There are probably many persons who could repeat by heart the greater
portion of the last scene in the last book of the _Iliad_, and who
yet have never been struck by the fact, that not its least excellence
consists in its setting before us a carefully accurate picture of a
group of usages which for the antiquity of their origin, the wide
area of their observance, and the tenacity with which they have been
preserved, may be fairly said to occupy an unique position amongst
popular customs and ceremonials. First, we are shown the citizens of
Troy bearing their vanquished hero within the walls amidst vehement
demonstrations of grief: the people cling to the chariot wheels, or
prostrate themselves on the earth; the wife and the mother of the dead
tear their hair and cast it to the winds. Then the body is laid on
a bed of state, and the leaders of a choir of professional minstrels
sing a dirge, which is at times interrupted by the wailing of the
women. When this is done, Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen in turn give
voice each one to the feelings awakened in her by their common loss;
and afterwards--so soon as the proper interval has elapsed--the body
is burnt, wine being poured over the embers of the pyre. Lastly,
the ashes are consigned to the tomb, and the mourners sit down to a
banquet. "Such honours paid they to the good knight Hector;" and such,
in their main features, are the funeral rites which may be presumed to
date back to a period not only anterior to the siege of Troy, granting
for the moment that event to have veritably taken place, but also
previous to the crystallisation of the Greek or any other of the
Indo-European nationalities which flowed westward from the uplands of
the Hindu Kush. The custom of hymning the dead, which is just now what
more particularly concerns us, once prevailed over most if not all
parts of Europe; and the firmness of its hold upon the affections
of the people may be inferred from the persistency with which they
adhered to it, even when it was opposed not only by the working of the
gradual, though fatal, law of decay to which all old usages must in
the end submit, but also by the active interposition of persons
in authority. Charlemagne, for instance, tried to put it down in
Provence--desiring that all those attending funerals, who did not know
by rote any of the appropriate psalms, should recite aloud the _Kyrie
eleison_ instead of singing "profane songs" made to suit the occasion.
But the edict seems to have met with a signal want of success; for
some five hundred years after it was issued, the Provencals still
hired Praeficae, and still introduced within the very precincts of their
churches, whole choirs of lay dirge-singers, frequently composed of
young girls who were stationed in two companies, that chanted songs
alternately to the accompaniment of instrumental music; and this
notwithstanding that the clergy of Provence showed the strongest
objection to the performance of observances at funerals, other than
such as were approved by ecclesiastical sanction. The custom in
question bears an obvious affinity to Highland coronachs and Irish
keens, and here in England there is reason to believe it to have
survived as late as the seventeenth century. That Shakespeare was
well acquainted with it is amply testified by the fourth act of
_Cymbeline_; for it is plain that the song pronounced by Guiderius
and Arviragus over the supposed corpse of Imogene was no mere poetic
outburst of regret, but a real and legitimate dirge, the singing or
saying of which was held to constitute Fidele's obsequies. In the
Cotton Library there is a MS., having reference to a Yorkshire village
in the reign of Elizabeth, which relates: "When any dieth, certaine
women sing a song to the dead bodie recyting the jorney that the
partye deceased must goe." Unhappily the English Neniae are nearly all
lost and forgotten; I know of no genuine specimen extant, except the
famous Lyke Wake (_i.e._, Death Watch) dirge beginning:
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
_Everie nighte and alle_,
Fire and sleete and candle lighte,
_And Christe receive thy saule_, &c.
To the present day we find practices closely analogous with those
recounted in the _Iliad_ scattered here and there from the shores of
the Mediterranean to the banks of Lake Onega; and the Trojan threnody
is even now reproduced in Ireland, in Corsica, Sardinia, and Roumania,
in Russia, in Greece, and South Italy. Students who may be tempted to
make observations on this strange survival of the old world, will
do well, however, to set about it at once, in parts which are either
already invaded or else threatened with an imminent invasion of
railways, for the screech of the engine sounds the very death-knell of
ancient customs. Thus the Irish practice of keening is becoming less
and less general. On recently making inquiries of a gentleman residing
in Leinster, I learnt that it had gone quite out in that province;
he added that he had once seen keeners at a funeral at Clonmacnoise
(King's County), but was told they came from the Connaught side of
the Shannon. The keens must not be confused with the peculiar wail or
death-cry known as the Ullagone; they are articulate utterances, in
a strongly marked rhythm, extolling the merits of the dead, and
reproaching him for leaving his family, with much more in the same
strain. The keeners may or may not be professional, and the keens are
more often of a traditional than of an improvised description. One
or two specimens in Gaelic have appeared in the _Journal of the Irish
Archaeological Association_, but on the whole the subject is far from
having received the attention it deserves. The Irish keeners are
invariably women, as also are all the continental dirge-singers
of modern times. Whether by reason of the somewhat new-fashioned
sentiment which forbids a man to exhibit his feelings in public,
or from other motives not unconnected with selfishness, the onus of
discharging the more active and laborious obligations prescribed in
popular funeral rites has bit by bit been altogether shifted upon the
shoulders of the weaker sex; _e.g._, in places where scratching and
tearing of the face forms part of the traditional ritual, the women
are expected to continue the performance of this unpleasant ceremony
which the men have long since abandoned. Together with the dirge, a
more or less serious measure of self-disfigurement has come down from
an early date. An Etruscan funeral urn, discovered at Clusi, shows an
exact picture of the hired mourners who tear their hair and rend
their garments, whilst one stands apart, in a prophetic attitude, and
declaims to the accompaniment of a flute. Of the precise origin of
the employment of Public Wailers, or Praeficae, not much has been
ascertained. One distinguished writer on folk-lore suggests that it
had its rise not in any lack of consideration for the dead, but in the
apprehension lest the repose of their ghosts should be disturbed by a
display of grief on the part of those who had been nearest and dearest
to them in life; and his theory gains support in the abundant evidence
forthcoming to attest the existence of a widely-spread notion that
the dead are pained, and even annoyed and exasperated, by the tears
of their kindred. Traces of this belief are discoverable in Zend
and Hindu writings; also amongst the Sclavs, Germans, and
Scandinavians--and, to look nearer home, in Ireland and Scotland. On
the other hand, it is possible that the business of singing before the
dead sprang from the root of well-nigh every trade--that its duties
were at first exclusively performed by private persons, and their
passing into public hands resulted simply from people finding out
that they were executed with less trouble and more efficiency by a
professional functionary; a common-place view of the matter which is
somewhat borne out by the circumstance, that whenever a member of the
family is qualified and disposed to undertake the dirge-singing, there
seems to be no prejudice against her doing so. It is often far from
easy to determine whether such or such a death-song was composed by a
hired praefica who for the time being assumed the character of one of
the dead man's relatives, or by the latter speaking in her own person.
