the old superstitions lived, but under a new disguise. The religions
of Gaul, of Germany, of Great Britain, of the Scandinavian and the
Slavonic lands, the mythologies of Greece and of Rome, lived on in a
crowd of legends, which modern erudition delights in collecting and
tracing back to their sources. These legends, more numerous in the
lands occupied by Teutonic peoples, are almost always of Pagan stuff,
embroidered over with Christian ideas. Not only so, but the very names
of the old gods remain; they no longer remain as the names of gods held
high in heaven, but of devils cast down to earth. With us the Deuce
signifies Satan, and is in common usage in the mouth as an oath, but he
takes his name from the Dusii, the night genii of the Kelts. Old Nick
again is Hnikr, an honourable designation of Wuotan, the supreme god of
the Anglo-Saxons, who gives his name to Wednesday.
So, also, we use the word Bogie, Bogart, as a designation of an evil
spirit, and Bug is the name of a night-tormenting insect. It is
well-known that in an old English Bible the verse in Ps. xci. runs,
“He shall deliver thee from the Bug that walketh in darkness,” that
is, from the Hobgoblin. The Norsemen and Danes brought this name with
them to England. Bog is in Slavonic God. Biel-bog is the White God,
Czerni-bog is the Black God of the Slavs.
The Northmen had formerly come across Slavs on the Continent, and they,
the worshippers of Odin, scorned the gods of the Slavs as devils, and
called all unclean spirits--Bogs or Bogies. And now, also, the Supreme
God of the Norsemen, Hnikr, has become our Old Nick.
This being so, it will be seen at once how the votaries of the
dethroned god came to be regarded as devil-worshippers, and how
that in time, when the old religion with its myths and theogony was
long dead, those who still clung to an hysterical religion, with
love-feasts, dances, and ecstasies, came to believe themselves to be
devil-worshippers.
The Reformation caused such a disturbance of religious ideas, incited
to such revolt against all that had been held sacred in the past, that
it is only natural that those whose religion had been one of pure
spiritualism, of ecstasy and hysteric raving, should believe that their
day had come. But after the first explosion, the Reformers set to work
to consolidate their several systems into dogmatic shape; they drew up
Institutes, Confessions, Articles, and agreed only in this, to put down
Mysticism as severely as they had dealt with Catholicism. And they had
good cause to come to this resolution, for on all sides the Mystics
were breaking forth into the wildest excesses. In Münster they had set
up a Kingdom of Salem, from which every element of common decency was
expelled, and which knew no law save the revelations accorded to the
prophets.
The “spiritually minded,” that is to say, the unintelligent,
hysterically disposed, did not at all relish the form given to belief,
and the discipline of Divine service framed by the Reformers. They
founded sects on all sides following the old lines of the Markosites
and Cathari.
Bishop Barlow, one of those who helped to draw up the English
Prayer-book, was himself an eye-witness of the proceedings of some of
these sects, and he describes them in words we do not care to quote.[30]
England, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, were overrun with these
sectaries, with their love-feasts, raptures, and license. It was the
old story again of the revolt of the spiritual faculty against the
reason, a story that will be told over and over again as long as man
lives on the earth, and religion is dogmatic and exercises moral
restraint.
One essential condition was always present in order to produce its
effect in these sectarian meetings. The intellect must remain inactive,
the emotions must be excited, and the sentiment of vague fear must
be specially appealed to and powerfully wrought upon. It was this
condition which determined the success alike of the revivalist meetings
of the Mystics, and the revelries of the witches. This condition it was
that provoked the orgies at Corinth among St. Paul’s converts, and the
scenes in the assemblies of the Carpocratites. It was this condition
which roused the attendants on the assemblies of the Goeti, of the
Dionysian revellers, and of the Schamans and the medicine men.
These meetings always took place at night. There is reason to believe
that during each day there is a normal alteration in the functions
of the intellectual and emotional parts of the brain; that during
the sunlight the perceptive faculties and the reflective are chiefly
active; and that these, reposing during the night, permit the
feelings to be mostly dominant; and it is well-known that general and
simultaneous activity, both of the intellect and of the emotions, is
unnatural; that thought and feeling are antagonistic to each other.
