by George Moore
That day the box edgings were trampled under foot, and all the flowers in the beds. My mother, perhaps, cared little for flowers, or she did not live here sufficiently long to see that this garden was carefully tended; for years there were no children to come here for a walk, and it was thought sufficient to keep in repair the boundary wall so that cattle should not get in. No trees were cut here when the Woods were thinned, and the pines and the yews have grown so thickly that the place is overshadowed; and the sepulchral dark is never lifted even at midday. At the back of the tomb, in the wood behind it, the headstones of old graves show above the ground, though the earth has nearly claimed them; only a few inches show above the dead leaves; all this hillside must have been a graveyard once, hundreds of years ago, and this ancient graveyard has never been forgotten by me, principally on account of something that happened long ago when I was a little child. The mystery of the wood used to appeal to my curiosity, but I never dared to scramble over the low wall until one day, leaving my governess, who was praying by the tomb, I discovered a gap through which I could climb. My wanderings were suddenly brought to an end by the appearance, or the fancied appearance, of somebody in a brown dress — a woman I thought it must be; she seemed to float along the ground, and I hurried back, falling and hurting myself severely in my hurry to escape through the gap. So great was my fear that I spoke not of my hurt to my governess, but of the being I had seen, beseeching of her to come back; but she would not come back, and this fact impressed me greatly. I said to myself, “If she didn’t believe somebody was there she’d come back.” The fear endured for long afterwards; and I used to beg of her not to cross the open space between the last shift of the wood and the tomb itself. We can re-live in imagination an emotion already experienced. Everything I had felt when I was a child about the mysterious hollows in the beech wood behind the tomb and the old stone there, and the being I had seen clothed in a brown cloak, I could re-live again, but the wood enkindled no new emotion in me. Everything seemed very trivial. The steps leading to the tomb, the tomb itself, the boundary wall, and the enchanted wood was now no more than a mere ordinary plantation. There were a few old stones showing through the leaves, that is all. Marvels never cease; in youth one finds the exterior world marvellous, later on one finds one’s inner life extraordinary, and what seemed marvellous to me now was that I should have changed so much. The seeing of the ghost might be put down to my fancy, but how explain the change in the wood — was its mystery also a dream, an imagination? Which is the truth — that experience robs the earth of its mystery, or that we have changed so that the evanescent emanations which we used suddenly to grow aware of, and which sometimes used to take shape, are still there, only our eyes are no longer capable of perceiving them? May not this be so? — for as one sense develops, another declines. The mystic who lives on the hillside in the edge of a cave, pondering eternal rather than ephemeral things, obtains glimpses, just as the child does, of a life outside this life of ours. Or do we think these things because man will not consent to die like a plant? Wondering if a glimpse of another life had once been vouchsafed to me when my senses were more finely wrought, I descended the hillside; the bird, probably a chaffinch, repeated its cry without any variation. I went down the hillside and lay in the shadow of the tasselled larches, trying to convince myself that I had not hoped to see the brown lady, if it were a lady I had seen, bending over the stones of the old burial-ground.
One day the silence of the woods was broken by the sound of a mason’s hammer, and on making inquiry from a passing workman — his hodman probably — I learned that on opening the vault it had been discovered that there was not room for another coffin. But no enlargement of the vault was necessary; a couple of more shelves was all that would be wanted for many a year to come. His meaning was not to be mistaken — when two more shelves had been added there would be room for my brothers, myself, and my sister, but the next generation would have to order that a further excavation be made in the hill or look out for a new burial-ground. He stood looking at me, and I watched for a moment a fine young man whose eyes were pale as the landscape, and I wondered if he expected me to say that I was glad that things had turned out very well.... The sound of the mason’s hammer got upon my nerves, and feeling the wood to be no longer a place for meditation, I wandered round the shore as far as the old boat-house, wondering how it was that the words of a simple peasant could have succeeded in producing such a strange revulsion of feeling in me. No doubt it was the intensity with which I realised the fact that we are never far from death, none of us, that made it seem as if I were thinking on this subject for the first time. As soon as we reach the age of reflection the thought of death is never long out of our minds. It is a subject on which we are always thinking. We go to bed thinking that another day has gone, that we are another day nearer our graves. Any incident suffices to remind us of death. That very morning I had seen two old blue-bottles huddled together in the corner of a pane, and at once remembered that a term of life is set out for all things — a few months for the blue-bottle, a few years for me. One forgets how one thought twenty years ago, but I am prone to think that even the young meditate very often upon death; it must be so, for all their books contain verses on the mutability of things, and as we advance in years it would seem that we think more and more on this one subject, for what is all modern literature but a reek of regret that we are but bubbles on a stream? I thought that nothing that could be said on this old subject could move me, but that boy from Derryanny had brought home to me the thought that follows us from youth to age better than literature could have done; he had exceeded all the poets, not by any single phrase — it was more his attitude of mind towards death (towards my death) that had startled me — and as I walked along the shore I tried to remember his words. They were simple enough, no doubt, so simple that I could not remember them, only that he had reminded me that Michael Malia, that was the mason’s name, had known me since I was a little boy; I do not know how he got it out; I should not have been able to express the idea myself, but without choosing his words, without being aware of them, speaking unconsciously, just as he breathed, he had told me that if my heart were set on any particular place I had only to tell Michael Malia and he would keep it for me; there would be a convenient place for me just above my grandfather when they had got the new shelf up; he had heard we were both writers.
