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_ My voyages (in paper boats) among savages often yield me matter for
reflection at home. It is curious to trace the savage in the
civilised man, and to detect the hold of some savage customs on
conditions of society rather boastful of being high above them.
I wonder, is the Medicine Man of the North American Indians never
to be got rid of, out of the North American country? He comes into
my Wigwam on all manner of occasions, and with the absurdest
'Medicine.' I always find it extremely difficult, and I often find
it simply impossible, to keep him out of my Wigwam. For his legal
'Medicine' he sticks upon his head the hair of quadrupeds, and
plasters the same with fat, and dirty white powder, and talks a
gibberish quite unknown to the men and squaws of his tribe. For
his religious 'Medicine' he puts on puffy white sleeves, little
black aprons, large black waistcoats of a peculiar cut, collarless
coats with Medicine button-holes, Medicine stockings and gaiters
and shoes, and tops the whole with a highly grotesque Medicinal
hat. In one respect, to be sure, I am quite free from him. On
occasions when the Medicine Men in general, together with a large
number of the miscellaneous inhabitants of his village, both male
and female, are presented to the principal Chief, his native
'Medicine' is a comical mixture of old odds and ends (hired of
traders) and new things in antiquated shapes, and pieces of red
cloth (of which he is particularly fond), and white and red and
blue paint for the face. The irrationality of this particular
Medicine culminates in a mock battle-rush, from which many of the
squaws are borne out, much dilapidated. I need not observe how
unlike this is to a Drawing Room at St. James's Palace.
The African magician I find it very difficult to exclude from my
Wigwam too. This creature takes cases of death and mourning under
his supervision, and will frequently impoverish a whole family by
his preposterous enchantments. He is a great eater and drinker,
and always conceals a rejoicing stomach under a grieving exterior.
His charms consist of an infinite quantity of worthless scraps, for
which he charges very high. He impresses on the poor bereaved
natives, that the more of his followers they pay to exhibit such
scraps on their persons for an hour or two (though they never saw
the deceased in their lives, and are put in high spirits by his
decease), the more honourably and piously they grieve for the dead.
The poor people submitting themselves to this conjurer, an
expensive procession is formed, in which bits of stick, feathers of
birds, and a quantity of other unmeaning objects besmeared with
black paint, are carried in a certain ghastly order of which no one
understands the meaning, if it ever had any, to the brink of the
grave, and are then brought back again.
In the Tonga Islands everything is supposed to have a soul, so that
when a hatchet is irreparably broken, they say, 'His immortal part
has departed; he is gone to the happy hunting-plains.' This belief
leads to the logical sequence that when a man is buried, some of
his eating and drinking vessels, and some of his warlike
implements, must be broken and buried with him. Superstitious and
wrong, but surely a more respectable superstition than the hire of
antic scraps for a show that has no meaning based on any sincere
belief.
Let me halt on my Uncommercial road, to throw a passing glance on
some funeral solemnities that I have seen where North American
Indians, African Magicians, and Tonga Islanders, are supposed not
to be.
Once, I dwelt in an Italian city, where there dwelt with me for a
while, an Englishman of an amiable nature, great enthusiasm, and no
discretion. This friend discovered a desolate stranger, mourning
over the unexpected death of one very dear to him, in a solitary
cottage among the vineyards of an outlying village. The
circumstances of the bereavement were unusually distressing; and
the survivor, new to the peasants and the country, sorely needed
help, being alone with the remains. With some difficulty, but with
the strong influence of a purpose at once gentle, disinterested,
and determined, my friend--Mr. Kindheart--obtained access to the
mourner, and undertook to arrange the burial.
There was a small Protestant cemetery near the city walls, and as
Mr. Kindheart came back to me, he turned into it and chose the
spot. He was always highly flushed when rendering a service
unaided, and I knew that to make him happy I must keep aloof from
his ministration. But when at dinner he warmed with the good
action of the day, and conceived the brilliant idea of comforting
the mourner with 'an English funeral,' I ventured to intimate that
I thought that institution, which was not absolutely sublime at
home, might prove a failure in Italian hands. However, Mr.
Kindheart was so enraptured with his conception, that he presently
wrote down into the town requesting the attendance with to-morrow's
earliest light of a certain little upholsterer. This upholsterer
was famous for speaking the unintelligible local dialect (his own)
in a far more unintelligible manner than any other man alive.
