A strip of black cloth an inch and a half in width stitched round the
sleeve--that is the final, or perhaps penultimate expression (for it may
dwindle further to a black thread) of the usage of wearing mourning on the
decease of a relative.
The usage is one that commends itself to us as an outward and visible sign
of the inward sentiment of bereavement, and not one in ten thousand who
adopt mourning has any idea that it ever possessed a signification of
another sort. And yet the correlations of general custom--of mourning
fashions, lead us to the inexorable conclusion that in its inception the
practice had quite a different signification from that now attributed to
it, nay more, that it is solely because its primitive meaning has been
absolutely forgotten, and an entirely novel significance given to it, that
mourning is still employed after a death.
Look back through the telescope of anthropology at our primitive ancestors
in their naked savagery, and we see them daub themselves with soot mingled
with tallow. When the savage assumed clothes and became a civilised man,
he replaced the fat and lampblack with black cloth, and this black cloth
has descended to us in the nineteenth century as the customary and
intelligible trappings of woe.
The Chinaman when in a condition of bereavement assumes white garments,
and we may be pretty certain that his barbarous ancestor, like the Andaman
Islander of the present day, pipeclayed his naked body after the decease
and funeral of a relative. In Egypt yellow was the symbol of sorrow for a
death, and that points back to the ancestral nude Egyptian having smeared
himself with yellow ochre.
Black was not the universal hue of mourning in Europe. In Castile white
obtained on the death of its princes. Herrera states that the last time
white was thus employed was in 1498, on the death of Prince John. This use
of white in Castile indicates chalk or pipeclay as the daub affected by
the ancestors of the house of Castile in primeval time as a badge of
bereavement.
Various explanations have been offered to account for the variance of
colour. White has been supposed to denote purity; and to this day white
gloves and hat-bands and scarves are employed at the funeral of a young
girl, as in the old ballad of “The Bride’s Burial”:--
A garland fresh and fair
Of lilies there was made,
In signs of her virginity,
And on her coffin laid.
Six pretty maidens, _all in white_,
Did bear her to the ground,
The bells did ring in solemn swing
And made a doleful sound.
Yellow has been supposed to symbolise that death is the end of human
hopes, because falling leaves are sere; black is taken as the privation of
light; and purple or violet also affected as a blending of joy with
sorrow. Christian moralists have declaimed against black as heathen, as
denoting an aspect of death devoid of hope, and gradually purple is taking
its place in the trappings of the hearse, if not of the mourners, and the
pall is now very generally violet.
But these explanations are afterthoughts, and an attempt to give reason
for the divergence of usage which might satisfy, but these are really no
explanations at all. The usage goes back to a period when there were no
such refinements of thought. If violet or purple has been traditional, it
is so merely because the ancestral Briton stained himself with woad on the
death of a relative.
The pipeclay, lampblack, yellow ochre, and woad of the primeval mourners
must be brought into range with a whole series of other mourning usages,
and then the result is something of an “eye-opener.” It reveals a
condition of mind and an aspect of death that causes not a little
surprise and amusement. It is one of the most astonishing, and, perhaps,
shocking traits of barbarous life, that death revolutionises completely
the feelings of the survivors towards their deceased husbands, wives,
parents, and other relatives.
A married couple may have been sincerely attached to each other so long as
the vital spark was twinkling, but the moment it is extinguished the dead
partner becomes, not a sadly sweet reminiscence, but an object of the
liveliest terror to the survivor. He or she does everything that ingenuity
can suggest to get him or herself out of all association in body and
spirit with the late lamented. Death is held to be thoroughly demoralising
to the deceased. However exemplary a person he or she may have been in
life, after death the ghost is little less than a plaguing, spiteful
spirit.
There is in the savage no tender clinging to the remembrance of the loved
one, he is translated into a terrible bugbear, who must be evaded and
avoided by every contrivance conceivable. This is due, doubtless, mainly
to the inability of the uncultivated mind to discriminate between what is
seen waking from what presents itself in phantasy to the dreaming head.
After a funeral, it is natural enough for the mourners to dream of the
dead, and they at once conclude that they have been visited by his
_revenant_. After a funeral feast, a great gorging of pork or beef, it is
very natural that the sense of oppression and pain felt should be
associated with the dear departed, and should translate itself into the
idea that he has come from his grave to sit on the chests of those who
have bewailed him.
