now why is it that, we have gone back four hundred years and more, to linger thus long with the Secretary of the Great Ecclesiastical Council of Bâle, in that quaint and queer old town, with its half French, half German look, its grand, grotesque old churches, hung round with knightly shields and filled with women, each in a pulpit of her own, its stork-crowned roofs, its houses blazing with wrought gold and silver, its threescore fountains, and the magnificence in which, without a court, it rivalled the richest capitals of Italy, its noble-spirited and pleasure-loving, but simple-minded and unlearned burghers, its white-limbed beauties, and its deceitful clocks? It is not because that town is now one of the principal ribbon-factories of the world, and exports to this country alone over $1,200,000 worth yearly; although some fair readers may suppose that an all-sufficient reason,—and some of their admirers and protectors, too, for that matter. Think of it! nearly one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of ribbons coming to us every year from a single town in Switzerland! The statement is enough to carry horror and dismay to the heart and the pocket of every father and brother, and above all, of every husband, actual or possible, who hears of it. It is a godsend to the protectionists, who might reëdify their party on the basis of a prohibitory tariff against ribbons. If they were successful, their success would be brilliant; for if our fair tyrants could not get ribbons—those necessaries of life—from Bâle in Switzerland, they would tease and coax us to build them a Bâle in America; and we should do it.
We have gone back to the old Bâle of four hundred and twenty years ago, because there, and not long after that time,—about 1498,—according to general belief, Hans Holbein was born; because these were the surroundings under the influence of which he grew to manhood; and because there, about sixty years before his birth, a Dance of Death was painted, the most ancient and important of which we have any remaining memorial. This Dance was painted upon the wall of the churchyard of the Dominican Convent in Great Bâle, by order of the very Ecclesiastical Council of which our Aeneas Sylvius was Secretary, and in commemoration of a plague which visited the town during the sitting of that Council, and carried off many of its members.
What is a Dance of Death? and why should Death be painted dancing? Some readers may think of it as a frantic revel of grim skeletons, or perhaps—like me in my boyish musings—imagine nameless shapes with Death and Hell gleaming in their faces, each clasping a mortal beguiled to its embrace, all flitting and floating round and round to unearthly music, and gradually receding through vast mysterious gloom till they are lost in its horrible obscurity.
But neither of these notions is near the truth. The Dance of Death is not a revel, and in it Death does not dance at all. A Dance of Death, or a Dance Macabre, as it was called, is a succession of isolated pictures, all informed with the same motive, it is true, but each independent of the others, and consisting of a group, generally of but two figures, one of which is the representative of Death. The second always represents a class; and in this figure every rank, from the very highest to the lowest, finds its type. The number of these groups or pictures varies considerably in the different dances, according to the caprice of the artist, or, perhaps, to the expense of his time and labor which he thought warranted by the payment he was to receive. But all express, with sufficient fulness, the idea that Death is the common lot of humanity, and that he enters with impartial feet the palace and the cottage, neither pitying youth nor respecting age, and waiting no convenient season.
The figure of Death in these strange religious works of Art,—for they were as purely religious in their origin as the Holy Families and Madonnas of the same and a subsequent period,—this figure of Death is not always a skeleton. It is so in but one of the forty groups in the Dance at Bâle, which was the germ of Holbein's, and which, indeed, until very recently, was attributed to him, although it was painted more than half a century before he was born. It is generally assumed that a skeleton has always been the representative of Death, but erroneously; for, in fact, Holbein was the first to fix upon a mere skeleton for the embodiment of that idea.
The Hebrew Scriptures, which furnish us with the earliest extant allusion to Death as a personage, designate him as an angel or messenger of God,—as, for instance, in the record of the destruction of the Assyrian host in the Second Book of Kings (xix. 35). The ancient Egyptians, too, in whose strange system of symbolism may be found the germ, at least, of most of the types used in the religion and the arts of more modern nations, had no representation of Death as an individual agent. They expressed the extinction of life very naturally and simply by the figure of a mummy. Such a figure it was their custom to pass round among the guests at their feasts; and the Greeks and Romans imitated them, with slight modifications, in the form of the image and the manner of the ceremony. Some scholars have found in this custom a deep moral and religious significance, akin to that which certainly attached to the custom of placing a slave in the chariot of a Roman conquering general to say to him at intervals, as his triumphal procession moved with pomp and splendor through the swarming streets, "Remember that thou art a man." But this is too subtile a conjecture. The ceremony was but a silent way of saying, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," which, as Paul's solemn irony makes but too plain, must be the philosophy of life to those who believe that the dead rise not, which was the case with the Egyptians and the Greeks, and the Hebrews also. An old French epitaph expresses to the full this philosophy:—
"Ce que j'ai mangé,
Ce que j'ai bu,
Ce que j'ai dissipé,
Je l'ai maintenant avec moi.
Ce que j'ai laissé,
Je l'ai perdu,"
What I ate,
What I drank,
What I dissipated,
I have with me.
That which I left
I lost.
The figure of the sad youth leaning upon an inverted torch, in which the Greeks embodied their idea of Death, is familiar to all who have examined ancient Art. The Etruscan Death was a female, with wings upon the shoulders, head, and feet, hideous countenance, terrible fangs and talons, and a black skin. No example of the form attributed to him by the early Christians has come down to us, that I can discover; but we know that they, as well as the later Hebrews, considered Death as the emissary of the Evil One, if not identical with him, and called him impious, unholy. It was in the Dark Ages, that the figure of a dead body or a skull was first used as a symbol of Death; but even then its office appears to have been purely symbolic, and not representative;—that is, these figures served to remind men of their mortality, or to mark a place of sepulture, and were not the embodiment of an idea, not the creation of a personage,—Death. It is not until the thirteenth or fourteenth century that we find this embodiment clearly defined and generally recognized; and even then the figure used was not a skeleton, but a cadaverous and emaciated body.
Among the remains of Greek and Roman Art, only two groups are known in which a skeleton appears; and it is remarkable that in both of these the skeletons are dancing. In one group of three, the middle figure is a female. Its comparative breadth at the shoulders and narrowness at the hips make at first a contrary impression; but the position of the body and limbs is, oddly enough, too like that of a female dancer of the modern French school to leave the question in more than a moment's doubt. Thus the artists who did not embody their idea of death in a skeleton were the first to conceive and execute a real Dance of Death. In both the groups referred to, the motive is manifestly comic; and neither of them has any similarity to the Dances of Death of which Holbein's has become the grand representative. These had their origin, we can hardly tell with certainty how, or when, or where; although the subject has enlisted the investigating labors of such accomplished scholars and profound antiquaries as Douce and Ottley in England, and Peignot and Langlois in France. But a story with which they are intimately connected, even if it is not their germ, has been discovered; ancient customs which must have aided in their development are familiar to all investigators of ancient manners, and especially of ancient amusements; and the motives which