In Corsica, the wailing and chanting are kept up, off and on, from
the hour of death to the hour of burial. The news that the head of
a family has expired is quickly communicated to his relations and
friends in the surrounding hamlets, who hasten to form themselves
into a troop or band locally called the Scirrata, and thus advance in
procession towards the house of mourning. If the death was caused by
violence, the scirrata makes a halt when it arrives in sight of the
village; and then it is that the Corsican women tear their hair and
scratch their faces till the blood flows--just as do their sisters in
Dalmatia and Montenegro. Shortly after this, the scirrata is met by
the deceased's fellow-villagers, accompanied by all his near relatives
with the exception of the widow, to whose abode the whole party
now proceeds with loud cries and lamentations. The widow awaits the
scirrata by the door of her house, and, as it draws near, the leader
steps forward and throws a black veil over her head to symbolise her
widowhood; the term of which must offer a dreary prospect to a woman
who has the misfortune to lose her husband while she is still in the
prime of life, for public opinion insists that she remain for years in
almost total seclusion. The mourners and as many as can enter the
room assemble round the body, which lies stretched on a table or plank
supported by benches; it is draped in a long mantle, or it is clothed
in the dead man's best suit. Now begins the dirge, or Vocero. Two
persons will perhaps start off singing together, and in that case the
words cannot be distinguished; but more often only one gets up at a
time. She will open her song with a quietly-delivered eulogy of the
virtues of the dead, and a few pointed allusions to the most important
events of his life; but before long she warms to her work, and pours
forth volleys of rhythmic lamentation with a fire and animation that
stir up the women present into a frenzied delirium of grief, in which,
as the praefica pauses to take breath, they howl, dig their nails into
their flesh, throw themselves on the ground, and sometimes cover their
heads with ashes. When the dirge is ended they join hands and dance
frantically round the plank on which the body lies. More singing takes
place on the way to the church, and thence to the graveyard. After the
funeral the men do not shave for weeks, and the women let their hair
go loose and occasionally cut it off at the grave--cutting off the
hair being, by the way, a universal sign of female mourning; it was
done by the women of ancient Greece, and it is done by the women of
India. A good deal of eating and drinking brings the ceremonials to a
close. If the bill of fare comes short of that recorded of the funeral
feast of Sir John Paston, of Barton, when 1300 eggs, 41 pigs, 40
calves, and 10 nete were but a few of the items--nevertheless the
Corsican baked meats fall very heavily upon the pockets of such
families as deem themselves compelled to "keep up a position." Sixty
persons is not an extraordinary number to be entertained at the
banquet, and there is, over and above, a general distribution of bread
and meat to poorer neighbours. Mutton in summer, and pork in winter,
are esteemed the viands proper to the occasion. In happy contrast to
all this lugubrious feasting is the simple cup of milk drunk by each
kinsman of the shepherd who dies in the mountains; in which case his
body is laid out, like Robin Hood's, in the open air, a green sod
under his head, his loins begirt with the pistol belt, his gun at
his side, his dog at his feet. Curious are the superstitions of the
Corsican shepherds touching death. The dead, they say, call the living
in the night time, and he who answers will soon follow them; they
believe, too, that, if you listen attentively after dark, you may hear
at times the low beating of a drum, which announces that a soul has
passed.
A notable section of the voceri treats of that insatiable thirst
after vengeance which formerly provided as fruitful a theme to French
romancers as it presented a perplexing problem to French legislators.
In these dirges we see the vendetta in its true character, as the
outgrowth and relic of times when people were, in self-defence,
almost coerced into lawlessness through the perpetual miscarriage
of constituted justice, and they enable us to better understand the
process by which what was at the outset something of the nature of a
social necessity, developed into the ruling passion of the race, and
led to the frightful abuses that are associated with its name. All
that he held sacred in heaven or on earth became bound up in the
Corsican's mind with the obligation to avenge the blood of his
kindred. Thus he made Hate his deity, and the old inexorable spirit
of the Greek _Oresteia_ lived and breathed in him anew, the Furies
themselves finding no bad counterpart in the frenzied women who
officiated at his funeral rites. As is well known, when no man was to
be found to do the deed a woman would often come forward in his stead,
and this not only among the lower orders, but in the highest ranks of
society. A lady of the noble house of Pozzo di Borgo once donned
male attire, and in velvet-tasselled cap, red doublet, high sheepskin
boots, with pistol, gun, and dagger for her weapons, started off in
search of an assassin at the head of a band of partisans. When he was
caught, however, after the guns had been two or three times levelled
at his breast, she decided to give him his life. Another fair avenger
whose name has come down to us was Maria Felice di Calacuccia, of
Niolo. Her vocero may be cited here as affording a good idea of the
tone and spirit of the vendetta dirges in general.
"I was spinning at my distaff when I heard a loud noise; it was a
gun-shot, it re-echoed in my heart. It seemed to say to me: 'Fly! thy
brother dies.' I ran into the upper chamber. As I unlatched the door,
'I am struck to the heart,' he said; and I fell senseless to the
ground. If I too died not, it was that one thought sustained me. Whom
wouldst thou have to avenge thee? Our mother, nigh to death, or thy
sister Maria? If Lario was not dead surely all this would not end
without bloodshed. But of so great a race, thou dost only leave thy
sister: she has no cousins, she is poor, an orphan, young. Still be at
rest--to avenge thee, she suffices!"