Prayer meetings and witches’ assemblies alike began after dark and were
often continued till the small hours of the morning. Ignorant men and
women, and the youth of both sexes, were crowded together to partake
in some mysterious spiritual rite. The quiescence of the observant
and reflective faculties was facilitated, the imagination goaded
and stimulated until it conjured up conceptions of hell and visions
of devils with a vividness approaching reality; then came cries,
tremblings, fallings on the ground, and raptures.
During Wesley’s preaching at Bristol, “one after another,” we are told,
“sank to the earth.” Men and women by “scores were sometimes strewed on
the ground at once, insensible as dead men.” During a Methodist revival
in Cornwall, 4000 people, it was computed, fell into convulsions.
“They remained during this condition so abstracted from every earthly
thought, that they stayed two and sometimes three days and nights
together in the chapels, agitated at the time by spasmodic movements,
and taking neither repose nor refreshment. The symptoms followed
each other usually as follows:--A sense of faintness and oppression,
shrieks as if in the agony of death, convulsions of the muscles of
the eyelids--the eyes being fixed and staring--and of the muscles of
the neck, trunk, and arms, sobbing respiration, tremors, and general
agitation, and all sorts of strange gestures. When the exhaustion came
on, patients usually fainted and remained in a stiff and motionless
state until their recovery.”[31]
Now let the reader turn back to the account of the Tungu Schaman, at
the beginning of this article. Is it not obvious that we have here
precisely the same phenomenon?
While at Newcastle, Wesley investigated the physical effects that
resulted from his preaching. “He found, first, that all persons who
had been thus affected were in perfect health, and had not before been
subject to convulsions of any kind.” Secondly, that they were affected
suddenly. Thirdly, that they usually fell on the ground, lost their
strength, and were afflicted with spasms. “Some thought a great weight
lay upon them, some said they were quite choked, and found it difficult
to breathe.” Wesley believed these phenomena were of diabolic origin.
One section of Methodists, in Cornwall and Wales, was seized with a
dancing or jumping mania. Because David danced before the ark, these
fanatics concluded that jumping and dancing must form an acceptable
form of service. The practice became epidemic. Each devotee would
caper for hours, till, completely exhausted, he or she fell insensible.
During a great Presbyterian revival, which passed over Kentucky and
Tennessee in the beginning of this century, persons swooned away and
lay as dead on the ground for a quarter of an hour; this “falling
exercise” was succeeded by that of the “jerks.” A Backwoods preacher
who has left us his valuable biography, says:--
“A new exercise broke out among us, called the _jerks_, which was
overwhelming in its effects upon the bodies and minds of the people.
No matter whether they were saints or sinners, they would be taken
under a warm song or sermon, and seized with a convulsive jerking all
over, which they could not by any possibility avoid, and the more they
resisted, the more they jerked. I have seen more than five hundred
persons jerking at one time in my large congregations. Most usually
persons taken with the jerks would rise up and dance. Some would run,
but could not get away. To see those proud young gentlemen, and young
ladies dressed in their silks, jewelry, and prunella, from top to toe
take the jerks, would often excite my risibilities. The first jerk
or so, you would see their fine bonnets, caps, and combs fly; and so
sudden would be the jerking of the head that their long, loose hair
would crack almost as loud as a waggoner’s whip.”[32]
Another revivalist in Kentucky says; “While preaching, we have after
a smooth and gentle course of expression suddenly changed our voice
and language, expressing something awful and alarming, and instantly
some dozen or twenty persons, or more, would simultaneously be jerked
forward, where we were sitting, and with a suppressed noise once or
twice, somewhat like the barking of a dog. One young woman went round
like a top, we think, at least fifty times in a minute, and continued
without interruption for at least an hour, and one young woman danced
in her pew for twenty or thirty minutes with her eyes shut and her
countenance calm, and then fell into convulsions; some ran with amazing
swiftness, some imitated the motion of playing on a fiddle, others
barked like dogs.”
Surely we have here a scene precisely identical in character with
that described by Dr. Hecker as having broke out in Germany in 1374.