Moreover, the savage associates the idea of desolation, death, discomfort,
with the condition of the soul after death, and believes that the ghosts
do all they can to return to their former haunts and associates for the
sake of the warmth and food, the shelter of the huts, and the
entertainment of the society of their fellows. But the living men and
women are not at all eager to receive the ghosts into the family circle,
and they accordingly adopt all kinds of “dodges,” expedients to prevent
the departed from making these irksome and undesired visits.
The Venerable Bede tells us that Laurence, Archbishop of Canterbury,
resolved on flying from England because he was hopeless of effecting any
good under the successor of Ethelbert, king of Kent. The night before he
fled he slept on the floor of the church, and dreamed that St. Peter
cudgelled him soundly for resolving to abandon his sacred charge. In the
morning he awoke stiff and full of aches and pains. Turned into modern
language, we should say that Archbishop Laurence was attacked with
rheumatism on account of his having slept on the cold stones of the
church. His mind had been troubled before he went to sleep with doubts
whether he were doing right in abandoning his duty, and very naturally
this trouble of conscience coloured his dream, and gave to his rheumatic
twinges the complexion it assumed.
Now Archbishop Laurence regarded the Prince of the Apostles in precisely
the light in which a savage views his deceased relatives and ancestors. He
associates his maladies, his pains, with theirs, if he should happen to
dream of them. If, however, when in pain, he dreams of a living person,
then he holds that this living person has cast a magical spell over him.
Among nature’s men, before they have gone through the mill of
civilisation, plenty to eat and to drink, and some one to talk to, are the
essentials of happiness. They see that the dead have none of these
requisites, they consider that they are miserable without them. The writer
remembers how, when he was a boy, and attended a funeral of a relative in
November, he could not sleep all night--a bitter, frosty night--with the
thought how cold it must be to the dead in the vault, without blankets,
hot bottle, or fire. It was in vain for him to reason against the feeling;
the feeling was so strong on him that he was conscious of an uncomfortable
expectation of the dead coming to claim a share of the blanket, fire, or
hot bottle. Now the savage never reasons against such a feeling, and he
assumes that the dead will return, as a matter of course, for what he
cannot have in the grave.
The ghost is very anxious to assert its former rights. A widow has to get
rid of the ghost of her first husband before she can marry again. In
Parma a widow about to be remarried is pelted with sticks and stones, not
in the least because the Parmans object to remarriage, but in order to
scare away the ghost of No. 1, who is hanging about his wife, and who will
resent his displacement in her affections by No. 2.
To the present day, in some of the villages of the ancient Duchy of Teck,
in Würtemberg, it is customary when a corpse is being conveyed to the
cemetery, for relatives and friends to surround the dead, and in turn talk
to it--assure it what a blessed rest it is going to, how anxious the
kinsfolk are that it may be comfortable, how handsome will be the cross
set over the grave, how much all desire that it may sleep soundly and not
by any means leave the grave and come haunting old scenes and friends, how
unreasonable such conduct as the latter hinted at would be, how it would
alter the regard entertained for the deceased, how disrespectful to the
Almighty who gives rest to the good, and how it would be regarded as an
admission of an uneasy conscience. Lively comparisons are drawn between
the joys of Paradise and the vale of tears that has been quitted, so as to
take away from the deceased all desire to return.
This is a survival of primitive usage and mode of thought, and has its
analogies in many places and among diverse races.
The Dacotah Indians address the ghost of the dead in the same “soft
solder,” to induce it to take the road to the world of spirits and not to
come sauntering back to its wigwam. In Siam and in China it is much the
same; persuasion, flattery, threats are employed.
Unhappily all ghosts are not open to persuasion, and see through the
designs of the mourners, and with them severer measures have to be
resorted to. Among the Sclavs of the Danube and the Czechs, the bereaved,
after the funeral, on going home turn themselves about after every few
steps and throw sticks, stones, mud, even hot coals in the direction of
the churchyard, so as to frighten the spirit back to the grave so
considerately provided for it. A Finnish tribe has not even the decency to
wait till the corpse is covered with soil; they fire pistols and guns
after it as it goes to its grave, and lies in it.