Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush (21 page)

“How will the funeral expenses ever be paid?” exclaims the anxious, weeping mother. “When it is all over, and the mourning bought, there will not remain a single copper to find us in bread.” The sorrow of obtaining this useless outward show of grief engrosses all the available means of the family, and that is expended upon the dead which might, with careful management, have kept the living from starving. Oh, vanity of vanities! there is no folly on earth that exceeds the vanity of this!

There are many persons who put off their grief when they put on their mourning, and it is a miserable satire on mankind to see these somber-clad beings in festal halls mingling with the gay and happy, their melancholy garments affording a painful contrast to light laughter, and eyes sparkling with pleasure.

Their levity, however, must not be mistaken for hypocrisy. The world is in fault, not they. Their grief is already over, – gone like a cloud from before the sun; but they are forced to wear black for a
given time
. They are true to their nature, which teaches them that “no grief with man is permanent,” that the storms of to-day will not darken the heavens tomorrow. It is complying with a
lying custom
makes them
hypocrites;
and, as the world always judges by appearances, it so happens that by adhering to one of its conventional rules, appearances in this instance are against them.

Nay, the very persons who, in the first genuine outburst of natural grief besought them to moderate their sorrow, to dry their tears, and be comforted for the loss they had sustained, are among the
first
to censure them for following advice so common and useless. Tears are as necessary to the afflicted as showers are to the parched earth, and are the best and sweetest remedy for excessive grief.

To the mourner we would say – Weep on; nature requires your tears. They are sent in mercy by Him who wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus. The man of sorrows himself taught us to weep.

We once heard a very beautiful volatile young lady exclaim, with something very like glee in her look and tone, after reading a letter she had received by the post, with its ominous black bordering and seal –“Grandmamma is dead! We shall have to go into deep mourning. I am so glad, for black is so becoming to me!”

An old aunt, who was present, expressed her surprise at this indecorous avowal; when the young lady replied, with great
naivete
–“I never saw grandmamma in my life. I cannot be expected to feel any grief for her death.”

“Perhaps not,” said the aunt. “But why, then, make a show of that which you do not feel? ”

“Oh, it’s the custom of the world. You know we must. It would be considered
shocking
not to go into very
deep
mourning for such a near relation.”

The young lady inherited a very nice legacy, too, from her grandmamma; and, had she spoken the truth, she would have said,
“I cannot weep for joy.”

Her mourning, in consequence, was of the deepest and most expensive kind; and she really did look charming in her
“love of a black crape bonnet!”
as she skipped before the glass, admiring herself and it, when it came home fresh from the milliner’s.

In contrast to the pretty young heiress, we knew a sweet orphan girl whose grief for the death of her mother, to whom she was devotedly attached, lay deeper than this hollow tinsel show; and yet the painful thought that she was too poor to pay this mark of respect to the memory of her beloved parent,
in a manner suited to her birth and station, added greatly to the poignancy of her sorrow.

A family who had long been burthened with a cross old aunt, who was a martyr to rheumatic gout, and whose violent temper kept the whole house in awe, and whom they dared not offend for fear of her leaving her wealth to strangers, were in the habit of devoutly wishing the old lady a
happy
release from her sufferings. When this long anticipated event at length took place, the very servants were put into the deepest mourning. What a solemn farce – we should say, lie – was this!

The daughters of a wealthy farmer had prepared everything to attend the great agricultural provincial show. Unfortunately, a grandfather to whom they all seemed greatly attached, died most inconveniently the day before, and as they seldom keep a body in Canada over the second day, he was buried early in the morning of the one appointed for their journey. They attended the remains to the grave, but after the funeral was over they put off their black garments and started for the show, and did not resume them again until after their return. People may think this very shocking, but it was not the laying aside the black that was so, but the fact of their being able to go from a grave to a scene of confusion and gaiety. The black clothes had nothing to do with this want of feeling, which would have remained the same under a black or a scarlet vestment.

A gentleman in this neighbourhood, since dead, who attended a public ball the same week that he had seen a lovely child consigned to the earth, would have remained the same heartless parent dressed in the deepest sables.

No instance that I have narrated of the business-like manner in which Canadians treat death, is more ridiculously striking than the following: –

The wife of a rich mechanic had a brother lying, it was supposed, at the point of death. His sister sent a note to me, requesting me to relinquish an engagement I had made with a sewing girl in her favour, as she wanted her immediately to make up her mourning, the doctor having told her that her brother could not live many days.

“Mrs. — is going to be beforehand with death,” I said, as I gave the girl the desired release. “I have known instances of persons being too late with their mourning to attend a funeral, but this is the first time I ever heard of it being made in anticipation.”

After a week the girl returned to her former employment.

“Well, Anne, is Mr. — dead?”

“No, ma’am, nor likely to die this time; and his sister is so vexed that she bought such expensive mourning, and all for no purpose!”

The brother of this provident lady is alive to this day, the husband of a very pretty wife, and the father of a family, while she, poor body, has been consigned to the grave for more than three years.

During her own dying illness, a little girl greatly disturbed her sick mother with the noise she made. Her husband, as an inducement to keep the child quiet, said, “Mary, if you do not quit that, I’ll whip you; but if you keep still like a good girl, you shall go to ma’s funeral.”

