Chapter VII (6)

Bova is the chief place in Calabria where Greek survives. The inhabitants call it "Vua," or simply "Hora." The word "hora," _the city_, is applied by the Greeks of Terra d'Otranto to that part of their hamlets which an Englishman would call "the old village." It is not generally known that "city" is used in an identical sense by old country-folks in the English Eastern counties. The Bovesi make a third of the whole Greek-speaking population of Calabria, and Bova has the dignity of being an episcopal seat, though its bishop has moved his residence to the Marina, a sort of seaside suburb, five miles distant from the town. Thirty years ago the ecclesiastical authorities were already agitating for the transfer, but the people opposed it till the completion of the railway to Reggio and the opening of a station at the Marina di Bova settled the case against them. The cathedral, the four or five lesser churches, the citadel, even the Ghetto, all tell of the unwritten age of Bova's prosperity. Old street-names perpetuate the memory of the familiar spirits of the place; the Lamiae who lived in a particular quarter, the _Fullitto_ who frequented the lane under the cathedral wall. Ignoring Praxiteles, the poorer Bovesi set faith in a tradition that their ancestors dwelt on the coast, and that it was in consequence of Saracenic incursions that they abandoned their homes and built a town on the crags of Aspromonte near the lofty pastures to which herds of cattle (_bovi_) were driven in the summer. The name of Bova would thus be accounted for, and its site bears out the idea that it was chosen as a refuge. The little Greek city hangs in air. To more than one traveller toiling up to it by the old Reggio route it has seemed suggestive of an optical delusion. There is refreshment to be had on the way: a feast for the sight in pink and white flowers of gigantic oleanders; a feast for the taste in the sweet and perfumed fruit of the wild vine. Still it is disturbing to see your destination suspended above your head at a distance that seems to get longer instead of shorter. Some comfort may be got from hearing Greek spoken at Ammendolea, itself an eyrie, and again at Condufuri. A last, long, resolute effort brings you, in spite of your forebodings, to Bova, real as far as stones and fountains, men and women, and lightly-clothed children can make it; yet still half a dream, you think, when you sit on the terrace at sunset and look across the blue Ionian to the outline, unbroken from base to crown, of "Snowy AEtna, nurse of endless frost, the prop of heaven."

There is plenty of activity among the Greeks of Calabria Ultra. Many of them contrive to get a livelihood out of the chase; game of every sort abounds, and wolves are not extinct. In the mountaineers' cottages, which shelter a remarkable range of animals, an infant wolf sometimes lies down with a tame sheep; whilst on the table hops a domesticated eagle, taken when young from its nest in defiance of the stones dropped upon the robber by the outraged parent-birds. The peasants till the soil, sow corn, plant vegetables, harvest the olives and grapes, gather the prickly pears, make cheese, tend cattle, and are wise in the care of hives. It is a kind of wisdom of which their race has ever had the secret. The Greek Calabrians love bees as they were loved by the idyllic poets. "Ehi tin cardia to melissa" ("he has the heart of a bee"), is said of a kindly and helpful man. Sicilian Hybla cannot have yielded more excellent honey than Bova and Ammendolea. It is sad to think of, but it is stated on good authority that the people of those lofty cities quarrel over their honey as much as about Praxiteles. Somehow envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness find a way into the best of real idylls. You may live at the top of a mountain and cordially detest your neighbour. The folk of Condufuri greet the folk of Bova as Vutani dogs, which is answered by the epithet of Spesi-spasu, all the more disagreeable because nobody knows what it means. In Terra d'Otranto the dwellers in the various Greek hamlets call each other thieves, asses, simpletons, and necromancers. The Italian peasants are inclined to class Greeks and Albanians alike in the category of "Turchi," and though the word Turk, as used by Italians, in some cases simply means foreign, it is a questionable term to apply to individuals. The Greeks, with curious scorn, are content to fling back the charge of Latin blood.

When the day's work is done, comes the frugal evening meal; a dish of _ricotta_, a glass of wine and snow. Wine is cheap in Calabria, where the finest variety is of a white sweet kind called _Greco_; and the heights of Aspromonte provide a supply of frozen snow, which is a necessary rather than a luxury in this climate. About the hour of Avemmaria the bagpipers approach. In the mountains the flocks follow the wild notes of the "Zampogna" or "Ceramedda," unerringly distinguishing the music of their own shepherd. A visit from the Zampognari to hill-town, or village sets all the world on the alert. There is gossiping, and dancing, and the singing of songs, in which expression takes the place of air. Two young men sing together, without accompaniment, or one sings alone, accompanied by bagpipe, violin, and guitar. So the evening passes by, till the moon rises and turns the brief, early darkness into a more glorified day. The little hum of human sound dies in the silence of the hills; only perhaps a single clear, sweet voice prolongs the monotone of love.

