[Footnote 1:] In classical Greek, μάχαιρα.
FOLK SONGS OF PROVENCE.
On a day in the late autumn it happened to me to be standing at a window looking down into an untidy back street at Avignon. It was a way of getting through the hours between a busy morning and a busy evening—hours which did not seem inclined to go. If ever man be tempted to upbraid the slowness of the flight of time, it is surely in the vacant intervals of travel. The prospect at the window could hardly be called enlivening; by-and-by, however, the dulness of the outlook was lessened a little. The sounds of a powerful and not unmusical voice came along the street; people hastened to their doors, and in a minute or so a young lame man made his appearance. He was singing Provençal songs. Here was the last of the troubadours!
If it needed some imagination to see in this humble minstrel the representative of the courtly adepts in the gay science, still his relationship to them was not purely fanciful. The itinerant singer used to be the troubadour of the poor. No doubt his more illustrious brother grudged him the name. "I am astonished," said Giraud Riquier to Alfonso of Aragon, "that folks confound the troubadours with those ignorant and uncouth persons who, as soon as they can play some screeching instrument, go through the streets asking alms and singing before a vile rabble;" and Alfonso answered that in future the noble appellation of "joglaria" should be granted no longer to mountebanks who went about with dancing dogs, goats, monkeys, or puppets, imitating the song of birds, or for a meagre pittance singing before people of base extraction, but that they should be called "bufos," as in Lombardy. Giraud Riquier was not benevolently inclined when he embodied in verse his protest and the King's endorsement of it; yet his words now lend an ancient dignity to the class they were meant to bring into contempt. The lame young man at Avignon had no dancing dogs, nor did he mimic the song of birds—an art still practised with wonderful skill in Italy.[1] He helped out his entertainment by another device, one suitable to an age which reads; he sold printed songs, and he presented "letters." If you bought two sous' worth of songs you were entitled to a "letter." It has to be explained that "letters" form a kind of fortune-telling, very popular in Provence. A number of small scraps of paper are attached to a ring; you pull off one at hazard, and on it you find a full account of the fate reserved to you. Nothing more simple. As to the songs, loose sheets containing four or five of them are to be had for fifteen centimes. I have seen on the quay at Marseilles an open bookstall, where four thousand of these songs are advertised for sale. Some are in Provençal, some in French; many are interlarded with prose sentences, in which case they are called "cansounetto émé parla." Formerly the same style of composition bore the name of cantefable. The subjects chosen are comic, or sentimental, or patriotic, or, again, simply local. There is, for example, a dialogue between a proprietor and a lodger. "Workman, why are you always grumbling?" asks the "moussu," who speaks French, as do angels and upper-class people generally in Provençal songs. "If your old quarters are to be pulled down, a fine new one will be built instead. Ere long the town of Marseilles will become a paradise, and the universe will exclaim, 'What a marvel! Fine palaces replace miserable hovels!'" For all that, replies the workman in Provençal patois, the abandonment of his old quarter costs a pang to a child deis Carmes (an old part of Marseilles, standing where the Greek town stood). It was full of attraction to him. There his father lived before him; there his friends had grown with him to manhood; there he had brought up his children, and lived content. The proprietor argues that it was far less clean than could be wished—there was too much insectivorous activity in it. He tells the workman that he can find a lodging, after all not very expensive, in some brand-new building outside the town; the railway will bring him to his work. Unconvinced, the workman returns to his refrain, "Regreterai toujour moun vieil Marsïo." If the rhymes are bad, if the subject is prosaic, we have here at least the force of a fact pregnant with social danger. Is it only at Marseilles that the grand improvements of modern days mean, for the man who lives by his labour, the break-up of his home, the destruction of his household gods, the dispersion of all that sweetened and hallowed his poverty? The songs usually bear an author's name; but the authors of the original pieces, though they may enjoy a solid popularity in Provence, are rarely known to a wider fame. One of them, M. Marius Féraud, whose address I hold in my hands, will be happy to compose songs or romances for marriages, baptisms, and other such events, either in Provençal or in French, introducing any surname and Christian name indicated, and arranging the metre so as to suit the favourite tune of the person who orders the poem.
Street ditties occupy an intermediate place between literate and illiterate poesy. Once the repertory of the itinerant bufo was drawn from a source which might be called popular without qualifying the term. With the pilgrim and the roving apprentice he was a chief agent in the diffusion of ballads. Even now he has a right to be remembered in any account of the songs of Provence; but, having given him mention, we must leave the streets to go to the well-heads of popular inspiration—the straggling village, the isolated farm, the cottage alone on the byeway.
When in the present century there was a revival of Provençal literature, after a suspension of some five hundred years, the poets who devoted their not mean gifts to this labour of love discerned, with true insight, that the only Provençal who was still thoroughly alive was the peasant. Through the long lapse of time in the progress of which Provence had lost its very name—becoming a thing of French departments—the peasant, it was discovered, had not changed much; acting on which discovery, the new Provençal school produced two works of a value that could not have been reached had it been attempted either to give an archaic dress to the ideas and interests of the modern world, or to galvanise the dry bones of mediæval romance into a dubious animation. These works are Mirèio and Margarido. Mistral, with the idealising touch of the imaginative artist, paints the Provence of the valley of the Rhone, whilst Marius Trussy photographs the ruder and wilder Provence of mountain and torrent. Taken together, the two poems perfectly illustrate the Wahrheit und Dichtung of the life of the people whose songs we have to study.
Since there is record of them the Provençals have danced and sung. They may be said to have furnished songs and dances to all France, and even to lands far beyond the border of France. A French critic relates how, when he was young, he went night after night to a certain theatre in Paris to see a dance performed by a company of English pantomimists. The dancers gradually stripped a staff, or may-pole, of its many-coloured ribbons, which became in their hands a sort of moving kaleidoscope. This, that he thought at the time to be an exclusively English invention, was the old Provençal dance of the olivette. In the Carnival season dances of an analogous kind are still performed, here and there; by bands of young men, who march in appropriate costume from place to place, led by their harlequin and by a player on the galooubé, the little pipe which should be considered the national instrument of Provence. Harlequin improvises couplets in a sarcastic vein, and the crowd of spectators is not slow to apply each sally to some well-known person; whence it comes that Ash Wednesday carries a sense of relief to many worthy individuals. May brings with it more dances and milder songs. Young men plant a tree, with a nosegay atop, before their sweethearts' doors, and then go singing—
Lou premier jour de mai,
O Diou d'eime!