Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (1886) Part 21

It establishes unholy relations between the possessor and the spirit world which render him defenceless against spells and enchantments. A late chaplain to the forces in Mauritius told me that the witches, or rather wizards, who have it all their own way in that island, contrived, after a course of preparatory persecution, to surrept.i.tiously introduce into his house the little finger of a child.

He could not think what to do with it: at last he consulted a friend, a Catholic priest, who advised him to burn it, which was done. We all know "the finger of birth-strangled babe" in the witches' cauldron in _Macbeth_; but it is somewhat surprising to find a similar "charm for powerful trouble" in current use in a British colony.

A Corsican legend, reported by M. Frederic Ortoli, should have a place here. On the Day of the Dead a certain man had to go to Sartena to sell chestnuts. Overnight he filled his panniers, so as to be ready to start with the first gleam of daylight. The only thing left for him to do was to go and get his horse, which was out at pasture not far from the village. So he went to bed, but hardly had he lain down when a fearful storm broke over the house. Cries and curses echoed all round: "Cursed be thou! cursed be thy wife! cursed be thy children!" The wretched man grew cold with fear; he got quite close to his wife, who asked: "Did you put the water outside the window?" "Sangu di Cristu!"

cried the man, "I forgot!" He rose at once to put vessels filled with water on the balcony. The dead--whose vigil it was--were in fact come, and finding no water either to drink or to wash and purify their sins in, they had made a frightful noise and hurled maledictions against him who had forgotten their wants. The poor man went to bed again, but the storm continued, though the cursing and blaspheming had ceased.

Towards three in the morning the man wished to get up, "Stay," said his wife, "do not go."

"No, go I must."

"The weather is so bad, the wind so high; some mischief will come to you."

"Never mind; keep me no more."

And so saying the husband went out to find his horse. He had barely reached the crossway when by the path from Giufari, he saw, marching towards him, the _squadra d'Arrozza_--the Dead Battalion. Each dead man held a taper, and chanted the _Miserere_.

The poor peasant was as if petrified; his blood stood still in his veins, and he could not utter a word. Meanwhile the troop surrounded him, and he who was at its head offered him the taper he was carrying.

"Take hold!" he said, and the poor wretch took it.

Then the most dreadful groans and cries were heard. "Woe! woe! woe! Be accursed, be accursed, be accursed."

The villager soon came to himself, but oh! horrid sight! in his hand was the arm of a little child. It was that, and not a taper, that the dead had given him. He tried to get rid of it, but every effort proved fruitless. In despair, he went to the priest, and told him all about it. "Men should never take what spirits offer them," said the priest, "it is always a snare they set for us; but now that the mischief is done, let us see how best we can repair it."

"What must I do?"

"For three successive nights the Dead Battalion will come under your windows at the same hour as when you met it: some will cry, some will sob, others will curse you, and ask persistently for the little child's arm; the bells of all the churches will set to tolling the funeral knell, but have no fear. At first you must not throw them the arm--only on the third day may you get rid of it, and this is how.

Get ready a lot of hot ashes; then when the dead come and begin to cry and groan, throw them a part. That will make them furious; they will wish to attack your house--you will let them in, but when all the spectres are inside, suddenly throw at them what is left of the hot ashes with the child's arm along with it. The dead will take it away, and you will be saved."

Everything happened just as the priest said; for three nights cries, groans, and imprecations surrounded the man's house, while the bells tolled the death-knell. It was only by throwing hot ashes on the ghosts that he got rid of the child's arm. Not long after, he died.

"Woe be to him who forgets to give drink to the dead."

The Dead Battalion, or Confraternity of Ghosts, walk abroad dressed as penitents, with hoods over their heads. The solitary night traveller sees them from time to time, defiling down the mountain gorges; they invariably try to make him accept some object, not to be recognised in the dark--but beware, lest you accept! If some important person is about to die, they come out to receive his soul into their dread brotherhood.

Ghost stories are common in Corsica. What wilder tale could be desired than that of the girl, betrayed by her lover to wed a richer bride, who returns thrice, and lies down between man and wife--twice she vanishes at c.o.c.k-crow, the third time she clasps her betrayer in her chilly arms, saying, "Thou art mine, O beloved! mine thou wilt be forever, we part no more." While she speaks he breathes his last breath.

