CHIPPINGS WITH A CHISEL.
Passing a summer several years since at Edgartown, on the island ofMartha's Vineyard, I became acquainted with a certain carver oftombstones who had travelled and voyaged thither from the interior ofMassachusetts in search of professional employment. The speculationhad turned out so successful that my friend expected to transmuteslate and marble into silver and gold to the amount of at least athousand dollars during the few months of his sojourn at Nantucket andthe Vineyard. The secluded life and the simple and primitive spiritwhich still characterizes the inhabitants of those islands, especiallyof Martha's Vineyard, insure their dead friends a longer and dearerremembrance than the daily novelty and revolving bustle of the worldcan elsewhere afford to beings of the past. Yet, while every family isanxious to erect a memorial to its departed members, the untaintedbreath of Ocean bestows such health and length of days upon the peopleof the isles as would cause a melancholy dearth of business to aresident artist in that line. His own monument, recording his deceaseby starvation, would probably be an early specimen of his skill.Gravestones, therefore, have generally been an article of importedmerchandise.
In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown--where the deadhave lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, hasreturned to its original barrenness--in that ancient burial-ground Inoticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dateda century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowersand are adorned with a multiplicity of death's-heads, crossbones,scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious emblems of mortality, withhere and there a winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit upward.These productions of Gothic taste must have been quite beyond thecolonial skill of the day, and were probably carved in London andbrought across the ocean to commemorate the defunct worthies of thislonely isle. The more recent monuments are mere slabs of slate in theordinary style, without any superfluous flourishes to set off the baldinscriptions. But others--and those far the most impressive both to mytaste and feelings--were roughly hewn from the gray rocks of theisland, evidently by the unskilled hands of surviving friends andrelatives. On some there were merely the initials of a name; some wereinscribed with misspelt prose or rhyme, in deep letters which the mossand wintry rain of many years had not been able to obliterate. These,these were graves where loved ones slept. It is an old theme ofsatire, the falsehood and vanity of monumental eulogies; but whenaffection 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 aready market for all his blank slabs of marble and full occupation inlettering and ornamenting them. He was an elderly man, a descendant ofthe old Puritan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain simplicity andsingleness both of heart and mind which, methinks, is more rarelyfound among us Yankees than in any other community of people. In spiteof his gray head and wrinkled brow, he was quite like a child in allmatters save what had some reference to his own business; he seemed,unless my fancy misled me, to view mankind in no other relation thanas people in want of tombstones, and his literary attainmentsevidently comprehended very little either of prose of poetry which hadnot at one time or other been inscribed on slate or marble. His soletask and office among the immortal pilgrims of the tomb--the duty forwhich Providence had sent the old man into the world, as it were witha chisel in his hand--was to label the dead bodies, lest their namesshould be forgotten at the resurrection. Yet he had not failed, withina narrow scope, to gather a few sprigs of earthly, and more thanearthly, wisdom--the harvest of many a grave. And, lugubrious as hiscalling might appear, he was as cheerful an old soul as health andintegrity and lack of care could make him, and used to set to workupon one sorrowful inscription or another with that sort of spiritwhich impels a man to sing at his labor. On the whole, I found Mr.Wigglesworth an entertaining, and often instructive, if not aninteresting, character; and, partly for the charm of his society, andstill more because his work has an invariable attraction for "man thatis born of woman," I was accustomed to spend some hours a day at hisworkshop. The quaintness of his remarks and their not infrequenttruth--a truth condensed and pointed by the limited sphere of hisview--gave a raciness to his talk which mere worldliness and generalcultivation would at once have destroyed.
Sometimes we would discuss the respective merits of the variousqualities of marble, numerous slabs of which were resting against thewalls of the shop, or sometimes an hour or two would pass quietlywithout a word on either side while I watched how neatly his chiselstruck out letter after letter of the names of the Nortons, theMayhews, the Luces, the Daggets, and other immemorial families of theVineyard. Often with an artist's pride the good old sculptor wouldspeak of favorite productions of his skill which were scatteredthroughout the village graveyards of New England. But my chief andmost instructive amusement was to witness his interviews with hiscustomers, who held interminable consultations about the form andfashion of the desired monuments, the buried excellence to becommemorated, the anguish to be expressed, and finally the lowestprice in dollars and cents for which a marble transcript of theirfeelings might be obtained. Really, my mind received many fresh ideaswhich perhaps may remain in it even longer than Mr. Wigglesworth'shardest marble will retain the deepest strokes of his chisel.