The Italian complimentary alphabet is unknown to the Greek poets. The person whom they address is not apostrophised as Beauty or Beloved, or star, or angel, or _Fior eterno_, or _Delicatella mia_. They do not carry about ready for use a pocketful of poetic-sugared rose-leaves, nor have they the art of making each word serve as an act of homage or a caress. It is true that "caxedda," a word that occurs frequently in their songs, has been resolved by etymologists into "pupil of my eye;" but for the people it means simply "maiden." The Greek Calabrian gives one the impression of rarely saying a thing because it is a pretty thing to say. If he treats a fanciful idea, he presents it, as it were, in the rough. Take for instance the following:--

Oh! were I earth, and thou didst tread on me,
Or of thy shoe the sole, this too were sweet!
Or were I just the dress that covers thee,
So might I fall entangling round thy feet.
Were I the crock, and thou didst strike on me,
And we two stooped to catch the waters fleet;
Or were I just the dress that covers thee,
So without me thou couldst not cross the street.

Here the fancy is the mere servant of the thought behind it. The lover does not figure himself as the fly on the cheek of his mistress, or the flower on her breast. There is no intrinsic prettiness in the common earth or the common water-vessel, in the sole of a worn shoe, or in a workaday gown.

It cannot be pretended that the Greek is so advanced in untaught culture as some of his Italian brothers; in fact there are specimens of the _Sonetto Grico_ which are so bald and prosaic that the "Latins" might not be at much pains to learn them even were they sung at noonday. The Titianesque glow which illuminates the plain materials of Venetian song must not be looked for. What will be found in Graeco-Calabrian poesy is a strong appearance of sincerity, supplemented at times by an almost startling revelation of tender and chivalrous feeling. To these Greek poets of Calabria love is another name for self-sacrifice. "I marvel how so fair a face can have a heart so tyrannous, in that thou bearest thyself so haughtily towards me, while for thee I take no rest; and thou dost as thou wilt, because I love thee--if needs be that I should pour out my blood with all my heart for thee, I will do it." This is love which discerns in its own depths the cause of its defeat. A reproach suggestive of Heine in its mocking bitterness changes in less than a moment to a cry of despairing entreaty--

I know you love me not, say what you may,
I'll not believe, no, no, my faithless one;
With all the rest I see you laugh and play,
'Tis only I, I only whom you shun.
Ah, could I follow where you lead the way:
The obstinate thoughts upon your traces run
Make me a feint of love, though you have none,
For I must think upon you night and day.

The scene is easily pictured: the bravery of words at meeting, all the just displeasure of many a day bursting forth; then the cessation of anger in the beloved presence and the final unconditional surrender. A lighter mood succeeds, but love's royal clemency is still the text:

Say, little girl, what have I done to thee,
What have I done to thee that thou art dumb?
Oft wouldst thou seek me once, such friends were we,
But now thou goest away whene'er I come.
If thou hast missed in aught, why quick, confess it,
For thee this heart will all, yes all, forgive;
If miss be mine, contrive that I should guess it;
And soon the thing shall finish, as I live!

The dutiful lover rings all the changes on humble remonstrance:

I go where I may see thee all alone,
So I may kneel before thee on the ground,
And ask of thee how is it that unknown
Unto thy heart is every prick and wound?
Canst thou not see that e'en my breath is flown,
Thinking of thee while still the days go round?
If thou wouldst not that I should quickly die,
Love only me and bid the rest good-bye.

He might as well speak to the winds or to the stones, and he admits as much. "Whensoever I pass I sing to make thee glad; if I do not come for a few hours I send thee a greeting with my eyes. But thou dost act the deaf and likewise the dumb: pity thou hast none for my tears." If he fails to fulfil his prophecy of dying outright, at any rate he falls into the old age of youth, which arrives as soon as the bank of hope breaks:

Come night, come day, one only thought have I,
Which graven on my heart must ever stay;
Grey grows my hair and dismal age draws nigh,
Wilt thou not cease the tyrant's part to play?
Thou seem'st a very Turk for cruelty,
Of Barbary a very Turk I say;
I know not why thy love thou dost deny,
Or why with hate my love thou dost repay.

This may be compared with a song taken down from the mouth of a peasant near Reggio, an amusing illustration of the kind of thing in favour with Calabrian herdsmen:--

Angelical thou art and not terrene,
Who dost kings' wives excel in loveliness!
Thou art a pearl, or Grecian Helen, I ween,
For whom Troy town was brought to sore distress;
Thine are the locks which graced the Magdalene,
Lucrece of Rome did scarce thy worth possess:
If thou art pitiless to me, oh, my Queen,
No Christian thou, a Turk, and nothing less!

