Strange Survivals

England, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, were overrun with these sectaries, with their love-feasts, raptures, and license. It was the old story again of the revolt of the spiritual faculty against the reason, a story that will be told over and over again as long as man lives on the earth, and religion is dogmatic and exercises moral restraint.

One essential condition was always present in order to produce its effect in these sectarian meetings. The intellect must remain inactive, the emotions must be excited, and the sentiment of vague fear must be specially appealed to and powerfully wrought upon. It was this condition which determined the success alike of the revivalist meetings of the Mystics, and the revelries of the witches. This condition it was that provoked the orgies at Corinth among St. Paul’s converts, and the scenes in the assemblies of the Carpocratites. It was this condition which roused the attendants on the assemblies of the Goeti, of the Dionysian revellers, and of the Schamans and the medicine men.

These meetings always took place at night. There is reason to believe that during each day there is a normal alteration in the functions of the intellectual and emotional parts of the brain; that during the sunlight the perceptive faculties and the reflective are chiefly active; and that these, reposing during the night, permit the feelings to be mostly dominant; and it is well-known that general and simultaneous activity, both of the intellect and of the emotions, is unnatural; that thought and feeling are antagonistic to each other. Prayer meetings and witches’ assemblies alike began after dark and were often continued till the small hours of the morning. Ignorant men and women, and the youth of both sexes, were crowded together to partake in some mysterious spiritual rite. The quiescence of the observant and reflective faculties was facilitated, the imagination goaded and stimulated until it conjured up conceptions of hell and visions of devils with a vividness approaching reality; then came cries, tremblings, fallings on the ground, and raptures.

During Wesley’s preaching at Bristol, “one after another,” we are told, “sank to the earth.” Men and women by “scores were sometimes strewed on the ground at once, insensible as dead men.” During a Methodist revival in Cornwall, 4000 people, it was computed, fell into convulsions. “They remained during this condition so abstracted from every earthly thought, that they stayed two and sometimes three days and nights together in the chapels, agitated at the time by spasmodic movements, and taking neither repose nor refreshment. The symptoms followed each other usually as follows: – A sense of faintness and oppression, shrieks as if in the agony of death, convulsions of the muscles of the eyelids – the eyes being fixed and staring – and of the muscles of the neck, trunk, and arms, sobbing respiration, tremors, and general agitation, and all sorts of strange gestures. When the exhaustion came on, patients usually fainted and remained in a stiff and motionless state until their recovery.”[31 - Quoted in Westminster Review, Jan., 1860, p. 194.]

Now let the reader turn back to the account of the Tungu Schaman, at the beginning of this article. Is it not obvious that we have here precisely the same phenomenon?

While at Newcastle, Wesley investigated the physical effects that resulted from his preaching. “He found, first, that all persons who had been thus affected were in perfect health, and had not before been subject to convulsions of any kind.” Secondly, that they were affected suddenly. Thirdly, that they usually fell on the ground, lost their strength, and were afflicted with spasms. “Some thought a great weight lay upon them, some said they were quite choked, and found it difficult to breathe.” Wesley believed these phenomena were of diabolic origin. One section of Methodists, in Cornwall and Wales, was seized with a dancing or jumping mania. Because David danced before the ark, these fanatics concluded that jumping and dancing must form an acceptable form of service. The practice became epidemic. Each devotee would caper for hours, till, completely exhausted, he or she fell insensible.

During a great Presbyterian revival, which passed over Kentucky and Tennessee in the beginning of this century, persons swooned away and lay as dead on the ground for a quarter of an hour; this “falling exercise” was succeeded by that of the “jerks.” A Backwoods preacher who has left us his valuable biography, says: —

“A new exercise broke out among us, called the jerks, which was overwhelming in its effects upon the bodies and minds of the people. No matter whether they were saints or sinners, they would be taken under a warm song or sermon, and seized with a convulsive jerking all over, which they could not by any possibility avoid, and the more they resisted, the more they jerked. I have seen more than five hundred persons jerking at one time in my large congregations. Most usually persons taken with the jerks would rise up and dance. Some would run, but could not get away. To see those proud young gentlemen, and young ladies dressed in their silks, jewelry, and prunella, from top to toe take the jerks, would often excite my risibilities. The first jerk or so, you would see their fine bonnets, caps, and combs fly; and so sudden would be the jerking of the head that their long, loose hair would crack almost as loud as a waggoner’s whip.”[32 - “Autobiography of Peter Cartwright.” London, 1862 (7th ed.)]

