Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/343

 Rh the fabric, as varied, as eloquent, as one of those wonderful Sicilian churches where every stone speaks of history. In Pitre's twenty-five volumes of Sicilian folklore the soul of Sicily will live for ever. The Archivio delle Tradizioni Popolari which he edited with his friend Salomone Marino (who died a few days before his own death) became the pivot of folklore researches all over Italy, and may be said to have prevented them from dying out after the first enthusiasm aroused by the works of Tigri, Nigra, and other pioneers. Its publication was continued for thirty years in the face of all sorts of difficulties. Pitrè could not have done what he did for Sicilian folklore without a knowledge of the whole subject, which astonished even Professor Child, who was one of his warmest admirers. Added to this, he had great stores of general erudition acquired one hardly knows how, for he lived far away from museums and libraries, but he was helped by two things which, especially the last, are too often absent: a strong memory and a mental habit of scientific accuracy. What was most essential of all to his work, was his familiarity with every byway, every hidden corner in Sicilian history, every germ which went to form the people in whom the original stock was mixed with such extraordinarily various elements, Greek and Arab, Norman and French and Spanish, all of which left their traces in the bodies and minds, the passions and instincts of the Sicilian race—and in its folklore.

For a long while, though appreciated abroad, Pitrè was far from being a prophet in his own country. His fellow-citizens regarded him, if I am not mistaken, as slightly mad. Why, after a hard day's work in going his rounds among his patients, should he sit up half the night in writing down and setting in order those "childish things?" Why half ruin himself to get them printed? In Pitrè's case the gains of a doctor, that are not large at Palermo, were made the smaller by his refusal to take fees from those who could ill afford to give them. But whether mad or sane, the people of Palermo always loved him. It was the love that is never denied to him that loves. Of love Pitrè gave large draughts to his people, and in return they opened their inmost soul to him. He had an actual effluence of goodness. He could not bring himself to do what his conscience did not approve: thus, in spite of the exhortations of some eminent German professors, he would