A glance at the daughter of Greek Calabria will throw some light on the plaints of her devoted suitors. The name she bears = _Dihatera_, brings directly to mind the Sanskrit _Duhita_; and the vocation of the Graeco-Calabrian girl is often as purely pastoral as that of the Aryan milkmaid who stood sponsor for so large a part of maidenhood in Asia and in Europe. She is sent out into the hills to keep sheep; a circumstance not ignored by the shepherd lad who sits in the shade and trills on his treble reed. Ewe's milk is as much esteemed as in the days of Theocritus; it forms the staple of the inevitable _ricotta_. In the house the Greek damsel never has her hands idle. She knows how to make the mysterious cakes and comfits, for which the stranger is bound to have as large an appetite in Calabria as in the isles of Greece. A light heart lightens her work, whatever it be. "You sit on the doorstep and laugh as you wind the reels, then you go to the loom, _e ecinda magna travudia travudia_" ("and sing those beautiful songs"). So says the ill-starred poet, who discovers to his cost that it is just this inexhaustible merriment that lends a sharp edge to maiden cruelty. "I have loved you since you were a little thing, never can you leave my heart; you bound me with a light chain; my mind and your mind were one. Now,"--such is the melancholy outcome of it all--"now you are a perfect little fox to me, while you will join in any frolic with the others." The fair tyrant develops an originality of thought which surprises her best friends: "Ever since you were beloved, you have always an idea and an opinion!" It is beyond human power to account for her caprices: "You are like a fay in the rainbow, showing not one colour, but a thousand." When trouble comes to her as it comes to all--when she has a slight experience of the pain she is so ready to inflict--she does not meekly bow her head and suffer. "Manamu," cries a girl who seems to have been neglected for some one of higher stature. "Mother mine, I have got a little letter, and all sorts of despair. _She_ is tall, and _I_ am little, and I have not the power to tear her in pieces!"--as she has probably torn the sheet of paper which brought the unwelcome intelligence. She goes on to say that she will put up a vow in a chapel, so as to be enabled to do some personal, but not clearly explained damage to the cause of her misfortunes. There is nothing new under the sun; the word "anathema" originally meant a votive offering: one of those execratory tablets, deposited in the sacred places, by means of which the ancient Greeks committed their enemies to the wrath of the Infernal Goddesses. Mr Newton has shown that it was the gentler sex which availed itself, by far the most earnestly, of the privilege. Most likely our Lady of Hate in Brittany would have the same tale to tell. Impotence seeks strange ways to compass its revenge.

In some extremities the lover has recourse, not indeed to anathemas, but to irony. "I am not a reed," he protests, "that where you bend me I should go; nor am I a leaf, that you should move me with a breath." Then, after observing that poison has been poured on his fevered vitals, he exclaims, "Give your love to others, and just see if they will love you as I do!" One poet has arrived at the conclusion that all the women of a particular street in Bova are hopelessly false: "Did you ever see a shepherd wolf, or a fox minding chickens, or a pig planting lettuces, or an ox, as sacristan, snuffing out tapers with his horns? As soon will you find a woman of Cuveddi who keeps her faith." Another begins his song with sympathy, but ends by uttering a somewhat severe warning:

Alas, alas! my heart it bleeds to see
How now thou goest along disconsolate;
And in thy sorrow I no help can be--
My own poor heart is in a piteous state.
Come with sweet words--ah! come and doctor me,
And lift from off my heart this dolorous weight.
If thou come not, then none can pardon thee:
Go not to Rome for shrift; it is too late.

The Calabrian Greek has more than his share of the pangs of unrequited love; that it is so he assures us with an iteration that must prove convincing. Still, some balm is left in Gilead. Even at Bova there are maidens who do not think it essential to their dignity to act the _role_ of Eunica. The poorest herdsman, the humblest shepherd, has a chance of getting listened to; a poor, bare chance perhaps, but one which unlocks the door to as much of happiness as there is in the world. At least the accepted lover in the mountains of Calabria would be unwilling to admit that there exists a greater felicity than his. If he goes without shoes, still "love is enough:"

Little I murmur against my load of woe--
Our love will never fail, nor yet decline;
For to behold thy form contents me so,
To see thee laugh with those red lips of thine.
Dost thou say not a word when past I go?
This of thy love for me is most sure sign;
Our love will no decline or failing know
Till in the sky the sun shall cease to shine.

Karro, the day-labourer (to whom we will give the credit of inventing this song), would not, if he could, put one jot of his burden on Filomena of the Red Lips. Provided she laughs, he is sufficiently blest. It so happens that Filomena is his master's granddaughter; hence, alas! the need of silence as the sign of love. The wealthy old peasant has sworn that the child of his dead son shall never wed a penniless lad, who might have starved last winter if he had not given him work to do, out of sheer charity. Karro comes to a desperate resolution: he will go down to Reggio and make his fortune. When he thinks it over, he feels quite confident of success: other folks have brought back lots of money to Bova out of the great world, and why should not he? In the early morning he calls Filomena to bid her a cheerful farewell:

Come hither! run! thy friend must go away;
Come with a kiss--the time is flying fast.
Sure am I thou thy word wilt not betray,
And for remembrance' sake my heart thou hast.
Weep not because I leave thee for a day--
Nay, do not weep, for it will soon be past;
And, I advise thee, heed not if they say,
"Journeys like this long years are wont to last."

Down at Reggio, Karro makes much poetry, and, were it not for his defective education, one might think that he had been studying Byron:

If I am forced far from thine eyes to go,
Doubt not, ah! never doubt my constancy;
The very truth I tell, if thou wouldst know--
Distance makes stronger my fidelity.
On my sure faith how shouldst thou not rely?
How think through distance I can faithless grow?
Remember how I loved thee, and reply
If distance love like mine can overthrow.

