Note 11 — Chapter XII · Death.

Mr. John Ruskin has been very severe upon the Italians for the humour with which they introduce Death as a person of their masque. ‘When I was in Venice in 1850,’ he says, ‘the most popular piece of the comic opera was “Death and the Cobbler,” in which the point of the plot was the success of a village cobbler as a physician, in consequence of the appearance of Death to him beside the bed of every patient who was not to recover; and the most applauded scene in it was one in which the physician, insolent in success, and swollen with luxury, was himself taken down into the abode of Death, and thrown into an agony of terror by being shown lives of men, under the form of wasting lamps, and his own ready to expire.’ On which he expresses the opinion that ‘this endurance of fearful images is partly associated with indecency, partly with general fatuity and weakness of mind.’11 But may it not rather be the healthy reaction from morbid images of terror, with which a purely natural and inevitable event has so long been invested by priests, and portrayed in such popular pictures as ‘The Dance of Death?’ The mocking laughter with which the skeletons beset the knight in our picture (Fig. 20), from the wall of La Chaise Dieu, Auvergne, marks the priestly terrorism, which could not fail to be vulgarised even more by the frivolous. In 1424 there was a masquerade of the Dance of Death in the Cemetery of the Innocents at Paris, attended by the Duke of Bedford and the Duke of Burgundy, just returned from battle. It may have been the last outcome in the west of Kali’s dance over the slain; but it is fortunate when Fanaticism has no worse outcome than Folly. The Skeleton Death has the advantage over earlier forms of suggesting the naturalness of death. It is more scientific. The gradual discovery by the people that death is not caused by sin has largely dissipated its horrors in regions where the ignorance and impostures of priestcraft are of daily observation; and although the reaction may not be expressed with good taste, there would seem to be in it a certain vigour of nature, reasserting itself in simplicity.