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Certain Personal Matters - The Mode in Monuments · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter thirty eight of Certain Personal Matters. This is a
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  Speaker 1: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Jimney Knobber. Certain Personal Matters by H. G. Wells,
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  Speaker 1: Chapter thirty eight The mode in monuments stray thoughts in
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  Speaker 1: Highgate Cemetery on a sharp sunlight morning, when the white
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  Speaker 1: clouds are drifting swiftly across the luminous blue sky. There
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  Speaker 1: is no finer walk about London than the Highgate Ridge.
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  Speaker 1: One may stay a while on the archway, looking down
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  Speaker 1: upon the innumerable roofs of London, stretching southward into the
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  Speaker 1: haze and shining here and there with the reflection of
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  Speaker 1: the rising sun, and then wander on along the picturesque
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  Speaker 1: road by the College of Saint Aloysius to the New
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  Speaker 1: Catholic Church, and so through the Waterloo Park to the Cemetery.
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  Speaker 1: The Waterlow Park is a pleasant place, full of children
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  Speaker 1: and aged persons and perambulators during the middle hours of
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  Speaker 1: the day and in the summer evening time, a haunt
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  Speaker 1: of young lovers. But your early wanderer finds it solitary
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  Speaker 1: save for the vertomnas, who, with Elsie c on the
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  Speaker 1: front of him, is putting in crocuses. So we wander
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  Speaker 1: down to the little red lodge. Whence a sinuous road
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  Speaker 1: runs to Hampstead, and presently into the close groves of
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  Speaker 1: monuments that whiten the opposite slope. How tightly these white
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  Speaker 1: sepulchers are packed here, How different this congestion of sorrow
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  Speaker 1: from the mossy latitude of God's acre in the country.
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  Speaker 1: The dead are crammed together as closely as the living
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  Speaker 1: seemed in that bird's eye view from the archway. There
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  Speaker 1: is no ample shadow of trees, no tangled corners where
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  Speaker 1: Mother Earth may weave flower garlands over her returning children.
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  Speaker 1: The monuments positively jostle and elbow each other for frontage
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  Speaker 1: upon the footways, and they are so rawly clean and assertive.
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  Speaker 1: Most of them are conspicuously new, whitened with freshly blackened
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  Speaker 1: or newly gilt inscriptions, bare of lichen, moss or mystery,
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  Speaker 1: and altogether so restless that it seems to the meditative
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  Speaker 1: man that the struggle for existence from mere standing room
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  Speaker 1: and a show in the world still rages among the dead.
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  Speaker 1: The unstable slope of the hill, with its bristling array
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  Speaker 1: of obelisks, crosses and urns craning one above another, is
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  Speaker 1: as directly opposed to the restfulness of the village churchyard,
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  Speaker 1: with its serene, outspreading ewes, as midday Fleet Street to
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  Speaker 1: a Sabbath evening amidst the Sussex Hills. This cemetery is
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  Speaker 1: indeed a veritable tumult of tombs. Another thing that presently
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  Speaker 1: comes painfully home to one is the lack of individuality
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  Speaker 1: among all the dead, not a necessary lack of individuality,
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  Speaker 1: so much as a deliberate avoidance of it. As one
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  Speaker 1: wanders along the steep, narrow pathways, one is more and
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  Speaker 1: more profoundly impressed by the wholesale flavor of the morning,
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  Speaker 1: the stereotyping of the monuments. The place is too modern
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  Speaker 1: for Memento mori and the hour glass and the skull.
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  Speaker 1: Instead slap and Dash, that excellent firm of monumental masons
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  Speaker 1: everywhere crave to be remembered. Truly, the firm of Slap
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  Speaker 1: and Dash have much to answer for among these graves,
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  Speaker 1: and they do not seem to be ashamed of it.
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  Speaker 1: From one elevated point, in the cemetery, one can count
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  Speaker 1: more than a hundred urns, getting at last weary and
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  Speaker 1: confused with the receding multitude. The urn is not dissimilar
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  Speaker 1: to the domestic mantle ornament, and always a stony piece
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  Speaker 1: of textile fabric is feigned to be thrown over its shoulder.
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  Speaker 1: At times it is wreathed in stony flowers. The only
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  Speaker 1: variety is in the form. Sometimes your urn is broad
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  Speaker 1: and squat, a silenus among urns, sometimes fragile and high
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  Speaker 1: shouldered like a slender old maid, here and outsize in
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  Speaker 1: urns stalwart and strong, and there a dwarf peeping quaintly
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  Speaker 1: from its wrapping. The obelisks, too, run through a long
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  Speaker 1: scale of size and refinement. But the curious man finds
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  Speaker 1: no hidden connection between the carriage of the monument and
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  Speaker 1: the character of the dead. Messrs Slap and Dash apparently
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  Speaker 1: take the urn or obelisk that comes readiest to hand.
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  Speaker 1: One wonders dimly why mourners have this overwhelming proclivity from
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  Speaker 1: Messer's slap and dash, and there obelisk can earn. The
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  Speaker 1: reason why the firm produces these articles may be guessed at.
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  Speaker 1: They are probably easy to make, and require scarcely any skill.
