The genuine Provençal does not shrink from violence. Old inhabitants still tell tales of the savage brigandage of the Estérel, of the horrors of the Terreur blanche. Mild manners and social amenities have never been characteristic of fair Provence. Even now the peasant cannot disentangle his thoughts without a volley of oaths—harmless indeed, for the most part (except those which are borrowed from the franciots), but in sound terrific. Yet if it be true that the character of a nation is asserted in its songs, it must be owned that the songs of Provence speak favourably for the Provençal people. They say that they are a people who have a steady and abiding sympathy with honest men and virtuous women. They say further that rough and ruthless though they may be when their blood is stirred, yet have they a pitiful heart. The Provençal singer is slow to utterly condemn; he grasps the saving inconsistencies of human nature; he makes the murderer lay his victim "souto lou flour dou jaussemin:" under the white jessamine flower, cherished beyond all flowers in Provence, which has a strange passion for white things—white horses, white dogs, white sheep, white doves, and the fair white hand of woman. Many songs deal directly with almsgivings, the ritual of pity. To no part of the Bible is there more frequent reference than to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus; no neocatholic legend has been more gladly accepted than the story in which some tattered beggar proves to be Christ—a story, by the by, that holds in it the essence of the Christian faith. If a Greek saw a beautiful unknown youth playing his pipe beside some babbling stream, he believed him to be a god; the Christian of the early ages recognised Christ in each mendicant in loathsome rags, in each leper succoured at the risk of mortal infection.
The Provençal tongue is not a mixture (as is too often said) of Italian and French; nor is physical Provence a less fair Italy or a fairer France. A land wildly convulsed in its storms, mysteriously breathless in its calms; a garden here, a desert there; a land of translucent inlets and red porphyry hills; before all, a land of the illimitable grey of olive and limestone—this is Provence. Anyone finding himself of a sudden where the Provençal olives raise their dwarf heads with a weary look of eternity to the rainless heaven, would say that the dominant feature in the landscape was its exceeding seriousness. Sometimes on the coast the prevailing note changes from grey to blue; the blanched rocks catch the colour of the sea, and not the sky only, but dry fine air close around seems of a blueness so intense as to make the senses swim. Better suited to a Nature thus made up of crude discords and subtle harmonies is the old Provençal speech, howsoever corrupt, than the exquisite French of Parisian salons. But the language goes and the songs go too. Damase Arbaud relates how, when he went on a long journey to speak with a man reported to have cognisance of much traditional matter, he met, issuing from the house door, not the man, but his coffin. The fact is typical; the old order of things passes away: nouastei diou se'n van.
[Footnote 1:] I am told that the peasants of the country round Moscow have a natural gift for imitating birds, and that they intersperse the singing of their own sad songs with this sweet carolling.
THE WHITE PATERNOSTER.
In a paper published under the head of "Chaucer's Night Spell" in the Folk-lore Record (part i. p. 145), Mr Thoms drew attention to four lines spoken by the carpenter in Chaucer's Miller's Tale:
Lord Jhesu Crist, and seynte Benedyht
Blesse this hous from every wikked wight,
Fro nyghtes verray, the White Paternostre
When wonestow now, seynte Petres soster.