The disposition of the mortal remains was, and is, to a considerable extent, in England, an ecclesiastical function; in Catholic lands it is a priestly interest. Indignity to the body, after death, was one of the most dreaded punishments of heresy and crime; to scatter human ashes to the winds, expose the skulls of malefactors in iron gratings over city portals, refuse interment in ground consecrated by the church, and disinter and insult the body of an unpopular ruler, were among the barbarous reprisals of offended power. And yet, in these same twilight eras, in the heathen customs and the mediæval laws, under the sway of Odin and the Franks, the sentiment of respect for the dead was acted upon in a manner to shame the indifference and hardihood of later and more civilized times. With the emigration to America, this sentiment looked for its legal vindication entirely to the civic authority. With their reaction from spiritual tyranny, our ancestors transferred this, with other social interests, to popular legislation and private inclination. Hence the comparatively indefinite enactments on the subject, and the need of a uniform code, applicable to all the States, and organized so as clearly to establish the rights both of the living and the dead, and to preserve inviolable the choice of disposition, and the place of deposit, of human remains.
The practical treatment of this subject is anomalous. Amid the scenes of horror, outraging humanity in every form, which characterized the anarchy incident to the first dethronement of legitimate authority in France, how startling to read, among the first decrees of the Convention, provisions for the dead, while pitiless destruction awaited the living! And in this country, while motives of hygiène limit intermural interments, and a higher impulse sets apart and adorns rural cemeteries, our rail-tracks still often ruthlessly intersect the fields of the dead, and ancestral tombs are annually broken up to make way for streets and warehouses. The tomb of Washington was long dilapidated; the bones of Revolutionary martyrs are neglected, and half the graveyards of the country desecrated by indifference or misuse. The conservative piety of the Hebrews reproaches our inconsiderate neglect, in the faithfully-tended cemetery of their race at Newport, R. I., where not a Jew remains to gather the ashes of his fathers, thus carefully preserved by a testamentary fund. Of late years elaborate monuments in rural cemeteries have done much to redeem this once proverbial neglect. They constitute the most sacred adornment of the environs of our principal cities.
Both the modes and places of burial have an historical significance. The pyre of the Greeks and Romans, the embalming process of the Egyptians, the funeral piles of Hindoo superstition, and those bark stagings, curiously regarded by Mississippi voyagers, where Indian corpses are exposed to the elements,—the old cross-road interment of the suicide, the inhumation of the early patriarchs and Christians,—all symbolize eras and creeds. The lying-in-state of the royal defunct, the sable catafalque of the Catholic temples, the salutes over the warrior’s grave, the ‘Day of the Dead’ celebrated in Southern Europe, the eulogies in French cemeteries, the sublime ritual of the Establishment, and the silent prayer of the Friends,—requiems, processions, emblems, inscriptions, badges, and funereal garlands,—mark faith, nation, rank, and profession at the very gates of the sepulchre. Vain is the sceptic’s sneer, useless the utilitarian’s protest; by these poor tributes the heart utters its undying regret and its immortal prophecies, though ‘mummy has become merchandise,’ and to be ‘but pyramidically extant is a fallacy in duration;’ for, as the same religious philosopher[23] of Norwich declared, ‘it is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature;’ and, therefore, in the grim Tuscan’s Hell, the souls of those who denied their immortality when in the flesh, are shut up through eternity in living tombs. How the idea of a local abode for the mortal remains is hallowed to our nature, is realized in the pathos which closes the noble and sacred life of the Hebrew lawgiver: ‘And he buried him in a valley of the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor; but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.’[24] Etruria’s best relics are sepulchral urns. Social distinctions are as obvious in the tombs of the ancients as in their palaces: witness the Columbarium in ruins, and the fresh pit of the plebeians; the sandy isles of the Venetian cemetery, and Pompeii’s street of tombs. Byron thought ‘Implora pace’ the most affecting of epitaphs; and the visitor at Coppet recognizes a melancholy appropriateness, in the garden-grave of its gifted mistress.