An elderly lady came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who hadbeen killed by a whale in the Pacific Ocean no less than forty yearsbefore. It was singular that so strong an impression of early feelingshould have survived through the changes of her subsequent life, inthe course of which she had been a wife and a mother, and, so far as Icould 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 herhistory. It had given an ideality to her mind; it had kept her purerand less earthy than she would otherwise have been by drawing aportion of her sympathies apart from earth. Amid the throng ofenjoyments and the pressure of worldly care and all the warmmaterialism of this life she had communed with a vision, and had beenthe better for such intercourse. Faithful to the husband of hermaturity, and loving him with a far more real affection than she evercould have felt for this dream of her girlhood, there had still beenan imaginative faith to the ocean-buried; so that an ordinarycharacter had thus been elevated and refined. Her sighs had been thebreath of Heaven to her soul. The good lady earnestly desired that theproposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of marineplants interwined with twisted sea-shells, such as were probablywaving over her lover's skeleton or strewn around it in the far depthsof the Pacific. But, Mr. Wigglesworth's chisel being inadequate to thetask, she was forced to content herself with a rose hanging its headfrom a broken stem.
After her departure I remarked that the symbol was none of the mostapt.
"And yet," said my friend the sculptor, embodying in this image thethoughts that had been passing through my own mind, "that broken rosehas shed its sweet smell through forty years of the good woman'slife."
It was seldom that I could find such pleasant food for contemplationas in the above instance. None of the applicants, I think, affected memore disagreeably than an old man who came, with his fourth wifehanging on his arm, to bespeak gravestones for the three formeroccupants of his marriage-bed. I watched with some anxiety to seewhether his remembrance of either were more affectionate than of theother two, but could discover no symptom of the kind. The threemonuments were all to be of the same material and form, and eachdecorated in bas-relief with two weeping willows, one of thesesympathetic trees bending over its fellow, which was to be broken inthe midst and rest upon a sepulchral urn. This, indeed, was Mr.Wigglesworth's standing emblem of conjugal bereavement. I shuddered atthe gray polygamist who had so utterly lost the holy sense ofindividuality in wedlock that methought he was fain to reckon upon hisfingers how many women who had onc
e slept by his side were nowsleeping in their graves. There was even--if I wrong him, it is nogreat matter--a glance sidelong at his living spouse, as if he wereinclined to drive a thriftier bargain by bespeaking four gravestonesin a lot.
I was better pleased with a rough old whaling-captain who gavedirections for a broad marble slab divided into two compartments, oneof which was to contain an epitaph on his deceased wife and the otherto be left vacant till death should engrave his own name there. As isfrequently the case among the whalers of Martha's Vineyard, so much ofthis storm-beaten widower's life had been tossed away on distant seasthat out of twenty years of matrimony he had spent scarce three, andthose at scattered intervals, beneath his own roof. Thus the wife ofhis youth, though she died in his and her declining age, retained thebridal 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 deadwives than widows to their dead husbands. I was not ill-natured enoughto fancy that women less than men feel so sure of their own constancyas to be willing to give a pledge of it in marble. It is more probablythe fact that, while men are able to reflect upon their lostcompanions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the otherhand, are conscious that a portion of their being has gone with thedeparted whithersoever he has gone. Soul clings to soul, the livingdust has a sympathy with the dust of the grave; and by the verystrength of that sympathy the wife of the dead shrinks the moresensitively from reminding the world of its existence. The link isalready strong enough; it needs no visible symbol. And, though ashadow walks ever by her side and the touch of a chill hand is on herbosom, yet life, and perchance its natural yearnings, may still bewarm within her and inspire her with new hopes of happiness. Thenwould she mark out the grave the scent of which would be perceptibleon the pillow of the second bridal? No, but rather level its greenmound with the surrounding earth, as if, when she dug up again herburied heart, the spot had ceased to be a grave.
Yet, in spite of these sentimentalities, I was prodigiously amused byan incident of which I had not the good-fortune to be a witness, butwhich Mr. Wigglesworth related with considerable humor. A gentlewomanof the town, receiving news of her husband's loss at sea, had bespokena handsome slab of marble, and came daily to watch the progress of myfriend's chisel. One afternoon, when the good lady and the sculptorwere in the very midst of the epitaph--which the departed spirit mighthave been greatly comforted to read--who should walk into the workshopbut the deceased himself, in substance as well as spirit! He had beenpicked up at sea, and stood in no present need of tombstone orepitaph.
