In the portion of Jezreel—by a retributive local coincidence—were to lie
the mangled remains of Jezebel—what the dogs should leave of her. “And
the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in
the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is Jezebel.”
_This_, Jezebel? how could _this_ be identified with the superb wife and
superior of the king of Israel, as she was in her prime of life and pride
of place? or even with the faded form of her that, newly a widow, but
energetic and manœuvring to the last, and defiant in her fall, painted
her face, and tired her head, and looked out at the window as Jehu
entered in at the gate? Imperious Jezebel, thrice puissant and insatiably
presuming, transformed into a heap of bone dust—reduced to her lowest
terms as mere organic matter—resolved into just so much manure upon the
face of the field.
“Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that the earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.”
So muses and speculates Hamlet, on the theme of “to what base uses we
may return, Horatio,” when his imagination traces the noble dust of
Alexander, till he find it stopping a bunghole. ’Twere to consider too
curiously to consider so, Horatio may object. Not a jot, is Hamlet’s
answer to the objection; for look you, Alexander died, was buried, was
resolved into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam. “And why of
that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?”
_Quod erat demonstrandum._
The Prince of Denmark was in the like mood when, in other company, he
talked, to the same purpose, of how a man may fish with the worm[12] that
hath eat of a king; and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
Well may Juvenal bid the meditative moralist, _expende Annibalem_,
and expound the text that _Mors sola fatetur quantula sint hominum
corpuscula_. But it needs a Shakspeare to reduce these to their lowest
terms, in the style of Hamlet with imperious Cæsar,—a _reductis ad
absurdum_ indeed.
Sydney Smith somewhere girds at the idea of doctrinaire legislators
making irrevocable laws for men who toss their remains about with spades,
“and use the relics of these legislators, to give breadth to brocoli,
and to aid the vernal eruption of asparagus.” Hawthorne once designed
a symbolical tale of a young man being slain and buried in the flower
garden of his betrothed, and the earth levelled over him. That particular
spot, which she happens to plant with some peculiar variety of flowers,
produces them of admirable splendour, beauty, and perfume; and thus the
classic fantasy is realized, of dead people transformed to flowers.
Sir Thomas Browne—how pregnant his hints are!—touches on Mummy as having
become merchandize: Mizraim curing wounds, and Pharaoh being sold for
balsams.
The heroic dust, as Chateaubriand calls it, of the heart of Duguesclin,
stolen during the Revolution, was on the point of being pounded up
by a glazier to mix his paints. So again we read of the slaughtered
hosts during the retreat from Moscow: “Some industrial companies have
transported themselves into the desert with their furnaces and their
caldrons; the bones have been converted into animal black; whether it
come from the dog or from the man, the varnish is equally valuable,
and is as brilliant when drawn from obscurity as from glory.” Cornelia
Knight mentions a Parmese canon, who one day, while the French were
in occupation of Piacenza, found the church in possession of three
surgeons, or surgeons’ mates, of that army, “busily skinning” the dead
body of a French soldier. “Horrified at the sight, he asked the meaning
of this ghastly proceeding, and was told that some scientific men had
discovered that the human skin made excellent leather,” and that it had
been therefore ordered that all dead bodies should be skinned, for the
purpose of providing boots and shoes for the soldiers. Ziska’s skin-deep
drum-destiny was at least a seeming nobler, if not essentially a more
useful one.
Xenophon makes his pattern-prince desirous of having his body turned to
beneficial uses after death, by being incorporated with mother earth;
positively enjoining his sons not to enshrine it in gold or silver, but
to bury it in the ground as soon as the life was gone out of it. Little
would trouble him the anticipated contingency of such a _peut-être_ as
Burns surmises, in the case of a recently deceased acquaintance—like
Xenophon, a sportsman to the core:—
“There low he lies, in lasting rest;
Perhaps, upon his mould’ring breast
Some spitefu’ moorfowl bigs her nest,
To hatch and breed.”
Cyrus, like the essentially practical statesman in Mrs. Gore’s tale,
would presumably have detected no irony in Hamlet’s assignment of
purpose to the ashes of imperious Cæsar: “It seemed a relief to his mind
that emperors, when turned to clay, could be turned to account.” No
more objection to that, than to such a circumstance as “The Traveller”
deplores, that
... “in those domes where Cæsar once bore sway,
Defaced by time, and tottering in decay,
There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed.”
