As I stood musing over this grave, it was not wonderful that my mind should travel back through vast ages, and follow man in his various moods, influenced in his treatment of the dead by various doctrines relative to the condition of the soul.
Here was the cup for holy water, itself a possible descendant of the food-vessel for the dead. And now it is used, not to furnish the dead with drink and meat, but with flowers. And it seemed to me that man was the same in all ages, through all civilisations, and that his acts are governed much more by custom than by reason. Is it not quite as irrational to put flowers on a grave as to put on it cake or ale? Does the soul live in the green mound with the bones? Does it come out to smell and admire the roses and lilies and picotees? The putting flowers on the grave is a matter of sentiment. Quite so—and in a certain phase of man’s growth in culture the food-vessel was cut in stone as a mere matter of sentiment, even when no food was put in it.
There are many of the customs of daily life which deserve to be considered, and which are to us full of interest, or ought to be so, for they tell us such a wondrous story. If I have in this little volume given a few instances, it is with the object of directing attention to the survivals of usage which had its origin in ideas long ago abandoned, and to show how much there is still to be learned from that proper study of mankind—Man.
Archæology is considered a dry pursuit, but it ceases to be dry when we find that it does not belong solely to what is dead and passed, but that it furnishes us with the interpretation of much that is still living and is not understood.
XIII.
Raising the Hat.
It is really remarkable how many customs are allowed to pass without the idea occurring as to what is their meaning. There is, for instance, no more common usage of everyday life than that of salutation by raising the hat, or touching the cap, and yet, not one person in ten thousand stops to inquire what it all means—why this little action of the hand should be accepted as a token of respect.
Raising the hat is an intermediate form; the putting up the finger to the cap is the curtailed idea of the primitive act of homage, reduced to its most meagre expression.
There is an amusing passage in Sir Francis Head’s “Bubbles from the Brunnen of Nassau” on hat-lifting: