In the threatening style of lullaby, the bogey plays a considerable
part. A history of the bogeys of all nations would be an instructive
book. The hero of one people is the bogey of another. Wellington and
Napoleon (or rather "Boney") served to scare naughty babies long after
the latter, at least, was laid to rest. French children still have
songs about "le Prince Noir," and the nurses sang during the siege of
Paris:
As-tu vu Bismarck
A la porte de Chatillon?
Il lance les obus
Sur le Pantheon.
The Moor is the nursery terror of many parts of Southern Europe;
not, however, it would seem of Sicily--a possible tribute to the
enlightened rule of the Kalifs. The Greeks do not enjoy a like
immunity: Signor Avolio mentions, in his "Canti popolari di Noto,"
that besides saying "the wolf is coming," it is common for mothers
to frighten their little ones with, "Zittiti, ca vienunu i Riece; Nu
sciri ca 'ncianu ci su i Rieci" ("Hush, for the Greeks are coming:
don't go outside for the Greeks are there.") Noto was the centre of
the district where the ancient Sikeli made their last stand against
Greek supremacy: a coincidence that opens the way to bold speculation,
though the originals of the bogey Greeks may have been only pirates of
times far less remote.
In Germany the same person distributes rewards and punishments: St
Nicholas in the Rhenish provinces, Knecht Ruprecht in Northern and
Central Germany, Julklapp in Pomerania. On Christmas eve, some one
cries out "Julklapp!" from behind a door, and throws the gift into the
room with the child's name pinned upon it. Even the gentle St Lucy,
the Santa Claus of Lombardy, withholds her cakes from erring babes,
and little Tuscans stand a good deal in awe of their friend the
Befana; delightful as are the treasures she puts in their shoes when
satisfied with their behaviour, she is credited with an unpleasantly
sharp eye for youthful transgressions. She has a relative in Japan of
the name of Hotii. Once upon a time Hotii, who belongs to the sterner
sex, lived on earth in the garb of a priest. His birthland was China,
and he had the happy fame of being extremely kind to children. At
present he walks about Japan with a big sack full of good things
for young people, but the eyes with which the back of his head is
furnished, enable him to see in a second if any child misconducts
itself. Of more dubious antecedents is another patron of the children
of Japan, Kishi Mojin, the mother of the child-demons. Once Kishi
Mojin had the depraved habit of stealing any young child she could lay
hands on and eating it. In spite of this, she was sincerely attached
to her own family, which numbered one thousand, and when the exalted
Amida Niorai hid one of its members to punish her for her cruel
practices, she grieved bitterly. Finally the child was given back on
condition that Kishi Mojin would never more devour her neighbours'
infants: she was advised to eat the fruit of the pomegranate whenever
she had a craving for unnatural food. Apparently she took the advice
and kept the compact, as she is honoured on the 28th day of every
month, and little children are taught to solicit her protection. The
kindness shown to children both in Japan and China is well known;
in China one baby is said to be of more service in insuring a safe
journey than an armed escort.
"El coco," a Spanish bogey, figures in a sleep-song from Malaga:
"Sleep, little child, sleep, my soul; sleep, little star of the
morning. My child sleeps with eyes open like the hares. Little baby
girl, who has beaten thee that thine eyes look as if they had been
crying? Poor little girl! who has made thy face red? The rose on the
rose-tree is going to sleep, and to sleep goes my child, for already
it is late. Sleep little daughter for the _coco_ comes."
The folk-poet in Spain reaps the advantage of a recognised freedom of
versification; with the great stress laid upon the vowels, a consonant
more or less counts for nothing:
A dormir va la rosa
De los rosales;
A dormir va mi nina
Porque ya es tarde.
All folk-poets, and notably the English, have recourse to an
occasional assonant, but the Spaniard can trust altogether to such.