A dramatic vocero, dealing with the same subject, is that of the
sister of Canino, a renowned brigand, who fell at Nazza in an
encounter with the military. She begins by regretting that she has not
a voice of thunder wherewith to rehearse his prowess. Alas! one early
morning the soldiers ("barbarous set of bandits that they are!")
sallied forth on his pursuit, and pounced upon him like wolves upon
a lamb. When she heard the bustle of folks going to and fro in the
street, she put her head out of window and asked what it was all
about. "Thy brother has been slaughtered in the mountains," they
reply. Even so it was; his arquebuse was of no use to him; no, nor his
dagger, nor his pistol, nor yet his amulet. When they brought him in,
and she beheld his wounds, the bitterness of her grief redoubled. Why
did he not answer her--did he lack heart to do so? "Canino, heart of
thy sister," she cries, "how thou art grown pale! Thou that wert
so stalwart and so full of grace, thou who didst appear like unto a
nosegay of flowers. Canino, heart of thy sister, they have taken thy
life. I will plant a blackthorn in the land of Nazza, that none of our
house may henceforth pass that way--for there were not three or four,
but seven men against one. Would I could make my bed at the foot of
the chestnut tree beneath whose shade they fired upon thy breast. I
desire to cast aside these women's skirts, to arm me with poniard, and
pistol, and gun, to gird me with the belt and pouch; Canino, heart of
thy sister, I desire to avenge thy death." In the lamentations over
one Matteo, a doctor who was murdered in 1745, we have an example of
the songs improvised along the road to the grave. This time there are
plenty of male relatives--brothers, brothers-in-law, and cousins--to
accomplish the vendetta. The funeral procession passes through the
village where the crime was committed, and one of the inhabitants,
perhaps as a peace-offering, invites the whole party to come in and
refresh themselves. To this a young girl replies: "We want none of
your bread and wine; what we do want is your blood." She invokes a
thunderbolt to exterminate every soul in the blood-guilty place. But
an aged dame interposes, for a wonder, with milder counsels; she bids
her savage sisters calm their wrath: "Is not Matteo in heaven with the
Lord? Look at his winding sheet," says she, "and learn from it that
Christ dwells above, who teaches forgiveness. The waters are troubled
enough already without your goading on your men to violence." It is
not unlikely that the Corsicans may have been in the habit, like the
Irish, of intentionally parading the coffin of a murdered man past the
door of the suspected murderer, in order that they might have a public
opportunity of branding the latter with infamy.
Having glanced at these hymns of the avenger, we will turn to the
laments expressive of grief unmixed with threats or anger. In these,
also, Corsica is very rich. Sometimes it is a wife who deplores her
husband struck down by no human hand, but by fever or accident. In one
such vocero the widow pathetically crowds epithet on epithet, in the
attempt to give words to her affection and her sorrow. "You were my
flower, my thornless rose, my stalwart one, my column, my brother, my
hope, my prop, my eastern gem, my most beautiful treasure," she says
to her lost "Petru Francescu!" She curses fate which in a brief moment
has deprived her of her paladin--she prayed so hard that he might
be spared, but it was all in vain. He was laid low, the greatly
courageous one, who seemed so strong! Is it indeed true, that he, the
clever-headed, the handy-handed, will leave his Nunziola all alone?
Then she bids Mari, her little daughter, come hither to where papa
lies, and beg him to pray God in paradise that she may have a better
lot than her little mother. She wishes her eyes may change into two
fountains ere she forgets his name; for ever would she call him her
Petru Francescu. But most of all she wishes that her heart might
break so that her poor little soul could go with his, and quit this
treacherous world where is no more joy. The typical keen given in
Carleton's _Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry_ is so like
Nunziola's vocero, that in parts it might be taken for a translation
of it. Sometimes it is a plaint of a mother whose child has met the
fate of those "whom the gods love." That saying about the gods has its
equivalent in the Corsican lines:
Chi nasci pe u paradisu
A stu mondu un po' imbecchia,
which occur in the lament of La Dariola Danesi, of Zuani, who mourns
her sixteen-year-old daughter Romana. Decked in feast-day raiment
the damsel sleeps in the rest of death, after all her sufferings. Her
sweet face has lost its hues of red and white; it is like a gone-out
sun. Romana was the fairest of all the young girls, a rose among
flowers; the youths of the country round were consumed by love of her,
but in her presence they were filled with decorous respect. She was
courteous to all, familiar with none; in church everybody gazed at
her, but she looked at no one; and the minute mass was over she would
say: "Mamma, let us go." Never can the mother be consoled, albeit she
knows her darling fares well up there in heaven where all things smile
and are glad. Of a surety this earth was not worthy to contain so fair
a face. "Ah! how much more beautiful Paradise will be now she is in
it!" cries the voceratrice, with the sublime audacity of maternal
love. In another dirge we have pictured a troop of girls coming early
to the house of Maria, their young companion, to escort her to the
Church of St Elia: for this morning the father of her betrothed has
settled the marriage portion, and it is seemly that she should hear
mass, and make an offering of wax tapers. But the maiden's mother
comes forth to tell the gladsome band that to-day's offering to
St Elia is not of waxen tapers; it is a peerless flower, a bouquet
adorned with ribands--surely the saint will be well pleased with such
a fine gift! For the bride elect lies dead; who will now profit by
her possessions--the twelve mattresses, the twenty-four lambs? "I will
pray the Virgin," says the mother, "I will pray my God that I may go
hence this morning, pressing my flower to my heart." The playfellows
bathe Maria's face with tears: sees she not those who loved her? Will
she leave them in their sadness? One runs to pluck flowers, a second
to gather roses; they twine her a garland, a bridal crown--will she
depart all the same, lying upon her bier? But, after all, why should
there be all this grief? "To-day little Maria becomes the spouse of
the Lord; with what honour will she not be greeted in paradise!"
Alas for broken hearts! they were never yet healed by that line of
argument. Up the street steals the chilling sound of the funeral
chant, _Ora pro ea_. They are come to bear the maiden to St Elia's
Church; the mother sinks to the ground; fain would she follow the body
to the grave, but she faints with sorrow; only her streaming tears can
pay the tribute of her love.
