Breton and some Norse and Russian tales." And again, "I have never come across a single story of knightly prowess in any shape." Now, this is an important fact in studying the people, but detracts decidedly from the interest of their fire-side stories, and accounts for the contempt for their own folk-lore which extracts all pungency from its flavour. The wildest story crooned by a 'Highland mother over a peat fire has a kernel in it, while most of the fairy stories given here read like leaves from some unillustrated nonsense-book. But we have no desire to deserve the censure of Cesare Cantu, quoted in these pages, concerning those who like to seem above giving their attention to such slight matters, and "are only careful for what they must look at through a telescope." So summoning to our aid another kind of instrument, we will extract what element of beauty or of interest may lie revealed in the volume before us.
Mr. Busk tells us in his preface a humorous story of what be assures us was one of his worst disappointments in his search after Esempj (legends), Ciarpe (gossip), and Favole. It was the case of an old woman, toothless, tremulous, and inconsecutive, buttup- posed to know more of such things than anyone else. Nothing, however, could induce the old woman to be communicative. "Her arguments," says Mr. Bask, "were not difficult to appreciate in the following way,—that having had a long run of weary bad fortune, she had rather not dwell on stories where things turned out as one could wish to have them." We sympathise with the writer's regret "that so vast a store is going to the grave under one's very eyes, and that one cannot touch it." The story of Filigranata is one of the prettiest in the collection, bat in the appendix Mr. Busk notices that his attention has been called to a collection of stories published in Geneva without the author's name in 1718,
* The Folk-Lore of Rome. By R. H. Busk. London : Longmans, Green, and 0o. 1874.
and that he is able from the perusal of these to subjoin some notes of analogies between the Folk-tales of France and those of the text which are extremely interesting, and any reader who will take the pains to read the story of Filigranata, as given from the lips of the Roman peasant at the beginning of this volume, and the variation of it, under the title of "Prince Rainbow" (" Le Prince Arc-en-ciel ") in the appendix, will understand all we would say of the inferiority of the Roman edition. The Cinderella series possesses the main characteristics of the same story everywhere ; its root is in human nature itself.
But we do not remember elsewhere that Cinderella enriched her sisters. Her character is certainly enhanced by the fact, though to us it seems to modernise the legend. In the second version of the story there is a wonder-working cow, which suggests to Mr. Busk's mind the probability that its prototype may be found in Sabala, the heavenly cow of the Ramayana. We have here one or two really good editions of "Beauty and the Beast." "The Dark King," under which title the story is told, is delightful, to our mind the finest in the book. Another version, translated from Perrault's collection, given in the appendix, is also very beautiful, but belongs to a higher order of thought, and to some minds will appear perhaps to lose as much in simplicity as it gains in depth of meaning. In this version, Kadour, the beautiful Princess of Cashmere, has the gift of mind bestowed on her by the monster on condition of receiving the gift of her love. But her in- telligence once awakened, she falls in love with Arada, "the handsomest of her adorers." The monster threatens to send her back to her first estate, but her newly acquired powers have given her such a loathing of this condition, that she finally prefers retaining her mind even on the terrible condition of marrying the King of the Gnomes. And while one edition of the story makes her afterwards seek the sympathy of Arada, and get punished by the transformation of his handsome person into
a duplicate of the monster's, another and better-known version gives a happier ending, by the beautiful princess having "the
compensating faculty of rendering handsome her mind-giving but hideous lover." We have the old story of Aladdin's Lamp, which borrows fresh interest from its local colouring. The narrator assured Mr. Busk she had never read the story, but was told it by her mother when she was only five years old. We pass from the Favole to the legendary tales, which contain a curious mixture of Pagan and Christian elements. Mr. Busk, however, inclines to the idea that the elementary myth has been more Christianised by the Romans than by some other peoples. This is possible, but the grossly superstitious element is none the less conspicuous. The idea of the eternal merit of hospitality figures largely, as in the story of " Pret'Plivo," and another very like it, but which show, by the way, how wild the human imagination can run, and how curiously it can mingle things sacred and profane, a kind of grotesque humour running through the whole. In "Fret' Olivo " the host asks, as a reward for his hospitality to Christ and his disciples, to be allowed to live a hundred years, and give Death what orders he shall please, when she (Death is feminine in Italian) comes to fetch him ; and when that moment arrives, he sends her up a tree on pretence of gathering figs, and then bids her stick there, till she promises to leave him alone for another hundred years. For a similar act of hospitality another story makes the host ask always to be successful in card-playing, and then makes him play with the Devil for fifteen thousand souls, "nice-looking souls," as the narrator puts it. Most of the legends are great rubbish, indi- cating nothing but the wretched fare on which minds long kept in ignorance are content to feed ; but here and there we meet with one showing traces of a higher order of thought, as the "Nun Beatrice," some of the traditions concerning Padre Filippo, and a few others. We give an illustration of the best :— " One day as he was going into the Temple, he saw two men quarrel- ling before the door : a young man and an old man. The young man wanted to go in first, and the old man was vindicating the honour of his grey hairs. What is the matter?' asked Jesus Christ ; and they showed him wherefore they strove. Jesus Christ said to the young man, 'If you are desirous to go in first, you must accept the state to which honour belongs,' and he touched him, and he became an old man, bowed in gait, feeble, and grey-haired. while to the old man he gave the com- pensation for the insult he had received, by investing him with the youth of the other."
