On Funeral Customs

Ihave been cheering myself lately with a very bright and pleasant book on the subject of death and burial which appeared some few months ago. It is called Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Develofmenty by Bertram S. Puckle, and the point of view of the writer is interesting because in a sense individual. He does not write in the usual supercilious way about superstition, indirectly identifying it with religion. He is rather concerned to show that it is not religion which is responsible for superstition. He quotes the very simple forms actually required by ecclesiastical authorities, and contrasts them with the mass of fussy formalities, old and new, that have been added without any authority at all. To this extent he is undoubtedly quite right. The nightmare pomp which seemed so nonsensical to Dickens, the tall black plumes, the long black streamers, the horrible marionettes of mutes — all that sort of thing was often carried out with religious solemnity, but it had nothing to do with religion. Those forms were never imposed by the Churchy they were always imposed by the world. They were signs of worldliness and not of unworldliness j being almost always devoted to proclaiming the pride and pedigree and soii8 GENERALLY SPEAKING cial rank of the dead man: all the things which religion declares to be obviously useless to him when he is dead. We may agree that it was always a worldly gloom and a worldly solemnity. St. Augustine said it, as he said so many things, a long while ago. He who uttered the ^^Pereant qui ante noSy etc.y^ must have provoked many other people to say it. He says somewhere that funeral customs are not tributes to the dead but to the living. But perhaps it is not quite so indefensible to pay tributes to the living. If the demand comes not from the Church but from the world, it may be that the worldly are not always quite just to the world. There is more to be said than Mr. Puckle allows for, even for the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, altogether apart from the long-drawn anthem swelling the note of praise. On the whole, however, we may well be grateful to a writer who will point out that religion has not complicated human customs, but rather simplified them. I remarked many years ago that the most ritualistic service in the world is a very simple matter, concerned with plain things like fire and water or bread and wine, compared with the existing ritualism observed by butlers and waiters in serving a long dinner.

But why will even the most intelligent people insist on saying that every obvious human custom is a relic of some base and barbaric custom? Here, for instance, the writer suggests that leading the favourite charger of a general behind his hearse is a "survival" of some primitive habit of sacrificing an animal on the grave. This seems to me exactly like saying that taking ofif our hats to a lady is a survival of having our heads cut oflF, when we were suitors for a fairy princess. In one sense the connexion is quite correct. Taking off hats is a sign of respect to the lady, in a society where ladies are supposed to be respected. And cutting off heads, in the fairy-tale, was a sign that respect for that particular lady was perhaps almost carried to excess. But there is no reason to suppose that the idea would not have existed in its saner form, even if it had never been carried to excess. Similarly, it is natural to associate the horse with the glory of the warrior j and people were doubtless moved by some such emotion, even if they went so far as to kill the horse to his greater glory. But if nobody had ever thought of killing the horse, thousands of people would still have thought of leading the horse. They would have thought of it because it is a perfectly natural thing to think of. Where a higher type of society thinks chiefly of the dignity and solemn beauty of the occasion, it is the occasion of a procession. Where a lower or wilder type of society thinks chiefly of the doom and terror of the occasion, it is the occasion of a sacrifice. Both are, of course, in one sense feeling the intensity and importance of the occasion. That is why they both do something to celebrate it. But I can never see why we should say that the sane form of it is a variation of the savage form, any more than that the savage form is a variation of the sane form. It seems to me much more true to say that the natural introduction of the horse is sometimes degraded into the unnatural immolation of the horse, than to put it the other way round j and say that the immolation introduces the introduction. The presence of the horse behind the hearse is a normal thing, which has sometimes in the past taken an abnormal form. In other words, this explanation of putting the horse behind the hearse is an excellent example of putting the cart before the horse.