The fact is that he has not found fortune-making quite so quick a business as he had hoped. To the sun he says, when it rises, "O Sun! thou that travellest from east to west, if thou shouldst see her whom I love, greet her from me, and see if she shall laugh. If she asks how I fare, tell her that many are my ills; if she asks not this of thee, never can I be consoled." One day, in the market place, he meets a friend of his, Toto Sgro, who has come from Bova with wine to sell. Here is an opportunity of safely sending a _sonetto_ to the red-lipped Filomena. The public letter-writer is resorted to. This functionary gets out the stock of deep pink paper which is kept expressly in the intention of enamoured clients, and says gravely "Proceed." "An imme larga an' du lucchiu tu dicussu," begins Karro. "Pray use a tongue known to Christians," interposes the scribe. Toto Sgro, who is present, remarks in Greek that such insolence should be punished; but Karro counsels peace, and racks his brains for a poem in the Calabrese dialect. Most of the men of Bova can poetize in two languages. The poem, which is produced after a moderate amount of labour, turns chiefly on the idle talk of mischief-makers, who are sure to insinuate that the absent are in the wrong. "The tongue of people is evil speaking; it murmurs more than the water of the stream; it babbles more than the water of the sea. But what ill can folks say of us if we love each other? I love thee eternally. Love me, Filomena, and think nothing about it."

Amame, Filomena, e nu' pensare!

Towards spring-time, Karro goes to Scilla to help in the sword-fish taking; it is a bad year, and the venture does not succeed. He nearly loses courage--fate seems so thoroughly against him. Just then he hears a piece of news: at the _osteria_ there is an _Inglese_ who has set his mind on the possession of a live wolf cub. "Mad, quite mad, like all _Inglesi_," is the comment of the inhabitants of Scilla. "Who ever heard of taking a live wolf?" Karro, as a mountaineer, sees matters in a different light. Forthwith he has an interview with the Englishman; then he vanishes from the scene for two months. "Poveru giuvinetto," says the host at the inn, "he has been caught by an old wolf instead of catching a young one!" At the end of the time, however, Karro limps up to the door with an injured leg, and hardly a rag left to cover him; but carrying on his back a sack holding two wolf cubs, unhurt and tame as kittens. The gratified _Inglese_ gives a bountiful reward; he is not the first of his race who has acted as the _deus ex machina_ of a love-play on an Italian stage. Nothing remains to be done but for Karro to hasten back to Bova. Yet a kind of uneasiness mixes with his joy. What has Filomena been doing and thinking all this while! He holds his heart in suspense at the sight of her beauty:

In all the world fair women met my gaze,
But none I saw who could with thee compare;
I saw the dames whom most the Rhegians praise,
And by the thought of thee they seemed not fair.
When thou art dressed to take the morning air
The sun stands still in wonder and amaze;
If thou shouldst scorn thy love of other days,
I go a wanderer, I know not where.

The story ends well. Filomena proves as faithful as she is fair; Karro's leg is quickly cured, and the old man gives his consent to the marriage--nay more, feeble as he is now, he is glad to hand over the whole management of the farm to his son-in-law. Thus the young couple start in life with the three inestimable blessings which a Greek poet reckons as representing the sum total of human prosperity: a full granary, a dairy-house to make cheese in, and a fine pig.

In collections of Tuscan and Sicilian songs it is common to find a goodly number placed under the heading "Delle loro bellezze." The Greek songs of Calabria that exactly answer to this description are few. A new Zeuxis might successfully paint an unseen Tuscan or Sicilian girl--local Anacreons by the score would give him the needful details: the colour of the hair and eyes, the height, complexion, breadth of shoulders, smallness of waist; nor would they forget to mention the nobility of pose and carriage, _il leggiadro portamento altero_, which is the crowning gift of women south of the Alps. It can be recognized at once that the poets of Sicily and Tuscany have not merely a vague admiration for beauty in general; they have an innate artistic perception of what goes to constitute the particular form of beauty before their eyes. Poorer in words and ideas, the Greek Calabrian hardly knows what to say of his beloved, except that she is _dulce ridentem_, "sweetly-laughing," and that she has small red lips, between which he is sure that she must carry honey--

To meli ferri s' ettunda hilucia ...

He seems scarcely to notice whether she is fair or dark. Fortunately it is not impossible to fill in the blank spaces in the picture. The old Greek stamp has left a deep impression at home and abroad. Where there were Greeks there are still men and women whose features are cut, not moulded, and who have a peculiar symmetry of form, which is not less characteristic though it has been less discussed. A friend of mine, who accompanied the Expedition of the Thousand, was struck by the conformity of the standard of proportion to be observed in the women of certain country districts in Sicily with the rule followed in Greek sculpture; it is a pity that the subject is not taken in hand by some one who has more time to give to it than a volunteer on the march. I have said "men _or_ women," for it is a strange fact that the heritage of Greek beauty seems to fall to only one sex at a time. At Athens and in Cyprus young men may be seen who would have done credit to the gymnasia, but never a handsome girl; whilst at Arles, in Sicily, and in Greek Calabria the women are easily first in the race. The typical Graeco-Calabrian maiden has soft light hair, a fairness of skin which no summer heats can stain, and the straight outline of a statue. There is another pattern of beauty in Calabria: low forehead, straight, strongly-marked eyebrows, dark, blue, serious eyes, lithe figure, elastic step. Place beside the women of the last type a man dyed copper-colour, with black, lank locks, and the startled look of a wild animal. The Greeks have many dark faces, and many ugly faces, too; for that matter, uncompromising plainness was always amongst the possibilities of an Hellenic physiognomy. But the beautiful dark girl and her lank-locked companion do not belong to them. Whom they do belong to is an open question; perhaps to those early Brettians who dwelt in the forest of the Syla, despised by the Greeks as savages, and docketed by the Romans, without rhyme or reason, as the descendants of escaped criminals. Calabria offers an inviting field to the ethnologist. It is probable that the juxtaposition of various races has not led in any commensurate degree to a mixture of blood. Each commune is a unit perpetually reformed out of the same constituents. Till lately intermarriage was carried to such a pitch that it was rare to meet with a man in a village who was not closely related to every other inhabitant of it.