That country boy took it out of me as perhaps no poet had ever done! I shall never forget him as I saw him going away stolidly through the green wood, his bag of lime on his back.
And sitting down in front of the tranquil lake I said, “In twenty or thirty years I shall certainly join the others in that horrible vault; nothing can save me,” and again the present slipped away from me and my mind became again clear as glass; the present is only subconscious; were it not so we could not live. I have said all this before; again I seemed to myself like a fly crawling up a pane of glass, falling back, buzzing, and crawling again. Every expedient that I explored proved illusory, every one led to the same conclusion that the dead are powerless. “The living do with us what they like,” I muttered, and I thought of all my Catholic relations, every one of whom believes in the intervention of priests and holy water, the Immaculate Conception, the Pope’s Indulgences, and a host of other things which I could not remember, so great was my anguish of mind at the thought that my poor pagan body should be delivered helpless into their pious hands. I remembered their faces, I could hear their voices — that of my dear brother, whom I shall always think of as a strayed cardinal rather than as a colonel; I could see his pale eyes moist with faith in the intercession of the Virgin — one can always tell a Catholic at sight, just as one can tell a consumptive. The curving lake, the pale mountains, the low shores, the sunlight, and the haze contributed not a little to frighten me; the country looked intensely Catholic at that moment. My thoughts swerved, and I began to wonder if the face of a country takes its character from the ideas of those living in it.
“How shall I escape from that vault?” I cried out suddenly. Michael Malia’s hodman had said that they might place me just above my grandfather, and my grandfather was a man of letters, a historian whose histories I had not read; and in the midst of the horror my probable burial inspired in me, I found some amusement in the admission that I should like the old gentleman whose portrait hung in the dining-room to have read my novels. This being so, it was not improbable that he would like me to read his histories, and I began to speculate on what the author of a history of the French Revolution would think of “Esther Waters.” The colour of the chocolate coat he wears in his picture fixed itself in my mind’s eye, and I began to compare it with the colour of the brown garment worn by the ghost I had seen in the wood. Good Heavens, if it were his ghost I had seen!
1. Still unpublished.
And listening to the lapping of the lake water I imagined a horrible colloquy in that vault. It all came into my mind, his dialogue and my dialogue. “Great God,” I cried out, “something must be done to escape!” and my eyes were strained out on the lake, upon the island on which a Welshman had built a castle. I saw all the woods reaching down to the water’s edge, and the woods I did not see I remembered; all the larch trees that grew on the hillsides came into my mind suddenly, and I thought what a splendid pyre might be built out of them. No trees had been cut for the last thirty years; I might live for another thirty. What splendid timber there would then be to build a pyre for me! — a pyre fifty feet high, saturated with scented oils, and me lying on the top of it with all my books (they would make a nice pillow for my head). The ancient heroes used to be laid with their arms beside them; their horses were slaughtered so that their spirits might be free to serve them in the aerial kingdoms they had gone to inhabit. My pyre should be built on the island facing me; its flames would be seen for miles and miles; the lake would be lighted up by it, and my body would become a sort of beacon-fire — the beacon of the pagan future awaiting old Ireland! Nor would the price of such a funeral be anything too excessive — a few hundred pounds perhaps, the price of a thousand larches and a few barrels of scented oil and the great feast: for while I was roasting, my mourners should eat roast meat and drink wine and wear gay dresses — the men as well as the women; and the gayest music would be played. The “Marriage of Figaro” and some Offenbach would be pleasing to my spirit, the ride of the Valkyrie would be an appropriate piece; but I am improvising a selection, and that is a thing that requires careful consideration. It would be a fine thing indeed if such a funeral — I hate the word — such a burning as this could be undertaken, and there is no reason why it should not be, unless the law interdicts public burnings of human bodies. And then my face clouded, and my soul too; I grew melancholy as the lake, as the southern mountains that rippled down the sky plaintive as an Irish melody, for the burning I had dreamed of so splendidly might never take place. I might have to fall back on the Public Crematorium in England — in Ireland there is no Crematorium; Ireland lingers in the belief in the resurrection of the body. “Before I decide,” I said to myself, “what my own funeral shall be, I must find out what funeral liberties the modern law and Christian morality permit the citizen,” and this I should not be able to discover until I returned to Dublin.