It will be observed that it is usual for the survivors to be held up
as objects of pity rather than the dead, who are generally regarded
as well off; but now and then we come across less optimist presages of
the future life. A woman named Maddele complains that they have taken
her blonde daughter, her snow-white dove, her "Chili, cara di Mamma,"
to the worst possible of places, where no sun penetrates, and no fire
is lit.
Sometimes to a young girl is assigned the task of bewailing her
playmate. "This morning my companion is all adorned," begins a maiden
dirge-singer; "one would think she was going to be married." But the
ceremony about to take place differs sadly from that other. The
bell tolls slowly, the cross and banner arrive at the door; the dead
companion is setting out on a long journey, she is going to find their
ancestors--the voceratrice's father, and her uncle the cure--in the
land whither each one must go in his turn and remain for ever. Since
she has made up her mind thus to change country and climate (though
it be all too soon, for she has not yet done growing), will she at any
rate listen for an instant to her friend of other days? She wishes
to give her a little letter to carry to her father; and, besides the
letter, she would like her to take him a message, and give him news of
the family he left so young, all weeping round his hearth. She is to
tell him that all goes well; that his eldest daughter is married and
has a boy, a flowering lily, who already knows his father, and points
at him with his finger. The boy is called after the grandpapa, and old
friends declare him to be his very image. To the cure she is to say
that his flock flourish and do not forget him. Now the priest enters,
bringing the holy water; everyone lifts his hat; they bear the body
away: "Go to heaven, dear; the Lord awaits you."
It is hardly necessary to add that the voceri of Corsica are without
exception composed in the native speech of the country, which the
accomplished scholar, lexicographer, and poet, Niccolo Tommaseo, spoke
of with perfect truth as one of "the most Italian of the dialects
of Italy." The time may come when the people will renounce their own
language in favour of the idiom of their rulers, but it has not come
yet; nor do they show much disposition to abandon their old usages, as
may be guessed from the fact that even in their Gallicanised capital
the dead are considered slighted if the due amount of wailing is left
undone.
The Sardinian Attitido--a word which has been thought to have some
connection with the Greek [Greek: ototoi], and the Latin _atat_--is
made on exactly the same pattern as the Corsican vocero. I have been
told on trustworthy authority that in some districts in the island the
keening over a married man is performed not by a dirge-singer but by
his own children, who chant a string of homely sentences, such as:
"Why art thou dead, papa? Thou didst not want for bread or wine!" A
practice may here be mentioned which recalls the milk and honey and
nuts of the Roman Inferiae, and which, so far as I am aware, lingers on
nowhere excepting Sardinia; the attidora whilst she sings, scatters
on the bier handfuls of almonds or--if the family is well-to-do--of
sweetmeats, to be subsequently buried with the body.
Very few specimens of the attitido have found their way into print;
but amongst these few, in Canon Spano's _Canti popolari Tempiesi_,
there is one that is highly interesting. Doubts have been raised as
to whether the bulk of the songs in Canon Spano's collection are of
purely illiterate origin; but even if the author of the dirge to which
I allude was guilty of that heinous offence in the eyes of the strict
folk-lore gleaner--the knowledge of the alphabet--it must still be
judged a remarkable production. The attidora laments the death of a
much-beloved bishop:--
"It was the pleasure of this good father, this gentle pastor," she
says, "at all hours to nourish his flock; to the bread of the soul he
joined the bread of the body. Was the wife naked, her sons starving
and destitute? He laboured unceasingly to console them all. The one he
clothed, the others he fed. None can tell the number of the poor whom
he succoured. The naked came to him that they might be clothed, the
hungry came to him that they might be fed, and all went their way
comforted. How many had suffered hunger in the winter's cold, had not
his tender heart proffered them help! It was a grand sight to behold
so many poor gathered together in his house--above, below, they were
so numerous there was no room to pass. And these were the comers of
every day. I do not count those to whom once a month he supplied
the needful food, nor yet those other poor to whose necessities he
ministered in secret. By the needy rogue he let himself be deceived
with shut eyes: he recognised the fraud, but he esteemed it gain so to
lose. Ah, dear father, father to us all, I ought not to weep for thee!
I mourn our common bereavement, for thy death this day has been a blow
to all of us, even to the strongest men."
It would be hard to conceive a more lovely portrait of the Christian
priest; it is scarcely surpassed by that of Monseigneur Bienvenu
in _Les Miserables_, of whose conduct in the matter of the silver
candlesticks we are not a little reminded by the good Sardinian
bishop's compassion for the needy rogue. Neither the one nor the other
realises an ideal which would win the unconditional approval of the
Charity Organisation Society, and we must perhaps admit that humane
proclivities which indirectly encourage swindling are more a mischief
than an advantage to the State. Yet who can be insensible to the
beauty of this unconquerable pity for the evil-doer, this charity that
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things? Who can
say how much it has done to make society possible, to keep the world
on its wheels? It is the bond that binds together all religions. Six
thousand years ago the ancient Egyptian dirge-singers chanted before
their dead: "There is no fault in him. No answer riseth up against
him. In the truth he liveth, with the truth he nourisheth himself.
The gods are satisfied with all he hath done.... He succoured the
afflicted, he gave bread to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothes
to the naked, he sheltered the outcast, his doors were open to the
stranger, he was a father to the fatherless."
The part of France where dirge-singing stayed the longest seems to
have been the south-west. The old women of Gascony still preserve
the memory of a good many songs, some of which have been fortunately
placed on record by M. Blade in his collection of Gascon folk-lore.
The Gascon dirge is a kind of prose recitative made up of distinct
exclamations that fall into irregular strophes. Each has a burden of
this description:
Ah!
Ah! Ah! Ah!
Ah! Praube!
Ah! Praube!
Moun Diu!
Moun Diu! Moun Diu!