The Greeks of Terra d'Otranto bear a strong physical resemblance to the Greeks of Calabria Ultra. It is fifty or sixty years since the Hon. R. Keppel Craven remarked a "striking regularity of feature and beauty of complexion" in the women of Martano and Calimera. At Martano they have a pretty song in praise of some incomparable maid:

My Sun, where art thou going? Stay to see
How passing beautiful is she I love.
My Sun, that round and round the world dost move,
Hast thou seen any beautiful as she?
My Sun, that hast the whole world travelled round,
One beautiful as she thou hast not found!

Next to his lady's laughter, the South Italian Greek worships the sun. It is the only feature in nature to which he pays much heed. In common with other forms of modern Greek the Calabrian possesses the beautiful periphrase for sunset, _o iglio vasileggui_ ([Greek: ho helios basileuei]). Language, which is altogether a kind of poetry, has not anything more profoundly poetic. There is a brisk, lively ring in the "Sun up!" of the American Far West; but an intellectual Atlantic flows between it and the Greek ascription of kingship, of heroship, to the Day-giver at the end of his course--

Wie herrlich die Sonne dort untergeht,
So stirbt ein Held! Anbetungswuerdig!

When we were young, were not our hearts stirred to their inmost depths by this?

The love-songs of Bova include one composed by a young man who had the ill-luck to get into prison. "Remember," he says, "the words I spoke to thee when we were seated on the grass; for the love of Christ, remember them, so as not to make my life a torment. Think not that I shall stay in here for ever; already I have completed one day. But if it should happen that thou art forgetful of my words, beyond a doubt this prison awaits me!" The singer seems to wish it to be inferred that his line of conduct in the given case will be such as to entitle him to board and lodging at the expense of the state for the rest of his days. In times still recent, prisoners at Bova could see and be seen, and hear and be heard, through the bars. Thus the incarcerated lover had not to wait long for an answer, which must have greatly relieved his mind: "The words that thou didst say to me on the tender grass, I remember them--I forget them not. I would not have thee say them over again; but be sure I love thee. Night and day I go to church, and of Christ I ask this grace: 'My Christ, make short the hours--bring to me him whom I love!'"

The Greeks have a crafty proverb, "If they see me I laugh; but if not, I rob and run." A Graeco-Italic word[1], _maheri_, or "poignard," has been suggested as the origin of _Mafia_, the name of one of the two great organisations for crime which poison the social atmosphere of southern Italy. The way of looking upon an experience of the penalties of the law, not as a retribution or a disgrace, but as a simple mischance, still prevails in the provinces of the ex-kingdom of Naples. "The prisons," says a Calabrian poet, "are made for honest men." Yet the people of Calabria are rather to be charged with a confusion of moral sense than with a completely debased morality. What has been said of the modern Greek could with equal truth be said of them, whether Greeks or otherwise: put them upon their point of honour and they may be highly trusted. At a date when, in Sicily, no one went unarmed, it was the habit in Calabria to leave doors and windows unfastened during an absence of weeks or months; and it is still remembered how, after the great earthquake of 1783, five Calabrians who happened to be at Naples brought back to the treasury 200 ducats (received by them out of the royal bounty) on learning, through private sources, that their homesteads were safe. The sort of honesty here involved is not so common as it might be, even under the best of social conditions.

In that year of catastrophe--1783--it is more than possible that some of the Greek-speaking communities were swallowed up, leaving no trace behind. Calabria was the theatre of a series of awful transformation scenes; heroism and depravity took strange forms, and men intent on pillage were as ready to rush into the tottering buildings as men intent on rescue. A horrid rejoicing kept pace with terror and despair. In contrast to all this was the surprising calmness with which in some cases the ordeal was faced. At Oppido, a place originally Greek, a pretty young woman, aged nineteen years, was immured for thirty hours, and shortly after her husband had extricated her she became a mother. Dolomieu asked what had been her thoughts in her living tomb; to which she simply answered, "I waited." The Prince of Scilla and four thousand people were swept into the sea by a single volcanic wave. Only the mountains stood firm. Bova, piled against the rock like a child's card-city, suffered no harm, whilst the most solid structures on the shore and in the plain were pitched about as ships in a storm. Still, in the popular belief the whole mischief was brewed deep down in the innermost heart of Aspromonte. It may be that the theory grew out of the immemorial dread inspired by the Bitter Mount--a dread which seems in a way prophetic of the dark shadow it was fated to cast across the fair page of Italian redemption.