It was by the side of dulcet Lough Cara that I began to imagine my interview with the old family solicitor, prejudiced and white-headed as the king in a certain kind of romantic play, a devout Catholic who would certainly understand very little of my paganism; but I should catch him on two well-sharpened horns — whether he should be guilty of so unbusiness-like an act as to refuse to make a will for theological reasons, or to do a violence to his conscience by assisting a fellow-creature to dispose of his body in a way that would give the Almighty much trouble to bring about the resurrection of the body in the valley of Jehoshaphat. The embarrassment of the family solicitor would be amusing, and if he declined to draw up my will for me there would be plenty of other solicitors who would not hesitate to draw up whatever will I was minded to make. In order to secure the burial of my body, my notion was to leave all my property, lands, money, pictures, and furniture to my brother, Colonel Maurice Moore on the condition that I should be burnt and the ashes disposed of without the humiliation of Christian rites; that if the conditions that the inheritance carried with it were so disagreeable to Colonel Maurice Moore that he could not bring himself to see that the disposal of my remains was carried out according to my wishes, my property, lands, money, pictures, and furniture, should go to my brother Augustus Moore; that in the event of his declining to carry out my wishes regarding the disposal of my remains, all my property should go to my brother Julian Moore; that if he should refuse to carry out my wishes regarding the disposal of my remains, all the said property should go to my friend Sir William Eden, who would, I felt sure, take a sad pleasure in giving effect to the wishes of his old friend. A will drawn up on these lines would secure me against all chance of being buried with my ancestors in Kiltoon, and during the next two days I pondered my own burning. My brother might think that he was put to a good deal of expense, but he would not fail me. He had taken off my hands the disagreeable task of seeing the undertakers and making arrangements for the saying of Masses, etc., arrangements which would be intensely disagreeable to me to make so. I had plenty of time to think out the details of my burning; and I grew happy in the thought that I had escaped from the disgrace of Christian burial — a disgrace which was never, until the last two days, wholly realised by me, but which was nevertheless always suspected. No doubt it was the dread of Kiltoon that had inspired that thought of death from which in late years I had never seemed able to escape. I am of the romantic temperament, and it would be a pity to forgo the burning I had imagined. I delighted in the vision that had come upon me of the felling of the larch trees on the hillside and the building of the pyre about the old castle. It would reach much higher; I imagined it at least fifty feet high. I saw it flaming in imagination, and when half of it was burnt, the mourners would have to take to the boats, so intense would be the heat. What a splendid spectacle! Never did any man imagine a more splendid funeral! It would be a pity if the law obliged me to forgo it. But there was no use hoping that the law would not; there was a law against the burning of human remains, and I might have to fall back on the Public Crematorium: it only remained for me to decide what I would wish to be done with the ashes. In a moment of happy inspiration I conceived the idea of a Greek vase as the only suitable repository for my ashes, and I began to remember all the Greek vases I had seen: all are beautiful, even the Roman Greek; these are sometimes clumsy and heavy, but the sculpture is finely designed and executed. Any Greek vase I decided would satisfy me, provided, of course, that the relief represented Bacchanals dancing, and nearly every Greek vase is decorated in this way. The purchase of the vase would be an additional expense; no doubt I was running my brother in for a good deal of money; it is becoming more and more difficult to buy original Greek sculpture! and in a moment of posthumous parsimony my thoughts turned to a copy of a Greek vase in granite, granite being more durable than marble, and I wanted the vase to last for a long time. It was delightful to take a sheet of paper and a pencil and to draw all that I remembered of the different vases I had seen, different riots of lusty men carrying horns of wine, intermingled with graceful girls dancing gracefully, youths playing on pipes, and amidst them fauns, the lovely animality of the woods, of the landscape ages, when men first began to milk their goats, and when one man out of the tribe, more pensive, more meditative than the others, went down to the river’s bank and cut a reed and found music within it. The vase I remembered best has upright handles springing from the necks of swans. It stands about two feet high, perhaps a little more, and its cavity should be capable of containing all that remains of me after my burning. None would have thought, from the happy smile upon my lips, that I was thinking of a Grecian urn and a little pile of white ashes. “O death, where is thy sting?” I murmured, and the pencil
