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Title: Epitaphs
Author: Augustine Birrell [
More Titles by Birrell]
Epitaphs, if in rhyme, are the real literature of the masses. They need no commendation and are beyond all criticism. A Cambridge don, a London bus-driver, will own their charm in equal measure. Strange indeed is the fascination of rhyme. A commonplace hitched into verse instantly takes rank with Holy Scripture. This passion for poetry, as it is sometimes called, is manifested on every side; even tradesmen share it, and as the advertisements in our newspapers show, are willing to pay small sums to poets who commend their wares in verse. The widow bereft of her life's companion, the mother bending over an empty cradle, find solace in thinking what doleful little scrag of verse shall be graven on the tombstone of the dead. From the earliest times men have sought to squeeze their loves and joys, their sorrows and hatreds, into distichs and quatrains, and to inscribe them somewhere, on walls or windows, on sepulchral urns and gravestones, as memorials of their pleasure or their pain.
'Hark! how chimes the passing bell--
There's no music to a knell;
All the other sounds we hear
Flatter and but cheat our ear.'
So wrote Shirley the dramatist, and so does he truthfully explain the popularity of the epitaph as distinguished from the epigram. Who ever wearies of Martial's 'Erotion'?--
'Hic festinata requiescit Erotion umbra,
Crimine quam fati sexta peremit hiems.
Quisquis eris nostri post me regnator agelli
Manibus exiguis annua justa dato.
Sic lare perpetuo, sic turba sospite, solus
Flebilis in terra sit lapis iste tua'--
so prettily Englished by Leigh Hunt:
'Underneath this greedy stone
Lies little sweet Erotion,
Whom the Fates with hearts as cold
Nipped away at six years old.
Those, whoever thou may'st be,
That hast this small field after me,
Let the yearly rites be paid
To her little slender shade;
So shall no disease or jar
Hurt thy house or chill thy Lar,
But this tomb be here alone
The only melancholy stone.'
Our English epitaphs are to be found scattered up and down our country churchyards--'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons do not look with favour upon them, besides which--to use a clumsy phrase--besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against burials, and without texts there can be no sermons:
'I'll stay and read my sermon here,
And skulls and bones shall be my text.
* * * *
Here learn that glory and disgrace,
Wisdom and Folly, pass away,
That mirth hath its appointed space,
That sorrow is but for a day;
That all we love and all we hate,
That all we hope and all we fear,
Each mood of mind, each turn of fate,
Must end in dust and silence here.'
The best epitaphs are the grim ones. Designed, as epitaphs are, to arrest and hold in their momentary grasp the wandering attention and languid interest of the passer-by, they must hit him hard and at once, and this they can only do by striking some very responsive chord, and no chords are so immediately responsive as those which relate to death and, it may be, judgment to come.
Mr. Aubrey Stewart, in his interesting Selection of English Epigrams and Epitaphs, published by Chapman and Hall, quotes an epitaph from a Norfolk churchyard which I have seen in other parts of the country. The last time I saw it was in the Forest of Dean. It is admirably suited for the gravestone of any child of very tender years, say four:
'When the Archangel's trump shall blow
And souls to bodies join,
Many will wish their lives below
Had been as short as mine.'
It is uncouth, but it is warranted to grip.
Frequently, too, have I noticed how constantly the attention is arrested by Pope's well-known lines from his magnificent 'Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' which are often to be found on tombstones:
'So peaceful rests without a stone and name
What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame.
How loved, how honoured once avails thee not,
To whom related or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be.'
I wish our modern poetasters who deny Pope's claim to be a poet no worse fate than to lie under stones which have engraved upon them the lines just quoted, for they will then secure in death what in life was denied them--the ear of the public.
Next to the grim epitaph, I should be disposed to rank those which remind the passer-by of his transitory estate. In different parts of the country--in Cumberland and Cornwall, in Croyland Abbey, in Llangollen Churchyard, in Melton Mowbray--are to be found lines more or less resembling the following:
'Man's life is like unto a winter's day,
Some break their fast and so depart away,
Others stay dinner then depart full fed,
The longest age but sups and goes to bed.
O reader, there behold and see
As we are now, so thou must be.'
The complimentary epitaph seldom pleases. To lie like a tombstone has become a proverb. Pope's famous epitaph on Newton:
'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.'
is hyperbolical and out of character with the great man it seeks to honour. It was intended for Westminster Abbey. I rejoice at the preference given to prose Latinity.
The tender and emotional epitaphs have a tendency to become either insipid or silly. But Herrick has shown us how to rival Martial:
'UPON A CHILD THAT DIED.
Here she lies a pretty bud
Lately made of flesh and blood;
Who as soon fell fast asleep
As her little eyes did peep.
Give her strewings, but not stir
The earth that lightly covers her.'
Mr. Dodd, the editor of the admirable volume called The Epigrammatists, published in Bohn's Standard Library, calls these lines a model of simplicity and elegance. So they are, but they are very vague. But then the child was very young. Erotion, one must remember, was six years old. Ben Jonson's beautiful epitaph on S.P., a child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, beginning,
'Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know for whom the tear you shed
Death's self is sorry,'
is fine poetry, but it is not life or death as plain people know those sober realities. The flippant epitaph is always abominable. Gay's, for example:
'Life is a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, but now I know it.'
But does he know it? Ay, there's the rub! The note of Christianity is seldom struck in epitaphs. There is a deep-rooted paganism in the English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in the oddest of ways. Coleridge's epitaph for himself is a striking exception:
'Stop, Christian passer-by! stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast, Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.
O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C,
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise--to be forgiven for fame,
He ask'd and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same.'
[The end]
Augustine Birrell's essay: Epitaphs
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