Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 | Page 3

to what they promised; they would rather be upright than
merely seem to be so. Though provident, they were content, unless very
poor.
Another peculiarity of Bâle: its clocks were one hour ahead of all
others, and so continued at least till the middle of the last century. This
of course depended on no difference of time; it was merely that when,
for instance, at mid-day, the clocks of neighboring towns struck twelve,
the clocks of Bâle struck one. The origin of this seeming effort to
hasten him who usually moves rapidly enough for us all is lost in
obscurity.
And 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