The dead, when a.s.sembled in numbers, and when not employed in rehearsing the business or calling of their former lives, are usually engaged either in dancing or in going through some sort of religious exercise. On this point there is a conformity of evidence. A spectre's ma.s.s is a very common superst.i.tion. On All Soul's Eve an old woman went to pray in the now ruined church of St Martin, at Bonn. Priests were performing the service, and there was a large congregation, but by and by the old woman became convinced that she was the only living mortal in the church. She wished to get away, but she could not; just as Ma.s.s was ending, however, her deceased husband whispered to her that now was the time to fly for her life. She ran to the door, but she stopped for one moment at the spot in the aisle where two of her children were buried, just to say, "Peace be unto them." The door swung open and closed after her: a bit of her cloak was shut in, so that she had to leave it behind. Soon after she sickened and died; the neighbours said it must be because a piece of her clothes had remained in the possession of the dead.

The dance of the dead sometimes takes the form not of an amus.e.m.e.nt but of a doom. One of the most curious instances of this is embodied in a Rhineland legend, which has the advantage of giving names, dates, and full particulars. In the 14th century, Freiherr von Metternich placed his daughter Ida in a convent on the island of Oberworth, in order to separate her from her lover, one Gerbert, to whom she was secretly betrothed. A year later the maiden lay sick in the nunnery, attended by an aged lay sister. "Alas!" she said, "I die unwed though a betrothed wife." "Heaven forefend!" cried her companion, "then you would be doomed to dance the death-dance." The old sister went on to explain that betrothed maidens who die without having either married or taken religious vows, are condemned to dance on a gra.s.sless spot in the middle of the island, there being but one chance of escape--the coming of a lover, no matter whether the original betrothed or another, with whom the whole company dances round and round till he dies; then the youngest of the ghosts makes him her own, and may henceforth rest in her grave. The old nun's gossip does not delay (possibly it hastens) the hapless Ida's departure, and Gerbert, who hears of her illness on the sh.o.r.es of the Boden See, arrives at Coblentz only to have tidings of her death. He rows over to Oberworth: it is midnight in midwinter. Under the moonlight dance the unwed brides, veiled and in flowing robes; Gerbert thinks he sees Ida amongst them. He joins in the dance; fast and furious it becomes, to the sound of a wild, unearthly music. At last the clock strikes, and the ghosts vanish--only one, as it goes, seems to stoop and kiss the youth, who sinks to the ground. There the gardener finds him on the morrow, and in spite of all the care bestowed upon him by the sisterhood he dies before sundown.

In China they are more practical. In the natural course of things the spirit of an engaged girl would certainly haunt her lover, but there is a way to prevent it, and that way he takes. He must go to the house where she died, step over the coffin containing her body, and carry home a pair of her shoes. Then he is safe.

A story may be added which comes from a Dutch source. The gravedigger happened to have a fever on All Saints' Day. "Is it not unlucky?" he said to a friend who came to see him, "I am ill, and must go to-night in the cold and snow to dig a grave." "Oh, I'll do that for you," said the gossip. "That's a little service." So it was agreed. The gossip took a spade and a pick-axe, and cheered himself with a gla.s.s at the alehouse; then, by half-past eleven, the work was done. As he was going away from the churchyard he saw a procession of white friars--they went round the close, each with a taper in his hand. When they pa.s.sed the gossip, they threw down the tapers, and the last flung him a big ball of wax with two wicks. The gossip laughed quite loudly: all this wax would sell for a pretty sum! He picked up the tapers and hid them under his bed. Next day was All Souls'. The gossip went to bed betimes, but he could not get to sleep, and as twelve struck he heard three knocks. He jumped up and opened the door--there stood all the white monks, only they had no tapers! The gossip fell back on his bed from fright, and the monks marched into the room and stood all round him. Then their white robes dropped off, and, only to think of it! they were all skeletons! But no skeleton was complete; one lacked an arm, another a leg, another a backbone, and one had no head.

Somehow the cloth in which the gossip had wrapped the wax came out from under the bed and fell open; instead of tapers it was full of bones. The skeletons now called out for their missing members: "Give me my rib," "Give me my backbone," and so on. The gossip gave back all the pieces, and put the skull on the right shoulders--it was what he had mistaken for a ball of wax. The moment the owner of the head had got it back he s.n.a.t.c.hed a violin which was hanging against the wall, and told the gossip to begin to play forthwith, he himself extending his arms in the right position to conduct the music. All the skeletons danced, making a fearful clatter, and the gossip dared not leave off fiddling till the morning came and the monks put on their clothes and went away. The gossip and his wife did not say one word of what had happened till their last hour, when they thought it wisest to tell their confessor.

