In connection with this Dr. Pitrè recalls a striking story.

In 1866, after some years of collating Sicilian proverbs, he had obtained more than eight thousand examples, written on slips of paper. These were kept in a room in the neighborhood of the Church of San Francesco di Paola, at that time a suburb of Palermo. On the 15th of September of that year, the people of the city and its environs made one of their instinctive insurrections, without clearly knowing the reason why; and it was rumored that San Francesco di Paola was to be assaulted. The young Pitrè hastened to his home within the city gates, leaving his proverbs to their fate; which would have been that of all philosophy in times of war, if he had not soon returned to find them, and, aided by his brother, bear them away from danger, crawling on hands and knees in order to avoid the bullets which rained from the Porta Macqueda upon the few soldiers defending the Piazza Ruggiero Settimo. "The words still sound terrible to me," Dr. Pitrè records, "which, when we hazarded to cross that street, were shouted to us by an officer: Go on! If you fall, that is your own affair!'"

articles, of various nationalities, which were received by Dr. Pitrè too late to be included in the body of the work.

Next to a prolonged stay in the island, - which sojourn should moreover be fortunate, as was ours, in occasions to gain the friendliness of the people and have access to their daily life, there is no way to know one's Sicily so well as by the reading of the Biblioteca of Dr. Pitrè. It is an infinite comment upon the spirit and manners of the country. The first two volumes of the series are devoted to an essay upon Sicilian poetry, with nearly eleven hundred examples of the lyrics and legends of the people, which appears a logical starting-point for the study of the folk-lore of the island, when we remember that the origins of the Italian language were in the troubadour court of Frederic II. at Palermo.

His collection of Sicilian proverbs, afterward augmented to the number of thirteen thousand, and compared with nearly seventeen thousand from the other dialects of Italy, as well as with Latin and Biblical citations, forms part of the series of volumes of the Biblioteca delle Tradizioni Siciliane.

In 1882, Dr. Pitrè devised the scheme of publishing the Archivio per lo Studio delle Tradizioni Popolari, the pioneer of all the journals of folk-lore, which he still continues to edit with the aid of his longtime friend and colleague, Dr. SalomoneMarino. Of course the present Bibliografia indexes all the articles which have appeared in this periodical. A supplementary volume will record books and

cial idioms, provided these be adjudged useful and not ill constructed. What Hellenic forms, what Oriental color, are in the speech of Sicily and of Calabria! Compared to their eagle cries or nightingale throbs, this always under privilege of a pagan in presence of the worship of the Toscaneggiamento, the pure Tuscan locution, with its pretty redundancies and suave preciosities, sounds like the warbling of linnets in a bush!)

Italian poetry, then, began in Sicily; and there is a current song of the peasants that boasts, "Whoever wants poetry, let him come to Sicily, for she bears the banner of victory; of songs we have a hundred thousand.”

Because of the curious phenomenon of the coincident and equal development

of the cultured and of the popular poetry of Sicily, the task of separating them is extremely difficult; and many acute critics have erred therein, confused by the clever literary imitations of the songs of the people. Here Dr. Pitrè's intuition and tact have greatly availed him. From the lips of the peasants he has noted the genuine Sicilian lyrics, imposing in their abundance and variety: love and hatred, jealousy and reconciliation, parting and death, lullabies and the ingenuous and often fantastic invocations of religion, history, and legend, all find their large expression in poetry.

1

Not less plenteous and characteristic is the collection of popular tales which fill four volumes of the Biblioteca. They have been already somewhat illustrated for American readers by Professor Crane's charming book of Italian folktales, so that little need be said here, except to note the vivid imagination and the extraordinary spiritedness of their manner of telling. They touch the Arabian Nights on the one hand, and the legends of Hellas on the other, yet always preserving the popular tonality. Among them are various anecdotes familiar to laughers in all languages, and attributed to the chief wit of the time and place in which they happen to be related, be he Dante or Sydney Smith, or, in Sicily, the unconscious humorist, Giufà the simpleton.

A volume containing a study of the religious festivals and spectacles in Sicily throws light upon the bizarre superstitions, the touching devotion and faith, the survivals of the pagan spirit, and the natural and pure religion that mingle inextricably in the Sicilian credences and forms of worship.

In four other volumes are recorded the traditions of the secular existence; which, however, are constantly interwoven with the observances of the Church or