A thousand years ago every nook and cranny in the Calabrian mountains had its Greek hermit. Now and then one of these anchorites descended to the towns, and preached to flocks of penitents in the Greek idiom, which was understood by all. Under Byzantine rule the people generally adhered to the Greek rite; nor was it without the imposition of the heavy hand of Rome that they were finally brought to renounce it. As late as the sixteenth century the liturgies were performed in Greek at Rossano, and perhaps much later in the hill-towns, where there are women who still treasure up scraps of Greek prayers. Greek, in an older sense than any attached to the ritual of the Eastern Church, is the train of thought marked out in this line from a folk-song of Bova: "O Juro pu en chi jerusia" ("The Lord who hath not age"). The Italian imagines the Creator as an old man; witness, to take only one example, the frescoes on the walls of the Pisan Campo Santo. A Tuscan proverb, which means no evil, though it would not very well bear translating--"Lascia fare a Dio che e Santo Vecchio"--shows how in this, as in other respects, Italian art is but the concrete presentation of Italian popular sentiment. The grander idea of "a Divine power which grows not old" seems very like an exotic in Italy. Without yielding too much to the weakness of seeking analogies, one other coincidence may be mentioned in passing. The Greek mother soothes her crying child by telling him that "the wild doves drink at the _holy sea_." This "ago Thalassia" recalls the [Greek: hals dia] of the greatest folk-poet who ever lived. _Thalassia_ is now replaced in ordinary conversation by the Italian _mare_; indeed, in Terra d'Otranto it is currently supposed to be the proper name of a saint. The next step would naturally lead to the establishment of a cult of St Thalassia; and this may have been the kind of way in which were established a good many of those cults that pass for evidences of nature-worship.

The language of the Graeco-Calabrian songs, mixed though it is with numberless Calabrese corruptions, is still far more Greek than the actual spoken tongue. So it always happens; poetry, whether the highest or the lowest, is the shrine in which the purer forms of speech are preserved. The Greeks of Calabria are at present bi-lingual, reminding one of Horace's "Canusini more bilinguis." It is a comparatively new state of things. Henry Swinburne says that the women he saw knew only Greek or "Albanese," as he calls it, which, he adds, "they pronounce with great sweetness of accent." The advance of Calabrese is attended by the decline of Greek, and a systematic examination of the latter has not been undertaken a moment too soon. The good work, begun by Domenico Comparetti and Giuseppe Morosi, is being completed by professor Astorre Pellegrini, who has published one volume of _Studi sui dialetti Greco-Calabro di Bova_, which will be followed in due course by a second instalment. I am glad to be able to record my own debt to this excellent and most courteous scholar. He informs me that he hopes to finish his researches by a thorough inspection of the stones and mural tablets in Calabrian graveyards. The dead have elsewhere told so much about the living that the best results are to be anticipated.

It need scarcely be said that the leavings of the past in the southern extremity of Italy are not confined to the narrow space where a Greek idiom is spoken. There is not even warrant for supposing them to lie chiefly within that area. The talisman which the hunter or brigand wears next to his heart, believing that it renders him invulnerable; the bagpipe which calls the sheep in the hills, and which the wild herds of swine follow docilely over the marshes; the faggot which the youth throws upon his mother's threshold before he crosses it after the day's toil; the kick, aimed against the house door, which signifies the last summons of the debtor; the shout of "Barca!" raised by boys who lie in wait to get the first glimpse of the returning fishing fleet, expecting largess for the publication of the good news; the chaff showered down by vine-dressers upon bashful maids and country lads going home from market; the abuse of strangers who venture into the vineyards at the vintage season--these are among the things of the young world that may be sought in Calabria.

Other things there are to take the mind back to the time when the coins the peasant turns up with his hoe were fresh from the mint at Locri, and when the mildest of philosophies was first--

... dimly taught
In old Crotona;

wild flowers as sweet as those that made Persephone forsake the plain of Enna; maidens as fair as the five beautiful virgins after whom Zeuxis painted his _Helen_; grasshoppers as loudly chirping as the "cricket" that saved the prize to Eunomus; and, high in the transparent air, the stars at which Pythagoras gazed straining his ears to catch their eternal harmonies.

[Footnote 1: In classical Greek, [Greek: machaira].]

FOLK SONGS OF PROVENCE.

On a day in the late autumn it happened to me to be standing at a window looking down into an untidy back street at Avignon. It was a way of getting through the hours between a busy morning and a busy evening--hours which did not seem inclined to go. If ever man be tempted to upbraid the slowness of the flight of time, it is surely in the vacant intervals of travel. The prospect at the window could hardly be called enlivening; by-and-by, however, the dulness of the outlook was lessened a little. The sounds of a powerful and not unmusical voice came along the street; people hastened to their doors, and in a minute or so a young lame man made his appearance. He was singing Provencal songs. Here was the last of the troubadours!

