Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/416

 392 Reviews.

This was the original inspiration of the present most interesting volume.

The enthusiasm of M. Croze for the island which he thus learnt to know explains the detailed and careful information which he collected during a sojourn of three years, on what, so far as folk- lore was concerned, seems to have been almost maiden soil.

Some literature on the subject seems to exist already, but M. Croze considers it not merely imperfect, but even misleading. The writers had sought in the wrong direction, had not lived among the shepherds and peasants who are the obvious guardians of tradition, had been discouraged by the nature and language of the songs, and thought it well not to encourage the political opinions they expressed. M. Croze, as he puts it, "made himself a Corsican of the Corsicans"; he studied their dialects, of which it appears there are seven ; he mastered their music where alone it can be properly heard, in the open air. This music, of which he gives several examples, is the sort of plain-song with which all visitors to the Levant become familiar, depending on rhythm rather than on time, and, as a rule, unaccompanied. The songs include the usual varieties of cradle songs, laments, and wedding songs. Some of the most interesting are derived from the bandits, an element in the population which the author accepts seriously ; indeed some of these are themselves poets, and one is quoted whose defence in court was that he was not likely to have a fair hearing because he was dreaded as a master of satire. This was as late as 1886. A curious fact is that the sojourn of Napoleon in the island seems to have left no mark upon popular literature, while Paoli is recognized as a national hero, and celebrated in epic and lyric. Another curiosity is that folklore is little to be looked for in songs of national life, of religious occasions, or referring to special seasons, but rather in songs of death and heroism. There is not much agricultural life ; the country is so fertile that little care is needed, and that little must be rendered with knife and gun at hand. Even the dances have less that is characteristic than in other countries, and for the same reason. " Would it not be difficult to dance with the gun in hand, the companion from which the Corsican seldom separates him- self?" (p. 115).