6

the passion for liberty (a passion strong enough to die for, as he proved), the passion against injustice, the passion of the will to live and the will to know, fretting against the limits of death and ignorance. It was then that thoughts which should call down thunder' came to him, calling down thunder indeed, on the wrongs and hypocrisies of his time and country, as a moralist more intellectually disinterested, further aloof from the consequences of his words, could not have done.

Byron had no philosophy; he saw no remedy or alternative for any evil, least of all in his own mind, itself more tossed than the world without him. He had flaming doubts, stormy denials; he had the idealism of revolt, and fought instead of dreaming. His idolatry of good is shown by his remorseful consciousness of evil, morbid, as it has seemed to those who have not realised that every form of spiritual energy has something of the divine in it, and is on its way to become divine. 'Cain' is a long, restless, proud, and helpless questioning of the powers of good and evil, by one who can say:

'I will have nought to do with happiness

Which humbles me and mine,'

with a pride equal to Lucifer's; and can say also, in all the humility of admitted defeat:

Were I quiet earth,

That were no evil.'

'Obstínate questionings,' resolving themselves into nothing except that pride and that humility of despair, form the whole drama in which Byron has come nearest to abstract thinking, in his 'gay metaphysical style,' as he called it. Think and endure' is Lucifer's last counsel to Cain. Why art thou wretched?' he has already asked him; and been answered: "Why do I exist?' Cain's arraignment of God, which has nothing startling to us, who have read Nietzsche, raised all England in a kind of panic; religion itself seemed to be tottering. But Byron went no further in that direction; his greater strength lay elsewhere. Dropping heroics, he concludes, at the time that he is writing Don Juan,' that man has always been and always will be an unlucky rascal,' with a tragic acquiescence in that summary settlement of the enigma, laughingly. Humour was given us that we might disguise from ourselves the consciousness of our common misery. Humour turned by thought into irony, which is humour thinking about itself, is the world's substitute for philosophy, perhaps the only weapon that can be turned against it with

success.

Byron used the world's irony to condemn the world. He had conquered its attention by the vast clamour of his revolt; he had lulled it asleep by an apparent acceptance of its terms; now, like a treacherous friend, treacherous with the sublime treachery of the intellect, he drove the nail into its sleeping forehead.

And so we see Byron ending, after all the 'daring, dash, and grandiosity' (to use Goethe's words, as they are rendered by Matthew Arnold) of his earlier work, a tired and melancholy jester, still fierce at heart. Byron gives us, in an overwhelming way, the desire of life, the enjoyment of life, and the sense of life's deceit, as it vanishes from between our hands, and slips from under our feet, and is a voice and no more. In his own way he preaches vanity of vanities,' and not less cogently because he has been drunk with life, like Solomon himself, and has not yet lost the sense of what is intoxicating in it. He has given up the declamation of despair, as after all an effect, however sincere, of rhetoric; his jesting is more sorrowful than his outcries, for it shows him to have surrendered.

'We live and die,

But which is best, you know no more than I.'

All his wisdom (experience, love of nature, passion, tenderness, pride, the thirst for knowledge) comes to that in the end, not even a negation.

ART. III. THE ETHICS OF CREMATION.

1. Earth to Earth. Three letters to 'The Times,' by F. Seymour Haden, F.R.C.S., January 12th, May 20th, June 17th, 1875. 2. Modern Cremation: its History and Practice. By Sir Henry Thompson, F.R.C.S. London: Macmillan, 1891.

3. Cremation an Incentive to Crime: a Plea for Legislation. By Sir F. Seymour Haden, F.R.C.S. London: Stanford, 1892.

4. Vegetable Mould and Earthworms. By Charles Darwin. London: John Murray, 1897.

5. First and Second Reports from the Select Committee on Death Certification. Presented to both Houses of Parliament,

August 15th and September 1st, 1893.

THE

THE question how to bring about such a reasonable and considerate treatment of the bodies of the dead as shall neither wound legitimate sensibilities nor compromise the rights of the living, is one which in the hands of successive British Governments has proved, though a somewhat variable, yet a curiously persistent phase of administrative failure for the greater part of the nineteenth century. Nor would it appear that the magnitude and importance of this failure, or of the difficulties, not to say the dangers, which it has entailed upon us, have even yet been fully grasped by the Home Office, the Local Government. Board, or the County Council-these being the several Government Departments which now enjoy a divided responsibility in a matter for which the Home Office was formerly alone responsible. The abuses, which impair, to the extent of rendering nugatory, our whole cemeterial system, still go on. The unintelligent enclosure of the perishable bodies of the dead in coffins which, being themselves imperishable, prevent their resolution, is still practised. The use of the brick grave and vault, directed of course to the same end, is not only permitted but actually prescribed. The repeated purchase, at a heavy cost, of land for new cemeteries, which would not be wanted if the dead were properly buried, is still incurred: while the cemeteries themselves, instead of being under direct municipal or State control, as in every other civilised country, are handed over to joint-stock companies, speculators, and tradesmen, of whom the undertaker is the chief, to treat as they please. Finally, as if indifference to public safety could no further go,

*The Local Government Board, Memorandum on the Sanitary Requirements of Cemeteries' (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1893),

the destruction, by cremation, of all evidence deducible from a dead body of the manner in which that body came by its death, has for some time been going on, with at least the connivance of the law.

