Part 3

The influence of death on the popular imagination is shown in those ballads of the supernatural of which folk-poetry offers so great an abundance as to make choice difficult. One of the most powerful as well as the most widely diffused of the people's ghost stories is that which treats of the persecuted child whose mother comes out of her grave to succour him. There are two or three variants of this among the Czech songs. A child aged eighteen months loses his mother. As soon as he is old enough to understand about such things, he asks his father what he has done with her? "Thy mother sleeps a heavy sleep, no one will wake her; she lies in the graveyard hard by the gate." When the child hears that, he runs to the graveyard. He loosens the earth with a big pin and pushes it aside with his little finger. Then he cries mournfully, "Ah! mother, little mother, say one little word to me!" "My child, I cannot," the mother replies, "my head is weighed down with clay; on my heart is a stone which burns like fire; go home little one, there you have another mother." "Ah!" rejoins he, "she is not good like you were. When she gives me bread she turns it thrice; when you gave it me you spread it with butter. When she combs my hair she makes my head bleed; when you combed my hair, mother, you fondled it. When she bathes my feet she bruises them against the side of the basin; when you bathed them you kissed them. When she washes my shirt she loads me with curses; you used to sing whilst you washed." The mother answers: "Go back to the house, my child, to-morrow I will come for you." The child goes back to the house and lies down in his bed. "Ah! father, my little father, make ready my winding-sheet, my soul now belongs to God, my body to the grave, to the grave near my mother--how glad her heart will be!" One day he was ill, the second he died, the third day they buried him. The effect is heightened by the interval placed between the mother's death and the child's awakening to his own forlorn condition. When the mother died he was too young to think or to grieve. He did not know that she was gone until he missed her. Only by degrees, after years of harsh treatment, borne with the patience of a child or a dumb animal, he began to feel intuitively rather than to remember that it had not been always so--that he had once been loved. Then, going straight to the point with the terrible accusative power that lies in children, he said to the father, "What have you done with my mother?" He had been able to live and to suffer until he was old enough to think; when he thought, he died. Here we have an instance, one of the many that exist, of a motive which, having recurred again and again in folk-poetry, gets handled at last by a master-poet, who gives it enduring shape and immortality. Victor Hugo may or may not have known the popular legend. It is most likely that he did not know it. Yet, stripped of the marvellous, and modified in certain secondary points of construction, the story is the story of "Petit Paul," little Paul, the child of modern France, who takes company with Dante's Anselmuccio and Shakespeare's Arthur, and who with them will live in the pity of all time. The Ruthenes affirm that it was Christ who bade the child seek his mother's grave. The Provencal folk-poet begins his tale: "You shall hear the complaint of three very little children." The mother of these children was dead, the father had married again. The new wife brought a hard time for the children, and the day came when they were like to starve. The littlest begged for a bit of bread, and he got a kick which threw him to the ground. Then the biggest of the brothers said, "Get up and let us go to our mother in the graveyard; she will give us bread." They set out at once; on their way they met Jesus Christ.

Et ount anetz, mes angis, Mes angis tant petits?

