THE CULT OF THE CADAVEROUS.
"LAST week the respectable classes in France were
scandalised by the accounts of a concert held in the Catacombs of Paris,—those weird underground quarries in which the bones and skulls of some three or four million Parisians were deposited when, in the eighteenth century, the old burial-grounds were built over or otherwise made use of. There, amid candles stuck into skulls and in a dim and irreligious light, a mixed party of sensation-seekers listened to appropriate music, and imagined that they were doing something very desperate and daring. One's first impulse on reading of these trashy horrors is one of mere contempt and disgust. Naughty boys always show a fondness for skeletons, and students—the affair was organised by a body of students— are proverbially wanting in good taste. Why, then, should any one trouble about the charnel-house vagaries of a set of youths eager to do something which will shock decent people, and perhaps also make their own flesh creep ? Besides, the love of the cadaverous is nothing in the least new. Time out of mind, when a young man has wanted to make himself seem eccentric and to shock his neighbours, he has resorted to tomfoolery with skulls and bones. Did not Byron, to entertain and horrify his friends at Newstead, turn what he professed to be the Abbot's skull into a drinking-bowl, and, equipped in a monastic habit, drink champagne therefrom with all the gusto of a bold, bad man? Again, is it not very common for secret societies to mingle the emblems of the grave in their rites and ceremonies, to talk in initiation oaths, wildly if not wisely or well, about coffins and worms, and to borrow the furniture of the undertaker for their chairs, chests, and goblets ? In literature, too, the simple artifice of exploiting the paraphernalia of mortification has always been popular among the young. Webster's line, " What is this talk fit for a charnel-house ? " is in truth perpetually applicable to the verse of the young lady poets of both sexes. In art, too, corpses and blood, the dead and the dying, have always appealed to those intent, like the fat boy, on making oar flesh creep.
No doubt, under ordinary circumstances, these objections would apply to taking too seriously ugly pranks like those of the concert in the Catacombs. Unfortunately, however, this last outrage on good taste cannot be regarded as a mere eccentric or spasmodic incident. It is, we fear, instead an example of a well-marked tendency among a considerable class in Paris. Nobody who has watched, even superficially, French art, French literature, and that section of Parisian life which belongs to the artistic and literary classes—the public life of Paris it may be called for want of a better term—can doubt that the love of the cadaverous has been steadily growing during the last few years. The most enlightened and newest cliques may have dropped it, but the majority of the section to which we allude are now enlisted under the skull and cross-bones. Macabre pictures, Macabre poems, and Macabre music are all the fashion. We hear of cafes where the tables are shaped like coffins, where the waiters are dressed like mutes, and where the tables are set out with other fantastic symbols of the tomb. A putrid corpse or a heap of bones is the best foreground for a picture, and it would no doubt be thought far more chic for a lady to love a skeleton than a poet or a dragoon. Now a wave of sentiment affect- ing more or less a whole class must mean something,—cannot be regarded as a mere eccentric vagary. We fear that in Paris—Paris, of course, is not France—it means that the section of life affected has become intellectually depraved, has saffered, for a time at any rate, a marked degeneration. In the individual the love of the cadaverous, unless it is a mere piece of boyish affectation, is a clear sign of that morbidness of intellect which approaches actual insanity. The chief delight of one of the Kings of Spain during the eighteenth century—if we remember rightly, he was the predecessor of the King Napoleon overthrew—was to pass long hours in the vaults of the Escurial communing with his departed ancestors. There, " mid the cold Hic-Jacets of the dead," he found his only solace from the cares of life. It was a joy to the poor crazy creature to ar.reber the coffins of Kings, Emperors, and Princes, and even to open the lids and look upon their yellowing faces. The doctors who make insanity their special study could probably produce plenty of such cases, and would tell us of semi-lunatics whose mania it is to surround themselves with coffins and skulls. A curious example of the tyranny of the idea of death over those who are suffering from physical and mental decay is given by Mr. Stevenson in his study of the South Seas. He found in the Marquesas Islands a death-smitten race. The islanders were gradually perishing, and they knew it. They were a doomed, and so a degenerating, people, and their minds were for ever turned upon the thought of death. The most welcome present that could be made to a chief was a coffin, and when that had been secured the happy possessor used it as a bed,—thereby forestalling, as it were, the long-expected and little-dreaded end. The Marquesas islanders, however, showed no signs of bad taste in their familiarity with the grave. If they were degenerate, their degenerateness took a pathetic, and even a noble, form.
In saying that the Parisian fashion for cadaveroneness is a mark of degeneracy and of intellectual depravity, we admit that we explain very little. One would like if possible to come closer to the matter, and to understand how and why this craze for toying with corpses, grinning at skulls, and playing with bones has taken possession of a whole set of people. Even granted that they are decadents, why should they take so much thought of what is neither beautiful nor capable of appealing to the senses that give pleasure? It cannot be that the Parisians love corpses because they are materialists, and disbelieve scientifically in the immortality of the soul. To the con- vinced sceptic a man's bones should have no special meaning, and a simple physical fact like death ought to interest him no more than any other chemical process. But are the Parisians who worship the new corpse goddess really such convinced atheists, epicures, and materialists as they like to represent themselves ? If they are not we can well under- stand why death should loom so large in their disordered imaginations. If a man has a real and sincere belief in a future life, death may have physical and mental terrors for him, but the grave itself, unless he is to some extent insane, cannot exert any great or overwhelming effect on his mind. His attitude towards a dead body must more or less be that of the Greek philosopher when looking on a corpse,—" I see the shell of the flown bird." Again, as we have said, the true scientific materialist, if such a person exists, cannot take much account of death. Presume, however, a man perplexed and confused with hazy, half-realised unbeliefs,—a man wandering in a labyrinth of ill-considered sophistries at once violent and vague. To such a man the thought of death, and of what De Quincey calls "the pollutions of the grave," would have a very special force. In his wayward imaginings and half -nnbeliefs death and the grave would be the one fixed thing,—the one reality. He would be sure of nothing except that he must die, must lie down in a coffin, must rot and perish, must become a skull and a heap of bleaching bones. Death would be the one absolute, the one certain, thing appreciated by his intelligence. Here, at least, would be something fixed,—the pivot-point in the changing kaleidoscope of thoughts and fancies, lusts and sensations. But we know that among savages, man with nothing else to venerate, venerates the nearest big, clear, andoubtable thing,—a, great tree, a tall rock, if he is in a low scale of savagery, the sun or the open heaven if he possesses an imagination. Scepticism has made these things impossible for the emancipated Parisian, but it has left him death. He may not be able to venerate it, for in him the power of veneration is probably dead, but at any rate it is his great fact, his one great certainty. Thus, though incapable of worshipping death, he cannot get it out of his head. Hence his love of the ' cadaverous, and his fancy for skulls and coffins, is a kind of grovelling and inverted homage paid to death,—the poor shrunken survival that still shows him to belong to a race which is not and cannot be purely materialist. In other words, the love of the cadaverous in the emancipated Parisian comes from that mastery of the thought of death which is to be found in all minds disordered by an uneasy scepticism. As long, then, as the emancipated Parisians remain the fantastic and unreasonable sceptics that they are, so long may
they be expected to indulge in such tomfooleries as the concert in the Catacombs.
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