The Uncommercial Traveller

  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.

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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 windinstrument,

  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.

  CHAPTER XXIX - TITBULL'S ALMS-HOUSES

  By the side of most railways out of London, one may see Alms-Houses

  and Retreats (generally with a Wing or a Centre wanting, and

  ambitious of being much bigger than they are), some of which are

  newly-founded Institutions, and some old establishments

  transplanted. There is a tendency in these pieces of architecture

  to shoot upward unexpectedly, like Jack's bean-stalk, and to be

  ornate in spires of Chapels and lanterns of Halls, which might lead

  to the embellishment of the air with many castles of questionable

  beauty but for the restraining consideration of expense. However,

  the manners, being always of a sanguine temperament, comfort

  themselves with plans and elevations of Loomings in the future, and

  are influenced in the present by philanthropy towards the railway

  passengers. For, the question how prosperous and promising the

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  buildings can be made to look in their eyes, usually supersedes the

  lesser question how they can be turned to the best account for the

  inmates.

  Why none of the people who reside in these places ever look out of

  window, or take an airing in the piece of ground which is going to