Mr Benjamin Thorpe saw a link between the above legend, of which he gave a translation in his "Northern Mythology," and the Netherlandish proverb, "Let no one take a bone from the churchyard: the dead will torment him till he return it." Its general a.n.a.logy with our Shroud-theft does not admit of doubt, though the proceedings of the expropriator of wax lights are more easily accounted for than are those of the Shroud-thief. Peter of Provence either stole the winding-sheet out of sheer mischief, or he took it to enable him to see sights not lawfully visible to mortal eyes. In any case a well-worn shroud could scarcely enrich the thief, while the wax used for ecclesiastical candles was, and is still, a distinctly marketable commodity. A stranger who goes into a church at Florence in the dusk of the evening, when a funeral ceremony is in the course of performance, is surprised to see men and boys dodging the footsteps of the brethren of the _Misericordia_, and stooping at every turn to the pavement; if he asks what is the object of their peculiar antics, he will hear that it is to collect

The droppings of the wax to sell again.

The industry is time-honoured in Italy. At Naples in the last century, the wax-men flourished exceedingly by reason of a usage described by Henry Swinburne. Candidates for holy orders who had not money enough to pay the fees, were in the habit of letting themselves out to attend funerals, so that they might be able to lay by the sum needful. But as they were often indisposed to fulfil the duties thus undertaken, they dressed up the city vagrants in their clothes and sent them to pray and sing instead of them. These latter made their account out of the transaction by having a friend near, who held a paper bag, into which they made the tapers waste plenteously. Other devices for improving the trade were common at that date in the Neapolitan kingdom. Once, when an archbishop was to be buried, and four hundred genuine friars were in attendance, suddenly a mad bull was let loose amongst them, whereupon they dropped their wax lights, and the thieves, who had laid the plot, picked them up. At another great funeral, each a.s.sistant was respectfully asked for his taper by an individual dressed like a sacristan; the tapers were then extinguished and quietly carried away--only afterwards it was discovered that the supposed sacristans belonged to a gang of thieves. The Shroud-theft is a product of the peculiar fascination exercised by the human skeleton upon the mediaeval fancy. The part played by the skeleton in the early art and early fiction of the Christian aera is one of large importance; the horrible, the grotesque, the pathetic, the humorous--all are grouped round the bare remnants of humanity. The skeleton, figuring as Death, still looks at you from the _facades_ of the village churches in the north of Italy and the Trentino--sometimes alone, sometimes with other stray members of the _Danse Macabre_; carrying generally an inscription to this purport:

Giunge la morte plena de egualeza, Sole ve voglio e non vostra richeza.

Digna mi son de portar corona, E che signoresi ogni persona.

The _Danse Macabre_ itself is a subject which is well nigh exhaustless. The secret of its immense popularity can be read in the lines just quoted: it proclaimed equality. "Nous mourrons tous," said the French preacher--then, catching the eye of the king, he politely subst.i.tuted "_presque_ tous." Now there is no "presque" in the Dance of Death. Whether painted by Holbein's brush, or by that of any humble artist of the Italian valleys, the moral is the same: grand lady and milkmaid, monarch and herdsman, all have to go. Who shall fathom the grim comfort there was in this vivid, this highly intelligible showing forth of the indisputable fact? It was a foretaste of the declaration of the rights of man. Professor Pellegrini, who has added an instructive monograph to the literature of the _Danse Macabre_, mentions that on the way to the cemetery of Galliate a wall bears the guiding inscription: "Via al vero comunismo!"

The old custom of way-side ossuaries contributed no doubt towards keeping strongly before the people the symbol and image of the great King. I have often reflected on the effect, certainly if unconsciously felt, of the constant and unveiled presence of the dead. I remember once pa.s.sing one of the still standing chapels through the gratings of which may be seen neatly ranged rows of human bones, as I was descending late one night a mountain in Lombardy. The moon fell through the bars upon the village ancestors; one old man went by along the narrow way, and said gravely as he went the two words: "e tardi!" It was a scene which always comes back to me when I study the literature of the skeleton.

SONGS FOR THE RITE OF MAY.

