The Erewhonians regard death with less abhorrence than disease. If it
is an offence at all, it is one beyond the reach of the law, which is
therefore silent on the subject; but they insist that the greater
number of those who are commonly said to die, have never yet been
born—not, at least, into that unseen world which is alone worthy of
consideration. As regards this unseen world I understand them to say
that some miscarry in respect to it before they have even reached the
seen, and some after, while few are ever truly born into it at all—the
greater part of all the men and women over the whole country
miscarrying before they reach it. And they say that this does not
matter so much as we think it does.
As for what we call death, they argue that too much has been made of
it. The mere knowledge that we shall one day die does not make us very
unhappy; no one thinks that he or she will escape, so that none are
disappointed. We do not care greatly even though we know that we have
not long to live; the only thing that would seriously affect us would
be the knowing—or rather thinking that we know—the precise moment at
which the blow will fall. Happily no one can ever certainly know this,
though many try to make themselves miserable by endeavouring to find it
out. It seems as though there were some power somewhere which
mercifully stays us from putting that sting into the tail of death,
which we would put there if we could, and which ensures that though
death must always be a bugbear, it shall never under any conceivable
circumstances be more than a bugbear.
For even though a man is condemned to die in a week’s time and is shut
up in a prison from which it is certain that he cannot escape, he will
always hope that a reprieve may come before the week is over. Besides,
the prison may catch fire, and he may be suffocated not with a rope,
but with common ordinary smoke; or he may be struck dead by lightning
while exercising in the prison yards. When the morning is come on which
the poor wretch is to be hanged, he may choke at his breakfast, or die
from failure of the heart’s action before the drop has fallen; and even
though it has fallen, he cannot be quite certain that he is going to
die, for he cannot know this till his death has actually taken place,
and it will be too late then for him to discover that he was going to
die at the appointed hour after all. The Erewhonians, therefore, hold
that death, like life, is an affair of being more frightened than hurt.
They burn their dead, and the ashes are presently scattered over any
piece of ground which the deceased may himself have chosen. No one is
permitted to refuse this hospitality to the dead: people, therefore,
generally choose some garden or orchard which they may have known and
been fond of when they were young. The superstitious hold that those
whose ashes are scattered over any land become its jealous guardians
from that time forward; and the living like to think that they shall
become identified with this or that locality where they have once been
happy.
They do not put up monuments, nor write epitaphs, for their dead,
though in former ages their practice was much as ours, but they have a
custom which comes to much the same thing, for the instinct of
preserving the name alive after the death of the body seems to be
common to all mankind. They have statues of themselves made while they
are still alive (those, that is, who can afford it), and write
inscriptions under them, which are often quite as untruthful as are our
own epitaphs—only in another way. For they do not hesitate to describe
themselves as victims to ill temper, jealousy, covetousness, and the
like, but almost always lay claim to personal beauty, whether they have
it or not, and, often, to the possession of a large sum in the funded
debt of the country. If a person is ugly he does not sit as a model for
his own statue, although it bears his name. He gets the handsomest of
his friends to sit for him, and one of the ways of paying a compliment
to another is to ask him to sit for such a statue. Women generally sit
for their own statues, from a natural disinclination to admit the
superior beauty of a friend, but they expect to be idealised. I
understood that the multitude of these statues was beginning to be felt
as an encumbrance in almost every family, and that the custom would
probably before long fall into desuetude.
Indeed, this has already come about to the satisfaction of every one,
as regards the statues of public men—not more than three of which can
be found in the whole capital. I expressed my surprise at this, and was
told that some five hundred years before my visit, the city had been so
overrun with these pests, that there was no getting about, and people
were worried beyond endurance by having their attention called at every
touch and turn to something, which, when they had attended to it, they
found not to concern them. Most of these statues were mere attempts to
do for some man or woman what an animal-stuffer does more successfully
for a dog, or bird, or pike. They were generally foisted on the public
by some côterie that was trying to exalt itself in exalting some one
else, and not unfrequently they had no other inception than desire on
the part of some member of the côterie to find a job for a young
sculptor to whom his daughter was engaged. Statues so begotten could
never be anything but deformities, and this is the way in which they
are sure to be begotten, as soon as the art of making them at all has
become widely practised.
I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a
very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to
decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they
cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living
organism—better dead than dying. There is no way of making an aged art
young again; it must be born anew and grow up from infancy as a new
thing, working out its own salvation from effort to effort in all fear
and trembling.
The Erewhonians five hundred years ago understood nothing of all this—I
doubt whether they even do so now. They wanted to get the nearest thing
they could to a stuffed man whose stuffing should not grow mouldy. They
should have had some such an establishment as our Madame Tussaud’s,
where the figures wear real clothes, and are painted up to nature. Such
an institution might have been made self-supporting, for people might
have been made to pay before going in. As it was, they had let their
poor cold grimy colourless heroes and heroines loaf about in squares
and in corners of streets in all weathers, without any attempt at
artistic sanitation—for there was no provision for burying their dead
works of art out of their sight—no drainage, so to speak, whereby
statues that had been sufficiently assimilated, so as to form part of
the residuary impression of the country, might be carried away out of
the system. Hence they put them up with a light heart on the cackling
of their côteries, and they and their children had to live, often
enough, with some wordy windbag whose cowardice had cost the country
untold loss in blood and money.
