two of the best Corsican poets were natives of Calvi; a sacred poet, Giovanni Baptista Agnese, born in the year 1611, and Vincenzo Giubega, who died in the year 1800, thirty-nine years old, a judge of the tribunal at Ajaccio. Giubega is called, not without justice, the Anacreon of Corsica. I read a few pretty amatory poems of his, which are remarkable for grace and feeling. There are but few of his poems in existence, because he burnt the majority himself. As Sophocles says the memory is the queen of things, and as the Muse of Poetry is a daughter of Mnemosyne, I will here mention another Corsican of Calvi who once enjoyed a world-wide fame, Giulio Guidi, who was the wonder of Padua, in the year 1581, for his ill-fated memory. He was able to repeat 36,000 names after once hearing! He was called Guidi della gran memoria. He produced nothing; his memory had killed his creative powers. Pico of Mirandola, who lived before him, did produce, but he died young. Thus it is with the precious gift of memory as with all other gifts; it is a curse when the gods give too much of it. Cor I have once already mentioned the name Salvatore Viale. This poet, a native of Bastia, where he still lives at an advanced age, is the most fruitful poet that the island has produced. He has written La Dinomachia, a comic poem in the style of the Secchia rapita of Tassoni, translated Anacreon, and some things of Byron. So Byron is actually in Corsica! Viale has deserved excellently well of his country through his untiring scientific activity, and also for his elucidation of Corsican customs. sica has also a translator of Horace, Giuseppe Ottaviano Savelli, a friend of Alfieri, of whom I have already spoken. I might mention many other names of Corsican poets, such as the songpoet Biadelli, of Bastia, who died in the year 1822; but their songs will not penetrate far into the world. The finest that Corsica has produced, are and always have been the songs of the people, and their greatest poet, affliction. CHAPTER VII. CORSICAN DIRGES. THE character of the Corsican dirges is to be understood from the nation's rites with regard to the dead, which are very ancient. With a people among whom death moves more in the character of a destroying angel than elsewhere, presenting himself constantly in his most bloody forms, the dead must have a more striking ceremonial than elsewhere. There is something dark and striking in the fact, that the most favourite poetry of the Corsicans is the poetry of death, and that they compose and sing almost exclusively in the intoxication of grief. Most of these rare flowers of popular poetry have germinated in blood. When death has entered a house, the relations stand round the bed of the deceased and tell their beads, and then raise a cry of lamentation (grido). The body is now laid on a table called the tola, against the wall: his head lies on a pillow, and wears a cap. To prevent the head and features losing their expression, a cloth or ribbon is bound round the neck and chin, and tied fast on the crown under the cap. If it is a young girl, they put a white grave-shift upon her, and deck her with flowers; if a married woman, she has generally a party-coloured gown, and an old woman a black one. A man lies out in a graveshirt and Phrygian cap, and may then resemble an Etruscan corpse, such as I have found depicted in the Etruscan Museum of the Vatican, surrounded by mourners. They watch and lament beside the tola often the whole night through, and a fire is kept burning. But the grand lamentation begins on the early morning before the funeral, when the body is laid in the coffin and before the funeral friars come to lift the bier. To the funeral come friends and relatives from all the neighbouring villages: and this assembling throng is called the corteo or escort, or the scirrata, a word that sounds like the German schaar (host, band), but whose origin can hardly be discovered. A woman, who is always the poetess or singer, which is here identical, leads a chorus of the female lamenters. So they say in Corsica, andare alla scirrata, where the women go in procession to the house of mourning; if the deceased has been slain they say, andare alla gridata, to go to the howling. As soon as the chorus enters the house, the lamenters greet the mourner, whether she be the widow, mother, or sister of the dead, and they lean their heads together for about half a minute; then a woman of the bereaved family invites the assembled women to lamentation. They make a circle, the cerchio or caracollo, round the tola, and perform their evolutions round the deceased, howling the while, expanding the circle or closing it again, and always with a cry of lamentation, and the wildest tokens of grief. These pantomimes are not alike every where. In many places they are suppressed by the process of time, in others they are mitigated; but among the mountains far in the interior, especially in the Niolo, they exist in their old heathen force, resembling the funeral dances of Sardinia. Their dramatic vividness and furious ecstasy is agitating and awful. The dancing, lamenting, and singing are performed by women only, who, with hair dishevelled and shed wildly over their breasts, with eyes that dart fire, with black mantles