When from my bath next morning I overheard Mr. Kindheart and the
upholsterer in conference on the top of an echoing staircase; and
when I overheard Mr. Kindheart rendering English Undertaking
phrases into very choice Italian, and the upholsterer replying in
the unknown Tongues; and when I furthermore remembered that the
local funerals had no resemblance to English funerals; I became in
my secret bosom apprehensive. But Mr. Kindheart informed me at
breakfast that measures had been taken to ensure a signal success.
As the funeral was to take place at sunset, and as I knew to which
of the city gates it must tend, I went out at that gate as the sun
descended, and walked along the dusty, dusty road. I had not
walked far, when I encountered this procession:
1. Mr. Kindheart, much abashed, on an immense grey horse.
2. A bright yellow coach and pair, driven by a coachman in bright
red velvet knee-breeches and waistcoat. (This was the established
local idea of State.) Both coach doors kept open by the coffin,
which was on its side within, and sticking out at each.
3. Behind the coach, the mourner, for whom the coach was intended,
walking in the dust.
4. Concealed behind a roadside well for the irrigation of a garden,
the unintelligible Upholsterer, admiring.
It matters little now. Coaches of all colours are alike to poor
Kindheart, and he rests far North of the little cemetery with the
cypress-trees, by the city walls where the Mediterranean is so
beautiful.
My first funeral, a fair representative funeral after its kind, was
that of the husband of a married servant, once my nurse. She
married for money. Sally Flanders, after a year or two of
matrimony, became the relict of Flanders, a small master builder;
and either she or Flanders had done me the honour to express a
desire that I should 'follow.' I may have been seven or eight
years old;--young enough, certainly, to feel rather alarmed by the
expression, as not knowing where the invitation was held to
terminate, and how far I was expected to follow the deceased
Flanders. Consent being given by the heads of houses, I was jobbed
up into what was pronounced at home decent mourning (comprehending
somebody else's shirt, unless my memory deceives me), and was
admonished that if, when the funeral was in action, I put my hands
in my pockets, or took my eyes out of my pocket-handkerchief, I was
personally lost, and my family disgraced. On the eventful day,
having tried to get myself into a disastrous frame of mind, and
having formed a very poor opinion of myself because I couldn't cry,
I repaired to Sally's. Sally was an excellent creature, and had
been a good wife to old Flanders, but the moment I saw her I knew
that she was not in her own real natural state. She formed a sort
of Coat of Arms, grouped with a smelling-bottle, a handkerchief, an
orange, a bottle of vinegar, Flanders's sister, her own sister,
Flanders's brother's wife, and two neighbouring gossips--all in
mourning, and all ready to hold her whenever she fainted. At sight
of poor little me she became much agitated (agitating me much
more), and having exclaimed, 'O here's dear Master Uncommercial!'
became hysterical, and swooned as if I had been the death of her.
An affecting scene followed, during which I was handed about and
poked at her by various people, as if I were the bottle of salts.
Reviving a little, she embraced me, said, 'You knew him well, dear
Master Uncommercial, and he knew you!' and fainted again: which,
as the rest of the Coat of Arms soothingly said, 'done her credit.'
Now, I knew that she needn't have fainted unless she liked, and
that she wouldn't have fainted unless it had been expected of her,
quite as well as I know it at this day. It made me feel
uncomfortable and hypocritical besides. I was not sure but that it
might be manners in ME to faint next, and I resolved to keep my eye
on Flanders's uncle, and if I saw any signs of his going in that
direction, to go too, politely. But Flanders's uncle (who was a
weak little old retail grocer) had only one idea, which was that we
all wanted tea; and he handed us cups of tea all round,
incessantly, whether we refused or not. There was a young nephew
of Flanders's present, to whom Flanders, it was rumoured, had left
nineteen guineas. He drank all the tea that was offered him, this
nephew--amounting, I should say, to several quarts--and ate as much
plum-cake as he could possibly come by; but he felt it to be decent
mourning that he should now and then stop in the midst of a lump of
cake, and appear to forget that his mouth was full, in the
contemplation of his uncle's memory. I felt all this to be the
fault of the undertaker, who was handing us gloves on a tea-tray as
if they were muffins, and tying us into cloaks (mine had to be
pinned up all round, it was so long for me), because I knew that he
was making game. So, when we got out into the streets, and I
constantly disarranged the procession by tumbling on the people
before me because my handkerchief blinded my eyes, and tripping up
the people behind me because my cloak was so long, I felt that we
were all making game. I was truly sorry for Flanders, but I knew
that it was no reason why we should be trying (the women with their
heads in hoods like coal-scuttles with the black side outward) to
keep step with a man in a scarf, carrying a thing like a mourning
spy-glass, which he was going to open presently and sweep the
horizon with. I knew that we should not all have been speaking in
one particular key-note struck by the undertaker, if we had not
been making game. Even in our faces we were every one of us as
like the undertaker as if we had been his own family, and I
perceived that this could not have happened unless we had been
making game. When we returned to Sally's, it was all of a piece.