This fallacy, which is not peculiar to this writer, but is indeed rather refreshingly rare in him, is always the result of not using our own imagination: that is, our own inside knowledge of mankind. In other words, it comes from not really believing in the brotherhood of men. For there is no value in a version of the brotherhood of men which does not cover troglodytes and cannibals. People do solemn things because they think the occasion is solemn j and they do dreadful things because they think the occasion is dreadful. But there is no particular sense in saying that they do solemn things merely because they once did dreadful things. There is no need to explain ritual by remote extravagances j because it does not need any explanation. It explains itself. It explains all sorts of other things much better than definitions or abstractions explain them. To scatter flowers on a grave is simply a way in which an ordinary person can express in gesture things that only a very great poet could express in words. I decline to believe that those who do it necessarily believe that the dead man can smell. I doubt whether even those who did it in prehistoric times necessarily thought that the dead man could smell. Strange as it may seem, I do not think they were thinking in that vivid, vicarious fashion about the dead man's feelings. I think they were relieving their own feelings. "Funeral customs are a tribute not to the dead but to the living," said St. Augustine.

But those who write about primitive man's feelings always seem to start with the assumption that he had no feelings. He did everything that we do for sentimental reasons j but we are always told that he did it for totally different reasons. I have never been able to see the sense of this argument at all. Some men sometimes did dark and diabolical things then 5 and some men sometimes do dark and diabolical things now. Decadents in Paris attend a Black Mass, which is often a sort of parody of human sacrifice. But if somebody tells me that High Mass at the Madeleine, with Marshal Foch in the front pew, is a survival of the Black Mass in the den of the decadents

I shall take the liberty of disbelieving him. It is obviously more reasonable to call the bad thing a relic of the good one than vice versa. And I do not see why any number of people should not have conceived the common human notion of having a horse as the companion of a hero, quite apart from special ideas, which undoubtedly existed on special occasions, of terror and blood-offering and similar expiation. It is simply a question of the order in which the ideas occur to the mind 3 and I see no reason to suppose that the abnormal always occurs before the normal, or the inhuman before the human.

I do not profess to be reviewing a book, but only taking a text for an article j but there are, of course, any number of things in this sort of book that would provide texts for any number of articles. For instance, I have never read anything at all adequate about the very beautiful and profound tradition of the "soul-cake" or "souling-cake" connected with the ceremony of All Souls' Eve. The passage about it in this book is necessarily brief but very compact and contains some valuable information. It also contains a version which I had not seen of that very touching appeal in which there is all the tender irony of the Christian idea. The last two lines are given here thus:

**If you ain't got a penny, a ha'penny will do, If you ain't got a ha'penny, then God bless you."

I have always thought there was something very moving in that last gesture, admitting the man addressed into the brotherhood of the poor.

Here again it is really a matter of inside information. I mean information which we may obtain merely by diving inside ourselves. It is doubtless probable that the "soul-cake" is some sort of substitute for the funeral baked meats of which Shakespeare speaks. But it is not to be understood merely by looking it up in old books, even in Shakespeare. It is to be understood by imagining the moral atmosphere for ourselves. Mr. Puckle has some very sensible remarks about the effect of War Shrines 3 and how they silently ended the long protest of two or three centuries against prayers for the dead. But if anybody will put himself in the position of one praying for the dead, or, better still, simply pray for them, he will not have the smallest difficulty in understanding why the same people at the same time offered prayers for the dead and gave pennies to the poor. The truth is that the science of folk-lore has suffered terribly from oblivion of one fact: that folk-lorists also are folk. It is not in that sense a science like entomology or conchology or ornithology. A man must study a beetle from the outside 5 because it is quite difficult to get inside a beetle. Men must be objective about a winkle j they must regard it as an object j some even regard it as an unpleasant object. They cannot all become winkles j but they have all been born men. They ought to have an Inner Light, as the Quakers say, about all the things that men have done, which they cannot expect to have about the social activities of winkles. And a great deal of what is called enlightenment seems largely to consist of extinguishing this inner illumination j or, in other words, sinning against the light.