Another revivalist in Kentucky says; “While preaching, we have after a smooth and gentle course of expression suddenly changed our voice and language, expressing something awful and alarming, and instantly some dozen or twenty persons, or more, would simultaneously be jerked forward, where we were sitting, and with a suppressed noise once or twice, somewhat like the barking of a dog. One young woman went round like a top, we think, at least fifty times in a minute, and continued without interruption for at least an hour, and one young woman danced in her pew for twenty or thirty minutes with her eyes shut and her countenance calm, and then fell into convulsions; some ran with amazing swiftness, some imitated the motion of playing on a fiddle, others barked like dogs.”

Surely we have here a scene precisely identical in character with that described by Dr. Hecker as having broke out in Germany in 1374. He says: “It was called the dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterised. The dancers, appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion… While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions, their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out.”[33 - “The Epidemics of the Middle Ages.” London, 1859.]

It has happened in some cases, especially in that of women, that they have tried to tear off their clothes, and this explains the account given by those who had attended the Witches’ Sabbath, that many present were stark naked. We know that some of the wilder congregations of the Hussites developed their fanaticism in this form. So did the Anabaptists in Amsterdam.

We will now take a case or two from the Roman Communion. Hysteria, as we might suppose, would be likely to manifest itself in the monastic orders. St. Joseph of Cupertino was one Christmas Eve in church, when the pifferari began to play their carols. Joseph, who was a Franciscan friar, carried away by religious emotion, began to dance in the midst of the choir, and then, with a howl, he took a flying leap and lighted on the high altar. He was then vested in a gorgeous cope, conducting the service. The carollers were amazed, no less than the friars; and their amazement was increased when they saw him jump from the altar on to the pulpit ledge, fifteen feet above the ground. One day he went into the convent choir of the Sisters of St. Clara, at Cupertino. When the nuns began to sing, Joseph, unable to restrain his emotion, ran across the chancel, caught the old confessor of the convent in his arms, and danced with him before the altar. Then he span himself about like a teetotum, with the confessor clinging to his hands, and his legs flying out horizontally.

St. Christina, The Wonderful, a Belgian virgin, used to go into fits when her religious emotions were worked upon, put her head between her feet, bending her spine backwards, and roll round the room or church like a ball.

St. Peter of Alcantara in his fervours used to strip himself naked. He would jump, curled up like a ball, high into the air, and in and out at the church door. “What was going on in his soul all this while,” says his biographer, “it is not given to mortals to declare.”

The numerous cases of possession in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were nothing but hysterical disorders, the symptoms precisely those of Methodist revivals, Witches’ Sabbaths, Paulinian orgies, and Schamanism.

It is worthy of note that the witches were always a prey to extreme exhaustion after they had attended their Sabbaths, a feature that is invariable after spiritual raptures.

In Sweden a religious revival took place in 1842-3, which swept over the country, affecting great numbers of children. Boys and girls, only eight years of age, were inspired to preach the Gospel and go about in bands singing hymns. In the province of Skaraburg, where the epidemic was least extensive, it numbered, at least, 3000 victims. The patients had “quaking fits,” dropped down, became unconscious, had trances, saw visions, and preached when in an ecstatic state. Not two centuries before, a similar epidemic had passed over Sweden, affecting the children, but it then took a slightly different complexion: it was an epidemic of witchcraft. In 1669-70, the children declared that they were transported nightly to the Blockula, and their condition afterwards was one of complete prostration.

A Commission was appointed to examine into the matter, public prayers and humiliations were ordered, and a great number of women and children were executed for their guilt in having attended these meetings on the Blockula.

Into the details of the Witch-Sabbaths I have not entered; it is unnecessary. My object has been to show that in all likelihood there were such gatherings, that they took the place of assemblies of Pagan origin, which were analogous to the assemblies of the spiritual Pauline heretics in the early Church; that modern revivals are not derived from these, but are analogous exhibitions, and that all are alike manifestations of hysteria, superinduced by a love of the sensational, a vague credulity, and an absolute stagnation of the intellectual powers.

We are in the age of compulsory education; in our Board Schools religious teaching is reduced to the thinnest gruel, absolutely tasteless, and wholly unnutritious. We are straining, perhaps over-straining, the mental faculties, and making no provision for the co-ordinate development of the spiritual powers in the soul. The result will be, not that we shall kill the spiritual faculty, but that we shall drive it in – and it will break forth inevitably in extraordinary and outrageous manifestations. It must do so – just as a check to the free action of the pores superinduces fever. We shall have a sporadic fever of wild mysticism bursting forth, in the place of healthy religion. The spiritual element in man will rebel against compression, will insist on not being ignored. We are now suffering from the nuisance of the Salvation Army. But the Salvation Army is a comparatively innocuous form of reaction, or is comparatively innocuous just at present. We do not know but that it may herald other and worse forms of spiritual excitement, or that it may not itself develop in an Antinomian direction. We have no guarantee. There is a law in these manifestations that is constant. They all begin in ecstatic raptures and with a high moral aim, and all inevitably fall into laxity if not license in morality. The moral sense becomes inevitably blunted. It ceases to speak and work when man takes his ecstatic thrills and visions – which are veritable hallucinations – as the guide of his conduct, in place of the still small voice of conscience, instructed by the written, revealed law.