The Loreto legends Mr. Busk has purposely omitted, as being already well known, but explains the saying,—
" Chi va a Loreto E non va a °hello, Vedo la Madre E non vede il figliuolo," by the fact that Sirollo, as the place is marked on Murray's map, is five miles north of Loreto, 'where there is a crucifix, said by the people to be miracolosissimo. Strangers generally see only Loreto, but the country people living near consider the pilgrimage imperfect till the crucifix at Cirollo has also been visited, hence the popular saying. But we hasten on to the last division of the subject, where, under the head of "Ciarpe," or "Gossip," we have a number of mere tales such as peasant-folk might tell sitting at their door-steps on summer nights. They were told in some such fashion by word-of-mouth to Mr. Busk. One of the best seems very familiar to us, but we cannot recall where we have met with it before. It is the story of an old couple who lament together that through the fall of Adam they are compelled to labour. The husband observes, "If you and I had been there instead of Adam and Eve, all the human race had been in Paradise still." The Count their master, overhearing this, forthwith offers them all manner of luxuries, with servants to wait upon them, on condition of their not touching a certain dish which will be placed before them ; the end may be imagined,—beneath the cover of the for- bidden dish is a little live bird, whose flight betrays the delin- quents. A few pages further on we have a story, the date of which we should like to determine, since it bears a singular resemblance to the "Taming of the Shrew." Another, under the head of "The Value of Salt," is extremely good. "Ass or Pig" is very old and of Eastern origin, but the original story has more point than the Roman peasant gives it. The Sanscrit .sop speaks of a pious Brahmin who' would sacrifice a sheep, and is met on his way by three thieves who have plotted to cheat him ; the first offers to sell him a sheep, and opening his bag, brings out a dog lame and blind, and when the Brahmin remonstrates, saying, " Callest thou that cur a sheep ?" one of the accom- plices comes up, and confirms the statement of the first rogue ; and finally, the third, till the bewildered Brahmin distrusting the evidence of his own senses against such threefold testimony, asks pardon of him who carries the dog, and buys it for a measure of rice and a pot of glue. The point of this fable, rendered ever memorable by Macaulay's application of it, is clear enough ; but in the Italian edition it is the friars who play off the- cheat on the countryman, and call his pig an ass ; it is they who have to repent, and finally to restore the pig. There is provincial humour in making the friars the rogues, but the wider wisdom which underlies Pilpay's fable is lost alto- gether. The "Happy Couple" is another very old story ; Mr. Busk has given variations of it in his Sagas front the Far East, and Mr. Spurgeon's well-known story of "The Rat" is an admirable, though prosaic edition of the same idea. Our space forbids us to pursue the subject further, or we might go into some of the details on the subject cf witchcraft, and of night-flights through the air, upon which Mr Busk gives 11B some interesting notes. He says, whether sue flights were effected in the body or out of the body, was one of the most hotly-contested disputes of the demonographers, and thg question is not altogether one of a bygone age. The possibility of the independent action of the spirit is still held by persons whose sanity on other subjects would not be questioned. On the whole, we may fairly say, those who take the trouble to wade through this somewhat bulky volume will not be altogether without recompense for their pains.
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