He says: “It was called the dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on
account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterised. The
dancers, appearing to have lost all control over their senses,
continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together
in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state
of exhaustion.... While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being
insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted
by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they
shrieked out.”[33]
It has happened in some cases, especially in that of women, that they
have tried to tear off their clothes, and this explains the account
given by those who had attended the Witches’ Sabbath, that many
present were stark naked. We know that some of the wilder congregations
of the Hussites developed their fanaticism in this form. So did the
Anabaptists in Amsterdam.
We will now take a case or two from the Roman Communion. Hysteria, as
we might suppose, would be likely to manifest itself in the monastic
orders. St. Joseph of Cupertino was one Christmas Eve in church, when
the pifferari began to play their carols. Joseph, who was a Franciscan
friar, carried away by religious emotion, began to dance in the midst
of the choir, and then, with a howl, he took a flying leap and lighted
on the high altar. He was then vested in a gorgeous cope, conducting
the service. The carollers were amazed, no less than the friars; and
their amazement was increased when they saw him jump from the altar on
to the pulpit ledge, fifteen feet above the ground. One day he went
into the convent choir of the Sisters of St. Clara, at Cupertino. When
the nuns began to sing, Joseph, unable to restrain his emotion, ran
across the chancel, caught the old confessor of the convent in his
arms, and danced with him before the altar. Then he span himself about
like a teetotum, with the confessor clinging to his hands, and his legs
flying out horizontally.
St. Christina, The Wonderful, a Belgian virgin, used to go into fits
when her religious emotions were worked upon, put her head between her
feet, bending her spine backwards, and roll round the room or church
like a ball.
St. Peter of Alcantara in his fervours used to strip himself naked. He
would jump, curled up like a ball, high into the air, and in and out at
the church door. “What was going on in his soul all this while,” says
his biographer, “it is not given to mortals to declare.”
The numerous cases of possession in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were nothing but hysterical disorders, the symptoms precisely
those of Methodist revivals, Witches’ Sabbaths, Paulinian orgies, and
Schamanism.
It is worthy of note that the witches were always a prey to extreme
exhaustion after they had attended their Sabbaths, a feature that is
invariable after spiritual raptures.
In Sweden a religious revival took place in 1842-3, which swept over
the country, affecting great numbers of children. Boys and girls,
only eight years of age, were inspired to preach the Gospel and go
about in bands singing hymns. In the province of Skaraburg, where the
epidemic was least extensive, it numbered, at least, 3000 victims. The
patients had “quaking fits,” dropped down, became unconscious, had
trances, saw visions, and preached when in an ecstatic state. Not two
centuries before, a similar epidemic had passed over Sweden, affecting
the children, but it then took a slightly different complexion: it
was an epidemic of witchcraft. In 1669-70, the children declared that
they were transported nightly to the Blockula, and their condition
afterwards was one of complete prostration.
A Commission was appointed to examine into the matter, public prayers
and humiliations were ordered, and a great number of women and
children were executed for their guilt in having attended these
meetings on the Blockula.
Into the details of the Witch-Sabbaths I have not entered; it is
unnecessary. My object has been to show that in all likelihood there
were such gatherings, that they took the place of assemblies of Pagan
origin, which were analogous to the assemblies of the spiritual Pauline
heretics in the early Church; that modern revivals are not derived
from these, but are analogous exhibitions, and that all are alike
manifestations of hysteria, superinduced by a love of the sensational,
a vague credulity, and an absolute stagnation of the intellectual
powers.
We are in the age of compulsory education; in our Board Schools
religious teaching is reduced to the thinnest gruel, absolutely
tasteless, and wholly unnutritious. We are straining, perhaps
over-straining, the mental faculties, and making no provision for
the co-ordinate development of the spiritual powers in the soul. The
result will be, not that we shall kill the spiritual faculty, but
that we shall drive it in--and it will break forth inevitably in
extraordinary and outrageous manifestations. It must do so--just as
a check to the free action of the pores superinduces fever. We shall
have a sporadic fever of wild mysticism bursting forth, in the place
of healthy religion. The spiritual element in man will rebel against
compression, will insist on not being ignored. We are now suffering
from the nuisance of the Salvation Army. But the Salvation Army is
a comparatively innocuous form of reaction, or is comparatively
innocuous just at present. We do not know but that it may herald
other and worse forms of spiritual excitement, or that it may not
itself develop in an Antinomian direction. We have no guarantee. There
is a law in these manifestations that is constant. They all begin
in ecstatic raptures and with a high moral aim, and all inevitably
fall into laxity if not license in morality. The moral sense becomes
inevitably blunted. It ceases to speak and work when man takes his
ecstatic thrills and visions--which are veritable hallucinations--as
the guide of his conduct, in place of the still small voice of
conscience, instructed by the written, revealed law.