"Where are you going, my angels, my so very small angels?" "We go to the graveyard to find our mother." Jesus Christ tells the mother to come forth and give her children food. "How would you have me come forth, when there is no strength left in me?" He answers that her strength shall come back to her for seven years. Now, as the end of the seven years drew near, she was always sobbing and sighing, and the children asked why it was. "I weep, my children, because I have to go away from you." "Weep no more, mother, we will all go together; one shall carry the hyssop, another will take the taper, the last will hold the book. We will go home singing." The Provencal poet does not tell us what happened when the resuscitated wife came back to her former abode; we have to go to Scandinavia for an account of that. Dyring the Dane went to an island and wed a fair maiden. For seven years they dwelt together and were blessed with children; but while the youngest born was still a helpless babe, Death stalked through the land and carried off the young wife in his clutches. Dyring went to another island and married a girl who was bad and spiteful. He brought her home to his house, and when she reached the door the six little children were there crying. She thrust them aside with her foot, she gave them no ale and no bread; she said, "You shall suffer thirst and hunger." She took from them their blue cushions, and said, "You shall sleep on straw." She took from them their wax candles, and said, "You shall stay in the dark." In the evening, very late, the children cried, and their mother heard them under the ground. She listened as she lay in her shroud, and thought to herself, "I must go to my little children." She begged our Lord so hard to let her go, that her prayer was granted. "Only you must be back when the cock crows." She lifted her weary limbs, the grave gaped, she passed through the village, the dogs howled as she passed, throwing up their noses in the air. When she got to the house, she saw her eldest daughter on the threshold. "Why are you standing there, my dear daughter? Where are your brothers and sisters?" The daughter knew her not. She said her mother was fair and blithe, her face was white and pink. "How can I be fair and blithe? I am dead, my face is pale. How can I be white and pink, when I have been all this time in my winding-sheet?" Answering thus, the mother hastened to her little children's chamber. She found them with tears running down their cheeks. She brushed the clothes of one, she tidied the hair of the second, she lifted the third from the floor, she comforted the fourth, the fifth she set on her knee as though she were fain to suckle it. To the eldest girl she said, "Go and tell Dyring to come here." And when he came she cried in wrath, "I left you ale and bread, and my little ones hunger; I left you blue cushions, and my little ones lie on straw; I left you waxen candles, and my little ones are in the dark. Woe betide you, if there be cause I should return again! Behold the red cock crows, the dead fly underground. Behold the black cock crows, heaven's doors are thrown wide. Behold the white cock crows, I must begone." So saying she went, and was seen no more. Ever after that night each time Dyring and his wife heard the dogs bark they gave the children ale and bread; each time they heard the dogs bay they were seized with dread of the dead woman; each time they heard the dogs howl they trembled lest she should come back. Two universal beliefs are introduced into this variant: the disappearance of the dead at cock crow, and the connection of the howling of dogs with death or the dead. The last is a superstition which still obtains a wide acceptance even among educated people. I was speaking of it lately to an English officer, who stated that he had twice heard the death howl, once while on duty in Ireland, and once, if I remember right, in India. It was, he said, totally unlike any other noise produced by a dog. I observed that all noises sound singular when the nerves are strained by painful expectancy; but he answered that in his own case his feelings were not involved, as the death which occurred, in one instance at least, was that of a perfect stranger.

The interpretation of dreams as a direct intercourse with the spiritual world is not usual in folk-lore; the people hardly see the need of placing the veil of sleep between mortal eyes and ghostly appearances. In a Bulgarian song, however, a sleeping girl speaks with her dead mother. Militza goes down into the little garden where the white and red roses are in bloom. She is weary, and she is soon asleep. A small fine rain begins to fall, the wind rustles in the leaves; Militza sighs, and having sighed, she awakes. Then she upbraids the rain and the wind: "Whistle no more, O wind; thou, O rain, descend no more; for in my dreams I found my mother. Rain, may thy fount be dried; mayst thou be for ever silent, O wind: ye have taken me from the counsel my mother gave me." The few lines thus baldly summarized make up, as it seems to me, a little masterpiece of delicate conception and light workmanship: one which would surprise us from the lips of a letterless poet, were there not proof that no touch is so light and so sure as that of the artificer untaught in our own sense--the man or the woman who produces the intricate filigree, the highly wrought silver, the wood carving, the embroidery, the lace, the knitted wool rivalling the spider's web, the shawl with whose weft and woof a human life is interwoven.

I have only once come upon the case of a father who returns to take care of his offspring. Mr Chu, a worthy Chinese gentleman, revisited this earth as a disembodied spirit to guard and teach his little boy Wei. When Wei reached the age of twenty-two, and took his doctor's degree, his father, Mr Chu, finally vanished. As a general rule, the Chinese consider the sight of his former surroundings to be the worst penalty that can befall a soul. Mr Herbert Giles, in his fascinating work on the Liao-Chai of P'u Sing-Ling, gives a full account of the terrible See-one's-home terrace as represented in the fifth court of Purgatory in the Taoist Temples. Good souls, or even those who have done partly good and partly evil, will never stand thereon. The souls of the wicked only see their homes as if they were near them: they see their last wishes disregarded, everything upside down, their substance squandered, the husband prepares to take a new wife, strangers possess the old estate, in their misery the dead man's family curse him, his children become corrupt, lands are gone, the house is burnt, the wife sees her husband tortured, the husband sees his wife stricken down with mortal disease; friends forget: "some perhaps for the sake of bygone times may stroke the coffin and let fall a tear, departing with a cold smile." In the West, this gloomy creed is perhaps hinted at in the French proverb, "Les morts sont bien mort." But Western thought at its best, at its highest, imagines differently. It imagines that the most gracious privilege of immortal spirits is that of beholding those beloved of them in mortal life--

I am still near, Watching the smiles I prized on earth, Your converse mild, your blameless mirth.

