principles and religious beliefs, aspirations, ambition, personal, hereditary or racial temperament, and the temporary state of health and enjoyment in life. It must, to some extent, vary from time to time according to the condition of the mind and body and the changing moods of the individual. Moreover, supposed proximity is likely often to modify as well as to intensify the aspect in which the idea of death presents itself. Undoubtedly the representation of Death is generally much less repulsive in modern art than it was in typical fifteenth and sixteenth century designs-a dry skeleton has mostly superseded the worm-eaten, decaying corpse -and a comic element is frequently more or less obvious. The old memento mori motive in macabre designs has in modern art partially given place to one of merely amusing grotesqueness. (Cf. Part II. Heading xxi.) The gradually increasing unpopularity of the old "death's head and skeleton class" of memento mori devices and inscriptions is nowhere better illustrated than in regard to sun-dial mottoes. Formerly it was: "I tell the hour, think of your last hour"; "This is the last hour for many, and may be your last hour"; "Death draws nigh, perhaps only a moment separates you from eternity"; "Your death is certain, but uncertain is the time of your death," and so on. Compare the following lines from an English fifteenth-century didactic poem, printed in The Babees Book (Early English Text Society), London, 1868, p. 52: "And deeth is euere, as y trowe, The moost certeyn thing that is, And no thing is so uncerteyn to knowe, As is the tyme of deeth y-wis." This style of sun-dial inscription remained popular into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The physician and poet, Nathaniel Cotton (1705-1788), wrote the following lines for a sun-dial in the churchyard at Thornby (Northamptonshire) :— "Mark well my shade and seriously attend And know, each fleeting hour may be thy last." An ivory portable compass-dial by Hans Ducher (or Tucher) of Nürnberg, dated 1560,136 is inscribed― "Mors venit, hora fugit, metuas mortem venientem. Quaelibet est index funeris hora tui." A sun-dial, mentioned by Miss S. F. A. Caulfeild,137 at Corby Hall (not far from Carlisle), dated 1658, and known as Sir Francis Howard's dial, bears the inscription: "Deathe, Judgment, Heaven, Hell-Upon this moment depens Eternitie. O Eternitie! O Eternitie! O Eternitie! 1658." Another sun-dial inscription (dated 1697) reads "My change is sure, it may be soon, Nowadays the most popular sun-dial inscriptions are of the style of: "Horas non numero nisi serenas"; "Horas nullas nisi aureas"; "Ich zeige nur die heitern Stunden"; or "Let others tell of storms and showers, "Serene I stand among the flowers, And only count life's sunny hours." 136 See The Book of Sun-Dials, by Mrs. Alfred Gatty, &c., edition of 1900. 137 Caulfeild, House Mottoes and Inscriptions, new edition, 1908, p. 125. These last mottoes would suit best of all for a modern sunshinerecorder, such as is used at modern meteorological stations. For interesting English sun-dial verses by the Rev. G. F. Chester, with somewhat similar commencement, see The Book of Sun-Dials, by Mrs. Alfred Gatty, &c., edition of 1900. In regard to older sun-dial inscriptions of the kind, cf. Part II., xvii. footnote 387. Or, when a didactic text, of the "copy-book style," is preferred, as it has been on some buildings for municipal offices, &c., no gloomy reference is usually made nowadays to death, but only a cheerful enough one to doing one's daily work: "Do to-day's work to-day," and so forth. R. W. Emerson from this point of view wrote: "On bravely through the sunshine and the showers, Time hath his work to do, and we have ours." In an article on "The Dying of Death "138 Joseph Jacobs (born 1854) writes: "Death as a motive is moribund. Perhaps the most distinctive note of the modern spirit is the practical disappearance of the thought of death as an influence directly bearing upon practical life. We insure our lives, it is true, but having done so, think no more of the matter, except in the spirit of William Micawber," when that immortal creation of the brain of Charles Dickens signed a promissory note. "There are no skeletons at our feasts nowadays, or at least they are living ones. Death has lost its terrors." So unusual now in everyday life is much preoccupation with the thought of death that at a recent debate on "Fear" at the Medical Society of London (March, 1917) one of the speakers suggested that when an apparently healthy man in ordinary life is much troubled by fear of (his own) death, the man in question is probably suffering from a psychical disorder of the "phobia" class, allied to agoraphobia, claustrophobia, &c. Very modern was Madame de Sévigné's daughter (Françoise Marguerite, afterwards Madame de Grignan) in her answer to the Abbé La Mousse, when, on account of her supposed vanity, he told her: "Remember that all your beauty will turn to dust and ashes." "Yes," she replied, "but I am not yet dust and ashes." 