IX.
Broadside Ballads.
“I love a ballad in print, a’ life,” said Mopsa, in the “Winter’s
Tale,” and the clown confessed to the same liking. “I love a ballad
but even too well; if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very
pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.”
[Illustration: _Fig. 37._--BALLAD SINGER, FROM A BROADSIDE.]
In 1653, Dorothy Osborne tells Sir William Temple that she has received
from her brother a ballad “much older than my ‘Lord of Lorne,’ and she
sends it on to him.” Would that she had told us more about it. And then
she writes, “The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and
about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by
the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and
sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their
voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of,
and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as
innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing
to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that
they are so.”
Walton in his “Complete Angler,” printed in the very same year in which
Dorothy Osborne wrote to her lover of the singing peasant girls, says:
“I entered into the next field, and a second pleasure entertained me:
’twas a handsome milk-maid, that had cast away all care, and sung like
a nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it; ’twas
that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years
ago; and the milk-maid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by
Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger dayes.”
We know what the song was, “Come, live with me and be my love.”
The mother says to Walton, “If you will but speak the word, I will
make you a good sillabub, and then you may sit down in a hay-cock and
eat it, and Maudlin shall sit by and sing you the good old song of the
Hunting in Chevy Chase, or some other good ballad, for she hath good
store of them: Maudlin hath a notable memory.”
But ballad-singing was not confined to milk-maids and clowns, for
Walton proposes to spend a pleasant evening with his brother, Peter,
and his friends, “to tell tales, or sing ballads, or make a catch, or
find some harmless sport to content us.”
It is a somewhat sad fact--fact it is, that the ballad is at its last
gasp among us. It has gone through several phases, and it has now
reached the last, when it disappears altogether.
The ballad was anciently a story set to music, and music to which
the feet could move in dance. The _ballet_ is the dance to which the
_ballad_ was sung. It was not always danced to, but it always could be
danced to. It was of great length, but not too long for light hearts
or light feet on a threshing-floor. The ballad was accommodated to the
exigencies of the dance, by being given a burden, or _bourdon_, a drone
that was sung by the young men, when no bagpipe was there. This burden
appears in numerous ballads, and has usually no reference to the story
told by the singers, and when printed is set in italics. In the scene
in the “Winter’s Tale,” already quoted, the servant alludes to these
burdens, “He has the prettiest love-songs for maids--with such delicate
burdens of ‘dildos and fadings.’”
Thus:--
“There was a lady in the North country,
_Lay the bent to the bonny broom_,
And she had lovely daughters three,
_Fa, la la la; fa, la la la ra re_.”
or:--
“There were three sisters fair and bright,
_Jennifer, Gentle, and Rosemaree_,
And they three loved one valiant knight,
_As the doo (dove) flies over the mulberry tree_.”
In the first edition of Playford’s “Dancing Master,” in 1650-1,
nearly every air can be proved to have been that of a song or ballad
of earlier date than the book. Of these only a few have the words
preserved, and we cannot be sure that the words of those we have got
were the original, as ballads were continually being written afresh.
It was not till about 1690 that tunes were composed expressly for
dancing, and in the later editions of the “Dancing Master,” 1715 and
1728, about half the airs given are old ballad tunes. The other half,
newly composed dance tunes, had no traditional words set to them, and
none were composed to fit them.
In the old English romance of “Tom of Reading,” printed before 1600, we
have an instance of the way in which a ballad came to be turned into
a dance. Tom Dove was an Exeter clothier passionately fond of music.