IX.

Broadside Ballads

“I love a ballad in print, a’ life,” said Mopsa, in the “Winter’s Tale,” and the clown confessed to the same liking. “I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.”

In 1653, Dorothy Osborne tells Sir William Temple that she has received from her brother a ballad “much older than my ‘Lord of Lorne,’ and she sends it on to him.” Would that she had told us more about it. And then she writes, “The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.”

Walton in his “Complete Angler,” printed in the very same year in which Dorothy Osborne wrote to her lover of the singing peasant girls, says: “I entered into the next field, and a second pleasure entertained me: ’twas a handsome milk-maid, that had cast away all care, and sung like a nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it; ’twas that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago; and the milk-maid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger dayes.”

We know what the song was, “Come, live with me and be my love.”

The mother says to Walton, “If you will but speak the word, I will make you a good sillabub, and then you may sit down in a hay-cock and eat it, and Maudlin shall sit by and sing you the good old song of the Hunting in Chevy Chase, or some other good ballad, for she hath good store of them: Maudlin hath a notable memory.”

But ballad-singing was not confined to milk-maids and clowns, for Walton proposes to spend a pleasant evening with his brother, Peter, and his friends, “to tell tales, or sing ballads, or make a catch, or find some harmless sport to content us.”

It is a somewhat sad fact – fact it is, that the ballad is at its last gasp among us. It has gone through several phases, and it has now reached the last, when it disappears altogether.

The ballad was anciently a story set to music, and music to which the feet could move in dance. The ballet is the dance to which the ballad was sung. It was not always danced to, but it always could be danced to. It was of great length, but not too long for light hearts or light feet on a threshing-floor. The ballad was accommodated to the exigencies of the dance, by being given a burden, or bourdon, a drone that was sung by the young men, when no bagpipe was there. This burden appears in numerous ballads, and has usually no reference to the story told by the singers, and when printed is set in italics. In the scene in the “Winter’s Tale,” already quoted, the servant alludes to these burdens, “He has the prettiest love-songs for maids – with such delicate burdens of ‘dildos and fadings.’”

Thus: —

“There was a lady in the North country,
Lay the bent to the bonny broom,
And she had lovely daughters three,
Fa, la la la; fa, la la la ra re.”

or: —

“There were three sisters fair and bright,
Jennifer, Gentle, and Rosemaree,
And they three loved one valiant knight,
As the doo (dove) flies over the mulberry tree.”

In the first edition of Playford’s “Dancing Master,” in 1650-1, nearly every air can be proved to have been that of a song or ballad of earlier date than the book. Of these only a few have the words preserved, and we cannot be sure that the words of those we have got were the original, as ballads were continually being written afresh.

It was not till about 1690 that tunes were composed expressly for dancing, and in the later editions of the “Dancing Master,” 1715 and 1728, about half the airs given are old ballad tunes. The other half, newly composed dance tunes, had no traditional words set to them, and none were composed to fit them.

In the old English romance of “Tom of Reading,” printed before 1600, we have an instance of the way in which a ballad came to be turned into a dance. Tom Dove was an Exeter clothier passionately fond of music. William of Worcester loved wine, Sutton of Salisbury loved merry tales, Simon of Southampton “got him into the kitchen and to the pottage and then to a venison pasty.”

Now a ballad was composed relative to Tom of Exeter: —

“Welcome to town, Tom Dove, Tom Dove,
The merriest man alive.
Thy company still we love, we love,
God grant thee well to thrive.
And never will we depart from thee
For better or worse, my joy!
For thou shalt still have our good-will,
God’s blessing on my sweet boy.”

And the author adds, “This song went up and down through the whole country, and at length became a dance among the common sort.”

The old heroic ballad was a geste, and the singer was a gestour. Chaucer speaks of —

“Jestours that tellen tales
Both of seeping and of game.”

The tales of game were stories calculated to provoke laughter, in which very often little respect was paid to decency; sometimes, however, they were satirical. These tales of game were much more popular than those of weeping, and the gestour, whose powers were mainly employed in scenes of conviviality, finding by experience that the long lays of ancient paladins were less attractive than short and idle tales productive of mirth, accommodated himself to the prevailing coarse taste, and the consequence was that nine of the pieces conceived in a light vein have been preserved to every one of the other.