Happy and serene optimism!

The ghosts of folk-lore return not only to succour the innocent, they come back also to convict the guilty. The avenging ghost shows himself in all kinds of strange and uncanny ways rather than in his habit as he lived. He comes in animal or vegetable shape; or perhaps he uses the agency of some inanimate object. In the Faroe Isles there is a story of a girl whose sister pushed her into the sea out of jealousy. The blue waves cast ashore her body, which was found by two pilgrims, who made the arms into a harp, and the flaxen locks into strings. Then they went and played the harp at the wedding feast of the murderess and the dead girl's betrothed. The first string said, "The bride is my sister." The second string said, "The bride caused my death." The third string said, "The bridegroom is my betrothed." The harp's notes swelled louder and louder, and the guilty bride fell sick unto death; before the pilgrims had done playing, her heart broke. This is much the same story as the "Twa Sisters of Binnorie." A Slovack legend describes two musicians who, as they were travelling together, noticed a fine plane tree; and one said to the other, "Let us cut it down, it is just the thing to make a violin of; the violin will be equally yours and mine; we will play on it by turn." At the first blow the tree sighed; at the second blow blood spurted out; at the third blow the tree began to talk. It said: "Musicians, fair youths, do not cut me down; I am not a tree, I am made of flesh and blood; I am a lovely girl of the neighbouring town; my mother cursed me while I drew water--while I drew water and chatted with my friend. 'Mayst thou change into a plane tree with broad leaves,' said she. Go ye, musicians, and play before my mother." So they betook themselves to the mother's door and played a dirge over her child. "Play not, musicians, fair youths," she entreated. "Rend not my heart by your playing. I have enough of woe in having lost my daughter. Hapless the mother who curses her children!" The well-known German tale of the juniper tree belongs to the same class. A beautiful little boy is killed by his step-mother, who serves him up as a dish of meat to his father. The father eats in ignorance, and throws away the bones, which are gathered up by the little half-sister, who puts them into her best silk handkerchief and buries them under a juniper tree. Presently a bird of gay plumage perches on the tree, and whistles as it flits from branch to branch--

Min moder de mi slach't, Min fader de mi att, Min swester de Marleenken Soecht alle mine Beeniken, Und bindt sie in een syden Dook Legst unner den Machandelboom; Ky witt! ky witt! Ach watt en schoen vagel bin ich!

--a rhyme which Goethe puts into the mouth of Gretchen in prison. In the German story the step-mother's brains are knocked out by the fall of a mill-stone, and the bird-boy is restored to human form; but in a Scotch variant the last event does not take place. It may have been thrown in by some narrator who had a weakness for a plot which ends well. All these wonder-tales had probably an original connection with a belief in the transmigration of souls. In truth, the people's _Maerchen_ are rooted nearly always on some article of ancient faith: that is why they have so long a life. Faith vitalizes poetry or legend or art; and what once lived takes a great time to die. Now that the beliefs which fostered them have gone into the lumber-room of disused religions, the old wonder-tales still have a freshness and a horror which cannot be found even in the best of brand-new "made-up" stories.

Another reason why the dead come back is to fulfil a promise. The Greek mother of the Kleft song has nine sons and one only daughter. She bathes her in the darkness, her hair she combs in the light, she dresses her beneath the shining of the moon. A stranger from Bagdad has asked her in marriage, and Constantine, one of the sons, counsels his mother to give her to the stranger. "Thou art wont to be prudent, but in this thou art senseless," says the mother. "Who will bring her back to me if there be joy or sorrow?" Constantine gives her God as surety, and all the saints and martyrs, that if there be sorrow or joy he will bring her back. In two years all the nine sons die, and when it is Constantine's turn, the mother leans over his body and tears her hair. Fain would she have back her daughter Arete, and behold Constantine lies dead. At midnight Constantine gets up and goes to where his sister dwells, and bids Arete to follow him. She asks what has happened, but he tells her nothing. While they journey along the birds sing: "See you that lovely girl riding with the dead?" Then Arete asks her brother if he heard what the birds said. "They are only birds," he answers; "never mind them." She says her brother has such an odour of incense that it fills her with fear, "It is only," he says, "because we passed the evening in the chapel of St John." When they reach their home, the mother opens the portal and sees the dead and the living come in together, and her soul leaves her body. The motive of a ride with the dead, made familiar by the "Erl Koenig" and Burgher's "Lenore," can be traced through endless variations in folk-poesy.

