Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (1886) Part 20

Then he who found his cerements gone, Ding dong, dong ding dong!

Then he who found his cerements gone, From out the graveyard gazed and signed His winding-sheet should be resigned.

But Peter every entrance closed, Ding dong, dong ding dong!

But Peter every entrance closed With locks and bolts, approach defies, Then looks at him--but keeps the prize!

He with his arm, and with his hand, Ding dong, dong ding dong!

He with his arm, and with his hand, Made signs in vain, two times or three, And then the belfry entered he.

A noise is mounting up the stair, Ding dong, dong ding dong!

A noise is mounting up the stair, The bolts are shattered, and the door Is burst and dashed upon the floor.

The Ringer trembled with dismay, Ding dong, dong ding dong!

The Ringer trembled with dismay, And still the bell of good St John For ever swung: barin, baron.

At the first stroke of Angelus, Ding dong, dong ding dong!

At the first stroke of Angelus The skeleton broke all his bones, Falling to earth upon the stones.

Peter upon his bed was laid, Ding dong, dong ding dong!

Peter upon his bed was laid, Confessed his sin, repenting sore, Lingered three days, then lived no more.

It will be seen that, in this ballad, which is locally called "Lou Jour des Mouerts," the officiating priest a.s.sumes red vestments in the morning, and changes them in the course of the day for black.

The vestments appropriate to the evening of All Saints' Day are still black (it being the Vigil of All Souls'), but in the morning the colour worn is white or gold. An explanation, however, is at hand. The feast of All Saints had its beginning in the dedication of the Roman Pantheon by Boniface IV., in the year 607, to _S. Maria ad Martyres_, and red ornaments were naturally chosen for a day set apart especially to the commemoration of martyrdom. These were only discarded when the feast came to have a more general character, and there is evidence of their retention here and there in French churches till a date as advanced as the fifteenth century. Thus, we gain incidentally some notion of the age of the song.

Not long after giving a first reading to the Provencal ballad of the Shroud-theft, I became convinced of its substantial ident.i.ty with a poem whose author holds quite another rank to that of the nameless folk-poet. Goethe's "Todten Tanz" tends less to edification than "Lou jour des Mouerts;" nor has it, I venture to think, an equal power.

We miss the pathetic picture of the companies of sad ghosts; these kneeling before the wayside crosses; these lingering by their children's thresholds; these listening to the prayers of the pious on their behalf; these others weeping, _en vesent que n'ant plus d'amics_. But the divergence of treatment cannot hide the fact that the two ballads are made out of one tale.

THE DANCE OF DEATH.

The watcher looks down in the dead of the night On graves in trim order gleaming; The moon steeps the world all around in her light-- 'Tis clear as if noon were beaming.

One grave gaped apart, then another began; Here forth steps a woman, and there steps a man, White winding-sheets trailing behind them.

On sport they determine, nor pause they for long, All feel for the measure advancing; The rich and the poor, the old and the young; But winding-sheets hinder the dancing.

Since sense of decorum no longer impedes, They hasten to shake themselves free of their weeds, And tombstones are quickly beshrouded.

Then legs kick about and are lifted in air, Strange gesture and antic repeating; The bones crack and rattle, and crash here and there, As if to keep time they were beating.

The sight fills the watcher with mirth 'stead of fear, And the sly one, the Tempter, speaks low in his ear: "Now go and a winding-sheet plunder!"

The hint he soon followed, the deed it was done, Then behind the church-door he sought shelter; The moon in her splendour unceasingly shone, And still dance the dead helter-skelter.

At last, one by one, they all cease from the play, And, wrapt in the winding-sheets, hasten away, Beneath the turf silently sinking.

One only still staggers and stumbles along, The grave edges groping and feeling; 'Tis no brother ghost who has done him the wrong; Now his scent shows the place of concealing.

The church-door he shakes, but his strength is represt; 'Tis well for the watcher the portals are blest By crosses resplendent protected.

His s.h.i.+rt he must have, upon this he is bent, No time has he now for reflection; Each sculpture of Gothic some holding has lent, He scales and he climbs each projection.

Dread vengeance o'ertakes him, 'tis up with the spy!

From arch unto arch draws the skeleton nigh, Like lengthy-legged horrible spider.

The watcher turns pale, and he trembles full sore, The shroud to return he beseeches; But a claw (it is done, he is living no more), A claw to the shroud barely reaches.

The moonlight grows faint; it strikes one by the clock; A thunderclap burst with a terrible shock; To earth falls the skeleton shattered.

It needed but small penetration to guess that Goethe had neither seen nor heard of the Provencal song. It seemed, therefore, certain that a version of the Shroud-theft must exist in Germany, or near it--an inference I found to be correct on consulting that excellent work, Goethe's _Gedichte erlautert von Heinrich Viehoff_ (Stuttgart, 1870).

So far as the t.i.tle and the incident of the dancing are concerned, Goethe apparently had recourse to a popular story given in Appel's _Book of Spectres_, where it is related how, when the guards of the tower looked out at midnight, they saw Master Willibert rise from his grave in the moons.h.i.+ne, seat himself on a high tombstone, and begin to perform on his pocket pipe. Then several other tombs opened, and the dead came forth and danced cheerily over the mounds of the graves. The white shrouds fluttered round their dried-up limbs, and their bones clattered and shook till the clock struck one, when each returned into his narrow house, and the piper put his pipe under his arm and followed their example. The part of the ballad which has to do directly with the Shroud-theft is based upon oral traditions collected by the poet during his sojourn at Teplitz, in Bohemia, in the summer of 1813. Viehoff has ascertained that there are also traces of the legend in Silesia, Moravia, and Tyrol. In these countries the story would seem to be oftenest told in prose; but Viehoff prints a rhymed rendering of the variant localised in Tyrol, where the events are supposed to have occurred at the village of Burgeis:

The twelve night strokes have ceased to sound, The watchman of Burgeis looks around, The country all in moonlight sleeps; Standing the belfry tower beneath The tombstones, with their wreaths of death, The wan moon's ghastly pallor steeps.