"And how," inquired I, "did his wife bear the shock of joyfulsurprise?"
"Why," said the old man, deepening the grin of a death's-head on whichhis 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 aliving man!"
A comely woman with a pretty rosebud of a daughter came to select agravestone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before. I wasimpressed with the different nature of their feelings for the dead.The mother was calm and woefully resigned, fully conscious of herloss, as of a treasure which she had not always possessed, andtherefore had been aware that it might be taken from her; but thedaughter evidently had no real knowledge of what Death's doings were.Her thoughts knew, but not her heart. It seemed to me that by theprint and pressure which the dead sister had left upon the survivor'sspirit her feelings were almost the same as if she still stood side byside and arm in arm with the departed, looking at the slabs of marble,and once or twice she glanced around with a sunny smile, which, as itssister-smile had faded for ever, soon grew confusedly overshadowed.Perchance her consciousness was truer than her reflection; perchanceher dead sister was a closer companion than in life.
The mother and daughter talked a long while with Mr. Wigglesworthabout a suitable epitaph, and finally chose an ordinary verse ofill-matched rhymes which had already been inscribed upon innumerabletombstones. But when we ridicule the triteness of monumental verses,we forget that Sorrow reads far deeper in them than we can, and findsa profound and individual purport in what seems so vague andinexpressive unless interpreted by her. She makes the epitaph anew,though the selfsame words may have served for a thousand graves.
"And yet," said I afterward to Mr. Wigglesworth, "they might have madea better choice than this. While you were discussing the subject I wasstruck by at least a dozen simple and natural expressions from thelips of both mother and daughter. One of these would have formed aninscription equally original and appropriate."
"No, no!" replied the sculptor, shaking his head; "there is a gooddeal of comfort to be gathered from these little old scraps of poetry,and so I always recommend them in preference to any new-fangled ones.And somehow they seem to stretch to suit a great grief and shrink tofit a small one."
It was not seldom that ludicrous images were excited by what tookplace between Mr. Wigglesworth and his customers. A shrewd gentlewomanwho kept a tavern in the town was anxious to obtain two or threegravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay forthese solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board. Hereupon afantasy arose in my mind of good Mr. Wigglesworth sitting down todinner at a broad, flat tombstone carving one of his own plump littlemarble cherubs, gnawing a pair of crossbones and drinking out of ahollow death's-head or perhaps a lachrymatory vase or sepulchral urn,while his hostess's dead children waited on him at the ghastlybanquet. On communicating this nonsensical picture to the old man helaughed heartily and pronounced my humor to be of the right sort.
"I have lived at such a table all my days," said he, "and eaten nosmall quantity of slate and marble."
"Hard fare," rejoined I, smiling, "but you seemed to have found itexcellent of digestion, too."
A man of fifty or thereabouts with a harsh, unpleasant countenanceordered a stone for the grave of his bitter enemy, with whom he hadwaged warfare half a lifetime, to their mutual misery and ruin. Thesecret of this phenomenon was that hatred had become the sustenanceand enjoyment of the poor wretch's soul; it had supplied the place ofall kindly affections; it had been really a bond of sympathy betweenhimself and the man who shared the passion; and when its object died,the unappeasable foe was the only mourner for the dead. He expressed apurpose of being buried side by side with his enemy.
"I doubt whether their dust will mingle," remarked the old sculptor tome; for often there was an earthliness in his conceptions.
"Oh yes," replied I, who had mused long upon the incident; "and whenthey rise again, these bitter foes may find themselves dear friends.Methinks what they mistook for hatred was but love under a mask."
A gentleman of antiquarian propensities provided a memorial for anIndian of Chabbiquidick--one of the few of untainted blood remainingin that region, and said to be a hereditary chieftain descended fromthe sachem who welcomed Governor Mayhew to the Vineyard. Mr.Wiggles-worth exerted his best skill to carve a broken bow andscattered sheaf of arrows in memory of the hunters and warriors whoserace was ended here, but he likewise sculptured a cherub, to denotethat the poor Indian had shared the Christian's hope of immortality.
"Why," observed I, taking a perverse view of the winged boy and thebow and arrows, "it looks more like Cupid's tomb than an Indianchief's."
