MACABEBE, a town of the province of Pampanga, island of Luzon, Philippine Islands, on the Pampanga Grande river, about 10 m. above its mouth and about 25 m. N.W. of Manila. Pop. (1903), after the annexation of San Miguel, 21,481. The language is Pampango. Many of the male inhabitants serve in the U.S. Army as scouts. Macabebe’s principal industries are the cultivation of rice and sugar cane, the distilling of nipa alcohol, and the weaving of hemp and cotton fabrics.
MACABRE, a term applied to a certain type of artistic or
literary composition, characterized by a grim and ghastly humour,
with an insistence on the details and trappings of death. Such a
quality, deliberately adopted, is hardly to be found in ancient
Greek and Latin writers, though there are traces of it in Apuleius
and the author of the Satyricon. The outstanding instances in
English literature are John Webster and Cyril Tourneur, with
E. A. Poe and R. L. Stevenson. The word has gained its significance
from its use in French, la danse macabre, for that allegorical
representation, in painting, sculpture and tapestry,
of the ever-present and universal power of death, known in
English as the “Dance of Death,” and in German as Totentanz.
The typical form which the allegory takes is that of a series of
pictures, sculptured or painted, in which Death appears, either
as a dancing skeleton or as a shrunken corpse wrapped in grave-clothes
to persons representing every age and condition of life,
and leads them all in a dance to the grave. Of the numerous
examples painted or sculptured on the walls of cloisters or churchyards
through medieval Europe few remain except in woodcuts
and engravings. Thus the famous series at Basel, originally
at the Klingenthal, a nunnery in Little Basel, dated from the
beginning of the 14th century. In the middle of the 15th century
this was moved to the churchyard of the Predigerkloster
at Basel, and was restored, probably by Hans Kluber, in 1568;
the fall of the wall in 1805 reduced it to fragments, and only
drawings of it remain. A Dance of Death in its simplest form
still survives in the Marienkirche at Lübeck in a 15th-century
painting on the walls of a chapel. Here there are twenty-four
figures in couples, between each is a dancing Death linking the
groups by outstretched hands, the whole ring being led by a
Death playing on a pipe. At Dresden there is a sculptured life-size
series in the old Neustädter Kirchhoff, removed here from
the palace of Duke George in 1701 after a fire. At Rouen in
the aitre (atrium) or cloister of St Maclou there also remains a
sculptured danse macabre. There was a celebrated fresco of
the subject in the cloister of Old St Paul’s in London, and another
in the now destroyed Hungerford Chapel at Salisbury, of which
a single woodcut, “Death and the Gallant,” alone remains.
Of the many engraved reproductions, the most celebrated is the
series drawn by Holbein. Here the long ring of connected
dancing couples is necessarily abandoned, and the Dance of
Death becomes rather a series of imagines mortis.
Concerning the origin of this allegory in painting and sculpture there has been much dispute. It certainly seems to be as early as the 14th century, and has often been attributed to the overpowering consciousness of the presence of death due to the Black Death and the miseries of the Hundred Years’ War. It has also been attributed to a form of the Morality, a dramatic dialogue between Death and his victims in every station of life, ending in a dance off the stage (see Du Cange, Gloss., s.v. “Machabaeorum chora”). The origin of the peculiar form the allegory has taken has also been found, somewhat needlessly and remotely, in the dancing skeletons on late Roman sarcophagi and mural paintings at Cumae or Pompeii, and a false connexion has been traced with the “Triumph of Death,” attributed to Orcagna, in the Campo Santo at Pisa.
The etymology of the word macabre is itself most obscure. According to Gaston Paris (Romania, xxiv., 131; 1895) it first occurs in the form macabre in Jean le Févre’s Respit de la mort (1376), “Je lis de Macabré la danse,” and he takes this accented form to be the true one, and traces it in the name of the first painter of the subject. The more usual explanation is based on the Latin name, Machabaeorum chora. The seven tortured brothers, with their mother and Eleazar (2 Macc. vi., vii.) were prominent figures on this hypothesis in the supposed dramatic dialogues. Other connexions have been suggested, as for example with St Macarius, or Macaire, the hermit, who, according to Vasari, is to be identified with the figure pointing to the decaying corpses in the Pisan “Triumph of Death,” or with an Arabic word magbarah, “cemetery.”
