Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/342

 OBITUARY.

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The outward facts of Giuseppe Pitrè's life are soon told. He was seventeen when the great historical romance of the last century, the landing of Garibaldi at Marsala, brought new destinies to the "Isle of Fire." Pitrè took part in the revolution at Palermo which was crowned by the hero's entry, and he accompanied the deputation which went to Naples to present the Sicilian plebiscite to Victor Emmanuel. He had nothing more to do with politics till he was made a Senator in 1915. Politics, when not heroic, were not to his taste, but he did not shun the duties of a citizen in municipal affairs, in which his voice was always raised in favour of moral no less than of material progress; he was one of the first, for instance, to promote the Palermitan Society for the Protection of Animals. He had many opportunities of "arriving," as the phrase goes, especially after his devoted services during two cholera epidemics were rewarded by a medal, much to his surprise. But he chose a life of obscurity as a doctor in a poor quarter, giving his days to his profession, and his nights, or a great part of them, to his beloved studies.

One of the writers of the many biographical notices which have appeared in the Italian papers, said truly, "Pitrè became a folklorist as other people become great generals or saints—by vocation." Sprung from the acute and imaginative Sicilian people, acuteness and imagination joined to a "genius for taking pains" were the gifts which enabled him to accomplish his life's work. He succeeded in revealing the inmost soul of his race, not by a process of cold analysis, but by that other process which is summed up in the French proverb: "Aimer c'est comprendre." Severely critical in detecting the least trace of artificial manipulation in the material which came into his hands, he held that nothing that was genuine could be dismissed as unimportant; if you followed it to its roots, it contributed somehow to building