Natural, therefore, and human, is the consoling thought of the poet, of the ship bringing home for burial all of earth that remains of his lamented friend:—
‘I hear the noise about thy keel;
I hear the bell struck in the night;
I see the cabin-window bright;
I see the sailor at the wheel.
‘Thou bringest the sailor to his wife,
And travelled men from foreign lands;
And letters unto trembling hands;
And thy dark freight, a vanished life.
‘So bring him: we have idle dreams:
This look of quiet flatters thus
Our home-bred fancies; O, to us,
The fools of habit, sweeter seems
‘To rest beneath the clover sod,
That takes the sunshine and the rains,
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God,
‘Than if with thee the roaring wells
Should gulf him fathom deep in brine;
And hands so often clasped in mine
Should toss with tangle and with shells.’[25]
Doubtless many of the processes adopted by blind affection and superstitious homage, to rescue the poor human casket from destruction, are grotesque and undesirable. Had Segato, the discoverer of a chemical method of petrifying flesh, survived to publish the secret, it would be chiefly for anatomical purposes that we should appreciate his invention; there is something revolting in the artificial conservation of what, by the law of Nature, should undergo elemental dissolution; and it is but a senseless homage to cling to the shattered chrysalis when the winged embryo has soared away:
‘All’ ombra de’ cipressi e dentro l’urne
Confortate di pianto, è forse il sonno
Delia morte men duro?’[26]
Nature sometimes is a conservative mother even of mortal lineaments; in glacier or tarn, in tuffo and limestone fossils, she keeps for ages the entire relics of humanity. The fantastic array of human bones in the Capuchin cells at Palermo and Rome; the eyeless, shrunken face of Carlo Borromeo embedded in crystal, jewels, and silk, beneath the Milan cathedral; the fleshless figure of old Jeremy Bentham in the raiment of this working-day world; the thousand spicy wrappings which enfold the exhumed mummy whose exhibition provoked Horace Smith’s facetious rhymes,—these, and such as these, poor attempts to do vain honour to our clay, are not less repugnant to the sentiment of death, in its religious and enlightened manifestation, than the promiscuous and careless putting out of sight of the dead after battle and in the reign of pestilence, or the brutal and irreverent disposal of the bodies of the poor in the diurnal pits of the Naples Campo Santo. More accordant with our sense of respect to what once enshrined an immortal spirit, and stood erect and free, even in barbaric manhood, is the adjuration of the bard:—
‘Gather him to his grave again,
And solemnly and softly lay,
Beneath the verdure of the plain,
The warrior’s scattered bones away;
The soul hath quickened every part,—
That remnant of a martial brow,
Those ribs that held the mighty heart,
That strong arm,—strong no longer now!
Spare them, each mouldering relic spare,
Of God’s own image; let them rest,
Till not a trace shall speak of where
The awful likeness was impressed.’
Yet there are many and judicious reasons for preferring cremation to inhumation; the prejudice against the former having doubtless originated among the early Christians, in their respect for patriarchal entombment, practised by the Jews, and their natural horror at any custom which savoured of heathenism. But there is actually no religious obstacle, and, under proper arrangement, no public inconvenience, in the burning of the dead. It is, too, a process which singularly attracts those who would save the remains of those they love from the possibility of desecration, and anticipate the ultimate fate of the mortal coil ‘to mix for ever with the elements;’ at all events, there can be no rational objection to the exercise of private taste, and the gratification of personal feeling on this point. ‘I bequeath my soul to God,’ said Michael Angelo, in his terse will, ‘my body to the earth, and my possessions to my nearest kin;’—and this right to dispose of one’s mortal remains appears to be instinctive; though the indignation excited by any departure from custom would indicate that, in popular apprehension, the privilege so rarely exercised is illegally usurped.