Epitaphs, if in rhyme, are the real literature of the masses. They
need no commendation and are beyond all criticism. A Cambridge don, a
London bus-driver, will own their charm in equal measure. Strange
indeed is the fascination of rhyme. A commonplace hitched into verse
instantly takes rank with Holy Scripture. This passion for poetry, as
it is sometimes called, is manifested on every side; even tradesmen
share it, and as the advertisements in our newspapers show, are
willing to pay small sums to poets who commend their wares in verse.
The widow bereft of her life's companion, the mother bending over an
empty cradle, find solace in thinking what doleful little scrag of
verse shall be graven on the tombstone of the dead. From the earliest
times men have sought to squeeze their loves and joys, their sorrows
and hatreds, into distichs and quatrains, and to inscribe them
somewhere, on walls or windows, on sepulchral urns and gravestones, as
memorials of their pleasure or their pain.
'Hark! how chimes the passing bell--
There's no music to a knell;
All the other sounds we hear
Flatter and but cheat our ear.'
So wrote Shirley the dramatist, and so does he truthfully explain the
popularity of the epitaph as distinguished from the epigram. Who ever
wearies of Martial's 'Erotion'?--
'Hic festinata requiescit Erotion umbra,
Crimine quam fati sexta peremit hiems.
Quisquis eris nostri post me regnator agelli
Manibus exiguis annua justa dato.
Sic lare perpetuo, sic turba sospite, solus
Flebilis in terra sit lapis iste tua'--
so prettily Englished by Leigh Hunt:
'Underneath this greedy stone
Lies little sweet Erotion,
Whom the Fates with hearts as cold
Nipped away at six years old.
Those, whoever thou may'st be,
That hast this small field after me,
Let the yearly rites be paid
To her little slender shade;
So shall no disease or jar
Hurt thy house or chill thy Lar,
But this tomb be here alone
The only melancholy stone.'
Our English epitaphs are to be found scattered up and down our country
churchyards--'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the
sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out
by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons
do not look with favour upon them, besides which--to use a clumsy
phrase--besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against
burials, and without texts there can be no sermons:
'I'll stay and read my sermon here,
And skulls and bones shall be my text.
* * * *
Here learn that glory and disgrace,
Wisdom and Folly, pass away,
That mirth hath its appointed space,
That sorrow is but for a day;
That all we love and all we hate,
That all we hope and all we fear,
Each mood of mind, each turn of fate,
Must end in dust and silence here.'
The best epitaphs are the grim ones. Designed, as epitaphs are, to
arrest and hold in their momentary grasp the wandering attention and
languid interest of the passer-by, they must hit him hard and at once,
and this they can only do by striking some very responsive chord, and
no chords are so immediately responsive as those which relate to death
and, it may be, judgment to come.
Mr. Aubrey Stewart, in his interesting _Selection of English Epigrams
and Epitaphs_, published by Chapman and Hall, quotes an epitaph from a
Norfolk churchyard which I have seen in other parts of the country.
The last time I saw it was in the Forest of Dean. It is admirably
suited for the gravestone of any child of very tender years, say four:
'When the Archangel's trump shall blow
And souls to bodies join,
Many will wish their lives below
Had been as short as mine.'
It is uncouth, but it is warranted to grip.
Frequently, too, have I noticed how constantly the attention is
arrested by Pope's well-known lines from his magnificent 'Verses to
the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' which are often to be found on
tombstones:
'So peaceful rests without a stone and name
What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame.
How loved, how honoured once avails thee not,
To whom related or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be.'
I wish our modern poetasters who deny Pope's claim to be a poet no
worse fate than to lie under stones which have engraved upon them the
lines just quoted, for they will then secure in death what in life was
denied them--the ear of the public.
Next to the grim epitaph, I should be disposed to rank those which
remind the passer-by of his transitory estate. In different parts of
the country--in Cumberland and Cornwall, in Croyland Abbey, in
Llangollen Churchyard, in Melton Mowbray--are to be found lines more
or less resembling the following:
'Man's life is like unto a winter's day,
Some break their fast and so depart away,
Others stay dinner then depart full fed,
The longest age but sups and goes to bed.
O reader, there behold and see
As we are now, so thou must be.'
The complimentary epitaph seldom pleases. To lie like a tombstone has
become a proverb. Pope's famous epitaph on Newton:
'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.'
is hyperbolical and out of character with the great man it seeks to
honour. It was intended for Westminster Abbey. I rejoice at the
preference given to prose Latinity.
The tender and emotional epitaphs have a tendency to become either
insipid or silly. But Herrick has shown us how to rival Martial:
'UPON A CHILD THAT DIED.
Here she lies a pretty bud
Lately made of flesh and blood;
Who as soon fell fast asleep
As her little eyes did peep.
Give her strewings, but not stir
The earth that lightly covers her.'
Mr. Dodd, the editor of the admirable volume called _The
Epigrammatists_, published in Bohn's Standard Library, calls these
lines a model of simplicity and elegance. So they are, but they are
very vague. But then the child was very young. Erotion, one must
remember, was six years old. Ben Jonson's beautiful epitaph on S.P., a
child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, beginning,
'Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know for whom the tear you shed
Death's self is sorry,'
is fine poetry, but it is not life or death as plain people know those
sober realities. The flippant epitaph is always abominable. Gay's, for
example:
'Life is a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, but now I know it.'