No one, we think, on seeing this formidable list of abuses for the first time can fail to be struck by their painfully irrational character; by the comparative ease with which, through the adoption of proper regulations, they may be remedied; and by a sense of the heavy reproach which, unremedied, they cast upon us as a sensible and practical people. Our present purpose is, after a short discussion of rational burial and the arguments which have been alleged against it, to deal at length with the last of these abuses-that of cremation-the general sanction of which by law is now being demanded by Parliament. A Bill, at present before the House of Lords, is intended, we are told by its promoters, to empower the burial authorities to raise the rates for the purpose of cremation without having to apply to Parliament for the necessary authority by means of a private Bill.' Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Hull have already, it appears, obtained such powers; the City of London is following suit; and the present Bill, which is promoted by the London County Council, will apparently make the permission general. In view of the compulsion with which all ratepayers are threatened, and of the grave objections which may be, and have been, raised against the practice of cremation, a general consideration of the subject will not be out of place.

Little or no difficulty appears to have attended the ready and efficient disposal of the dead till towards the close of Charles the Second's reign. Not only was the strong coffin-the fons et origo mali-till then unknown, but the plainer sort of men were content to be carried to their graves in the open chests or coffers which were kept in every parish church for the occasion, and only employed to convey the body from the house of death to that other house which hath been appointed for all living'; after which the chests were returned to their accustomed place, which was usually a niche in the church wall. Arrived at the grave, the body, enveloped at one time in coarse linen kept together by bone pins, and afterwards in woollen, was removed from its temporary case and buried. An old ritualist, Wheatley, makes its removal from its temporary coffin and its 'just a-going to be put into the ground' the occasion for a homily on the shortness of this temporal life and on our entire dependence on the help and mercy of God.† In still earlier days,

Lord Monkswell in the House of Lords, June 18th, 1900. (Daily Papers.) The Reliquary,' No. 17, vol. v, July 1864 (Bemrose and Sons, Derby).

a couple of planks, separated at the head and foot by a turf, and enclosing the body between them, were used for the same purpose of carriage, and then, as they in no way interfered with the resolution of the body, were buried with it. That in early times the coffin was looked upon as a questionable contrivance may be inferred from the occasional request of sensible persons to be buried without it, and from the earliest records of our cathedrals and parish churches, which provide for the payment of larger fees for 'chested' than for 'unchested buryalls'; while elaborate judgments have from time to time been delivered in condemnation of their use, on account of the illegal and indefinite tenure of the soil which that use implied.

'It has been argued,' says Lord Stowell, 'that the ground once given to the body is appropriated to it for ever; it is literally in mortmain unalienably; it is not only the domus ultima, but the domus æterna of that tenant, who is never to be disturbed, be his condition what it may; the introduction of another body into that lodgement at any time, however distant, is an unwarrantable intrusion.. In support of these positions it seems to be assumed that the tenant himself is imperishable; for, surely, there can be no inextinguishable title, no perpetuity of possession, belonging to a subject which itself is perishable. But the fact is that " man " and "for ever" are terms quite incompatible in any state of his existence, dead or living, in this world. The time must come when ipsæ periere ruinæ, when the posthumous remains must mingle with, and compose a part of, that soil in which they have been deposited. . . . The domus æterna is a mere flourish of rhetoric; the process of nature will speedily resolve them into an intimate mixture with their kindred dust; and their dust will help to furnish a place of repose for other occupants in succession. . . . The common cemetery is not res unius ætatis, the property of one generation now departed, but is likewise the common property of the living, and of generations yet unb rn. . . . Any contrivance, therefore, that prolongs the time of dissolution beyond the period at which the common local understanding and usage have fixed it, is an act of injustice, since by such contrivances it is, in course of time, given to a comparatively small number of dead to shoulder out the living and their posterity. ... Coffins are not recognised by any authority whatever; mention of them is nowhere. made, but rather studiously avoided, in the Burial Service of the Church of England, and, generally, their use can only be regarded as an encroachment on the rights of the living.'t

The subject with which we are undertaking to deal was brought prominently forward by certain letters which were

Antiquities and Memoirs of the Parish of Myddle' (co. Salop), by R. Gough, 1700. t Gilbert v. Buzzard: Haggard, Consistory Reports,' ii, 352 ff.