1 Italian Popular Tales. By T. F. Crane. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

with the whims of superstition. What a phantasmagoria of common things taking color from the most improbable fancies and practices! What strange ideas concerning omens and auguries, the intervention of the saints and of the souls in purgatory! The personnel of the Greek and Roman mythology survives to-day in Sicily, baptized or banned, as the case may be. The bountiful Demeter, mother of corn, is still adored as the Madonna del Carmine in her ancient fields of Enna (now Castrogiovanni), and the finest of the wheat is offered upon her altar. Certain saints have assumed the record, more or less revised and corrected, of gods and demigods. Sant' Agata wove and raveled the web of Penelope; the mysterious divinities of the household, the Lares of the Etruscans, perhaps the Deæ Matres of the Romans, appear as the often beneficent, always capricious Donne di Fuora; sylvan spirits haunt the nut-trees; the siren sings on the rocks of the coast; Fate and Death in person are to be met in the roads. Infinite is the imagination that gives to the Sicilian view of existence a constant illusion and a marvelous coloring. The real is always supplemented and rendered significant by the purely ideal, which causes the most surprising contrasts in sentiment and in practice. A very interesting task of Dr. Pitre's may be noted here, the commission given to him by the National Italian Exposition, held at Palermo in 1891–92, to prepare a Sicilian ethnological exhibit, which by his care was made to comprise several thousand objects belonging to the manners and customs of the people. Nothing was admitted which was not of traditional as well as of present use. Many of the articles loaned were, after the close of the exhibition, returned to their proprietors; but enough remained of those owned by or ceded to Dr. Pitrè to form an instructive and not meagre museum; which he had the goodness to show and explain to us. It is lodged

in a storeroom not far from the Porta

Carini, an unpretentious theatre, indeed, for the object lesson upon Sicily brilliantly pronounced there one morning by Dr. Pitrè to an audience very small in number, but in inverse proportion attentive and grateful. A pamphlet at this moment near our hand records the exhibit, illustrating with careful woodcuts the text concerning the costumes, the vehicles, the implements of agricultural and of domestic use, the amulets and charms, the popular art as applied to the painting of ex votos or to the scenes of the Carlovingian legend, the children's toys, and the curious forms of loaves and sweets suggested by fancy, or more often by devotional tradition.

Though the titles of Dr. Pitrè's separate publications upon folk-lore amount to no less than two hundred and twenty in number, these brochures and journalistic articles are mostly reprinted in the volumes of the Biblioteca, which, with the exhibition catalogue and the great Bibliografia, represents the career of the Sicilian patriot and man of letters, who has worked always without subsidies or patronage of any sort, spending in the cause of folk-lore the slender gains of medical practice (not a little of which is gratuitous among the poor). For many years he was hindered by ignorant and envious opposition; he was called a fool, and a waster of time and of ink, by persons who later have fully recanted their error, and testified their admiration of his constancy and wisdom. Still in the prime of his powers and in the full impetus of work, he enjoys his due reward in the popular esteem, and in the personally expressed appreciation on the part of the king and queen of Italy.

On the eastern coast of Sicily are the scenes of the studies of rustic life by the eminent novelists Signor G. Verga and Signor L. Capuana. These two resemble each other closely in their theory of art and in the main qualities of their

1 Don Candeloro e Ci. Di G. VERGA. Milano: Treves. 1894.

Verga's

work; so that it is less by means of generalities than by particulars that criticism can differentiate them. Their recent volumes of short stories Don Candeloro1 and Capuana's Le Paesane 2-were published very nearly at the same time. With all respect to the more famous author of Cavalleria Rusticana, it may be frankly said that just now Signor Capuana appears to be doing the better work. They both have great and well-recognized merits. We are not aware whether many American readers are acquainted with the writings of Capuana, but cisatlantic attention has been widely directed to Verga as represented by the libretto of Mascagni's volcanic opera, and by the humane and beautiful novel, the Malavoglia (translated under title of The House by the Medlar Tree). Both authors are professed realists; they have studied with much care the manners and locutions of their region, the province of Catania, even to the particulars and the prejudices of the "bell-towerism" of their respective

towns.

At their best they are very good indeed; so much so that it was easy to condone the rather dogmatic rhapsody with which the American edition of the Malavoglia was introduced by Mr. Howells, who perhaps had not read certain others of Signor Verga's writings; and he was quite right in admiring that one. For indeed the Malavoglia is a masterpiece in its honest sympathy with the humble fisher folk of Aci Trezza, showing the little village as a real microcosm.

In the more limited bounds of a short sketch, Signor Capuana is great when he tells about the "Tabbùtu," the coffin bought at a bargain, and adapted as a receptacle for nuts pending its funereal serviceableness. He appears a Sicilian Dickens who portrays the old Don Stellario and his maiden sister Donna Salvatrice, with their incredible niggardli

2 Le Paesane. Di L. CAPUANA. Catania: Niccolò Giannotta. 1894.

ness, their fear of thieves, their dull, warped affections, in the atmosphere of the smoke-stained, disordered, cobwebby house, two fingers thick with dust, and exhaling the musty odors of decay.

But the defects of the writings of Signor Verga and of Signor Capuana are not those of their qualities, except in so far as they are inseparable from the the ories of art rather consciously proposed to themselves by these novelists. Their fault, their very great fault, is literary absenteeism. They have acted upon the proverbial paradox that "the longest way round is the shortest way home: " they have gone to Paris in order to look at their Sicily; they have absorbed the studies made by M. Zola to the end of becoming acquainted with their own fellowtownsmen. They have not neglected to note Sicilian details of places, customs, superstitions, sayings; they have transferred types, often with admirable efficacy. But they have remained too far away to impart to their stories the odor of the Sicilian soil, the breath of antique romance which breathes there like the perfumes of the zùgara. (One likes the pretty Sicilian word, of Arab strain, which means inclusively the flowerage of the lemon, the orange, the citron, and all their golden kindred.)