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  Speaker 1: The contemplative man has a dim vision of a grimy
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  Speaker 1: shed in a back street where a human being passes
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  Speaker 1: dismally through life, the while he chips out an unending
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  Speaker 1: succession of these cheap urns and obelisks for his employer's retailing.
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  Speaker 1: But the question why numberless people will profane the memory
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  Speaker 1: of their departed by these public advertisements of slap and
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  Speaker 1: dash and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem.
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  Speaker 1: For surely nothing could be more unmeaning or more ungainly
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  Speaker 1: than the monumental urn, unless it be the monumental obelisk.
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  Speaker 1: The plain cross, by contrast, has the tenderest meaning, and
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  Speaker 1: is a simple and fitting monument that no repetition can stale.
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  Speaker 1: The artistic cowardice of the English is perhaps the clue
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  Speaker 1: to the mystery. Your Englishman is always afraid to commit
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  Speaker 1: himself to criticism. Without the refuge of atuquoque, he is
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  Speaker 1: covered dead, just as he has covered living with the
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  Speaker 1: correct thing. A respectable stock in trade is proffered him
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  Speaker 1: by the insinuating shopman, to whom it is our custom
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  Speaker 1: to go. He is told this is selling well, or
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  Speaker 1: that is much admired, Heaven defend that he should admire
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  Speaker 1: on his own account. He orders the stock urn or
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  Speaker 1: the stock slab, because it is large and sufficiently expensive
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  Speaker 1: for his means and sorrow, and because he knows of
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  Speaker 1: nothing better. So we mourn as the stone makes him decrees,
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  Speaker 1: or after the example and pattern of the smith's next door.
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  Speaker 1: But some day it will dawn upon us that a
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  Speaker 1: little thought and a search after beauty are far more
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  Speaker 1: becoming than an order and a check to the nearest
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  Speaker 1: advertising tradesman. Or it may be that we shall conclude
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  Speaker 1: that the anonymous piece of a grassy mold is better
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  Speaker 1: than his commercial brutalities, and so there will be an
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  Speaker 1: end of him. One may go from end to end
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  Speaker 1: of this semi mimitary and finds scarcely anything beautiful, appropriate,
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  Speaker 1: or tender. A lion ill done and yet to some
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  Speaker 1: degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near
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  Speaker 1: this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of
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  Speaker 1: the life of Christ. In one place, a grotesque horse
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  Speaker 1: with a head disproportionately vast is to be seen. Perhaps
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  Speaker 1: among all these monuments, the one to Missus Blake is
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  Speaker 1: the most pleasing It is a simply and quaintly executed,
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  Speaker 1: kneeling figure, with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of
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  Speaker 1: pose that is strangely RESTful against the serried vulgarity around it.
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  Speaker 1: But the tradesman Ghoul will not leave us. He follows
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  Speaker 1: us up and down, in decently clamoring his name and address,
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  Speaker 1: and at last turns our meditation to despair. Certain stock
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  Speaker 1: devices become as painful as popular autotypes. There is the
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  Speaker 1: lily broken on its stalk. We meet it here on
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  Speaker 1: a cross, and there on an obelisk, presently on the
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  Speaker 1: pedestal of an urn. There is the hand pointing upward,
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  Speaker 1: here balanced on the top of an obelisk, and there
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  Speaker 1: upon a cross. The white robed angel, free from the
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  Speaker 1: remotest shadow of expression, meets us again and again. All
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  Speaker 1: this is mine, says the tradesman Ghoul. Behold the names
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  Speaker 1: of me, slap and dash. Here the ugliness company there,
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  Speaker 1: and this the work of the cheap and elegant funeral Association.
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  Speaker 1: This is where we slew the art of sculpture. These
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  Speaker 1: are our trophies. That sculpture is no more. All this
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  Speaker 1: marble might have been beautiful, all this sorrow might have
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  Speaker 1: been expressive had it not been for us. See this
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  Speaker 1: is our border number A five and our pedestal number e,
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  Speaker 1: and our second quality earn along of a nice appropriate text,
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  Speaker 1: a pretty combination and a cheap one, or we can
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  Speaker 1: do it you better in border A three and pedestal
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  Speaker 1: C and a larger urn or a hangle. The meditative
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  Speaker 1: man is seized with a dismal horror and retreats to
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  Speaker 1: the gates. Even there a wooden advertisement grins broadly at
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  Speaker 1: him in his discomfiture, and shouts a name athwart his route,
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  Speaker 1: and so down the winding road to the valley, and
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  Speaker 1: then up Parliament Hill towards Hampstead and its breeze whipped ponds.
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  Speaker 1: And the mind of him is full of a dim
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  Speaker 1: vision of days that have been when sculptor and stonemason
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  Speaker 1: were won, when the artist put his work in the
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  Speaker 1: porch for all the world to see, when people had
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  Speaker 1: leisure to think how things should be done, and heart
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  Speaker 1: to do them well, when there was beauty in the
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  Speaker 1: business of life and dignity in death. And he wonders,
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  Speaker 1: rather hopelessly if people will ever rise up against these
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  Speaker 1: damnable tradesmen who ruin our arts make our lives costly
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  Speaker 1: and dismal, and advertise, advertise even on our graves. End
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  Speaker 1: of Chapter thirty eight,