The wife mourns for the loss of "Praube Jan;" when she was a young
girl she loved only him. "No, no! I will not have it! I will not have
them take thee to the graveyard!" "What will become of us?" asks the
daughter; "my poor mother is infirm, my brothers and sisters are too
small; there is only me to rule the house." The mother bewails her
boy: "Poor little one! I loved thee so much, thou wert so pretty, thou
wert so good. Thou didst work so well; all I bid thee do, thou didst;
all I told thee, didst thou believe; thou wert very young, yet already
didst thou earn thy bread. Poor little one, thou art dead; they carry
thee to the grave, with the cross going before. They put thee into
the earth.... Poor little one, I shall see thee no more; never! never!
never! Thou goest and I stay. My God! thou wilt be very lonely in the
graveyard this night; and I, I shall weep at home."
If we transport ourselves to the government of Olonetz, we discover
the first cousin of the Corsican voceratrice in the Russian Voplenitsa
("the sobbing one"). But the jurisdiction of this functionary is of
wider extent; she is mistress of the ceremonies at marriages as well
as at funerals, and in both cases either improvises new songs or
adapts old ones. Mr Ralston has familiarised English readers with some
excellent samples of the Russian neniae in his work on the _Songs of
the Russian People_. In Montenegro dirge-singing survives in its
most primitive form. During the war of 1877 there were frequent
opportunities of observing it. One such occurred at Ostrog. A wounded
man arrived at that place, which was made a sort of hospital station,
with his father and mother, his sisters and a brother. Another
brother and a cousin had fallen by his side in the last fight--the
Montenegrins have always gone into battle in families--and the women
had their faces covered with scratches, self-inflicted in their
mourning for these kindred. The man was young, lively, and courageous;
he might have got well but there were no surgical instruments to
extract the ball in his back, and so in a day or two he was dead. At
three in the morning the women began shrieking in spite of the orders
given by the doctors in the interest of the other wounded; the noise
was horrible, and no sooner were they driven away than they came back
and renewed it. The Prince, who has tried to put down the custom as
barbarous, was quartered at Ostrog, and he succeeded in having the
wailers quieted for a moment, but when the body was borne to the
cemetery the uproar began again. The women beat their breasts,
scratched their faces, and screamed at a pitch that could be heard
a mile off. It is usual to return to the house where the person
died--they made their way therefore back into the hospital (the Prince
being absent), and it was only after immense efforts on the part of
the sisters of charity and those who were in authority that they were
expelled. Then they seated themselves in the courtyard, and continued
beating their breasts and reciting their death-song. An eyewitness of
the scene described the dirge as a monotonous chant. One of the dead
man's sisters had worked herself up into a state of hysterical frenzy,
in which she seemed to have lost all control over her words and
actions; she led the dirge, and her rhythmic ejaculations flowed forth
as if she had no power to contain them. The father and brother went to
salute the Prince the day after the funeral; the old man appeared to
be extremely cheerful, but was doggedly inattentive to the advice to
go home and fight no more, as his family had suffered enough losses.
He had a son of ten, he said, who could accompany him now as there was
a gun to spare, which before had not been the case. He wished he had
ten sons to bring them all to fight the Turks.
The Sclavs are everywhere very strict in all that regards the cult
of the dead, and the observances which have to be gone through by
Russians who have lost friends or relations are by no means confined
to the date of death and burial. Even when they have experienced
no personal loss, they are still thought called upon to visit the
cemeteries on the second Tuesday after Easter, and howl lustily over
the tombs of their ancestors. Nor would it be held sufficient to strew
flowers upon the graves, as is done on the Catholic All Souls'
day; the most orthodox ghosts want something more substantial, and
libations of beer and spirits are poured over their resting-places.
Furthermore, disagreeable consequences have been said to result upon
an omission of like marks of respect due to "the rude forefathers
of the hamlet;" there is no making sure that a highly estimable
individual will not, when thus incensed, re-enter an appearance
on life's stage in the shape of a vampire. A small volume might be
written on the preventive measures adopted to procure immunity from
such-like visitations. The people of Havellend and Altmark put a small
coin into the mouths of the dead in the hope that, so appeased, they
will not assume vampire form; but this time the superstition, like
a vast number of others, is clearly a later invention to explain a
custom, the original significance of which is forgotten. The peasants
of Roumelia also place pieces of money in the coffins, not as an
insurance against vampires--who they think may be best avoided by
burning instead of burying the mortal remains of any person they
credit with the prospect of becoming one--but to pay the entrance fee
into Paradise; a more authentic version of the old fable. The setting
apart of a day, fixed by the Church or varying according to private
anniversaries, for the special commemoration of the dead, is a
world-wide custom.
If, as Mr Herbert Spencer thinks, the rudimentary form of all religion
is the propitiation of dead ancestors who are supposed still to exist,
some kind of _fete des morts_ was probably the oldest of religious
feasts. A theory has been started, to the effect that the time of its
appointment has been widely influenced by the rising of the Pleiades,
in support of which is cited the curious fact that the Australians and
Society Islanders keep the celebration in November, though with
them November is a spring month. But this may be no more than a
coincidence. In ancient Rome, in Russia, in China, the tendency has
been to commemorate the dead in the season of resurrection.
The Letts and Esthonians observe the Feast of Souls, by spreading a
banquet of which they suppose their spirit relatives to partake; they
put torches on the graves to light the ghosts to the repast, and they
imagine every sound they hear through the day to be caused by the
movements of the invisible guests. Both these people celebrate
death-watches with much singing and drinking, the Esthonians
addressing long speeches to the dead, and asking him why he did
not stay longer, if his puddro (gruel) was not to his taste, &c.,
precisely after the style of the keeners of less remote parts. In
some countries the entire system of life would seem to be planned and
organised mainly with a view to honouring the dead. In Albania, for
example, one of the foremost objects pursued by the peasantry is
that of marrying their daughters near home; not so much from any
affectionate unwillingness to part with them, as in order to secure
their attendance at the _vai_ or lamentations which take place on
the death of a member of the family; and so rigorous are the mourning
regulations, that even married women who have lost their fathers
remain year after year shut up in houses deprived of light and draped
in black--they may not even go out to church. The Albanian keens are
not always versified; they sometimes consist simply in the endless
reiteration of a single phrase. M. Auguste Dozon reports that he was
at one time constantly hearing "les hurlements" of a poor Mussulman
widow who bewailed two sons; on certain anniversaries she took their
clothes out of a chest, and, placing them before her, she repeated,
without intermission, [Greek: Chalasia mon]. The Greeks have the
somewhat analogous practice, on the recurrence of the death-days
of their dear ones, of putting their lips close to the graves and
whispering to their silent tenants that they still love them.
