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 shirt 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 erlaeutert von Heinrich Viehoff_ (Stuttgart, 1870).
So far as the title 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 moonshine, 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
superstitions 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 passed 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.
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
surreptitiously 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 cock-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 assembled 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
mass is a very common superstition. 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 Mass 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 amusement 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 Oberwoerth, 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 grassless 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 shores of the Boden See, arrives at
Coblentz only to have tidings of her death. He rows over to Oberwoerth:
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 glass 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 passed 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 snatched 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 analogy 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 assistant
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
substituted "_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 passing 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.