flying, execute evolutions, utter a howl of lamentation, strike the flat of their hands together, beat their breasts, tear their hair, weep, sob, cast themselves down by the tola, bestrew themselves with dust:-then suddenly the howls cease, and these women now sit still like Sibyls on the floor of the chamber of mourning, breathing deep, and resting themselves. Terrible is the contrast between the wild funeral dance, with its howling laments, and the dead himself, who lies stiff and cold upon the bier, and yet rules this turmoil of Furies. On the mountains the female lamenters even tear their faces till the blood comes, because, according to an old heathen fancy, blood is pleasant to the dead, and appeases the shades. This is called raspa or scalfitto. The nature of these lamenters has something of the demoniacal, and must appear fearful when their dance and lament are for a murdered man. They then become perfect Furies—the snaky-haired avengers of murder that Eschylus painted them. They swing themselves round in horror-inspiring evolutions, with hair loosened, striking their hands against one another, howling, and singing revenge; and so powerful is often the effect of their song upon the murderer who hears it, that he is seized with all the awfulness of horror and the pangs of conscience, and betrays himself. I read of a murderer who, shrouded in the hooded robe of the funeral friars, had the boldness to hold the funeral taper at the bier of him whom he had helped to murder, and who, when he heard the song of revenge strike up, began to quake so violently that the taper fell. from his hand. In criminal trials, the declaration of a witness that a person has trembled during the lamentations is held as a proof of guilt. Yea, many a man in this island resembles the Orestes of Eschylus, and the prophetess might say of him,* "On the navel-stone behold a man And stretch'd before him, an unearthly host A deathlike stillness reigns in the chamber. Naught is heard but the deep breathing of the crouching lamenters, who sit covered up by their cloaks, with the head dropped upon the breast-expressing the deepest grief in the old Hellenic fashion, as the artist represents his head as covered whose grief is above measure great. Nature herself has given to man only two ways of expressing the highest grief-the outcry of bursting feeling, in which the vital power seems to unfetter all its energies, and deep silence, in which the vital power dies away in impotency. Suddenly one woman springs up from the circle of women, and strikes up a song to the deceased, like an inspired seer. She delivers the song in recitative, strophe by strophe, and every strophe ends with a Wo! wo! wo! which is repeated by the chorus of lamenters, in the manner of the Greek tragedies. singer is also chorus-leader, and either has composed or improvised the song. In Sardinia she is generally the youngest girl present. Generally these songs-panegyrics, or songs of revenge, in which the praise of the dead alternates with lamentation for him, or exhortation to revenge-are improvised upon the spot. The What an extraordinary contrast to European civilisation we have in a country which has preserved in life these scenes, which would seem to be parted from our state of society by a chasm of three thousand years! Behold the dead man on the bier, and the *Esch. Eum. 40.-Blackie's translation. lamenters crouching on the ground; a young girl rises, and with countenance glowing with inspiration improvises like Miriam or Sappho, composing verses full of unapproachable gracefulness and the boldest imagery; and her ecstatic soul flows on inexhaustibly in rhyme, with dithyrambs which melodiously tell the deepest and the highest of human grief. After every strophe the chorus howls out Deh deh! deh! I know not if a scene is to be found any where in life, which combines the awful with the lovely into such deep poetry as this, in which a girl sings before a bier whatever her maiden soul inspires her at the moment to say, and in which the chorus of furies accompanies her song with howls. And again there is another girl who, with eyes flashing fire and glowing cheeks, rises as an Erinys over her murdered brother, who lies in his armour on the tola, demanding revenge in verses, the wild and bloody language of which even a man's mouth could not have made more awful. In this country, woman, though low and subservient, holds her court of justice; and before the tribunal in which her plaint is made the guilty is cited to appear. So the chorus of maids sings in the Libation-pourers of schylus :*. "Son, the strong-jaw'd funeral fire Burns not the mind in the smoky pyre; Who through darkness hunts the track." Some of these seers, whom I would compare with the German Velleda, made themselves renowned for their inspirations; so in the last century Mariola delle Piazzole, the leader of funeral choruses, whose improvisations were every where in request, and so Clorinda Franceschi of the Casinca. In Sardinia the lamenters are called piagnoni or prefiche, in Corsica voceratrici * Esch. Choeph. 322.-Blackie's translation. Τέκνον, φρόνημα τοῦ θανόντος οὐ δαμάζει Φαίνει δ ̓ ὕστερον οργάς. Οτοτύζεται δ' ὁ θνήσκων, ̓Αναφαίνεται δ' ὁ βλάπτων. Τὸ πᾶν, ἀμφιλαφὴς ταραχθείς. |