The continued impossibility of getting on without plum-cake; the
ceremonious apparition of a pair of decanters containing port and
sherry and cork; Sally's sister at the tea-table, clinking the best
crockery and shaking her head mournfully every time she looked down
into the teapot, as if it were the tomb; the Coat of Arms again,
and Sally as before; lastly, the words of consolation administered
to Sally when it was considered right that she should 'come round
nicely:' which were, that the deceased had had 'as com-for-ta-ble a
fu-ne-ral as comfortable could be!'
Other funerals have I seen with grown-up eyes, since that day, of
which the burden has been the same childish burden. Making game.
Real affliction, real grief and solemnity, have been outraged, and
the funeral has been 'performed.' The waste for which the funeral
customs of many tribes of savages are conspicuous, has attended
these civilised obsequies; and once, and twice, have I wished in my
soul that if the waste must be, they would let the undertaker bury
the money, and let me bury the friend.
In France, upon the whole, these ceremonies are more sensibly
regulated, because they are upon the whole less expensively
regulated. I cannot say that I have ever been much edified by the
custom of tying a bib and apron on the front of the house of
mourning, or that I would myself particularly care to be driven to
my grave in a nodding and bobbing car, like an infirm four-post
bedstead, by an inky fellow-creature in a cocked-hat. But it may
be that I am constitutionally insensible to the virtues of a
cocked-hat. In provincial France, the solemnities are sufficiently
hideous, but are few and cheap. The friends and townsmen of the
departed, in their own dresses and not masquerading under the
auspices of the African Conjurer, surround the hand-bier, and often
carry it. It is not considered indispensable to stifle the
bearers, or even to elevate the burden on their shoulders;
consequently it is easily taken up, and easily set down, and is
carried through the streets without the distressing floundering and
shuffling that we see at home. A dirty priest or two, and a
dirtier acolyte or two, do not lend any especial grace to the
proceedings; and I regard with personal animosity the bassoon,
which is blown at intervals by the big-legged priest (it is always
a big-legged priest who blows the bassoon), when his fellows
combine in a lugubrious stalwart drawl. But there is far less of
the Conjurer and the Medicine Man in the business than under like
circumstances here. The grim coaches that we reserve expressly for
such shows, are non-existent; if the cemetery be far out of the
town, the coaches that are hired for other purposes of life are
hired for this purpose; and although the honest vehicles make no
pretence of being overcome, I have never noticed that the people in
them were the worse for it. In Italy, the hooded Members of
Confraternities who attend on funerals, are dismal and ugly to look
upon; but the services they render are at least voluntarily
rendered, and impoverish no one, and cost nothing. Why should high
civilisation and low savagery ever come together on the point of
making them a wantonly wasteful and contemptible set of forms?
Once I lost a friend by death, who had been troubled in his time by
the Medicine Man and the Conjurer, and upon whose limited resources
there were abundant claims. The Conjurer assured me that I must
positively 'follow,' and both he and the Medicine Man entertained
no doubt that I must go in a black carriage, and must wear
'fittings.' I objected to fittings as having nothing to do with my
friendship, and I objected to the black carriage as being in more
senses than one a job. So, it came into my mind to try what would
happen if I quietly walked, in my own way, from my own house to my
friend's burial-place, and stood beside his open grave in my own
dress and person, reverently listening to the best of Services. It
satisfied my mind, I found, quite as well as if I had been
disguised in a hired hatband and scarf both trailing to my very
heels, and as if I had cost the orphan children, in their greatest
need, ten guineas.