"Does the young mother in child-birth dead Rise in her shroud from her lonely bed, For the sake of the child she has left behind?

To mock them (they say) makes the dead ones grieve, Let's see if I cannot her work relieve, Or she no end to her toil may find."

So spake he, when something, with movement slow, Stirs in the deep-dug grave below, And in its trailing shroud comes out; And the little garments that infants have It hangs and stretches on gate and grave, On rail and trellis, the yard about.

The rest of the buried in sleep repose, That nothing of waking or trouble knows, For the woman the sleep of the grave is killed; Her leaden sleep, each midnight hour, Flees, and her limbs regain their power, And she hastes as to tend her new-born child.

All with rash spite the watchman views, And with cruel laughter the form pursues, As he leans from the belfrey's narrow height, And in sinful scorn on the tower rails Linen and sheets and bands he trails, Mocking her acts in the moon's wan light.

Lo, with swift steps, foreboding doom, From the churchyard's edge o'er grave and tomb The ghost to the tower wends its ways; And climbs and glides, ne'er fearing fall, Up by the ledges, the lofty wall, Fixing the sinner with fearful gaze.

The watcher grows pale, and with hasty hand, Tears from the tower the shrouds and bands; Vainly! That threatening grin draws nigh!

With a trembling hand he tolls the hour, And the skeleton down from the belfry-tower, Shattered and crumbling, falls from high.

This story overlaps the great cycle of popular belief which treats of the help given by a dead mother to her bereaved child. They say in Germany, when the sheets are ruffled in the bed of a motherless infant, that the mother has lain beside it and suckled it. Kindred superst.i.tions stretch through the world. The sin of the Burgeis watchman is that of heartless malice, but it stops short of actual robbery, which is perhaps the reason why he escapes with his life, having the presence of mind to toll forth the first hour of day, when--

Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, The extravagant and erring spirit hies To his confine.

The prose legends which bear upon one or another point in the Shroud-theft, are both numerous and important. Joseph Mace, a cabin-boy of Saint Cast, in Upper Brittany, related the following to the able collector of Breton folk-lore, M. Paul Sebillot. There was a young man who went to see a young girl; his parents begged him not to go again to her, but he replied: "Mind your own business and leave me to mind mine." One evening he invited two or three of his comrades to accompany him, and as they pa.s.sed by a stile they saw a woman standing there, dressed all in white. "I'll take off her coif," said the youth.

"No," said the others, "let her alone." But he went straight up to her and carried off her coif--there only remained the little skullcap underneath, but he did not see her face. He went with the others to his sweetheart, and showed her the coif. "Ah!" said he, "as I came here I met a woman all in white, and I carried off her coif." "Give me the coif," replied his sweetheart; "I will put it away in my wardrobe." Next evening he started again to see the girl, and on reaching the stile he saw a woman in white like the one of the day before, but this one had no head. "Dear me," he said to himself, "it is the same as yesterday; still I did not think I had pulled off her head." When he went in to his sweetheart, she said, "I wore to-day the coif you gave me; you can't think how nice I look in it!" "Give it back to me, I beg of you," said the young man. She gave it back, and when he got home he told his mother the whole story. "Ah, my poor lad," she said, "you have kept sorry company. I told you some ill would befall you." He went to bed, but in the night his mother heard sighs coming from the bed of her son. She woke her good man and said, "Listen; one would say someone was moaning." She went to her son's bed and found him bathed in sweat. "What is the matter with you?"

she asked. "Ah, my mother, I had a weight of more than three hundred pounds on my body; it stifled me, I could bear it no longer." Next day the youth went to confession, and he told all to the curate. "My boy,"

said the priest, "the person you saw was a woman who came from the grave to do penance; it was your dead sister." "What can I do?" asked the young man. "You must go and take her back her coif, and set it on the neck on the side to which it leans." "Ah! sir, I should never dare, I should die of fright!" Still he went that evening to the stile, where he saw the woman who was dressed in white and had no head; he set the coif just on the side the neck leant to; all at once a head showed itself inside it, and a voice said, "Ah! my brother, you hindered me from doing penance; to-morrow you will come and help me to finish it." The young man went back to bed, but next day he did not get up when the others did, and when they went to his bed he was dead.

At Saint Suliac a young man saw three young girls kneeling in the cemetery. He took the cap off one of them, saying that he would not give it back till she came to embrace him. Next day, instead of the cap he found a death's head. At midnight he carried it back, holding in his arms a new-born infant. The death's head became once more a cap, the woman disappeared, and the young man, thanks to the child, suffered no harm.

In a third Breton legend a child commits the theft, but without any consciousness of wrong-doing. A little girl picked up a small bone in a graveyard and took it away to amuse herself with it. In the evening, when she returned home, she heard a voice saying:

Give me back my bone!

Give me back my bone!

"What's that?" asked the mother.

"Perhaps it is because of a bone I picked up in the cemetery."

"Well, it must be given back."

The little girl opened the door and threw the bone into the court, but the voice went on saying:

Give me back my bone!

Give me back my bone!

"Maybe it is the bone of a dead man; take the candle, go into the court and give it back to him."

It is most unfortunate to possess a human bone, even by accident.