The near relations in Greece leave their dwelling, as soon as they
have closed the eyes of the dead, to take refuge in the house of a
friend, with whom they sojourn till the more distant connections have
had time to arrive, and the body is dressed in holiday gear. Then they
return, clothe themselves in white dresses, and take up their position
beside the bier. After some inarticulate wailing, which is strenuously
echoed back by the neighbours, the dirge is sung, the chief female
mourner usually leading off, and whosoever feels disposed following
wake. When the body is lowered into the earth, the best-beloved of the
dead--his mother or perhaps his betrothed--stoops down to the ground
and imploringly utters his name, together with the word "Come!" On his
making no reply, he is declared to be indeed dead, and the grave is
closed.[1] The usage points to a probability that all the exhortations
to awaken and to return with which the dirges of every nation
are interlarded are remnants of ancient makeshifts for a medical
certificate of death; and we may fancy with what breathless
excitement these apostrophes were spoken in former days when they were
accompanied by an actual, if faint, expectation that they would be
heard and answered. It is conceivable that the complete system of
making as much noise as possible at funerals may be derived from some
sort of notion that the uproar would wake the dead if he were not dead
at all, but sleeping. As elsewhere, so in Greece, the men take no part
in the proceedings beyond bidding one last farewell just before they
retire from the scene. Praeficae are still employed now and then; but
the art of improvisation seems to be the natural birthright of Greek
peasant women, nor do they require the inspiration of strong grief to
call their poetic gifts into operation; it is stated to be no unusual
thing to hear a girl stringing elegies over some lamb, or bird, or
flower, which may have died, while she works in the fields. The Greeks
send communications and even flowers by the dead to the dead: "Now
is the time," the folk-poet makes one say whose body is about to be
buried, "for you to give me any messages or commissions; and if your
grief is too poignant for utterance, write it down on paper and bring
me the letter." The Greek neniae are marked by great vigour and variety
of imagery as is apparent in the subjoined extract from the dirge of a
poor young country-woman who was left a widow with two children:--
"The other day I beheld at our threshold a youth of lofty stature and
threatening mien; he had out-stretched wings of gleaming white, and in
his hand was a sword. 'Woman, is thy husband in the house?' 'Yes; he
combs our Nicos' hair, and caresses him so he may not cry. Go not in,
terrible youth; do not frighten our babe.' The white-winged would not
listen; I tried to drive him back, but I could not; he darted past
me, and ran to thy side, O my beloved. Hapless one, he smote thee; and
here is thy little son, thy tiny Nicos, whom likewise he was fain to
strike." ...
So vivid was the impression created by the woman's fantasy that
some of the spectators looked towards the door, half expecting the
white-winged visitant to advance in their midst; others turned to the
child, huddled by his mother's knees. She, coming down from flights
of imagination to the bitter realities of her condition, exclaimed,
as she flung herself sobbing upon the bier: "How can I maintain the
children? How will they be able to live? What will they not suffer in
the contrast between the rough lot in store for them and the tender
care which guarded them in the happy days when their father lived?" At
last, worn out by the force of her emotions, she sank senseless to the
floor. The laments of widows, which are very rare in some localities,
are often to be met with in Greece. In one of them we come upon an
original idea respecting the requirements of spirits: the singer prays
that her tears may swell into a lake or a sea, so they may trickle
through the earth to the nether regions, to moisten those who get
no rain, to be drink to those who thirst, and--to fill up the dry
inkstands of the writers! "Then will they be able to chronicle the
chagrins of the loved ones who cross the river, taste its wave, and
forget their homes and their poor orphans." Every species of Grecian
peasant-song abounds in classical reminiscences, which are easy to
identify, although they betray some mental confusion of the attributes
and functions belonging to the personages of antiquity. Of all the
early myths, that of the Stygian ferryman is the one which has shown
greatest longevity. Far from falling into oblivion, the son of Erebus
has gone on diligently accumulating honours till he has managed to get
the arbitrament of life and death into his power, and to enlist the
birds of the air as a staff of spies, to give him prompt information
should any unlucky individual refer to him in a tone of mockery or
defiance. Perhaps this is not development but reversion. Charon may
have been a great Infernal deity before he was a boatman. The Charun
of the Etruscans could destroy life and torment the guilty--the office
of conducting shades to the other world forming only one part of his
duties.