139 According to Havelock Ellis, 140 however, the mediaeval conception 138 Joseph Jacobs, Fortnightly Review, London, 1899, pp. 264-269. 139 Cf. Lady Ritchie (Anne Isabella Thackeray), Madame de Sévigné, Edinburgh, 1881, p. 58. 140 Havelock Ellis, The Soul of Spain, London, 1908, pp. 24-26. Havelock Ellis also refers to Emile Verhaeren's España Negra (translated from the French of the distinguished Belgian author) in support of the same views. ... of dying still finds a congenial home in Spain, though it has practically passed out of the lives of other European peoples. In Spain death is still made part of the lesson of daily life. "A certain indifference to pain, even a positive delight in it, was long ago observed by Strabo to mark the Iberian. And the deliberate insistence on the thought of death, so congenial to the ethical temper of this people that, it has been said, the Spaniard has a natural passion for suicide, has always been a note of the romantic mood. . . . The Spaniard broods over and emphasizes the naked majesty of death. . . . In Barcelona Cathedral, the most solemnly impressive model of Catalan architecture, the broad and stately entrance to the crypt, the gloomy house of death, is placed in the centre of the church. . . . Every Spanish sacristan seems to possess a well-polished skull and a couple of thigh bones, with which to crown the catafalque it is his duty to erect. . . . In a church in the heart of the city of Zamora I have found, prominently placed on a pedestal, a skeleton of fine proportions holding an hour-glass in one hand and a scythe in the other, while high on the interior wall of Salamanca Cathedral one discerns a skeleton of lesser proportions with what seems to be the skin still clinging to the bones." The significance of memento mori designs, which reminded people of every man's liability to sudden death, was increased by the terrible and devastating pestilences of former times, and the meaning of representations of death and decay was doubtless intensified by the frequency of public executions and violent deaths of all kinds. Joseph Jacobs 141 thinks that one of the main causes of the modern change of sentiment is the improvement in sanitation and hygiene and the increased average duration of life. "In the Middle Ages," he writes, "nothing was so uncertain as life. Duels and private wars, feuds and bandits, plagues and pestilences, made men uncertain of their lives from hour to hour." Mediaeval chivalry also helped to keep death in the minds of its followers. According to the rite of admission to knighthood the candidate, after his ceremonial bath, was clothed in a white tunic, as a symbol of his purity; then in a red robe, suggestive of the blood he was ready to 141 Joseph Jacobs, loc. cit. shed; and in a black cloak, to remind him of his death that might be near at hand. T. A. Cook, in The Story of Rouen,142 writes: "Amid all this life and colour, death and the taint of death are ever present, for every church is little better than a charnel-house, and in the crowded. city nearly eighty cemeteries are packed with dead. ... . Even on ordinary days there is horror enough only too visible. You need not go so far as the gibbets just above the town, where corpses are clattering in chains beneath the wind; on the Place du Vieux Marché a sacrilegious priest is being slowly strangled; in the Parvis Notre Dame a blasphemer's throat is cut; close by the churchyard, a murderer's hand is chopped off, and he is hurried away to execution on the scaffold by the Halles." With this word-picture may be compared the views of Tudor London showing the heads of executed persons stuck up on stacks of spikes at London Bridge, Temple Bar, &c. A horrible idea it is that in the olden days a sovereign used to derive profit by the execution of his wealthy subjects. Riches undoubtedly excited the cupidity of those in power, and many of the attacks on the Jews in the Middle Ages were due to an underlying motive of this kind. The wealth of the famous Military Order of Knights Templars in France had probably a share in their undoing. The Knights were accused of heresy and immorality by King Philip IV of France, in 1307; many of them were burned alive or hanged, and the Order was finally suppressed by the Council of Vienne (under Pope Clement V), in 1312. The Grand Master Molay was burned alive at Paris in 1314. In England, under King Edward II, the Order was likewise suppressed, and the head of the Order in this country died in the Tower of London. Might not the extraordinary number of executions of great noblemen in Europe during the time of the English Tudor sovereigns (notably Henry VIII) have had something to do with an amusing conversation, as narrated by Lord Suffield (My Memories, London, 1913), between the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward VII) and Nassr-ed-Deen, Shah of Persia, in 1873? When entertained at Stafford House by the Duke of 142 T. A. Cook, The Story of Rouen, London, 1899, p. 303. |