A certain Giovanni Maria Turrini, in a collection of odds and ends entitled “Selva di Curiositá,” Bologna, 1674, declares that “the peony, if patients be touched with it, cures them of epilepsy, which results from the influence of the sun, to which this plant is subject, the same effect resulting from coral.” Here we also have the restoring to life or reason, as if from death; that is to say, from a fit or swoon. Truly, the ancients did not know botany as we do, but there was for them far more poetry and wonder in flowers.
Some time after all the foregoing was written I found—truly to my great astonishment—that in a novel by Xavier Montepin there is a student named Virgil, who has a mistress named Pivoine—the title of the book—which word is in Latin Pæonia. This, according to the kind of criticism which is now extensively current, would settle the whole business, and determine “the undoubted original.” I believe it to be a mere chance coincidence of names—strange, indeed, but nothing more. For, in the first place, I am sure that my collector or her informants are about as likely to have read the Sohar, or “Book of Light,” or Hegel’s “Cyclopædia,” as any novel whatever. But the great part of what is curious in my narrative is not that Virgil loves Pæonia, but that Pæonia-Minerva depresses people to, or raises them from, death by means of flowers. Very clearly in the Italian tale, as in others, Virgil is a physician, and Pæonia is his counterpart, of all which there is no hint in the French novel.
So it once befell that in a very strange Italian tale of Galatea, the Spirit of the White Pebble, there was a narrative agreeing in names with one in a romance by Eugene Sue. But on carefully examining the account of the Virgins of Sen, given by Pomponius Mela (Edition 1526, p. 34, for which purpose I expressly purchased the book), I found that the legend, as known to Maddalena, and also to an old woman whom she did not know, contained the main element as given by Mela, which is not to be found in the French story, namely, the transmigration of the soul or metamorphosis into different forms. The Latin writer states that such enchantresses are called Gallicenas. Now, there was at one time a great infusion of Celtic blood into Northern Italy, and if it was in correspondence with the Gauls, it may possibly be that the story of Sen and Galatea of the White Stone passed all round.
It may be observed, however, that there may linger among French peasants some legend of Virgil and Pivoine, or Pæonia, which Montepin had picked up, and should this be so, doubtless there is some folklorist who can confirm it. This is far more likely than that my authority took the names from a French novel.
The Spirit of Mirth in this story has really nothing in common with Momus, who was, in fact, the God of Sneering, or captious, petty criticism of the kind which objects to great and grand or beautiful subjects, because of small defects. The Virgilian spirit is that of the minor rural gods, or the daughters of the dawn, who were all smiling sub-forms of the laughing Venus. These play the principal part in the mythology of the Tuscan peasantry. This spirit differs from that of Momus as an angel from a devil.
Psellus held that there was a soul in all statues.
That the God of Mirth, or Laughter, is in this tale also a gay young cavalier in Florentine society is paralleled or outdone by Chaucer in the “Manciple’s Tale,” in which Apollo is described as follows:
“Whan Phebus dwelled here in erth adoun,
As oldé bookes maken mentioun,
He was the mosté lusty bacheler
Of all this world, and eke the best archer. . . .
Thereto he was the semelieste man
That is or was sithen the world began.”
That is, this “flour of bachelerie as well in fredom as in chivalrie” was simply human while here below, having “a wif which that he loved more than his lif.” Chaucer wrote this evidently with conscious humour of the naïve paradox by which those of his age could thus confuse gods and common mortals, even as a Red Indian vaguely confuses the great beaver or wolf with a human being. It is a curious reflection that, at the present day in Italy, there are believers in the old gods who regard the latter in the same way, as half divine and half like other folk.