But _does_ he know it? Ay, there's the rub! The note of Christianity
is seldom struck in epitaphs. There is a deep-rooted paganism in the
English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in
the oddest of ways. Coleridge's epitaph for himself is a striking
exception:
'Stop, Christian passer-by! stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast, Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.
O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C,
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise--to be forgiven for fame,
He ask'd and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same.'
'HANSARD'
'Men are we, and must mourn when e'en the shade of that which once was
great has passed away.' This quotation--which, in obedience to the
prevailing taste, I print as prose--was forced upon me by reading in
the papers an account of some proceedings in a sale-room in Chancery
Lane last Tuesday,[A] when the entire stock and copyright of
_Hansard's Parliamentary History and Debates_ were exposed for sale,
and, it must be added, to ridicule. Yet 'Hansard' was once a name to
conjure with. To be in it was an ambition--costly, troublesome, but
animating; to know it was, if not a liberal education, at all events
almost certain promotion; whilst to possess it for your very own was
the outward and visible sign of serious statesmanship. No wonder that
unimaginative men still believed that _Hansard_ was a property with
money in it. Is it not the counterpart of Parliament, its dark and
majestic shadow thrown across the page of history? As the pious
Catholic studies his _Acta Sanctorum_, so should the constitutionalist
love to pore over the _ipsissima verba_ of Parliamentary gladiators,
and read their resolutions and their motions. Where else save in the
pages of _Hansard_ can we make ourselves fully acquainted with the
history of the Mother of Free Institutions? It is, no doubt, dull, but
with the soberminded a large and spacious dulness like that of
_Hansard's Debates_ is better than the incongruous chirpings of the
new 'humourists.' Besides, its dulness is exaggerated. If a reader
cannot extract amusement from it the fault is his, not _Hansard's_.
But, indeed, this perpetual talk of dulness and amusement ought not to
pass unchallenged. Since when has it become a crime to be dull? Our
fathers were not ashamed to be dull in a good cause. We are ashamed,
but without ceasing to be dull.
[Footnote A: March 8, 1902.]
But it is idle to argue with the higgle of the market. 'Things are
what they are,' said Bishop Butler in a passage which has lost its
freshness; that is to say, they are worth what they will fetch. 'Why,
then, should we desire to be deceived?' The test of truth remains
undiscovered, but the test of present value is the auction mart. Tried
by this test, it is plain that _Hansard_ has fallen upon evil days.
The bottled dreariness of Parliament is falling, falling, falling. An
Elizabethan song-book, the original edition of Gray's _Elegy_, or
_Peregrine Pickle_, is worth more than, or nearly as much as, the 458
volumes of _Hansard's Parliamentary Debates_. Three complete sets were
sold last Tuesday; one brought £110, the other two but £70 each. And
yet it is not long ago since a _Hansard_ was worth three times as
much. Where were our young politicians? There are serious men on both
sides of the House. Men of their stamp twenty years ago would not have
been happy without a _Hansard_ to clothe their shelves with dignity
and their minds with quotations. But these young men were not bidders.
As the sale proceeded, the discredit of _Hansard_ became plainer and
plainer. For the copyright, including, of course, the goodwill of the
name--the right to call yourself 'Hansard' for years to come--not a
penny was offered, and yet, as the auctioneer feelingly observed, only
eighteen months ago it was valued at £60,000. The cold douche of the
auction mart may brace the mind, but is apt to lower the price of
commodities of this kind. Then came incomplete and unbound sets, with
doleful results. For forty copies of the 'Indian Debates' for 1889
only a penny a copy was offered. It was rumoured that the bidder
intended, had he been successful, to circulate the copies amongst the
supporters of a National Council for India; but his purpose was
frustrated by the auctioneer, who, mindful of the honour of the
Empire, sorrowfully but firmly withdrew the lot, and proceeded to the
next, amidst the jeers of a thoroughly demoralized audience. But this
subject why pursue? It is, for the reason already cited at the
beginning, a painful one. The glory of _Hansard_ has departed for
ever. Like a new-fangled and sham religion, it began in pride and
ended in a police-court, instead of beginning in a police-court and
ending in pride, which is the now well-defined course of true
religion.
The fact that nobody wants _Hansard_ is not necessarily a rebuff to
Parliamentary eloquence, yet these low prices jump with the times and
undoubtedly indicate an impatience of oratory. We talk more than our
ancestors, but we prove our good faith by doing it very badly. We have
no Erskines at the Bar, but trials last longer than ever. There are
not half a dozen men in the House of Commons who can make a speech,
properly so called, but the session is none the shorter on that
account. _Hansard's Debates_ are said to be dull to read, but there is
a sterner fate than reading a dull debate: you may be called upon to
listen to one. The statesmen of the time must be impervious to
dulness; they must crush the artist within them to a powder. The new
people who have come bounding into politics and are now claiming their
share of the national inheritance are not orators by nature, and will
never become so by culture; but they mean business, and that is well.
Caleb Garth and not George Canning should be the model of the virtuous
politician of the future.