Italian Popular Tales [pp. 325-326]

Italian Popular Tales.
ITALIAN POPULAR TALES.1
A RECENT important contribution to the
accumulating stores of folk-lore is a collec tion of I/alian Popfilar Tales, translated by
Professor Crane, of Cornell University, from
several recent Italian collections, and most
of them entirely unknown in English. They
weretaken down by the Italian collectors from
the lips of the people, literary versions being
avoided. Professor Crane's book is intended
primarily for students, and fully annotated
with reference to their needs; yet, from its
very subject matter it is interesting to the general reader. There is an introduction giving
the history of the recovery of the stories into
literature or historic record, and a full bibli ography of them; and there is some analysis
of their contents, their peculiarities, and their
relation to the stories of other peoples. The
author calls attention to the habit of beginning and ending with set forms, like our
own "Once upon a time there was," and
"They lived happy ever afterward." The
forms are various: "There was one time,"
"It is related there was one time," "It is related and related again, to your worships,"
"This very fine story," are Sicilian beginnings; but our own form is the ordinary one.
The ending is apt to express some discontented sense of contrast, such as "They remnained happy and contented-and we are
without anything"; or the Tuscan ending,
"They stayed and enjoyed it, and gave nothing to me." Sometimes, however, it is some
form like "Story written, story told; tell
yours, for mine is told." These formulas
are usually in a rhyming couplet. Professor
Crane classifies his material as "Fairy Tales,"
"Stories of Oriental Origin," "Legends and
Ghost Stories," "Nursery Tales," and "Stories and Jests." The fairy tales are almost
without exception variants of which we have
versions. The most wide-spread class is the
1 Italian Popular Tales. Translated by T. F Crane.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. For sale in
San Francisco by Chilion Beach.
one in which a wife endeavors to behold
the face of her husband, who comes to her
only at night, and expiates her indiscretion
by separation, journeys, and tasks —obvious ly "the popular form of the classic myth of
Cupid and Psyche." Derived from this is
a class in which the husband is the indis creet and curious one; then the one in which
the husband is a monster, is separated from
his wife by her sisters' envy or her own dis obedience, and finally regains human form.
Our own version is, of course, "Beauty and
the Beast." It is' no surprise now to stu dents, but still seems amazing to those who
are new to the subject, to read, taken down
from the lips of some Sicilian peasant, who
never read a page in his life, nor talked with
an Englishman, a tale told himn by his grand mother, who heard it from hers, and which
has never been in print before, yet whose resemblances to ourfamiliar taleof "Beautyand
the Beast" are greater than its divergencies
The mediaeval commerce of Italy with the
East brought thither a number of versions
of Oriental stories; and others came, by way
of France, from the Saracens in Spain. This
class of stories did not, like the others, origi
nate very far back, and owe their entire transmission to oral telling and retelling; they
existed in Arabic written collections of stories before they were known in Europe, and
some of them made their way thither very
early in translations. Some of them, however, must have come by the mouths of travelers, for stories from the "Arabian Nights"
were current in Europe before the earliest
translation. Since their introduction, these
stories have become naturalized as folk-lore,
being handed down from generation to generation without the least knowledge that they
exist anywhere in a book. Of course they go
through great transformations in this process
but "Aladdin," and "The Forty Thieves,"
and "The Hunchback," and others, are
still recognizable in the tales the Italian peas
1886.]
325'