Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (1886) Part 31

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 const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.sion of the race, and led to the frightful abuses that are a.s.sociated 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 n.o.ble house of Pozzo di Borgo once donned male attire, and in velvet-ta.s.selled cap, red doublet, high sheepskin boots, with pistol, gun, and dagger for her weapons, started off in search of an a.s.sa.s.sin 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 rehea.r.s.e 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds love." That saying about the G.o.ds 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s, 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 G.o.d 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 "Chil, cara di Mamma,"

to the worst possible of places, where no sun penetrates, and no fire is lit.

Sometimes to a young girl is a.s.signed 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, Niccol 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 Att.i.tido--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 att.i.tido 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 dest.i.tute? 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 pa.s.s. 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 surpa.s.sed 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 compa.s.sion 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d! 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns 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 l.u.s.tily 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 a.s.sume vampire form; but this time the superst.i.tion, 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 _va_ 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 a.n.a.logous 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 cla.s.sical 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 acc.u.mulating 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 const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.sing 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 c.o.c.k crows not, and the hen clucks not; where there is no water and no gra.s.s, 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 succ.u.mbed 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 Madchen_ 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 a.s.sociated 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 pa.s.sionate 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 const.i.tuents."

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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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: