"UNDERTAKER. Give him my service; I can't tell readilly: but our friend, Dr. Passeport, with the powder, has promised me six or seven funerals this week."
* * * * *
These extracts are not from the manuscript of a modern farce-comedy,[A] but belong to Steele's play of "The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode." If they have about them all the air of fin-de-siècle wit, so much the more eloquently do they testify to the freshness of Dick's satire. Freshness, satire, and death! Surely the three ingredients seem unmixable; yet when poured into the crucible of Steele's genius they resulted in a crystal that sparkled delightfully amid the lights of a theatre—a crystal which might still shed brilliancy if some enterprising manager would exhibit it to a jaded public.
[Footnote A: In "A Milk White Flag," a good specimen of "up-to-date" farce, Mr. Hoyt dallies entertainingly and discreetly with the blithesome topics of undertakers, corpses, and widows.]
In "The Funeral" the author impaled, with many a merciless slash of the pen, the hypocrisy and vulgar flummery that characterised the whole gruesome ceremony of conducting to its earthly resting-place the body of a well-to-do sinner. For the average Englishman loved a funeral and all its ghastly accompaniments as passionately as though he had Irish blood in his veins, and often insisted upon investing the burial of his friends with the mockery, rather than the sincerity, of woe.
Grief thus became a pleasure, and it was a pleasure, be it added, which was not taken too sadly. (Pardon the paradox.) The spirits of the deceased's many admirers had to be raised, and the enlivening process was set in motion by means of numerous libations, not of tea, but of lusty wine. When the wife of mine host of the "Crown and Sceptre" left this world of cooking and drinking, the women who crowded to the good lady's funeral had to drown their sorrows in a tun of red port,[A] and it is evident that at the burial of men the grief of the mourners required an equal amount of quenching. Indeed, the most absurd expenditures and preparations were made for what should be the simplest of ceremonies, and the result oftentimes proved garish in the extreme. As an example of the display in this direction, John Ashton quotes from the Daily Courant a report of the obsequies of Sir William Pritchard, sometime Lord Mayor of London. After a vast deal of pomp wasted in St. Albans and other places upon the unappreciative and inanimate Pritchard, the remains reached the country seat of the deceased, in the county of Buckingham. "Where, after the body had been set out, with all ceremony befitting his degree, for near two hours, 'twas carried to the church adjacent in this order, viz., 2 conductors with long staves, 6 men in long cloaks two and two, the standard, 18 men in cloaks as before, servants to the deceas'd two and two, divines, the minister of the parish and the preacher, the helm and crest, sword and target, gauntlets and spurs, born by an officer of Arms, both in their rich coats of Her Majesty's Arms enbroider'd; the body, between 6 persons of the Arms of Christ's Hospital, St. Bartholomew's, Merchant Taylors Company, City of London, empaled coat and single coat; the chief mourner and his four assistants, followed by the relations of the defunct, &c."[B] In this aggregation of grandeur the mere bagatelle in the shape of a corpse seems almost completely overshadowed, and it is thus comforting to reflect that the latter finally had interment in a "handsome large vault, in the isle on the north side of the church, betwixt 7 and 8 of the clock that evening." The dear departed, or grief for his memory, frequently played but too small a rôle in all these trappings of despondency, and the insignificance of the deceased might only be likened to the secondary position of a man at his own wedding. It was all fuss and mortuary feathers, mourning rings and mulled wine in the one case, just as in the other it is entirely a show of bride and blushes, flounces and femininity. [Footnote A: In writing of the customs connected with old-time English funerals, Misson says: "The relations and chief mourners are in a chamber apart, with their more intimate friends; and the rest of the guests are dispersed in several rooms about the house. When they are ready to set out, they nail up the coffin, and a servant presents the company with sprigs of rosemary: Every one takes a sprig and carries it in his hand till the body is put into the grave, at which time they all throw their sprigs in after it. Before they set out, and after they return, it is usual to present the guests with something to drink, either red or white wine, boil'd with sugar and cinnamon, or some such liquor. Butler, the keeper of a tavern, told me there was a tun of red port drank at his wife's burial, besides mull'd white wine. Note, no men ever go to women's burials, nor the women to the men's; so that there were none but women at the drinking of Butler's wine. Such women in England will hold it out with the men, when they have a bottle before them, as well as upon t'other occasion, and tattle infinitely better than they.">[
[Footnote B: The will of Benjamin Dod, a Roman Catholic citizen of London (died 1714) runs in part as follows: "I desire four and twenty persons to be at my burial … to every of which four and twenty persons … I give a pair of white gloves, a ring of ten shillings value, a bottle of wine at my funeral, and half a crown to be spent at their return that night; to drink my soul's health, then on her Journey for Purification in order to Eternal Rest. I appoint the room, where my corpse shall lie, to be hung with black, and four and twenty wax candles to be burning; on my coffin to be affixed a cross and this inscription, Jesus Hominum Salvator. I also appoint my corpse to be carried in a herse drawn with six white horses, with white feathers, and followed by six coaches, with six horses to each coach, to carry the four and twenty persons…. Item, I give to forty of my particular acquaintance, not at my funeral, to every one of them a gold ring of ten shillings value…. As for mourning, I leave that to my executors hereafter nam'd; and I do not desire them to give any to whom I shall leave a legacy…. I will have no Presbyterian, Moderate Low Churchmen, or Occasional Conformists, to be at or have anything to do with my funeral. I die in the Faith of the True Catholic Church. I desire to have a tomb stone over me, with a Latin inscription, and a lamp, or six wax candles, to burn seven days and nights thereon."—Vide ASHTON.]
Was it any wonder that when Dick Steele, aetat twenty-six, an officer of Fusiliers, and a merry vagabond, wanted to redeem his reputation by writing a rollicking comedy, his thoughts turned to the satirising of the British undertaker? For the young man must prove to the town that he was not the hypocrite several of his kind friends had dubbed him. The fact was, that he had been virtuous enough to write a pious work entitled, "The Christian Hero," which he afterwards published, but as he had not grown sufficiently master of himself to live up to its golden precepts (nay, rather did he continue to spend his evenings in the taverns), the author came in for many a taunt and sneer. Why did he not practice what he preached? was the sarcastic query of his intimates.
Yet there was no thought of cant in what the soldier had done. His design in issuing the "Christian Hero" was, as he explained in after years, "principally to fix upon his own mind a strong impression of virtue and religion, in opposition to a stronger propensity towards unwarrantable pleasures." This secret admiration was too weak; he therefore printed the book with his name, in hopes that a standing testimony against himself, and the eyes of the world (that is to say, of his acquaintances) upon him in a new light, would make him ashamed of understanding and seeming to feel what was virtuous, and living so contrary to life.
But the man was weak where the author was willing, and thus gay Richard went on "living so contrary a life" with true Celtic perversity, and made of himself anything but a Christian Hero. Rather was he a jolly Pagan, with a passion for his wine and his coffee-house, and a kindly, merry word even for those who twitted him upon his inconsistency. It was plain, therefore, that he must be some other sort of hero, and so he evolved the brilliant satire of "The Funeral," to "enliven his character, and repel the sarcasms of those who abused him for his declarations relative to religion."