Twice-told tales
remembrance than the daily novelty and revolving bustle of the world
can elsewhere afford to beings of the past. Yet, while every family is
anxious to erect a memorial to its departed members, the untainted
breath of Ocean bestows such health and length of days upon the people
of the isles as would cause a melancholy dearth of business to a
resident artist in that line. His own monument, recording his decease
by starvation, would probably be an early specimen of his skill.
Gravestones, therefore, have generally been an article of imported
merchandise.
In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown—where the dead have
lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned
to its original barrenness—in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much
variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated a century back
or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers and are adorned
with a multiplicity of death’s-heads, crossbones, scythes,
hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, with here and
there a winged cherub to direct the mourner’s spirit upward. These
productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond the colonial
skill of the day, and were probably carved in London and brought across
the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of this lonely isle. The
more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate in the ordinary style,
without any superfluous flourishes to set off the bald inscriptions.
But others—and those far the most impressive both to my taste and
feelings—were roughly hewn from the gray rocks of the island, evidently
by the unskilled hands of surviving friends and relatives. On some
there were merely the initials of a name; some were inscribed with
misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters which the moss and wintry rain
of many years had not been able to obliterate. These, these were graves
where loved ones slept. It is an old theme of satire, the falsehood and
vanity of monumental eulogies; but when affection and sorrow grave the
letters with their own painful labor, then we may be sure that they
copy from the record on their hearts.
My acquaintance the sculptor—he may share that title with Greenough,
since the dauber of signs is a painter as well as Raphael—had found a
ready market for all his blank slabs of marble and full occupation in
lettering and ornamenting them. He was an elderly man, a descendant of
the old Puritan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain simplicity and
singleness both of heart and mind which, methinks, is more rarely found
among us Yankees than in any other community of people. In spite of his
gray head and wrinkled brow, he was quite like a child in all matters
save what had some reference to his own business; he seemed, unless my
fancy misled me, to view mankind in no other relation than as people in
want of tombstones, and his literary attainments evidently comprehended
very little either of prose or poetry which had not at one time or
other been inscribed on slate or marble. His sole task and office among
the immortal pilgrims of the tomb—the duty for which Providence had
sent the old man into the world, as it were with a chisel in his
hand—was to label the dead bodies, lest their names should be forgotten
at the resurrection. Yet he had not failed, within a narrow scope, to
gather a few sprigs of earthly, and more than earthly, wisdom—the
harvest of many a grave. And, lugubrious as his calling might appear,
he was as cheerful an old soul as health and integrity and lack of care
could make him, and used to set to work upon one sorrowful inscription
or another with that sort of spirit which impels a man to sing at his
labor. On the whole, I found Mr. Wigglesworth an entertaining, and
often instructive, if not an interesting, character; and, partly for
the charm of his society, and still more because his work has an
invariable attraction for “man that is born of woman,” I was accustomed
to spend some hours a day at his workshop. The quaintness of his
remarks and their not infrequent truth—a truth condensed and pointed by
the limited sphere of his view—gave a raciness to his talk which mere
worldliness and general cultivation would at once have destroyed.
Sometimes we would discuss the respective merits of the various
qualities of marble, numerous slabs of which were resting against the
walls of the shop, or sometimes an hour or two would pass quietly
without a word on either side while I watched how neatly his chisel
struck out letter after letter of the names of the Nortons, the
Mayhews, the Luces, the Daggets, and other immemorial families of the
Vineyard. Often with an artist’s pride the good old sculptor would
speak of favorite productions of his skill which were scattered
throughout the village graveyards of New England. But my chief and most
instructive amusement was to witness his interviews with his customers,
who held interminable consultations about the form and fashion of the
desired monuments, the buried excellence to be commemorated, the
anguish to be expressed, and finally the lowest price in dollars and
cents for which a marble transcript of their feelings might be
obtained. Really, my mind received many fresh ideas which perhaps may
remain in it even longer than Mr. Wigglesworth’s hardest marble will
retain the deepest strokes of his chisel.
An elderly lady came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had
been killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean no less than forty years
before. It was singular that so strong an impression of early feeling
should have survived through the changes of her subsequent life, in the
course of which she had been a wife and a mother, and, so far as I
could judge, a comfortable and happy woman. Reflecting within myself,
it appeared to me that this lifelong sorrow—as, in all good faith, she
deemed it—was one of the most fortunate circumstances of her history.