The opinion of Achilles, that it was better to be a slave amongst
men than a king over ghosts, is very much that which prevails in the
Greece of to-day. Visions of a Christian paradise above the skies
have much less hold on the popular mind than dread of a pagan Tartarus
under the earth; and that full conviction that after all it was a very
bad thing to die, that tendency to attach a paramount value to life,
_per se_, and _quand meme_, which constituted so significant a
feature of the old Greeks, is equally characteristic of their modern
representatives. The next world of the Romaic songs is far from
being a place "where all smiles and is glad;" the forebodings of the
Corsican's Chilina's mother are common enough here in Greece. "Rejoice
in the present world, rejoice in the passing day," runs a [Greek:
myrologion], quoted by Fauriel; "to-morrow you will be under the sod,
and will behold the day no more." Down in Tartarus youths and maidens
spend their time dismally in asking if there be yet an earth and a
sky up above. Are there still churches and golden icons? Do people
continue to work at their several trades? "Blessed are the mountains
and the pastures," it is said, "where we meet not Charon." The parents
of a dying girl ask of her why she is resolved to hasten into the
other world where the cock crows not, and the hen clucks not;
where there is no water and no grass, and where the hungry find it
impossible to eat, and the tired are incapable of sleep. Why is
she not content to abide at home? The girl replies she cannot, for
yesterday, in the late evening, she was married, and her consort is
the tomb. That is the peasant elegist's way of speaking of a sudden
death, caused very likely by the chill of nightfall. Of another
damsel, who succumbed to a long illness, "who had suffered as none
before suffered under the sun," he narrates how she pressed her
father's hand to her heart, saying: "Alas! my father, I am about to
die." She clasped her mother's hand to her breast, saying: "Alas! my
mother, I am about to die." Then she sent for her betrothed, and she
bent over him and kissed him, and whispered softly into his ear: "Oh,
my friend, when I am dead deck my grave as you would have decked my
nuptial bed." We find in Greek poesy the universal legend of the lover
who kills himself on hearing of the death of his mistress; but, as
a rule, the regret of survivors is depicted as neither desperate nor
durable. Long ago, three gallant youths plotted together to contrive
an escape from Hades, and a fair-haired maiden prayed that they would
take her with them; she did so wish to see her mother mourning her
loss, her brothers weeping because she is no more. They answered: "As
to thy brothers, poor girl, they are dancing, and thy mother diverts
herself with gossiping in the street." The mournfully beautiful
music that Schubert wedded to Claudius's little poem _Der Tod und das
Maedchen_ might serve as melodious expression to many a one of these
Grecian lays of dead damsels. Death will not halt because he hears
a voice crying: "Tarry, I am still so young!" The future is as
irrevocably fixed as the past; and if fate deals hardly by mortals,
there is nothing to fall back upon but the sorry resignation of
despair; such is the sombre folk philosophy of the land of eternal
summer. Perhaps it is the very brightness of the sky and air that
makes the quitting of this mortal coil so unspeakably grievous. The
most horribly painful idea associated with death in the mind of the
modern as of the ancient Greek is the idea of darkness, of separation
from what Dante, yet more Greek than Italian in his passionate
sun-worship, describes in a line which seems somehow to hold incarnate
the thing it tells of--
... l'aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra.
It is worth noting that, whether the view entertained of immortality
be cheerful or the reverse, in the songs of Western nations the
disembodied soul is universally taken to be the exact duplicate of
the creature of flesh and blood, in wants, tastes, and semblance. The
European folk-singer could no more grasp a metaphysical conception of
the eternity of spirit, such as that implied in the grand Indian dirge
which craves everlasting good for the "unborn part" in man, than
he would know what to make of the scientific theory of the
indestructibility of matter shadowed forth in the ordinary Sanskrit
periphrases for death, signifying "the resolution of the body into its
five elementary constituents."
Among the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Southern Italy a peculiar
metre is set apart to the composition of the neniae, and the office
of public wailer is transmitted from mother to daughter; so that the
living praeficae are the lineal descendants of the praeficae who lived
of old in the Grecian Motherland. Unrivalled in the matter of her
improvisations as in the manner of their delivery, the hereditary
dirge-singer no doubt, like a good actress, keenly realises at
the moment the sorrow not her own, of which she undertakes the
interpretation in return for a trifling gratuity, and to her hearers
she appears as the genius or high priestess of woe: she excites them
into a whirlwind of ecstatic paroxysms not greatly differing
from kindred phenomena vouched for by the historians of religious
mysticism. There are, however, one or two of the Graeco-Italic
death-songs which bear too clear and touching a stamp of sincerity for
us to attribute them even to the most skilled of hired "sobbing ones."
There is no savour of vicarious mourning in the plaint of the desolate
girl, who says to her dead mother that she will wait for her, so that
she may tell her how she has passed the day: at eight she will await
her, and if she does not come she will begin to weep; at nine she will
await her, and if she comes not she will grow black as soot; at ten
she will await her, and if she does not come at ten she will turn to
earth, to earth that may be sown in. And it is difficult to believe
that aught save the anguish of a mother's broken heart could have
quickened the senses of an ignorant peasant to the tragic intensity of
the following lament:
Now they have buried thee, my little one,
Who will make thy little bed?
Black Death will make it for me
For a very long night.
Who will arrange thy pillows,
So thou mayst sleep softly?
Black Death will arrange them for me
With hard stones.
Who will awake thee, my daughter,
When day is up?
Down here it is always sleep,
Always dark night.
This my daughter was fair.
When I went (with her) to high mass,
The columns shone,
The way grew bright.
The neniae of Terra d'Otranto and of Calabria are not uncommonly
composed in a semi-dramatic form. Professor Comparetti cites one, in
which the friend of a dead girl is represented as going to pay her a
visit, in ignorance of the misfortune that has happened. She sees a
crowd at the door, and she exclaims: "How many folks are in thy house!
they come from all the neighbourhood; they are bidden by thy mother,
who shows thee the bridal array!" But on crossing the threshold she
finds that the shutters are closed: "Alas!" she cries, "I deceive
myself--I enter into darkness." Again she repeats: "How many folks are
in thy house! All Corigliano is there." The mother says: "My daughter
has bidden them by the tolling of the bell." Then the daughter is made
to ask: "What ails thee, what ails thee, my mother? wherefore
dost thou rend thy hair?" The mother rejoins: "I think of thee, my
daughter, of how thou liest down in darkness." "What ails thee, what
ails thee, my mother, that all around one can hear thee wailing?" "I
think of thee, my daughter, of how thou art turned black as soot." A
sort of chorus is appended: "All, all the mothers weep and rend their
hair: let them weep, the poor mothers who lose their children." Here
are the last four lines as they were originally set on paper:
Ole sole i mane i cluene
Isirnune anapota ta maddia,
Afi na clapsune tio mane misere
Pu ichannune ta pedia!
Professor Comparetti has shaped them into looking more like Greek:
[Greek: Olais, holais e manai eklaioune
Esyrnoune anapoda ta mallia
Aphese na klapsoune tais manais] _misere_
[Greek: Pou echanoune ta paidia!]
In his "Tour through the Southern Provinces of the Kingdom of Naples,"
the Hon. R. Keppel Craven gave an account of a funeral at Corigliano.