If it needed some imagination to see in this humble minstrel the representative of the courtly adepts in the gay science, still his relationship to them was not purely fanciful. The itinerant singer used to be the troubadour of the poor. No doubt his more illustrious brother grudged him the name. "I am astonished," said Giraud Riquier to Alfonso of Aragon, "that folks confound the troubadours with those ignorant and uncouth persons who, as soon as they can play some screeching instrument, go through the streets asking alms and singing before a vile rabble;" and Alfonso answered that in future the noble appellation of "joglaria" should be granted no longer to mountebanks who went about with dancing dogs, goats, monkeys, or puppets, imitating the song of birds, or for a meagre pittance singing before people of base extraction, but that they should be called "bufos," as in Lombardy. Giraud Riquier was not benevolently inclined when he embodied in verse his protest and the King's endorsement of it; yet his words now lend an ancient dignity to the class they were meant to bring into contempt. The lame young man at Avignon had no dancing dogs, nor did he mimic the song of birds--an art still practised with wonderful skill in Italy.[1] He helped out his entertainment by another device, one suitable to an age which reads; he sold printed songs, and he presented "letters." If you bought two sous' worth of songs you were entitled to a "letter." It has to be explained that "letters" form a kind of fortune-telling, very popular in Provence. A number of small scraps of paper are attached to a ring; you pull off one at hazard, and on it you find a full account of the fate reserved to you. Nothing more simple. As to the songs, loose sheets containing four or five of them are to be had for fifteen centimes. I have seen on the quay at Marseilles an open bookstall, where four thousand of these songs are advertised for sale. Some are in Provencal, some in French; many are interlarded with prose sentences, in which case they are called "cansounetto eme parla." Formerly the same style of composition bore the name of _cantefable_. The subjects chosen are comic, or sentimental, or patriotic, or, again, simply local. There is, for example, a dialogue between a proprietor and a lodger. "Workman, why are you always grumbling?" asks the "moussu," who speaks French, as do angels and upper-class people generally in Provencal songs. "If your old quarters are to be pulled down, a fine new one will be built instead. Ere long the town of Marseilles will become a paradise, and the universe will exclaim, 'What a marvel! Fine palaces replace miserable hovels!'" For all that, replies the workman in Provencal patois, the abandonment of his old quarter costs a pang to a child _deis Carmes_ (an old part of Marseilles, standing where the Greek town stood). It was full of attraction to him. There his father lived before him; there his friends had grown with him to manhood; there he had brought up his children, and lived content. The proprietor argues that it was far less clean than could be wished--there was too much insectivorous activity in it. He tells the workman that he can find a lodging, after all not very expensive, in some brand-new building outside the town; the railway will bring him to his work. Unconvinced, the workman returns to his refrain, "Regreterai toujour moun vieil Marsio." If the rhymes are bad, if the subject is prosaic, we have here at least the force of a fact pregnant with social danger. Is it only at Marseilles that the grand improvements of modern days mean, for the man who lives by his labour, the break-up of his home, the destruction of his household gods, the dispersion of all that sweetened and hallowed his poverty? The songs usually bear an author's name; but the authors of the original pieces, though they may enjoy a solid popularity in Provence, are rarely known to a wider fame. One of them, M. Marius Feraud, whose address I hold in my hands, will be happy to compose songs or romances for marriages, baptisms, and other such events, either in Provencal or in French, introducing any surname and Christian name indicated, and arranging the metre so as to suit the favourite tune of the person who orders the poem.

Street ditties occupy an intermediate place between literate and illiterate poesy. Once the repertory of the itinerant _bufo_ was drawn from a source which might be called popular without qualifying the term. With the pilgrim and the roving apprentice he was a chief agent in the diffusion of ballads. Even now he has a right to be remembered in any account of the songs of Provence; but, having given him mention, we must leave the streets to go to the well-heads of popular inspiration--the straggling village, the isolated farm, the cottage alone on the byeway.

When in the present century there was a revival of Provencal literature, after a suspension of some five hundred years, the poets who devoted their not mean gifts to this labour of love discerned, with true insight, that the only Provencal who was still thoroughly alive was the peasant. Through the long lapse of time in the progress of which Provence had lost its very name--becoming a thing of French departments--the peasant, it was discovered, had not changed much; acting on which discovery, the new Provencal school produced two works of a value that could not have been reached had it been attempted either to give an archaic dress to the ideas and interests of the modern world, or to galvanise the dry bones of mediaeval romance into a dubious animation. These works are _Mireio_ and _Margarido_. Mistral, with the idealising touch of the imaginative artist, paints the Provence of the valley of the Rhone, whilst Marius Trussy photographs the ruder and wilder Provence of mountain and torrent. Taken together, the two poems perfectly illustrate the _Wahrheit und Dichtung_ of the life of the people whose songs we have to study.

Since there is record of them the Provencals have danced and sung. They may be said to have furnished songs and dances to all France, and even to lands far beyond the border of France. A French critic relates how, when he was young, he went night after night to a certain theatre in Paris to see a dance performed by a company of English pantomimists. The dancers gradually stripped a staff, or may-pole, of its many-coloured ribbons, which became in their hands a sort of moving kaleidoscope. This, that he thought at the time to be an exclusively English invention, was the old Provencal dance of the _olivette_. In the Carnival season dances of an analogous kind are still performed, here and there; by bands of young men, who march in appropriate costume from place to place, led by their harlequin and by a player on the _galooube_, the little pipe which should be considered the national instrument of Provence. Harlequin improvises couplets in a sarcastic vein, and the crowd of spectators is not slow to apply each sally to some well-known person; whence it comes that Ash Wednesday carries a sense of relief to many worthy individuals. May brings with it more dances and milder songs. Young men plant a tree, with a nosegay atop, before their sweethearts' doors, and then go singing--

Lou premier jour de mai,
O Diou d'eime!
Quand tout se renouvelo
Rossignolet!
Quand tout se renouvelo.

