ng to a
sphere of the marvellous; hence they are repeated and repeated with
almost religious servility, as any one may observe who will listen to
the stories and verses told and sung even nowadays in the Tuscan
country, or who will glance over the splendid collections of folklore
made in the last twenty years. Such things, must suffer alteration from
people who can neither read nor write, and who cannot be expected to
remember very clearly details which, in many cases, must have for them
only the vaguest meaning. The stories split in process of telling and
re-telling, and are completed with bits of other stories; details are
forgotten and have to be replaced; the same happens with poetry: songs
easily get jumbled together, their meaning is partially obliterated, and
has to be restored or, again, an attempt is made by bold men to adapt
some seemingly adaptable old song to a new occasion an old love ditty
seems fit to sing to a new sweetheart.--names, circumstances, and
details require arranging for this purpose; and hence more alterations.
Now, however much a peasant may enjoy the confused splendours of Court
life and of Courtly love, he cannot, with the best will in the world,
restore their details or colouring if they happen to become obliterated.
If he chance to forget that when the princess first met the wizard she
was riding forth on a snow-white jennet with a falcon on her glove,
there is nothing to prevent his describing her as walking through the
meadow in charge of a flock of geese; and similarly, should he happen to
forget that the Courtly lover compares the skin of his mistress to ivory
and her eyes to Cupid's torches, he is quite capable of filling up the
gap by saying that the girl is as white as a turnip and as bright-eyed
as a ferret. As with details of description and metaphors, so also with
the emotional and social parts of the business. The peasant has not been
brought up in the idea that the way to gain a woman's affection is to
stick her glove on a helmet and perform deeds of prowess closely
resembling those of Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena; so he attempts to
ingratiate himself by offering her presents of strawberries, figs,
buttons, hooks-and-eyes, and similar desirable things. Again, were the
peasant to pay attentions to a married woman, he would merely get (what
noble husbands were too well bred to dream of) a sound horsewhipping, or
perhaps even a sharp knife thrust in his stomach; so that he tak