"You talk nonsense," said the sculptor, with the offended pride ofart. He then added with his usual good-nature, "How can Cupid die whenthere are such pretty maidens in the Vineyard?"
"Very true," answered I; and for the rest of the day I thought ofother matters than tombstones.
At our next meeting I found him chiselling an open book upon a marbleheadstone, and concluded that it was meant to express the erudition ofsome black-letter clergyman of the Cotton Mather school. It turnedout, however, to be emblematical of the scriptural knowledge of an oldwoman who had never read anything but her Bible, and the monument wasa tribute to her piety and good works from the orthodox church ofwhich she had been
a member. In strange contrast with this Christianwoman's memorial was that of an infidel whose gravestone, by his owndirection, bore an avowal of his belief that the spirit within himwould be extinguished like a flame, and that the nothingness whence hesprang would receive him again.
Mr. Wigglesworth consulted me as to the propriety of enabling a deadman's dust to utter this dreadful creed.
"If I thought," said he, "that a single mortal would read theinscription without a shudder, my chisel should never cut a letter ofit. But when the grave speaks such falsehoods, the soul of man willknow the truth by its own horror."
"So it will," said I, struck by the idea. "The poor infidel may striveto preach blasphemies from his grave, but it will be only anothermethod of impressing the soul with a consciousness of immortality."
There was an old man by the name of Norton, noted throughout theisland for his great wealth, which he had accumulated by the exerciseof strong and shrewd faculties combined with a most penuriousdisposition. This wretched miser, conscious that he had not a friendto be mindful of him in his grave, had himself taken the needfulprecautions for posthumous remembrance by bespeaking an immense slabof white marble with a long epitaph in raised letters, the whole to beas magnificent as Mr. Wigglesworth's skill could make it. There wassomething very characteristic in this contrivance to have his money'sworth even from his own tombstone, which, indeed, afforded him moreenjoyment in the few months that he lived thereafter than it probablywill in a whole century, now that it is laid over his bones.
This incident reminds me of a young girl--a pale, slender, feeblecreature most unlike the other rosy and healthful damsels of theVineyard, amid whose brightness she was fading away. Day after day didthe poor maiden come to the sculptor's shop and pass from one piece ofmarble to another, till at last she pencilled her name upon a slenderslab which, I think, was of a more spotless white than all the rest. Isaw her no more, but soon afterward found Mr. Wigglesworth cutting hervirgin-name into the stone which she had chosen.
"She is dead, poor girl!" said he, interrupting the tune which he waswhistling, "and she chose a good piece of stuff for her headstone.Now, which of these slabs would you like best to see your own nameupon?"
"Why, to tell you the truth, my good Mr. Wigglesworth," replied I,after a moment's pause, for the abruptness of the question hadsomewhat startled me--"to be quite sincere with you, I care little ornothing about a stone for my own grave, and am somewhat inclined toscepticism as to the propriety of erecting monuments at all over thedust that once was human. The weight of these heavy marbles, thoughunfelt by the dead corpse or the enfranchised soul, presses drearilyupon the spirit of the survivor and causes him to connect the idea ofdeath with the dungeon-like imprisonment of the tomb, instead of withthe freedom of the skies. Every gravestone that you ever made is thevisible symbol of a mistaken system. Our thoughts should soar upwardwith the butterfly, not linger with the exuviae that confined him. Intruth and reason, neither those whom we call the living, and stillless the departed, have anything to do with the grave."
"I never heard anything so heathenish," said Mr. Wigglesworth,perplexed and displeased at sentiments which controverted all hisnotions and feelings and implied the utter waste, and worse, of hiswhole life's labor. "Would you forget your dead friends the momentthey are under the sod?"
"They are not under the sod," I rejoined; "then why should I mark thespot where there is no treasure hidden? Forget them? No; but, toremember them aright, I would forget what they have cast off. And togain the truer conception of death I would forget the grave."
But still the good old sculptor murmured, and stumbled, as it were,over the gravestones amid which he had walked through life. Whether hewere right or wrong, I had grown the wiser from our companionship andfrom my observations of nature and character as displayed by those whocame, with their old griefs or their new ones, to get them recordedupon his slabs of marble. And yet with my gain of wisdom I hadlikewise gained perplexity; for there was a strange doubt in my mindwhether the dark shadowing of this life, the sorrows and regrets, havenot as much real comfort in them--leaving religious influences out ofthe question--as what we term life's joys.