William of Worcester loved wine, Sutton of Salisbury loved merry tales,
Simon of Southampton “got him into the kitchen and to the pottage and
then to a venison pasty.”
Now a ballad was composed relative to Tom of Exeter:--
“Welcome to town, Tom Dove, Tom Dove,
The merriest man alive.
Thy company still we love, we love,
God grant thee well to thrive.
And never will we depart from thee
For better or worse, my joy!
For thou shalt still have our good-will,
God’s blessing on my sweet boy.”
And the author adds, “This song went up and down through the whole
country, and at length became a dance among the common sort.”
The old heroic ballad was a _geste_, and the singer was a gestour.
Chaucer speaks of--
“Jestours that tellen tales
Both of seeping and of game.”
The tales of game were stories calculated to provoke laughter, in which
very often little respect was paid to decency; sometimes, however,
they were satirical. These tales of game were much more popular than
those of weeping, and the gestour, whose powers were mainly employed
in scenes of conviviality, finding by experience that the long lays
of ancient paladins were less attractive than short and idle tales
productive of mirth, accommodated himself to the prevailing coarse
taste, and the consequence was that nine of the pieces conceived in a
light vein have been preserved to every one of the other.
In the “Rime of Sir Thopas,” Chaucer speaks of--
“Minestrales
And gestours for to tellen tales,
Of romaunces that ben reales,
Of popes and of cardinales
And eke of love-longing.”
Here we have the historic geste and the light and ribald tale. When
Chaucer recited the Ballad of Sir Thopas, conceived after the fashion
of the old romances, the host interrupted him and said--
“This may well be rime--dogerel,
Mine eres aken of thy drafty speche.”
We heartily wish that Chaucer had finished the tale. The host merely
repeated the general objection to the heroic ballad, and showed the
common preference for the ribald tales. The author of the “Vision of
Piers the Ploughman,” complains that the passion for songs and ballads
was so strong that men attended to these to the neglect of more serious
and of sacred matters.
“I cannot parfitly my paternoster, as the priest it singeth,
But I can ryme of Roben Hode, of Randolf erl of Chester,
But of our Lord and our Lady I learn nothing at all;
I am occupied every day, holy daye and other, with idle tales at the
ale.”
The degradation in the meaning of the names once given to minstrels of
various classes tells its own sad tale. The _ryband_ has lent his name
to ribaldry; the _scurra_ to whatever is scurrilous; the _gestour_, who
sang the _gestes_ of heroes, became the jester, the mere buffoon; the
_joculator_ degenerated into a joker; and the _jongleur_ into a juggler.
A few men of taste and of reverence for the past stood up for the old
heroic ballads, which, indeed, contained the history of the past, mixed
with much mythical matter. So the great Charles, says his scribe,
Eginhard, “commanded that the barbarous and most ancient song in which
the acts and wars of the old kings were sung should be written down and
committed to memory.” And our own Alfred, says Asser, “did not fail
to recite himself and urge on others, the recitation by heart of the
Saxon songs.” But the English ballad found no favour with the Norman
conquerors, who readily received the Provençal troubadour. The old
heroic ballad lingered on, and was killed, not so much by the ridicule
of Chaucer as by the impatience of the English character, which will
not endure the long-drawn tale, and asks in preference what is pithy
and pointed.
Of song and ballad there were many kinds, characterised rather by the
instrument to which it was sung, than by the nature of the song itself;
or perhaps we may say most justly that certain topics and certain
kinds of composition suited certain instruments, and were, therefore,
accommodated to them.
In the “Romans de Brut” we have a list of some of these:
“Molt ot a la cort jugleors,
Chanteors, estrumanteors;
Molt poissiez oir chançons,
Rotruanges et noviaz sons
Vieleures, lais, et notes,
Lais de vieles, lais de rotes,
Lais de harpe et de fretiax.”
Here we have the juggler, the chanter, and the strummer. What the
_strumentum_[34] was we do not exactly know, but it was clearly a
stringed instrument that was twanged, and it has left its reminiscence
in our language,--every child strums before it can play a piano. There
exists an old table of civic laws for Marseilles of the date 1381, in
which all playing of minstrel and jongleur,--in a word, all strumming
was disallowed in the streets without a license.