One of the first of living painters has pointed to the old English custom of carrying about flowers on May Day as a sign that, in the Middle Ages, artistic sensibility and a pleasure in natural beauty were not dead among the common people of England. Nothing can be truer than this way of judging the observance of the Rite of May. Whatever might be the foolishness that it led to here and there, its origin lay always in pure satisfaction at the returned glory of the earth; in the wish to establish a link that could be seen and felt--if only that of holding a green bough or of wearing a daffodil crown--between the children of men and the new and beautiful growth of nature. The sentiment is the same everywhere, but the manner of its expression varies. In warmer lands it finds a vent long before the coming of May. March, in fact, rather than May, seems to have been chosen as the typical spring month in ancient Greece and Rome; and when we see the almond-trees blooming down towards Ponte Molle in the earliest week in February, even March strikes us as a little late for the beginning of the spring festival. A few icicles next morning on the Trevi, act, however, as a corrective to our ideas. In a famous pa.s.sage Ovid tells the reason why the Romans kept holiday on the first of March: "The ice being broken up, winter at last yields, and the snow melts away, conquered by the sun's gentle warmth; the leaves come back to the trees that were stripped by the cold, the sap-filled bud swells with the tender twig, and the fertile gra.s.s, that long lay unseen, finds hidden pa.s.sages and uplifts itself in the air. Now is the field fruitful, now is the time of the birth of cattle, now the bird prepares its house and home in the bough." (_Fastorum_, lib. iii.)

March day is still kept in Greece by bands of youngsters who go from house to house in the hopes of getting little gifts of fruit or cheese. They take with them a wooden swallow which they spin round to the song:

The swallow speeds her flight O'er the sea-foam white, And then a-singing she doth slake her wing.

"March, March, my delight, And February wan and wet, For all thy snow and rain thou yet Hast a perfume of the spring."

Or perhaps to the following variant, given by Mr Lewis Sergeant in _New Greece_:

She is here, she is here, The swallow that brings us the beautiful year; Open wide the door, We are children again, we are old no more.

These little swallow-songs are worth the attention of the Folk-Lore student, since they are of a greater antiquity than can be proved on written evidence in the case, so far as I know, of any other folk-song still current. More than two thousand years ago they existed in the form quoted from Theognis by Athenaeus as "an excellent song sung by the children of Rhodes."

The swallow comes! She comes, she brings Glad days and hours upon her wings.

See on her back Her plumes are black, But all below As white as snow.

Then from your well-stored house with haste, Bring sweet cakes of dainty taste, Bring a flagon full of wine, Wheaten meal bring, white and fine; And a platter load with cheese, Eggs and porridge add--for these Will the swallow not decline.

Now shall we go, or gifts receive!

Give, or ne'er your house we leave, Till we the door or lintel break, Or your little wife we take; She so light, small toil will make.

But whate'er ye bring us forth, Let the gift be one of worth.

Ope, ope your door, to greet the swallow then, For we are only boys, not bearded men.

In aegina the children's prattle runs: "March is come, sing, ye hills and ye flowers and little birds! Say, say, little swallow, where hast thou pa.s.sed? where hast thou halted?" And in Corfu: "Little swallow, my joyous one, joyous my swallow; thou that comest from the desert, what good things bringest thou? Health, joy, and red eggs." Yet another version of the swallow song deals in scant compliments to the month of March, which was welcomed so gladly at its first coming:

From the Black Sea the swallow comes, She o'er the waves has sped, And she has built herself a nest And resting there she said: "Thou February cold and wet, And snowy March and drear, Soft April heralds its approach, And soon it will be here.

The little birds begin to sing, Trees don their green array, Hens in the yard begin to cluck, And store of eggs to lay.

The herds their winter shelter leave For mountain-side and top; The goats begin to sport and skip, And early buds to crop; Beasts, birds, and men all give themselves To joy and merry heart, And ice and snow and northern winds Are melted and depart.

Foul February, snowy March, Fair April will not tarry.

Hence, February! March, begone!

Away the winter carry!"

When they leave off singing, the children cry "Pritz! Pritz!"

imitating the sound of the rapid flight of a bird. Longfellow translated a curious Stork-carol sung in spring-time by the Hungarian boys on the islands of the Danube:

Stork! Stork! Poor Stork!

Why is thy foot so b.l.o.o.d.y?

A Turkish boy hath torn it, Hungarian boy will heal it, With fiddle, fife, and drum.