Have we not heard Liebig indignantly complain of our importing immense
quantities of bones from abroad, thereby draining the fair foreign
fields of their very life-blood—scouring as we are said to do foreign
battle-plains, that the bony reliques of warriors who fought a good fight
in their day, may now be of further avail to make our bread? An English
satirist of German sentimentalism pictures a contemplative young Teuton,
at dinner time, pausing over his _sauer kraut_, as he calls to mind that
the churchyard wherein his ancestor was decently deposited, has been
converted into a kitchen garden; and the conviction flashes upon him that
what was a distinguished man is now on the table in the form of cabbage.
Have we not, again, heard Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans,
indignantly brand, as the outcome of current materialism, such a
“practical suggestion” as that of a certain M. Moleschott, that, in the
interest of humanity, “the honour of the dead should be abolished,” and
all cemeteries desecrated after being used a twelvemonth, that the bones
contained in them may “supply to plants the power of creating fresh men”?
It is, I think, in one of Mr. Dicey’s letters from the East that mention
is made of the writer’s seeing at Sakhara a half score of camels pacing
down from the mummy pits to the bank of the river, laden with nets in
which were human bones, some two hundredweight in each net on each side
of the camel; while among the pits were to be seen people busily engaged
in searching out, sifting, and sorting the bones with which the ground
is almost encrusted. The cargoes were to be sent on to Alexandria, and
thence shipped to manure manufacturers in England. It is a strange
fate, as the tourist reflects, to preserve one’s skeleton for thousands
of years in order that there may be fine Southdowns and Cheviots in a
distant land; and he stops to muse on the idea of a _gigot_ that consists
in great part of the dwellers in Memphis.
That is a graphic picture the historian of the United Netherlands paints,
of the artificial earthworks devised in extremity during the siege of
Ostend, in 1604, when there was no earth left for the defenders to
use, nearly everything solid having been scooped away in the perpetual
delving. The very sea-dykes had been robbed of their material, so that
the coming winter might find besiegers and besieged all washed together
into the German Ocean, and it was hard digging and grubbing among the
scanty cellarages of the dilapidated houses. But there were plenty of
graves, Mr. Motley proceeds to relate; and now, not only were all the
cemeteries within the precincts shovelled and carted in mass to the
inner fortifications, but rewards being offered of ten stivers for each
dead body, great heaps of disinterred soldiers were piled into the new
ramparts. “Thus these warriors, after laying down their lives for the
cause of freedom, were made to do duty after death.”
Who, exclaims Owen Feltham, would have thought when Scanderbeg was laid
in his tomb, that the Turks would afterwards break into it, and wear his
bones for jewels? But _telle est la vie_—or rather, in such a connection,
_la mort_.
The Rev. John Eagles, avowing an inclination to join in Shakspeare’s
anathema on the movers of bones, adverts incidentally to the alleged fact
of Swift’s larynx having been stolen, and being now in possession of the
purloiner in America,—of an itinerant phrenologist now hawking about
Pope’s skull,—and of Mathews’s thigh-bone circulating from house to house.
Coupling such corporeal vicissitudes _post mortem_ with the text with
which we started, of Jezebel’s scattered remains on the face of the
field, we call to mind Ben Jonson’s description (only too historically
true) of the dispersed fragments of him that the other day had been
virtually master of Rome, and so of the wide world. Contending hands have
appropriated all that is left of him: some have ravished an arm, others a
thigh; this spoiler has the hands, and that the feet; “these fingers, and
these toes; that hath his liver, he his heart....
“The whole, and all of what was great Sejanus,
And, next to Cæsar, did possess the world,
Now torn and scatter’d, as he needs no grave;
Each little dust covers a little part;
So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried.”
“_CONSIDER THE LILIES._”
ST. MATTHEW vi. 28.
Vulgar utilitarianism—for there is a vulgar and shallow phase of it, as
well as a scientific and a misrepresented one—can surely find little to
its fancy (but then it has no fancy) the invitation, or monition, even
though uttered in the Sermon on the Mount, of “Consider the lilies.” Why
consider them, it would fain object, seeing that they toil not, neither
do they spin? But that is the very reason for considering them. They are
clothed from above with surpassing beauty, without taking thought for
themselves; so clothed, not for utilitarian ends, except in the large
sense that the _dulce_ too is _utile_, that a thing of beauty is a joy
for ever; and _that_ is undeniably to be of some “use” in the world.