dropped from my hand, for my memory was more beautiful than anything I could realise upon paper. I could only remember one side of a youth, that side of him next to an impulsive maiden; her delight gives her wings; his left arm is about her shoulder. She is more impulsive than he, and I wondered at his wistfulness — whether he was thinking of another love or a volume of poems that he loved better. Little by little many of the figures in the dance were remembered, for the sculpture was so well done that the years had only clouded my memory. The clouds dispersed, and I saw this time one whole figure, that of a dancing-girl; her right arm is extended, her left arm is bent, she holds a scarf as she dances, and the muscles of the arms are placed so well, and the breasts too, that one thinks that the girl must have been before the sculptor as he worked. Ingres and Antiquity alone knew how to simplify. There is little, but that little is so correct that detail is unnecessary, and I exulted in remembrance of the dainty design of the belly, half hidden, half revealed by little liquid folds. “How exquisite,” I said, “is that thigh! how well it advances! And we poor moderns have lived upon that beauty now well-nigh two thousand years? But how vainly we have attempted to imitate that drapery flowing about the ankles, like foam breaking on the crest of a wave.” A slender youth stands next; his shoulders are raised, for the pipes are to his lips, his feet are drawn close together, and by him a satyr dances wildly, clashing cymbals as he dances. He is followed, I think — it is difficult to say whether this be a recollection of another vase or whether the figure is included in the same group — by a faun tempting the teeth and claws of a panther with a bunch of grapes. And it was this winsome faun that decided me to select this vase as the repository of my ashes. And I determined to stipulate in my will that this vase be chosen. But my will must not be too complicated, otherwise it might be contested. All that is not common can easily be argued to be madness by a loquacious lawyer before a stupid jury. Who except a madman, asks the lawyer, would trouble to this extent as to what shall be done with his remains? Everybody in the court agrees with him, for every one in court is anxious to prove to his neighbour that he is a good Christian. Everything is convention, and lead coffins and oak coffins cannot be held as proof of insanity, because men believe still in the resurrection of the body. Were the Pharaohs insane? Was the building of the Great Pyramid an act of madness? The common assurance is that it matters nothing at all what becomes of our remains, yet the world has always been engaged in setting up tombs. It is only those pretty satyrs who do not think of tombs. Satyrs wander away into some hidden place when they feel death upon them. But poor humanity desires to be remembered. The desire to be remembered for at least some little while after death is as deep an instinct as any that might be readily named, and our lives are applied to securing some little immortality for ourselves. What more natural than that every one should desire his death and burial to be, as it were, typical of the ideas which he agreed to accept during life: what other purpose is served by the consecration of plots of ground and the erection of crosses? In this at least I am not different from other people; if I am anxious about my burning, it is because I would to the last manifest and express my ideas, and neither in my prose nor verse have I ever traced out my thoughts as completely or as perfectly as I have done in this order for my tomb. One trouble, however, still remained upon my mind. Where should the vase be placed? Not in Westminster Abbey. Fie upon all places of Christian burial! A museum inspires lofty thoughts in a few; Gouncourt speaks of the icy admiration of crowds. The vase might stand in the stone wall, and in the very corner where I learned to spin my top? But sooner or later a housemaid would break it. The house itself will become the property of another family, and the stranger will look upon the vase with idle curiosity, or perhaps think it depressing to have me in the hall. An order for my removal to a garret might be made out.
