Morality called "Every Man," written about 1450, has a direct connection with the subject which we are considering. Every Man, the principal personage of the piece, is an allegorical representation of all mankind; and the purpose of the play is told in this sentence, which introduces it:—
"Here begynneth a Treatyse how the Hye Fader of Heven sendeth Dethe to somon every creature to come & gyve a count of theyr lyves in this worlde, & is in maner of a Morall Playe."
On the title-page of an edition printed in 1500, only one copy of which exists, is a very rude wood-cut, in which an individual, who is labelled "Every Man," is startled at the sight of Death standing at the door of a church and summoning him. In this Moral Play, Fellowship, Good Deeds, Worldly Goods, Knowledge, Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wittes are characters; and they cannot interpose between Every Man and the summons of Death, nor will any of them, except Good Deeds, go with him. The representation of this play was a kind of Dance of Death, and from the acting of "Every Man" to the execution of that Dance was but a short step.
But the Dance of Death had been performed before "Every Man" was written; and dances in churches and churchyards were of yet greater antiquity. For, by an order of a Roman council under Pope Pius II. in the tenth century, priests were directed "to admonish men and women not to dance and sing in the churches on feast-days, like Pagans." The evil increased, however, until, according to the old chroniclers, a terrible punishment fell upon a party of dancers. One of them, Ubert, tells the story. It was on Christmas Eve, in the time of the Emperor Henry II., who assumed the imperial diadem in the year 1002, that a company of eighteen men and women amused themselves by dancing and singing in the churchyard of St. Magnus, in the diocese of Magdeburg, to the annoyance of a priest who was saying mass in the church. He ordered them to desist; but they danced on in reckless mirth. The holy father then invoked God and St. Magnus to keep them dancing for a whole year; and not in vain. For twelve months they danced in spite of themselves. Neither dew nor rain fell upon them; and their shoes and their clothes were not worn away, although by their dancing they buried themselves waist-high. Yet, fatigued and famished beyond human endurance, they danced on, unable to stop an instant for rest or food. The priest's own daughter was among the dancers; and, unable to undo what the Saint had done, he sent his son to drag her out of the dance. But when her brother pulls her by the arm it comes off in his hand, and he in horror takes it to his father. No blood flows from the wound. The priest buries the arm, and the next morning he finds it upon the top of the grave. He repeats the burial, and with the same result. He makes a third attempt, and the grave casts out the limb with violence before his eyes. Meanwhile the girl and her companions continue dancing, and the Emperor, having heard of this strange occurrence, travels from Rome to see so sad a sight. He orders carpenters to inclose the dancers in a building, but in vain; for that which is built in the day falls down in the night. The dancers have neither rest nor mitigation of their curse until the expiration of the year, when they all rush into the church and fall before the altar in a swoon, from which they are not recovered for three days. Then they immediately flee each other's faces, and wander solitary through the world, still dancing at times in spite of themselves. In the olden time this was believed to be the origin of St. Vitus's dance; but we can now see that the dance is the origin of the story.
The Dance of Death was performed by a large company dressed in the costumes of various classes of society, which were then very marked in their difference. One by one the dancers suddenly and silently slipped off, thus typifying the departure of all mankind at Death's summons. That this Dance was performed, not only with the consent, but by the procurement of the clergy, is made certain by the discovery, in the archives of the Cathedral of Besançon, of the account of the payment of four measures of wine by the seneschal to those persons who performed the Dance Macabre on the 10th of July, 1453.
The moral lesson conveyed by this strange pastime or ceremony seems hardly calculated to secure for it a noteworthy popularity in any age; but for a long time it was, either as a ceremony or as a picture, very popular throughout Europe. We know of forty-four places in which it was painted or sculptured in some large public building, the oldest example being that at Little Bâle, which was painted in 1312. This, like that in Great Bâle, and most of the others, has been destroyed by time or violence. The Dance was made the ornament of books of devotion, and the subject of ornamental initial-letters; groups from it were engraved repeatedly by those fantastic designers and exquisite workmen known as the Little Masters of Germany; a single group was assumed as a device, or trademark, by more than one printer; and it was sung in popular ballads. There is now at Aix-la-Chapelle a huge state-bed-stead, on the posts, sides, and footboards of which it is elaborately carved, in the manner of the sixteenth century; and it was even made the ornament of ladies' fans.
The reasons for this popularity were a certain strange fascination in the subject,—yet not so strange at a time when women would crowd to see men burned or hanged and quartered;—but chiefly, the grand democratic significance of the dance. Death has ever been, and ever will be, the greatest leveller; and at a time when rank had an importance and bestowed advantages of which we can form little idea, while at the same time men had begun to ask why this should be, such a satire as this Dance of Death, sanctioned by the Church, that great protector of established rights and dignities, and yet sparing neither noble nor hierarch, not even the Pope himself, satisfied an eager craving in the breast of poor, envious, self-asserting human nature. In one of those ornamental initial-letters above mentioned, the date of which was some years prior to the execution of Holbein's Dance, Death appears as a grave-digger, and lifts on his spade, out of the grave which he is making, two skulls, one crowned, the other covered with a peasant's hat. He grins with savage glee at seeing these remnants of the two extremes of society side by side; and underneath them, on the shovel, is written Idem,—"The Same." In this word is the key to the popularity of the Dance.
The most important and interesting of these pictured Dances of Death were those at Bâle, at Strasbourg, and at Rouen. That at Bâle consisted of thirty-nine groups, in the first three of which appear a Pope, an Emperor, and a King. These were portraits of Pope Felix V., the Emperor Sigismund, and King Albert II., of Rome, all of whom were present at the Council, by whose order, as we have seen, the Dance was painted. The last group of this Dance shows the seizure of the painter's child by Death. It having been almost destroyed by time, the wall on which it was painted was torn down about a hundred years ago; but engravings had been made of it in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The Dance at Strasbourg, like that at Bâle, and many others, was on the wall of a Dominican convent. It was painted in arched compartments, and is peculiar in that its groups consist of many figures, among whom Death intrudes, and carries off one, generally the principal personage of the company. It was painted about 1450, and probably by the eminent German painter, Martin Schongauer; but having been utterly neglected and forgotten, it was finally plastered over, no one knows when. In repairing the church in 1824, it was accidentally discovered, and carefully exposed; but it was so much injured that it fell into decay soon after drawings had been made from it.
The Dance at Rouen was in the still existing Cemetery of St. Maclou, and was not a painting, but a sculpture. It was not entirely completed until 1526. The cemetery is surrounded by a covered gallery open on the inside, where it was supported by thirty-nine columns, distant about eleven feet from each other. Thirty-one of these still exist; and upon the shaft of all but four of them, on the side facing the court of the cemetery, is sculptured, in high relief, a group of two figures,—one a living personage, and the other the cadaverous body by which Death was represented. On the remainder were sculptured the Christian Virtues and the Fates,—two on each column. The capitals of these columns are decorated with figures quite in another manner. Cupids, naked female figures, grotesque masks, and shapes—human and bestial—are ingeniously substituted for the foliage usually found on that part of a column. The execution of these figures is of quite a high order. They have all been sadly mutilated; but, fortunately, that which has suffered least is a beautiful figure of Eve. Her head is gone; but the flowing lines of the lovely torso are unbroken, and the round and graceful limbs are almost as perfect as when they came from the sculptor's chisel. This figure is so like the Venus de Medici that it might have been copied from it.
But