Verse-making is thus made easy, provided ideas do not fail, and up to
to-day, they have not failed the Spanish peasant. He has not, like
the Italian, begun to leave off composing songs. My correspondent at
Malaga writes that at that place improvisation seems innate in the
people: they go before a house and sing the commonest thing they wish
to express. Love and hate they also turn into songs, to be rehearsed
under the window of the individual loved or hated. There is even an
old woman now living in Malaga who rhymes in Latin with extraordinary
facility. To the present section falls one other lullaby--coo-aby,
perhaps I ought to say, since the Spanish _arrullo_ means the cooing
of doves as well as the lulling of children. It is quoted by Count
Gubernatis:
Isabellita, do not pine
Because the flowers fade away;
If flowers hasten to decay
Weep not, Isabellita mine.
Little one, now close thine eyes,
Hark, the footsteps of the Moor!
And she asks from door to door,
Who may be the child who cries?
When I was as small as thou
And within my cradle lying,
Angels came about me flying
And they kissed me on my brow.
Sleep, then, little baby, sleep:
Sleep, nor cry again to-night,
Lest the angels take to flight
So as not to see thee weep.
"The Moor" is in this instance a benignant kind of bogey, not far
removed from harmless "wee Willie Winkie" who runs upstairs and
downstairs in his nightgown:
Tapping at the window,
Crying at the lock,
"Are the babes in their beds?
For it's now ten o'clock."
These myths have some analogy with a being known as "La Dormette" who
frequents the neighbourhood of Poitou. She is a good old woman who
throws sand and sleep on children's eyes, and is hailed with the
words:
Passez la Dormette,
Passez par chez nous!
Endormir gars et fillettes
La nuit et le jou.
Now and then we hear of an angel who passes by at nightfall; it is not
clear what may be his mission, but he is plainly too much occupied to
linger with his fellow seraphs, who have nothing to do but to kiss
the babe in its sleep. A little French song speaks of this journeying
angel:
Il est tard, l'ange a passe,
Le jour a deja baisse;
Et l'on n'entend pour tout bruit
Que le ruisseau qui s'enfuit.
Endors toi,
Mon fils! c'est moi.
Il est tard et ton ami,
L'oiseau blue, s'est endormi.
In Calabria, when a butterfly flits around a baby's cradle, it is
believed to be either an angel or a baby's soul.
The pendulum of good and evil is set swinging from the moment that the
infant draws its first breath. Angelical visitation has its complement
in demonial influence; it is even difficult to resist the conclusion
that the ministers of light are frequently outnumbered by the powers
of darkness. In most Christian lands the unbaptised child is given
over entirely to the latter. Sicilian women are loth to kiss a child
before its christening, because they consider it a pagan or a Turk. In
East Tyrol and Styria, persons who take a child to be baptised say on
their return--"A Jew we took away, a Christian we bring back." Some
Tyrolese mothers will not give any food to their babies till the rite
has been performed. The unbaptised Greek is thought to be simply
a small demon, and is called by no other designation than [Greek:
srakos] if a boy, and [Greek: srakoula] if a girl. Once when a
christening was unavoidably delayed, the parents got so accustomed to
calling their little girl by the snake name, that they continued doing
so even after she had been presented with one less equivocal.
Dead unchristened babes float about on the wind; in Tyrol they are
marshalled along by Berchte, the wife of Pontius Pilate; in Scotland
they may be heard moaning on calm nights. The state to which their
baby souls are relegated, is probably a lingering recollection of
that into which, in pagan days, all innocent spirits were conceived
to pass: an explanation that has also the merit of being as little
offensive as any that can be offered. There is naturally a general
wish to make baptism follow as soon as possible after birth--an
end that is sometimes pursued regardless of the bodily risks it may
involve. A poor woman gave birth to a child at the mines of Vallauria;
it was a bitterly cold winter; the snow lay deep enough to efface the
mountain tracks, and all moisture froze the instant it was exposed to
the air. However, the grandmother of the new-born babe carried it off
immediately to Tenda--many miles away--for the christening rite. As
she had been heard to remark that it was a useless encumbrance, there
were some who attributed her action to other motives than religious
zeal; but the child survived the ordeal and prospered. In several
parts of the Swiss mountains a baptism, like a funeral, is an event
for the whole community. I was present at a christening in a small
village lying near the summit of the Julier Pass. The bare, little
church was crowded, and the service was performed with a reverent
carefulness contrasting sharply with the mechanical and hurried
performance of a baptism witnessed shortly before in a very different
place, the glorious baptistry at Florence. It ended with a Lutheran
hymn, sung sweetly without accompaniment, by five or six young
girls. More than half of the congregation consisted of men, whose
weather-tried faces were wet with tears, almost without exception.
