MOURNING

My infant mind was "suckled in a creed outworn," in the form of a book called, by a strange misnomer, a "Book of Useful Knowledge." It was there stated, if my memory serves me, that "the Chinese mourn in yellow, but Kings and Cardinals mourn in purple." In what do modern English people mourn? That is the subject of to-day's enquiry.

Lord Acton, in one of his most impressive passages, speaks of England as living under "institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead." But the very notion of "prolonging the reign of the dead" is an anachronism in an age which forgets its friends the moment it has buried them. "Out of sight, out of mind" is an adage which nowadays verifies itself with startling rapidity. Mourning is as much out of date as Suttee; and, as to the Widow's Cap, the admirable Signora Vesey Neroni in "Barchester Towers" was only a little in advance of her age when she exclaimed, "The death of twenty husbands should not make me undergo such a penance. It is as much a relic of paganism as the sacrifice of a Hindoo woman at the burning of her husband's body. If not so bloody, it is quite as barbarous and quite as useless."

In days gone by, a death in a family extinguished all festivity. Engagements were cancelled, social plans were laid aside, and the mourners went into retreat for a twelvemonth. Men wore black trousers; women swathed themselves in black crape. "Mourning Jewellery"—hideous combinations of jet and bogwood—twinkled and jingled round the necks of the bereaved, and widows wrote on letter-paper which was virtually black, with a small white space in the middle of the sheet. Harry Foker, we know, honoured his father's memory by having his brougham painted black; and I have known a lady who, when she lost her husband, had her boudoir lined with black velvet, after the fashion of Lord Glenallan in "The Antiquary."

But nowadays people shrink (with amiable considerateness) from thus inflicting their griefs on their friends; and if (as we must in charity assume) they feel emotion, they studiously conceal it in their own bosoms. The ball follows the funeral with a celerity and a frank joyousness which suggest a Wake; and the keen pursuers of pleasure protest, with quite a religious air, that for their own part they would think it absolutely wicked to sorrow as those without hope. Weedless widows, becomingly "gowned," as Ladies' Papers say, in pale grey or black and white, sacrifice to propriety by forswearing the Opera or the Racecourse for twelve months or so, but find a little fresh air on the River or at Hurlingham absolutely necessary for health; and, if they dine out quietly or even give a little dance at home, are careful to protest that they have lost all pleasure in life, but must struggle to keep up for the sake of the dear children. Surely, as Master Shallow says, "good phrases are, and ever were, very commendable." The old-fashioned manifestations of mourning were no doubt overdone, but the modern disregard of the dead seems to me both heartless and indecent.

The supreme exemplar of Mourning was, of course, Queen Victoria. During her reign, and in her personal practice, the custom of Mourning reached its highest point of persistence and solemnity. In 1844 Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the present King and his sister the Princess Royal, wrote from Court, "We are such a 'boundless contiguity of shade' just now." The immediate cause of that shade was the death of Prince Albert's father; and although in Queen Victoria's life there was a fair allowance of sunshine, still, as Ecclesiastes said, "the clouds return after the rain"; and, in a family where cousinship is recognized to the third and fourth generation, the "shade" of mourning must constantly recur. The late Duke of Beaufort, head of the most numerous family in the Peerage, always wore a black band round his white hat, because, as he said, one of his cousins was always dead and he would not be wanting in respect for the deceased; and, similarly, a Maid of Honour once said to me, "I never see the Queen's jewels, because she is almost always in mourning for some German prince or princess, and then she only wears black ornaments." Of course, in a case where there was this natural predisposition to mournful observance, the supreme loss of a husband meant a final renunciation of the world and its gaieties. I suppose it is no exaggeration to say that from her bereavement in 1861 to her death in 1901 Queen Victoria lived in unbroken communion with the unseen but unforgotten. The necessary business of the State was not, even for a week, laid aside; but pomps and ceremonies and public appearances are profoundly distasteful to shattered nerves and broken hearts. Yielding to the urgent advice of her Ministers, Queen Victoria emerged from four years' seclusion to open the new Parliament in 1866; and her reward was reaped in the following December, when a peculiarly rancorous politician rebuked her at a great meeting of reformers in St. James's Hall for a lack of popular sympathies. It was then that, on the spur of the moment, John Bright, who himself had known so well what bereavement meant, uttered his chivalrous defence of the absent and lonely Sovereign:—

"I am not accustomed to stand up in defence of those who are possessors of crowns. But I could not sit and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think there has been, by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this—that a woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you."

Admirable and reverend as was this abiding sorrow, contemporary observers felt that its outward manifestations were not always harmonious. The Mausoleum at Frogmore is not a "poem in stone," and the Monument of Gilt opposite the Albert Hall has supplied the frivolous with an appropriate pun. Landseer, who, when once he forsook his stags and deerhounds, was surely the most debased painter of a hideous age, attained his worst in a picture of the Slopes at Windsor circa 1862. Under an inky sky, in the forefront of a sunless landscape, stands a black pony, and on its back is a lady dressed in the deepest weeds, with a black riding-skirt and a black bonnet. A retainer in subfusc kilt holds the pony's head, a dingy terrier looks on with melancholy eyes, and, in the distant background, two darkly-clad princesses shiver on a garden-seat. The only spot of colour in the scene is a red despatch-box, and the whole forms the highest tribute of English art to a national disaster and a Queenly sorrow.

Black, and intensely black, were all the trappings of courtly woe—black crape, black gloves, black feathers, black jewellery. The State-robes were worn no longer; the State-coach stood unused in the coach-house. The footmen wore black bands round their arms. It was only by slow degrees, and on occasions of high and rare solemnity, that white lace and modest plumes and diamonds and decorations were permitted to enliven the firmament of courtly woe. But we of the twentieth century live in an age of Æsthetic revival, and, though perhaps we do not mourn so heartily, we certainly mourn more prettily. One lady at least there is who knows how to combine the sincerity of sorrow with its becoming manifestation; and Queen Alexandra in mourning garb is as delightful a vision as was Queen Alexandra in her clothing of wrought gold, when she knelt before the altar of Westminster Abbey and bowed her head to receive her diamond crown.

Queen Victoria's devotion to the memory of those whom she had lost had one definite consequence which probably she little contemplated. The annual service, conducted in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore on the anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, accustomed English people to the idea, which since the Reformation had become strangely unfamiliar, of devotional commemoration of the Departed. To the Queen's religious instincts, deeply tinged as they had been by Prince Albert's Lutheranism, such commemorations were entirely natural; for German Protestantism has always cherished a much livelier sense of the relation between the living and the departed than was realized by English Puritanism. The example set in high quarters quickly spread. Memorial Services became an established form of English mourning. Beginning with simple prayers and hymns, they gradually developed into Memorial Eucharists. The splendid, wailing music of the Dies IrÆ was felt to be the Christian echo of the Domine, Refugium; and the common instinct of mourning humanity found its appropriate expression when, over the coffin of Prince Henry of Battenberg, the choir of St. George's Chapel sang the Russian hymn of supplication, "Give rest, O Christ, to Thy servant with Thy Saints."