The great business of the month is sheep-shearing, a labour celebrated in a special song. "When the month of May comes, the shearers come: they shear by night, they shear by day; for a month, and a fortnight, and three weeks they shear the wool of these white sheep." When the shearers go, the washers come; when the washers go, the carders come; then come the spinners, the weavers, the buyers, and the ragmen who gather up the bits. Across the nonsense of which it is composed the ditty reflects the old excitement caused in the lonely homesteads by the annual visit of the plyers of these several trades, who turned everything upside down and brought strange news of the world. At harvest there was, and there is yet, a great gathering at the larger farms. Troops of labourers assemble to do the needful work. Sometimes, after the evening meal, a curious song called the "Reapers' Grace" is sung before the men go to rest. It has two parts: the first is a variation on the first chapter of Genesis. Adam and _nouestro maire Evo_ are put into the Garden of Eden. Adam is forbidden to eat of the fruit of life; he eats thereof, and the day of his death is foretold him. He will be buried under a palm, a cypress, and an olive, and out of the wood of the olive the Cross will be made. The second part, sung to a quick, lively air, is an expression of goodwill to the master and the mistress of the farm, every verse ending, "Adorem devotoment Jesu eme Mario." A few years ago the harvest led on naturally to the vintage. It is not so now. The vines of Provence, excellent in themselves, though never turned to the same account as those of Burgundy or Bordeaux, have been almost completely ruined by the phylloxera. The Provencal was satisfied if his wine was good enough to suit his own taste and that of his neighbours; thus he had not laid by wealth to support him in the evil day that has come. "Is there no help?" I asked of a man of the poorer class. "Only rain, much rain, can do good," he answered, "and," he added, "we have not had a drop for four months." The national disaster has been borne with the finest fortitude, but in Provence at least there seems to be small faith in any method of grappling with it. The vines, they say, are spoilt by the attempt to submit them to an artificial deluge; so one after the other, the peasant roots them up, and tries to plant cabbages or what not. Three hundred years back the Provencals would have known what measures to take: the offending insect would have been prosecuted. Between 1545 and 1596 there was a run of these remarkable trials at Arles. In 1565 the Arlesiens asked for the expulsion of the grasshoppers. The case came before the Tribunal de l'Officialite, and Maitre Marin was assigned to the insects as counsel. He defended his clients with much zeal. Since the accused had been created, he argued that they were justified in eating what was necessary to them. The opposite counsel cited the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and sundry other animals mentioned in Scripture, as having incurred severe penalties. The grasshoppers got the worst of it, and were ordered to quit the territory, with a threat of anathematizatiom from the altar, to be repeated till the last of them had obeyed the sentence of the honourable court.

One night in the winter of 1819 there was a frost which, had it been a few times repeated, would have done as final mischief to the olives as the phylloxera has done to the vines. The terror of that night is remembered still. Corn, vine, and olive--these were the gifts of the Greek to Provence, and the third is the most precious of all. The olive has here an Eastern importance; the Provencals would see a living truth in the story of how the trees said unto it, "Reign thou over us." In the flowering season the slightest sharpness in the air sends half the rural population bare-foot upon a pilgrimage to the nearest St Briggitte or St Rossoline. The olive harvest is the supreme event of the year. It has its song too. In the warm days of St Martin's summer, says the late Damase Arbaud, some worker in the olive woods will begin to sing of a sudden--

Ai rescountrat ma mio--diluns.

It is a mere nonsense song respecting the meeting of a lover and his lass on every day of the week, she being each day on her way to buy provisions, and he giving her the invariable advice that she had better come back, because it is raining. Were it the rarest poetry the effect could be hardly more beautiful than it is. When the first voice has sung, "I met my love ..." ascending slowly from a low note, the whole group of olive-gatherers take it up, then the next, and again the next, till the country-side is made all musical by the swell and fall of sound sent forth from every grey coppice; and even long after the nearer singers have ceased, others unseen in the distance still raise the high-pitched call, "Come back, my love, come back! ... come back!"

On the first of November it is customary in Provence for families to meet and dine. The fruits of the earth are garnered, the year's business is over and done. The year has brought perhaps new faces into the family; very likely it has taken old faces away. Towards evening the bells begin to toll for the vigil of the feast of All Souls. Tears come into the eyes of the older guests, and the children are hurried off to bed. Why should they be present at this letting loose of grief? To induce them to retire with good grace, they are allowed to take with them what is left of the dessert--chestnuts, or grapes, or figs. The child puts a portion of his spoils at the bottom of his bed for the _armettes_: so are called the spirits of the dead who are still in a state of relation with the living, not being yet finally translated into their future abode. Children are told that if they are good the _armettes_ will kiss them this night; if they are naughty, they will scratch their little feet.