At last the evil reached such a pitch that the people rose, and with
indiscriminate fury destroyed good and bad alike. Most of what was
destroyed was bad, but some few works were good, and the sculptors of
to-day wring their hands over some of the fragments that have been
preserved in museums up and down the country. For a couple of hundred
years or so, not a statue was made from one end of the kingdom to the
other, but the instinct for having stuffed men and women was so strong,
that people at length again began to try to make them. Not knowing how
to make them, and having no academics to mislead them, the earliest
sculptors of this period thought things out for themselves, and again
produced works that were full of interest, so that in three or four
generations they reached a perfection hardly if at all inferior to that
of several hundred years earlier.
On this the same evils recurred. Sculptors obtained high prices—the art
became a trade—schools arose which professed to sell the holy spirit of
art for money; pupils flocked from far and near to buy it, in the hopes
of selling it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for
the sin of those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury
would infallibly have followed, but for the prescience of a statesman
who succeeded in passing an Act to the effect that no statue of any
public man or woman should be allowed to remain unbroken for more than
fifty years, unless at the end of that time a jury of twenty-four men
taken at random from the street pronounced in favour of its being
allowed a second fifty years of life. Every fifty years this
reconsideration was to be repeated, and unless there was a majority of
eighteen in favour of the retention of the statue, it was to be
destroyed.
Perhaps a simpler plan would have been to forbid the erection of a
statue to any public man or woman till he or she had been dead at least
one hundred years, and even then to insist on reconsideration of the
claims of the deceased and the merit of the statue every fifty
years—but the working of the Act brought about results that on the
whole were satisfactory. For in the first place, many public statues
that would have been voted under the old system, were not ordered, when
it was known that they would be almost certainly broken up after fifty
years, and in the second, public sculptors knowing their work to be so
ephemeral, scamped it to an extent that made it offensive even to the
most uncultured eye. Hence before long subscribers took to paying the
sculptor for the statue of their dead statesmen, on condition that he
did not make it. The tribute of respect was thus paid to the deceased,
the public sculptors were not mulcted, and the rest of the public
suffered no inconvenience.
I was told, however, that an abuse of this custom is growing up,
inasmuch as the competition for the commission not to make a statue is
so keen, that sculptors have been known to return a considerable part
of the purchase money to the subscribers, by an arrangement made with
them beforehand. Such transactions, however, are always clandestine. A
small inscription is let into the pavement, where the public statue
would have stood, which informs the reader that such a statue has been
ordered for the person, whoever he or she may be, but that as yet the
sculptor has not been able to complete it. There has been no Act to
repress statues that are intended for private consumption, but as I
have said, the custom is falling into desuetude.
Returning to Erewhonian customs in connection with death, there is one
which I can hardly pass over. When any one dies, the friends of the
family write no letters of condolence, neither do they attend the
scattering, nor wear mourning, but they send little boxes filled with
artificial tears, and with the name of the sender painted neatly upon
the outside of the lid. The tears vary in number from two to fifteen or
sixteen, according to degree of intimacy or relationship; and people
sometimes find it a nice point of etiquette to know the exact number
which they ought to send. Strange as it may appear, this attention is
highly valued, and its omission by those from whom it might be expected
is keenly felt. These tears were formerly stuck with adhesive plaster
to the cheeks of the bereaved, and were worn in public for a few months
after the death of a relative; they were then banished to the hat or
bonnet, and are now no longer worn.
The birth of a child is looked upon as a painful subject on which it is
kinder not to touch: the illness of the mother is carefully concealed
until the necessity for signing the birth-formula (of which hereafter)
renders further secrecy impossible, and for some months before the
event the family live in retirement, seeing very little company. When
the offence is over and done with, it is condoned by the common want of
logic; for this merciful provision of nature, this buffer against
collisions, this friction which upsets our calculations but without
which existence would be intolerable, this crowning glory of human
invention whereby we can be blind and see at one and the same moment,
this blessed inconsistency, exists here as elsewhere; and though the
strictest writers on morality have maintained that it is wicked for a
woman to have children at all, inasmuch as it is wrong to be out of
health that good may come, yet the necessity of the case has caused a
general feeling in favour of passing over such events in silence, and
of assuming their non-existence except in such flagrant cases as force
themselves on the public notice. Against these the condemnation of
society is inexorable, and if it is believed that the illness has been
dangerous and protracted, it is almost impossible for a woman to
recover her former position in society.
The above conventions struck me as arbitrary and cruel, but they put a
stop to many fancied ailments; for the situation, so far from being
considered interesting, is looked upon as savouring more or less
distinctly of a very reprehensible condition of things, and the ladies
take care to conceal it as long as they can even from their own
husbands, in anticipation of a severe scolding as soon as the
misdemeanour is discovered. Also the baby is kept out of sight, except
on the day of signing the birth-formula, until it can walk and talk.
Should the child unhappily die, a coroner’s inquest is inevitable, but
in order to avoid disgracing a family which may have been hitherto
respected, it is almost invariably found that the child was over
seventy-five years old, and died from the decay of nature.