Signor Verga and Signor Capuana, yet always asserting their aim to be that of interpreting the Sicilian character and manners, have adopted as their means a predetermined and emphatic tone of Gallicism, than which nothing could be more discordant with the temperament of Sicily. France, for causes easily understood, has never possessed the sympathies of the Sicilian people; instead, its name suggests to them ideas of distrust and enmity. It appears almost like a betrayal, this use of the French lorgnette of M. Zola, in the hands of Sicilian observers of their compatriots. This lens, let us be aware, -especially if we aspire to the large art of true realism in fiction, not being merely lovers of ignoble realities," as

Flaubert said, - this lens, then, has the perverse property of magnifying disproportionately all that is vicious, squalid, base; and of minifying to the vanishing point those ideal satisfactions of which, however poor or vague they may be, no conscious life is quite deprived.

The disciples of the school of M. Zola mistake the exceptions for the rule: they photograph monstrosities; they insist upon the sordid accidents of life as the whole and final meaning of the earth and of its creatures; they would deny to humanity that little gleam of inward poetry none the worse if this remain unformulated which illumines and comforts the personality of every one.

How much an artist is to be blamed, or, on the contrary, pitied, for "seeing ugly" is another question. It may be an affair partly of temperament, partly of a willful pose of pessimism. At all events, the opposite disposition of view is worth cultivating, especially for the sect of realists who like to declare themselves the ardent friends of the poor humanity whose nature they do not at all flatter in their art! In effect, they protest against injuries by means of insults. One distrusts, somehow, the philanthropists who court disillusion, and as eagerly announce it.

Perhaps for Signor Verga and Signor Capuana absence has been able to chill somewhat their appreciation of their fellow-countrymen. There is a sort of familiarity which, proverbially, breeds contempt; but there is also that familiarity which is impelled by good will toward its object, and whose result is intelligent sympathy. An important difference between the writings of these novelists and those of Dr. Pitrè is that for the former the Sicilian people are like so many models who stand before the artist, amid the technicalities or the blague which may be the atmosphere of his studio; while for Dr. Pitrè the proletariat is ignorant, unfortunate, sometimes criminal, but always to be dealt with fairly, studied in

a spirit of kindly philosophy, in order to make it comprehended by the Italy of which it is part.

In turning the pages of the present volumes, it is noticed that Signor Capuana has secured a tone of unity for his group of sketches by confining them to stories of peasant life. Among these emerge the Tabbùtu, already praised; Tre Colombe ed Una Fava, not too finely sifted, but veritable comedy; Lo Sciancato and Quacquarà, in which the pathos of a fixed idea is raised to a truly poetic height; Gli Scavi di Mastro Rocco, diggings inexhaustible of figurines of the goddess Ceres; and, most dramatic of all, the Assise, with its piteous heroine, half-unconscious cause of the tremendous passions that had whirled so tragically around her.

The sketches of Signor Verga are found to be less Sicilian, both in conception and in language, than those of Signor Capuana. Verga has absorbed

the French sentiment and idiom until his style has become to no slight degree denationalized. In adherence to his theories of realism he sometimes misses the point of his own story. Don Candeloro, for example, is the narrative of the career of a manager of a theatre of marionettes, a type peculiarly Sicilian, and essentially comic in the seriousness, any thing but ignoble, with which it takes itself. One could wish that Signor Verga had chosen to set forth the guild of marionette managers with the dignified selfesteem, the solemn artistic convictions, the improbable ideals of chivalry, which are the badge of all their tribe (and in which, indeed, Don Candeloro is not al

together lacking), instead of making prominent the vulgar escapades of the prodigal daughter Violante.

Paggio Fernando is another sketch of life behind the scenes of the minor drama, and is very good in its provincial atmosphere. La Serata della Diva is a sophisticated impression of the more ambitious coulisses; also Il Tramonto di Venere has nothing to do in this galère of rustic types. Signor Verga depicts with considerable truth and humor various figures from the populations of the convents, in these days becoming extinct in Italy. Epopea Spicciola is a grim fragment of war as seen by an old peasant, who cannot give himself a reason for the carnage and the disorders, ignorant of the purpose of the conflict, viewing it all divested of illusion, only an inhuman horror and pity.

There are many admirable qualities and brilliant passages in these two volumes of Sicilian stories; but it is not possible to commend them as a whole, or to indorse them as a just characterization of the people of Sicily. If only Signor Verga and Signor Capuana would decide to unite themselves with Dr. Pitrè in filial and sincere studies of their mother country, honoring her in her traditions and in her language, and this ought not to be difficult for either of them, surely not for the author of the Malavoglia, — what characteristic, illuminating, sympathetic fiction they could create! It is such a dreary business, that of certain realists who advertise themselves as chiropodists of the feet of clay of the image of humanity, never raising their eyes to regard its head of gold.