It had given an ideality to her mind; it had kept her purer and less
earthy than she would otherwise have been by drawing a portion of her
sympathies apart from earth. Amid the throng of enjoyments and the
pressure of worldly care and all the warm materialism of this life she
had communed with a vision, and had been the better for such
intercourse. Faithful to the husband of her maturity, and loving him
with a far more real affection than she ever could have felt for this
dream of her girlhood, there had still been an imaginative faith to the
ocean-buried; so that an ordinary character had thus been elevated and
refined. Her sighs had been the breath of Heaven to her soul. The good
lady earnestly desired that the proposed monument should be ornamented
with a carved border of marine plants interwined with twisted
sea-shells, such as were probably waving over her lover’s skeleton or
strewn around it in the far depths of the Pacific. But, Mr.
Wigglesworth’s chisel being inadequate to the task, she was forced to
content herself with a rose hanging its head from a broken stem.
After her departure I remarked that the symbol was none of the most
apt.
“And yet,” said my friend the sculptor, embodying in this image the
thoughts that had been passing through my own mind, “that broken rose
has shed its sweet smell through forty years of the good woman’s life.”
It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplation as
in the above instance. None of the applicants, I think, affected me
more disagreeably than an old man who came, with his fourth wife
hanging on his arm, to bespeak gravestones for the three former
occupants of his marriage-bed. I watched with some anxiety to see
whether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of the
other two, but could discover no symptom of the kind. The three
monuments were all to be of the same material and form, and each
decorated in bas-relief with two weeping willows, one of these
sympathetic trees bending over its fellow, which was to be broken in
the midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn. This, indeed, was Mr.
Wigglesworth’s standing emblem of conjugal bereavement. I shuddered at
the gray polygamist who had so utterly lost the holy sense of
individuality in wedlock that methought he was fain to reckon upon his
fingers how many women who had once slept by his side were now sleeping
in their graves. There was even—if I wrong him, it is no great matter—a
glance sidelong at his living spouse, as if he were inclined to drive a
thriftier bargain by bespeaking four gravestones in a lot.
I was better pleased with a rough old whaling-captain who gave
directions for a broad marble slab divided into two compartments, one
of which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased wife and the other
to be left vacant till death should engrave his own name there. As is
frequently the case among the whalers of Martha’s Vineyard, so much of
this storm-beaten widower’s life had been tossed away on distant seas
that out of twenty years of matrimony he had spent scarce three, and
those at scattered intervals, beneath his own roof. Thus the wife of
his youth, though she died in his and her declining age, retained the
bridal dewdrops fresh around her memory.
My observations gave me the idea, and Mr. Wigglesworth confirmed it,
that husbands were more faithful in setting up memorials to their dead
wives than widows to their dead husbands. I was not ill-natured enough
to fancy that women less than men feel so sure of their own constancy
as to be willing to give a pledge of it in marble. It is more probably
the fact that, while men are able to reflect upon their lost companions
as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other hand, are
conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the departed
whithersoever he has gone. Soul clings to soul, the living dust has a
sympathy with the dust of the grave; and by the very strength of that
sympathy the wife of the dead shrinks the more sensitively from
reminding the world of its existence. The link is already strong
enough; it needs no visible symbol. And, though a shadow walks ever by
her side and the touch of a chill hand is on her bosom, yet life, and
perchance its natural yearnings, may still be warm within her and
inspire her with new hopes of happiness. Then would she mark out the
grave the scent of which would be perceptible on the pillow of the
second bridal? No, but rather level its green mound with the
surrounding earth, as if, when she dug up again her buried heart, the
spot had ceased to be a grave.
Yet, in spite of these sentimentalities, I was prodigiously amused by
an incident of which I had not the good-fortune to be a witness, but
which Mr. Wigglesworth related with considerable humor. A gentlewoman
of the town, receiving news of her husband’s loss at sea, had bespoken
a handsome slab of marble, and came daily to watch the progress of my
friend’s chisel. One afternoon, when the good lady and the sculptor
were in the very midst of the epitaph—which the departed spirit might
have been greatly comforted to read—who should walk into the workshop
but the deceased himself, in substance as well as spirit! He had been
picked up at sea, and stood in no present need of tombstone or epitaph.
“And how,” inquired I, “did his wife bear the shock of joyful
surprise?”
“Why,” said the old man, deepening the grin of a death’s-head on which
his chisel was just then employed, “I really felt for the poor woman;
it was one of my best pieces of marble—and to be thrown away on a
living man!”
A comely woman with a pretty rosebud of a daughter came to select a
gravestone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before. I was
impressed with the different nature of their feelings for the dead. The
mother was calm and woefully resigned, fully conscious of her loss, as