When the Brothers of Death have arrived before the house to take away the bier, a loud wail is again raised, and the funeral procession now accompanies the deceased with laments to the church, where he receives consecration, and from the church again with wail and song to the churchyard. The obsequies are closed with a meal called the convito or conforto; a repast called the veglia has previously been given those who watched by the corpse, and each Brother of Death receives a cake. The conforto is given to the relations and friends of the deceased, either in his own house or in that of a kinsman, and it is customary to invite the guests with a pressing vehemency. It honours the departed if the repast be on as munificent a scale as possible; and if he has been respected during his life, it is observable in the number of the guests. Great expense is frequently lavished on this funeral banquet (banchetto), and bread and meats are distributed through the houses of the village. Black is the Corsican mourning colour; frequently the beard is allowed to remain for a long time uncut. When the anniversary of the funeral comes round, the banquet is sometimes repeated.
Such is the Corsican cultus of the dead, as it is preserved at the present day in the interior and the southern parts of the island. It is remarkable as a remnant of primitive paganism subsisting in the midst of our modern Christendom, and in combination with Christian usages. How old this ballata may be, and when and how it was brought into the country, are questions difficult to answer, and I shall not here venture upon their discussion.
The expressions of grief over beloved dead are everywhere the same—the weeping and lamenting, the copious and eloquent allusion to what they were in life, and to the affection that was felt for them. Passionate emotion finds vent in lively, forcible, and dramatic indications of grief. But the restraining power of culture, which regulates even the emotional part of our nature, checks those over whom it has established its sway, and refuses to the feelings all expression by extravagant gesture. It is not so in a primitive state of society, or among children. Neither is it so among the common people, so called, who represent, in the midst of our civilisation, the epic period of human development. If we wish to convince ourselves that the epic men, heroes, chiefs, and kings, demeaned themselves as passionately in giving expression to their grief, as the Corsicans of the present time in their ballata, we must read the songs of Firdusi, Homer, and the Bible. Esau cries aloud and weeps for the stolen blessing; Jacob rends his clothes for Joseph; Job rends his garments, and tears his hair, and falls to the earth, and his friends do the same, lifting up their voice and weeping, and each rends his garment and sprinkles dust upon his head towards heaven. David rends his garments for Saul and Jonathan, and afflicts himself, and weeps, and laments; he does the same for Absalom: "the king wept, and had his head covered, and he went barefoot."
Still more passionate and unbridled are the outbursts of grief with the men of Homer. Achilles laments for Patroclus, with both hands he strews black dust upon his head—
"Then, stretch'd in ashes, at the vast extent
Of his whole length he lay, disordering wild
With his own hands, and rending off his hair.
The maidens, captured by himself in war
And by Patroclus, shrieking from the tent
Ran forth, and hemm'd the glorious chief around;