See Peignot, Recherches sur les danses des morts (1826); Douce, Dissertation on the Dance of Death (1833); Massmann, Litteratur der Totentänze (1840); J. Charlier de Gerson, La Danse macabre des Stes Innocents de Paris (1874); Seelmann, Die Totentänze des Mittelalters (1893).
McADAM, JOHN LOUDON (1756–1836), Scottish inventor,
who gave his name to the system of road-making known as
“macadamizing,” was born at Ayr, Scotland, on the 21st of
September 1756, being descended on his father’s side from the
clan of the McGregors. While at school he constructed a model
road-section. In 1770 he went to New York, entering the
counting-house of a merchant uncle. He returned to Scotland
with a considerable fortune in 1783, and purchased an estate at
Sauhrie, Ayrshire. Among other public offices he held that of
road trustee. The highways of Great Britain were at this time
in a very bad condition, and McAdam at once began to consider
how to effect reforms. At his own expense he began at Sauhrie,
despite much opposition, a series of experiments in road-making.
In 1798 he removed to Falmouth, where he had received a
government appointment, and continued his experiments there.
His general conclusion was that roads should be constructed of
broken stone (see Roads). In 1815, having been appointed
surveyor-general of the Bristol roads, he was able to put his
theories into practice. In 1819 he published a Practical Essay
on the Scientific Repair and Preservation of Roads, followed, in
1820, by the Present State of Road-making. As the result of a
parliamentary inquiry in 1823 into the whole question of road-making,
his views were adopted by the public authorities, and
in 1827 he was appointed general surveyor of roads. In pursuing
his investigations he had travelled over thirty thousand
miles of road and expended over £5000. Parliament recouped
him for his expenses and gave him a handsome gratuity, but he
declined a proffered knighthood. He died at Moffat, Dumfriesshire,
on the 26th of November 1836.
MACAIRE, a French chanson de geste. Macaire (12th century)
and La reine Sibille (14th century) are two versions of the story
of the false accusation brought against the queen of Charlemagne,
called Blanchefleur in Macaire and Sibille in the later poem.
Macaire is only preserved in the Franco-Venetian geste of Charlemagne
(Bibl. St Mark MS. fr. xiii.). La Reine Sibille only exists
in fragments, but the tale is given in the chronicle of Alberic
Trium Fontium and in a prose version. Macaire is the product
of the fusion of two legends: that of the unjustly repudiated
wife and that of the dog who detects the murderer of his master.
For the former motive see Geneviève of Brabant. The
second is found in Plutarch, Script. moral., ed. Didot ii. (1186),
where a dog, like Aubri’s hound, stayed three days without
food by the body of its master, and subsequently attacked the
murderers, thus leading to their discovery. The duel between
Macaire and the dog is paralleled by an interpolation by Giraldus
Cambrensis in a MS. of the Hexameron of Saint Ambrose. Aubri’s
hound received the name of the “dog of Montargis,” because a
representation of the story was painted on a chimney-piece in
the château of Montargis in the 15th century. The tale was
early divorced from Carolingian tradition, and Jean de la Taille,
in his Discours notable des duels (Paris, 1607), places the incident
under Charles V.
See Macaire (Paris, 1866), ed. Guessard in the series of Anc. poètes de la France; P. Paris in Hist. litt. de la France, vol. xxiii. (1873); L. Gautier, Épopées françaises, vol. iii. (2nd ed., 1880); G. Paris, Hist. poét. de Charlemagne (1865); M. J. G. Isola, Storie nerbonesi, vol. i. (Bologna, 1877); F. Wolf, Über die beiden . . . Volksbücher von der K. Sibille u. Huon de Bordeaux (Vienna, 1857) and Über die neuesten Leistungen der Franzosen (Vienna, 1833). The Dog of Montargis; or, The Forest of Bondy, imitated from the play of G. de Pixérécourt, was played at Covent Garden (Sept. 30, 1814).
“Robert Macaire” was the name given to the modern villain in the Auberge des Adrets (1823), a melodrama in which Frédérick
