29 DECEMBER 1849, Page 12

THE COMMON SENSE OF FUNERALS.

THE undertaker's business will not be permitted to rest in peace, unreformed. One who is "Not a Mute" writes to the Times making two suggestions for the curtailment of idle expense- " The rank and station of the dead are not a measure of the worldly means of those he leaves behind. But in cases where a large circle of friends desire to show an outward mark of respect to genius, to public services, or to worth, why is a heavy burden to be cast upon the living? In such cases carriages are offered with their attendants. Why are the coachmen and footmen to be decorated in silk scarfs, at an expense, I am told, of two guineas for each carriage? Surely car- riages might follow without this mockery of wo, which is worn for the moment, then sold for its value to the undertaker again, perhaps for another occasion of equally idle pageantry; or, why should not such friends send their carriages, if such display is called for at all, with all these outward marks of mourning, at the expense of those who really desire to show a mark of respect thus pubhcly? Perhaps fewer carriages would attend. On the other hand, many would be anxious to do so, if only custom sanctioned it, with or without idle ostentation. Then the carriage would be a real mark of respect. "Again, I am confident many friends would attend funerals if they were al- lowed to do so without inconvenience to the living. Why, then, should not this numerous class attend in simple mourning at the grave—meet at the cemetery— join in the last rites—pay a tribute to private or public worth or eminence, with- out enhancing the undertaker's bill? I feel very sure, were the custom once sanctioned, the funeral would be simple and inexpensive;„and a more genuine ex- pression of sorrow would take the place of the empty and heartless ostentation now too common."

But if these suggestions were carried out, their spirit would no doubt be carried much further. None would object to the expense were the outlay a real sacrifice to the dead, either for his welfare or the honour of his memory : but by our usage of delegating the conduct of the funeral entirely to a tradesman, the sacrifice is not to the dead, but only to the undertaker. He undertakes to measure the respect and regret, and he does it virtually in the length of your bill ; the " properties " of the dismal drama being only pretexts to justify the bill. The spirit of reform should search into the matter, with the view of eliminating those parts of the ceremony'which are merely expensive, and of restoring the rest to a more natural relation with the laws of grief. In that sense, we find that the need of reform exists far less among the outward parts of the pageant, the visiters and their carriages, than in the more essential parts, the greater as you ap- proach the sacred person of Death. Were grief a mere pretence, there might be some show of rea- son in bringing a dismal aspect over the actor in the pageant, by the detestable arrangements of black stuffs about the mourning coach—in itself an ugly and unwieldy vehicle—and the faces of the mourners. A sad-coloured costume, and even black, might be used to typify the inward sombreness; but not that midnight

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sootiness which is so repulsive. Again, why should a tribe of mercenaries walk by the side of the procession? They mean nothing. If the departed was so beloved by friends and adhe- rents, let them walk with him on his last journey; but why those idle traders in funereal wo ? Cui bono ?

Especially, what is the use of that board of black feathers car- ried before the hearse? Does it solace the soul of the departed, or the grief of the living, or in any way reconcile death to life 'I No; it simply reconciles the undertaker's bill to his conscience, or rather to the usages of his trade. For the undertaker's object is the perfectly fair one of getting an income out of his trade, and he is quite willing to do suit and service for that estate according to what is expected of him.

One thing that multiplies the attendants is the weight of the coffin, and that is caused by the endeavour to render it impervi- ous. Now that endeavour was suggested by the old barbarous notion that the body could literally be retained in its actual form for future resurrection ; a conservative process carried to the most efficient shape of which it is capable in the process of embalming. But we now know that decay cannot be arrested : partial success only makes the ignorant attempt the more hideous ; and Queen Adelaide has set an example, even in the royal class, of waiving the process. It was only another graceful tribute of that lady to the laws of simplicity and nature ; for she it is who bears the repute of abolishing the custom, long disused on the Con- tinent, of disguising the change of time by wearing false hair. You cannot resist the laws of nature without the penalty of de- feat: false hair converts the time-worn countenance, not into a young one, but into a harsher caricature of age. Embalming converts the divine form of humanity into a mummy. The leaden shell and oaken coffin are but rude substitutes for embalming— contrivances for resisting or delaying the process which restores flesh to earth; but it is in the prolonged transition that the pro- cess is shown in its most shocking form. Living flesh and good fertile mould—the mould of a garden or a corn-field, of the grassy meadow or the forest—are both pleasing to our sense; and the -process which converts the one into the other is consecrated by all that we know of the beneficent laws under which it is operated. But when it is delayed !- What we desire in a funeral is that it shall typify our sorrow, and restore the fleshly body of our friend, which he has ceased to need, to the earth from which it was borrowed, in the manner most seemly, the most harmonious with our memory of his living condition and with the welfare of the living. For to make him a loathsome pest-bed for the living, is to desecrate his memory. In that view, our plan should be, to keep aloof as much as pos- sible the train of mercenary strangers ; to effect the restoration by the most direct and comely means. The coffin should not be im- pervious, but pervious; and a ground might be prepared to faci- litate the process, and thus consecrated to receive the ashes of the dead by a practical furtherance of those laws which close his mortal career, as they originated and sustained it. In the same sense, the mere transit from the abode of life to the cemetery should not be made a gazing-stock for the public : it is the last depositing that the eye of love will gladly watch, precisely in the same spirit that carries you to the railway station and detains you to gaze towards the parting train long after you have no trace of yourfriend but the cloud of steam or the glare of the red lamps.

But reduce the ceremony of the restoration to its essentials, and it is a very simple process; absolutely needing little beyond the services of the friends, the sexton, and the priest who sustains the trial of death with the knowledge of life, and calls change to its immortal duty of ministering to the eternal.