Part 25 Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (1886)

Part 25

Once in the gloaming, Fortune met me here; Fair did she seem, and Love was on me laid, Her hair was raised, as were it half a sphere, Flowered on her breast a rose that cannot fade.

Then said I, "Fortune, thou without a peer, What rule shall tell the measure of thine aid?"

"The pathway of the moon through all the year, The channel of the exhaustless sea," she said.

II.

One night, the while I slept, drew Fortune near, At once I loved, such beauty she displayed; A crescent moon did o'er her brows appear, And in her hand a wheel that never stayed.

Then said I to her, "O my mistress dear, Grant all my wishes, mine if thou wilt aid."

But she turned from me with dark sullen cheer And "Never!" as she turned, was all she said.

III.

I saw my Fortune midst the sounding sea Sit weeping on a rocky height and steep, Said I to her, "Fortune, how is't with thee?"

"I cannot help thee, child" (so answered she), "I cannot help thee more--so must I weep."

How sweet were those her tears, how sweet, ah me!

Even the fishes wept within the deep.

IV.

One day did Fortune call me to her side, "What are the things," she asked, "that thou hast done?"

Then answered I, "Dear mistress, I have tried To grave them upon marble, every one."

"Ah! maddest of the mad!" so she replied, "Better hadst writ on sand than wrought in stone; He who to marble should his love confide, Loves when he loves till all his wits are gone."

There where I lay asleep came Fortune in, She came the while I slept and bid me wake, "What dost thou now?" she said, "companion mine?

What dost thou now? Wilt thou then love forsake?

Arise," she said, "and take this violin, And play till every stone thereat shall wake."

I was asleep when Fortune came to me, And bid me rise, and led me unto thee!

These songs come from different villages; from Caballino and Morciano in Calabria, from Corigliano and Calimera in Terra d'Otranto; the two last are in the Greek dialect spoken in the latter district. There are a great many more, in all of which the same sweet and serious type is preserved; but the above quintet suffices to give a notion of this modern Magna-Graecian Idyll of Fortune.

[Footnote 1: In a Breton variant the "Bon Dieu" is the first to offer himself as sponsor, but is refused by the peasant, "Because you are not just; you slay the honest bread-winner and the mother whose children can scarce run alone, and you let folks live who never brought aught but shame and sorrow on their kindred." Death is accepted, "Because at least you take the rich as well as the poor, the young as well as the old."

The German tale of "G.o.dfather Death" begins in the same way, but ends rather differently, as it is the G.o.dson and not the father who is shown the many candles, and who vainly requests Death to give him a new one instead of his own which is nearly burnt out. A poem by Hans Sachs (1553) contains reference to the legend, of which there are also Provencal and Hungarian versions.]

[Footnote 2: Laura Gonzenbach was the daughter of the Swiss Consul at Messina, where she was born. At an early age she developed uncommon gifts, and she was hardly twenty when she made her collection of Sicilian stories, almost exclusively gathered from a young servant-girl who did not know how to write or read. It was with great difficulty that a publisher was found who would bring out the book. Fraulein Gonzenbach married Colonel La Racine, a Piedmontese officer, and died five or six years ago, being still quite young. A relation of hers, from whom I have these particulars, was much surprised to hear that the _Sicilianische Marchen_ is widely known as one of the best works of its cla.s.s. It is somewhat singular that the preservation of Italian folk-tales should have been so substantially aided by two ladies not of Italian origin: Fraulein Gonzenbach and Miss R. H. Busk, author of "The Folk-lore of Rome."]

FOLK-LULLABIES.

... A nurse's song Of lullaby, to bring her babe asleep.

Infancy is a great mystery. We know that we each have gone over that stage in human life, though even this much is not always quite easy to realise. But what else do we know about it? Something by observation, something by intuition; by experience hardly anything at all. We have as much personal acquaintance with a lake-dwelling or stone age infant as with our proper selves at the time when we were pa.s.sing through the "avatar" of babyhood. The recollections of our earliest years are at most only as the confused remembrance of a morning dream, which at one end fades into the unconsciousness of sleep, whilst at the other it mingles with the realities of awaking. And yet, as a fact, we did not sleep through all the dawn of our life, nor were we unconscious; only we were different from what we now are; the term "thinking animal" did not then fit us so well. We were less reasonable and less material.

Babies have a way of looking at you that makes you half suspect that they belong to a separate order of beings. You speculate as to whether they have not invisible wings, which drop off afterwards as do the birth wings of the young ant. There is one thing, however, in which the baby is very human, very manlike. Of all newborn creatures he is the least happy. You may sometimes see a little child crying softly to himself with a look of world woe on his face that is positively appalling. Perhaps human existence, like a new pair of shoes, is very uncomfortable till one gets accustomed to it. Anyhow the child, being for some reason or reasons exceedingly disposed to vex its heart, needs much soothing. In one highly civilised country a good many mothers are in the habit of going to the nearest druggist for the means to tranquillise their offspring, with the result that these latter are not unfrequently rescued from the sea of sorrows in the most final and expeditious way. In less advanced states of society another expedient has been resorted to from time immemorial--to wit, the cradle song.

Babies show an early appreciation of rhythm. They rejoice in measured noise, whether it takes the form of words, music, or the jingle of a bunch of keys. In the way of poetry I am afraid they must be admitted to have a perverse preference for what goes by the name of sing-song.

It will be a long time before the infantine public are brought round to Walt Whitman's views on versification. For the rest, they are not very severe critics. The small ancient Roman asked for nothing better than the song of his nurse--

Lalla, lalla, lalla, Aut dormi, aut lacta.

This two-line lullaby const.i.tutes one of the few but sufficing proofs which have come down to us of the existence among the people of old Rome of a sort of folk verse not by any means resembling the Latin cla.s.sics, but bearing a considerable likeness to the _canti popolari_ of the modern Italian peasant. It may be said parenthetically that the study of dialect tends altogether to the conviction that there are country people now living in Italy to whom, rather than to Cicero, we should go if we want to know what style of speech was in use among the humbler subjects of the Caesars. The lettered language of the cultivated cla.s.ses changes; the spoken tongue of the uneducated remains the same; or, if it too undergoes a process of change, the rate at which it moves is to the other what the pace of a tortoise is to the speed of an express train. About eight hundred years ago a handful of Lombards went to Sicily, where they still preserve the Lombard idiom. The Ober-Engadiner could hold converse with his remote ancestors who took refuge in the Alps three or four centuries before Christ; the Aragonese colony at Alghero, in Sardinia, yet discourses in Catalan; the Roumanian language still contains terms and expressions which, though dissimilar to both Latin and standard Italian, find their a.n.a.logues in the dialects of those eastward-facing "Latin plains" whence, in all probability, the people of Roumania sprang. But we must return to our lullabies.

There exists another Latin cradle song, not indeed springing from cla.s.sical times, but which, were popular tradition to be trusted, would have an origin greatly more ill.u.s.trious than that of the laconic effusion of the Roman nurse. It is composed in the person of the Virgin Mary, and was, in bygone days, believed to have been actually sung by her. Authorities differ as to its real age, some insisting that the peculiar structure of the verse was unknown before the 12th century. There is, however, good reason to think that the idea of composing lullabies for the Virgin belongs to an early period.

Dormi, fili, dormi! mater Cantat unigenito: Dormi puer, dormi! pater Nato clamat parvulo: Millies tibi laudes canimus Mille, mille, millies.

Lectum stravi tibi soli, Dormi, nate bellule!

Stravi lectum foeno molli: Dormi mi animule.