Can any one who ever beheld the stupendous absurdities attendant on
'A message from the Lords' in the House of Commons, turn upon the
Medicine Man of the poor Indians? Has he any 'Medicine' in that
dried skin pouch of his, so supremely ludicrous as the two Masters
in Chancery holding up their black petticoats and butting their
ridiculous wigs at Mr. Speaker? Yet there are authorities
innumerable to tell me--as there are authorities innumerable among
the Indians to tell them--that the nonsense is indispensable, and
that its abrogation would involve most awful consequences. What
would any rational creature who had never heard of judicial and
forensic 'fittings,' think of the Court of Common Pleas on the
first day of Term? Or with what an awakened sense of humour would
LIVINGSTONE'S account of a similar scene be perused, if the fur and
red cloth and goats' hair and horse hair and powdered chalk and
black patches on the top of the head, were all at Tala Mungongo
instead of Westminster? That model missionary and good brave man
found at least one tribe of blacks with a very strong sense of the
ridiculous, insomuch that although an amiable and docile people,
they never could see the Missionaries dispose of their legs in the
attitude of kneeling, or hear them begin a hymn in chorus, without
bursting into roars of irrepressible laughter. It is much to be
hoped that no member of this facetious tribe may ever find his way
to England and get committed for contempt of Court.
In the Tonga Island already mentioned, there are a set of
personages called Mataboos--or some such name--who are the masters
of all the public ceremonies, and who know the exact place in which
every chief must sit down when a solemn public meeting takes place:
a meeting which bears a family resemblance to our own Public
Dinner, in respect of its being a main part of the proceedings that
every gentleman present is required to drink something nasty.
These Mataboos are a privileged order, so important is their
avocation, and they make the most of their high functions. A long
way out of the Tonga Islands, indeed, rather near the British
Islands, was there no calling in of the Mataboos the other day to
settle an earth-convulsing question of precedence; and was there no
weighty opinion delivered on the part of the Mataboos which, being
interpreted to that unlucky tribe of blacks with the sense of the
ridiculous, would infallibly set the whole population screaming
with laughter?
My sense of justice demands the admission, however, that this is
not quite a one-sided question. If we submit ourselves meekly to
the Medicine Man and the Conjurer, and are not exalted by it, the
savages may retort upon us that we act more unwisely than they in
other matters wherein we fail to imitate them. It is a widely
diffused custom among savage tribes, when they meet to discuss any
affair of public importance, to sit up all night making a horrible
noise, dancing, blowing shells, and (in cases where they are
familiar with fire-arms) flying out into open places and letting
off guns. It is questionable whether our legislative assemblies
might not take a hint from this. A shell is not a melodious wind-
instrument, and it is monotonous; but it is as musical as, and not
more monotonous than, my Honourable friend's own trumpet, or the
trumpet that he blows so hard for the Minister. The uselessness of
arguing with any supporter of a Government or of an Opposition, is
well known. Try dancing. It is a better exercise, and has the
unspeakable recommendation that it couldn't be reported. The
honourable and savage member who has a loaded gun, and has grown
impatient of debate, plunges out of doors, fires in the air, and
returns calm and silent to the Palaver. Let the honourable and
civilised member similarly charged with a speech, dart into the
cloisters of Westminster Abbey in the silence of night, let his
speech off, and come back harmless. It is not at first sight a
very rational custom to paint a broad blue stripe across one's nose
and both cheeks, and a broad red stripe from the forehead to the
chin, to attach a few pounds of wood to one's under lip, to stick
fish-bones in one's ears and a brass curtain-ring in one's nose,
and to rub one's body all over with rancid oil, as a preliminary to
entering on business. But this is a question of taste and
ceremony, and so is the Windsor Uniform. The manner of entering on
the business itself is another question. A council of six hundred
savage gentlemen entirely independent of tailors, sitting on their
hams in a ring, smoking, and occasionally grunting, seem to me,
according to the experience I have gathered in my voyages and
travels, somehow to do what they come together for; whereas that is
not at all the general experience of a council of six hundred
civilised gentlemen very dependent on tailors and sitting on
mechanical contrivances. It is better that an Assembly should do
its utmost to envelop itself in smoke, than that it should direct
its endeavours to enveloping the public in smoke; and I would
rather it buried half a hundred hatchets than buried one subject
demanding attention. _
Read next: CHAPTER XXIX - TITBULL'S ALMS-HOUSES
Read previous: CHAPTER XXVII - IN THE FRENCH-FLEMISH COUNTRY
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