I could not find out that there was anything particularly sad in the
circumstances of the case; the women certainly wore black, but then,
the rule of attending the funerals even of mere acquaintances, causes
the best dress in Switzerland to be always one suggestive of mourning.
It seemed that the pathos of the dedication of a dawning life to the
Supreme Good was sufficient to touch the hearts of these simple folk,
starved from coarser emotion.
In Calabria it is thought unlucky to be either born or christened on
a Friday. Saturday is likewise esteemed an inauspicious day, which
points to its association with the witches' Sabbath, once the subject
of numerous superstitious beliefs throughout the southern provinces
of Italy. Not far from the battlefield near Benevento where Charles
of Anjou defeated Manfred, grew a walnut tree, which had an almost
European fame as the scene of Sabbatical orgies. People used to hang
upon its branches the figure of a two-headed viper coiled into a ring,
a symbol of incalculable antiquity. St Barbatus had the tree cut down,
but the devil raised new shoots from the root and so it was renewed.
Shreds of snake-worship may be still collected. The Calabrians hold
that the cast-off skin of a snake is an excellent thing to put under
the pillow of a sick baby. Even after their christening, children are
unfortunately most susceptible to enchantment. When a beautiful and
healthy child sickens and dies, the Irish peasant infers that the
genuine baby has been stolen by fairies, and this miserable sprite
left in its place. Two ancient antidotes have great power to
counteract the effect of spells. One is the purifying Fire. In
Scotland, as in Italy, bewitched children, within the memory of living
men, have been set to rights by contact with its salutary heat. My
relative, Count Belli of Viterbo, was "looked at" when an infant by a
_Jettatrice_, and was in consequence put by his nurse into a mild
oven for half-an-hour. One would think that the remedy was nearly as
perilous as the practice of the lake-dwellers of cutting a little hole
in their children's heads to let out the evil spirits, but in the case
mentioned it seems to have answered well.
The other important curative agent is the purifying spittle. In
Scotland and in Greece, any one who should exclaim, "What a beautiful
child!" is expected to slightly spit upon the object of the remark, or
some misfortune will follow. Ladies in a high position at Athens have
been observed to do this quite lately. The Scotch and Greek uneasiness
about the "well-faured" is by no means confined to those peoples; the
same anxiety reappears in Madagascar; and the Arab does not like you
to praise the beauty of his horse without adding the qualifying "an
it please God." Persius gives an account of the precautions adopted
by the friends of the infant Roman: "Look here--a grandmother or
superstitious aunt has taken baby from his cradle and is charming his
forehead and his slavering lips against mischief by the joint action
of her middle finger and her purifying spittle; for she knows right
well how to check the evil eye. Then she dandles him in her arms, and
packs off the little pinched hope of the family, so far as wishing can
do it, to the domains of Licinus, or to the palace of Cr[oe]sus. 'May
he be a catch for my lord and lady's daughter! May the pretty ladies
scramble for him! May the ground he walks on turn to a rose-bed.'"
(Prof. Conington's translation.)
One of the rare lullabies that contain allusion to enchantment is the
following Roumanian "Nani-nani":
Lullaby, my little one,
Thou art mother's darling son;
Loving mother will defend thee,
Mother she will rock and tend thee,
Like a flower of delight,
Or an angel swathed in white.
Sleep with mother, mother well
Knows the charm for every spell.
Thou shalt be a hero as
Our good lord, great Stephen, was,
Brave in war, and strong in hand,
To protect thy fatherland.
Sleep, my baby, in thy bed;
God upon thee blessings shed.
Be thou dark, and be thine eyes
Bright as stars that gem the skies.
Maidens' love be thine, and sweet
Blossoms spring beneath thy feet.