In the Swedish ballad of "Little Christina," a lover rises from his grave, not to carry off his beloved, but simply to console her. One night Christina hears light fingers tapping at her door; she opens it, and her dead betrothed comes in. She washes his feet with pure wine, and for a long while they speak together. Then the cocks begin to crow, and the dead get them underground. The young girl puts on her shoes and follows her betrothed through the wide forest. When they reach the graveyard, the fair hair of the young man begins to disappear. "See, maiden," he says, "how the moon has reddened all at once; even so, in a moment, thy beloved will vanish." She sits down on the tomb and says: "I shall remain here till the Lord calls me." Then she hears the voice of her betrothed saying to her: "Little Christina, go back to thy dwelling-place. Every time a tear falls from thine eyes my shroud is full of blood. Every time thy heart is gay, my shroud is full of rose leaves."

If the display of excessive grief is thus shown to be only grievous to the dead, yet they are held to be keenly sensible of a lack of due and decorous respect. Such respect they generally get from rough or savage natures, unless it be denied out of intentional scorn or enmity. There is a factory in England where common men are employed to manipulate large importations of bones for agricultural uses. Each cargo contains a certain quantity of bones which are very obviously human. These the workmen sort out, and when they have got a heap they bury it, and ask the manager to read over it some passages from the Burial Service. They do it of their own free will and initiative; were they hindered, they would very likely leave the works. Shall it be called foolish or sublime? Another curious instance of respect to the dead comes to my mind. On board ship two cannon balls are ordinarily sewed up with a body to sink it. Once a negro died at sea, and his fellows, negroes also, took him in a boat and rowed a long way to a place where they were to commit him to the deep. After a while the boat returned to the ship, still with its burden. The explanation was soon made. The negroes discovered that they had only one cannon ball, they had rowed back for the other. One would have been quite enough to answer all purposes; but it seemed to them disrespectful to their comrade to cheat him out of half his due.

The dead particularly object to people treading carelessly on their graves. So we learn from one of the songs of Greek outlawry.

All Saturday we held carouse, and far through Sunday night, And on the Monday morn we found our wine expended quite. To seek for more without delay the captain made me go; I ne'er had seen nor known the way, nor had a guide to show. And so through solitary roads and secret paths I sped, Which to a little ivied church long time deserted led. This church was full of tombs, and all by gallant men possest; One sepulchre stood all alone, apart from all the rest.

I did not see it, and I trod above the dead man's bones, And as from out the nether world came up a sound of groans. What ails thee, sepulchre? why thus so deeply groan and sigh? Doth the earth press, or the black stone weigh on thee heavily? "Neither the earth doth press me down, nor black stone do me scath, But I with bitter grief am wrung, and full of shame and wrath, That thou dost trample on my head, and I am scorned in death. Perhaps I was not also young, nor brave and stout in fight, Nor wont as thou, beneath the moon, to wander through the night."

Egil Skallagrimson, after his son was drowned, resolved to let himself die of hunger. Thorgerd, his daughter, came to him and prayed hard of him that he would sing. Touched by her affection, he made an effort, gathered up his ideas, dressed them in images, expressed them in song; and as he sang, his regrets softened, and in the end his soul became so calm that he was satisfied to live. In this beautiful saga lies the secret of folk-elegies. The people find comfort in singing. A Czech maiden asks of the dark woods how they can be as green in winter as in summer; as for her, she cannot help vexing her heart. "But who would not weep in my place? Where is my father, my beloved father? The sandy plain is his winding-sheet. Where is my mother, my good mother? The grass grows over her. I have no brother and no sister, and they have taken away my friend." Of a certainty when she had sung, her vexed heart was lighter. "Seul a un synonym: mort." Yes, but he who sings is scarcely alone, even though there be only the waving pine woods to answer with a sigh. The most passionate laments of the Sclavonic race are for father and mother. If a Little Russian loses both his parents his despair is such that it often drives him forth a wanderer on the face of the earth. One so bereft cries out, "Dear mother, why didst thou suffer me to see the day? Why didst thou bring me into the world without obtaining for me by thy prayers a portion of its blessings? My father and my mother are dead, and with them my country. Why was I left a wretched orphan? Oh, could I find a being miserable as myself that we might sympathize one with the other!" The birth-ties of kindred are reckoned the only strong ones. Some Russian lines, translated by Mr Ralston, indicate the degrees of mourning:

There weeps his mother--as a river runs; There weeps his sister--as a streamlet flows; There weeps his youthful wife--as falls the dew; The sun will rise and gather up the dew.