An artist cousin of mine was invited, with many other members of the Royal Academy, to attend the funeral of the celebrated Nollekens the sculptor. The party filled twelve mourning coaches, and were furnished with silk gloves, scarfs, and hatbands, and a dinner was provided after the funeral was over at one of the large hotels. “A merrier set that we were on that day,” said my cousin, “I never saw. We all got jovial, and
it was midnight before any of us reached our respective homes. The whole affair vividly brought to my mind that description of the ‘Gondola,’ given so graphically by Byron, that it

Some years ago I witnessed the funeral of a young lady, the only child of very wealthy parents, who resided in Bedford-square. The heiress of their enviable riches was a very delicate, fragile-looking girl, and on the day that she attained her majority her parents gave a large dinner party, followed by a ball in the evening, to celebrate the event. It was during the winter; the night was very cold, the crowded rooms overheated, the young lady thinly but magnificently clad. She took a chill in leaving the close ballroom for the large, ill-warmed supper-room, and three days after, the hope of these rich people lay insensible on her bier.

I heard from everyone that called upon Mrs. L—, the relative and friend with whom I was staying, of the magnificent funeral would be given to Miss C—. Ah, little heeded that pale crushed flower of yesterday, the pomp that was to convey her from the hot-bed of luxury to the cold, damp vault of St. Giles’s melancholy looking church! I stood at Mrs. L—’s window, which commanded a view of the whole square, to watch the procession pass up Russell-street to the place of interment. The morning was intensely cold, and large snow-flakes fell lazily and heavily to the earth. The poor dingy sparrows, with their feathers ruffled up, hopped mournfully along the pavement in search of food; they,

The mutes that attended the long line of mourning coaches stood motionless, leaning on their long staffs wreathed with white, like so many figures that the frost-king had stiffened into stone. The hearse, with its snowy plumes, drawn by six milk-white horses, might have served for the regal car of his northern majesty, so ghostlike and chilly were its sepulchral trappings. At length the coffin, covered with black velvet, and a pall lined with white silk and fringed with silver, was borne from the house and deposited in the gloomy depths of the stately hearse. The
hired
mourners, in their sable dresses and long white hatbands and scarfs, rode slowly forward mounted on white horses, to attend this bride of death to her last resting place. The first three carriages that followed contained the family physician and surgeon, a clergyman, and the male servants of the house, in deep sables. The family carriage too was there, but
empty
, and of a procession in which 145 private carriages made a conspicuous show, all but those enumerated above were
empty
. Strangers drove strange horses to that vast funeral, and
hired servants
were the only members of the family that conducted the last scion of that family to the grave. Truly, it was the most dismal spectacle we ever witnessed, and we turned from it sick at heart, and with eyes moist with tears – not shed for the dead, for she had escaped from this vexatious vanity, but from the heartless mockery of all this fictitious woe.

The expense of such a funeral probably involved many hundred pounds, which had been better bestowed on charitable purposes.

Another evil arising out of this absurd custom, is the high price attached to black clothing, on account of the necessity that compels people to wear it for so long a period after the death of a near relation, making it a matter of still greater difficulty for the poorer class to comply with the usages of society.

“But who cares about the poor, whether they go into mourning for their friends or no? it is a matter of no consequence.”

Ah, there it is. And this is not the least forcible argument we have to advance against this useless custom. If it becomes a moral duty for the rich to put on black for the death of a friend, it must be morally necessary for the poor to do the same. We see no difference in the degrees of moral feeling; the soul of man is of no rank, but of equal value in our eyes, whether belonging to rich or poor. But this usage is so general, and the neglect of it considered such a disgrace, that it leaves a very wide door open for the entrance of false pride.

Poverty is an evil which most persons, however humble their stations may be, most carefully endeavour to conceal. To avoid an exposure of their real circumstances, they will deprive themselves of the common necessaries of life, and incur debts which they have no prospect of paying, rather than allow their neighbours to suspect that they cannot afford a
handsome funeral
and good
mournings
for any deceased member of their family. If such persons would but follow the dictates of true wisdom, honesty, and truth, no dread of the opinion of others should tempt them to do what they cannot afford. Their grief for the dead would not be less sincere if they followed the body of the beloved in their ordinary costume to the grave; nor is the spectacle less imposing divested of all the solemn foppery which attends the funeral of persons who move in respectable society.

Some years ago, when it was the fashion in England (and may be it remains the fashion still) to give black silk scarfs and hatbands at funerals, mean and covetous persons threw themselves in the way of picking up these stray loaves and fishes. A lady, who lived in the same town with me after
I was married, boasted to me that her husband (who always contrived to be a necessary attendant on such occasions) found her in all the black silk she required for articles of dress, and that he had not purchased a pair of gloves for many years.

About two years before old King George the Third died, a report got about that he could not survive many days. There was a general rush among all ranks to obtain mourning. Up went the price of black goods; Norwich crapes and bombazines rose ten per cent, and those who were able to secure a black garment at any price, to shew their loyalty, were deemed very fortunate. And after all this fuss, and hurry, and confusion, the poor mad old king disappointed the speculators in sables, and lived on in darkness and mental aberration for two whole years. The mourning of some on that occasion was
real
, not imaginary. The sorrow with them was not for the
king’s death
, but that he had
not died
. On these public occasions of grief, great is the stir and bustle in economical families, who wish to show a decent concern for the death of the monarch, but who do not exactly like to go to the expense of buying new clothes for such a short period as a court mourning. All the old family stores are rummaged carefully over, and every stuff gown, worn ribbon, or shabby shawl, that can take a black dye, is handed over to the vat; and these second-hand black garments have a more
mournful appearance
than the glossy suits of the gay and wealthy, for it is actually humiliating to wear such, as they are both unbecoming to the young and old. Black, which is the most becoming and convenient colour for general wear, especially to the old and middle-aged, would no longer be regarded with religious horror as the type of mortality and decay, but would take its place on the same shelf with the gay tints that form the motley groups in our handsome stores. Could influential people be found to expose the folly and vanity of this
practice, and refuse to comply with its demands, others would soon be glad to follow their example, and, before many years, it would sink into contempt and disuse.