The deceased, a stout, swarthy man of about fifty, had been fond of
field sports; he was, therefore, laid on his open bier in the dress of
a hunter. When the procession passed the house of a friend of the dead
man, it halted as a mark of respect, and the friend got up from his
dinner and looked out for a few minutes, afterwards philosophically
returning to the interrupted meal. The busy people in the street,
carpenters, blacksmiths, cobblers, and fruitsellers, paused from their
several occupations--all carried on, as usual, in the open air, when
the dismal chant of the priests announced the approach of the funeral,
resuming them with redoubled energy as soon as it had moved on.
A group of weeping women led the widow, whose face was pale and
motionless as a statue; her black tresses descended to her knees,
and at regular intervals she pulled out two or three hairs--the women
instantly taking hold of her hands and replacing them by her side,
where they hung till the operation was next repeated.
The practice of plucking out the hair was so general in the last
century that even at Naples the old women had hardly a hair left from
out-living many relations. It was proper also to observe the day
of burial as a fast day. Two unlucky women near Salerno lost their
characters for ever because the dog of a visitor who had come to
condole, sniffed out a dish of tripe which had been hastily thrust
into a corner.
The Italian, or rather Calabrese-speaking population of Calabria,
call their preficae--where they still have any--_Reputatrici_. Some
remarkable songs have been collected in the commune of Pizzo, the
place of dubious fame by whose peasants Murat was caught and betrayed.
There is something Dantesque in the image of Death as _'nu gran
levreri_ crouching in a mountain defile:
Joy, I saw death; Joy, I saw her yesterday; I beheld her in a
narrow way, like unto a great greyhound, and I was very
curious. "Death, whence comest thou?" "I am come from Germany,
going thence to Count Roger. I have killed princes, counts,
and cavaliers; and now I am come for a young maiden so that
with me she may go".
Weep, mamma, weep for me, weep and never rest; weep for me
Sunday, Easter, and Christmas Day; for no more wilt thou see
thy daughter sit down at thy board to eat, and no more shalt
thou await me.
One conclusion forced upon us incidentally by folk-dirges must seem
strange when we remember how few are the cultured poetesses who have
attained eminence--to wit, that with the unlettered multitude the
poetic faculty is equally the property of women as of men.
In various parts of Italy the funerals of the poor are conducted
exclusively by those of like sex with the dead--a custom of which I
first took note at Varese in the year 1879. The funeral procession
came up slowly by the shady paths near the lake; long before it
appeared one could hear the sound of shrill voices chanting a litany.
When it got near to the little church of S. Vittore, it was seen that
only women followed the bier, which was carried by women. "Una povera
donna morta in parto," said a peasant standing by, as she pointed to
the coffin with a gesture of sympathy. The mourners had black shawls
thrown over their heads and bore tapers. A sight yet stranger to
unaccustomed eyes is the funeral of a child at Spezia. A number of
little girls, none older than eleven or twelve, some as young as five,
carry the small coffin to the cemetery. Some of the children hold
candles; they are nicely dressed in their best frocks; the sun plays
on their bare black or golden curls. They have the little serious look
of children engaged in some business of work or play, but no look of
gloom or sadness. The coffin is covered with a white pall on which
lies a large nosegay. No priests or elder persons are there except one
man, walking apart, who has to see that the children go the right
way. About twenty children is the average number, but there may
be sometimes a hundred. When they return, running across the grass
between the road and the sea-wall, they tumble over one another in the
scramble to snatch daisies from the ground.
It is still common in Lombardy to ring the bells _d'allegrezza_ on the
death of an infant, "because its soul goes straight to Paradise." This
way of ringing, or, rather, chiming, consists in striking the bell
with a clapper held in the hand, when a light, dancing sound is
produced, something like that of hand-bells. On a high _festa_ all the
bells are used; for dead babies, only two. I have often heard the sad
message sounding gaily from the belfry at Salo.
Were I sure that all these songs of the Last Parting would have
for others the same interest that they have had for me, I should
be tempted to add a study dedicated solely to the dirges of savage
nations and of those nations whose civilization has not followed the
same course as ours. I must, at all events, indicate the wonderfully
strange and wild Polynesian "Death-talks" and "Evas" (dirges proper)
collected by the Rev. W. W. Gill. The South Pacific Islanders say of
the dying, "he is passing over the sea." Their dead set out in a canoe
on a long and perilous voyage to the regions of the sun-setting. When
they get there, alas!--when they reach the mysterious spirit-land,
a horrid doom awaits them: children and old men and women--all, in
short, who have not died in battle, are devoured by a dreadful deity,
and perish for ever. But this fate does not overtake them immediately;
for a time they remain in a shadowy intermediate state till their
turn comes. The spirit-journey is described in a dirge for two little
children, composed by their father about the year 1796:
"Thy god,[2] pet-child, is a bad one;
For thy body is attenuated;
This wasting sickness must end thy days.
Thy form, once so plump, now how changed!
Ah! that god, that bad god!
Inexpressibly bad, my child!
* * * * *
Thou hast entered the expanse;
And wilt visit 'the land of red parrot feathers,'
Where O[=a]rangi was once a guest.
Thou feedest now on ocean spray,
And sippest fresh water out of the rocks,
Travelling over rugged cliffs,
To the music of murmuring billows.
Thy exile spirit is overtaken
By darkness at the ocean's edge.
Fourapapa[3] there sleeps. All three[4]
Stood awhile to gaze wistfully
At the glories of the setting sun."
There is much more, but this is perhaps sufficient to show the
particular note struck.
I will give, in its entirety, one more dirge--the death-chant of the
tribe of Badagas, in the Neilgherry Hills--because it is unique, so
far as I know, in reversing the rule _de mortius_, and in charging,
instead, the dead man with every sin, to make sure that none are
omitted of which he is actually guilty. It is accompanied by a
singular ceremony. An unblemished buffalo-calf is led into the midst
of the mourners, and as after each verse they catch up and repeat the
refrain, "It is a sin!" the performer of the dirge lays his hand upon
the calf, to which the guilt is transferred. At the end the calf is
let loose; like the Jewish scape-goat, it must be used for no secular
work; it bears the sins of a human being, and is sacred till death.
The English version is by Mr C. E. Gover, who has done so much for the
preservation of South-Indian folk-songs.