 | Twice-told tales |  |
CHIPPINGS WITH A CHISEL.
Passing a summer, several years since, at Edgartown,
on the island of Martha's Vineyard, I became acquainted
with a certain carver of tomb-stones, who had travelled
and voyaged thither from the interior of Massachusetts,
in search of professional employment. The
speculation had turned out so successful, that my friend
expected to transmute slate and marble into silver and
gold to the amount of at least a thousand dollars,
during the few months of his sojourn at Nantucket and
the Vineyard. The secluded life, and the simple and
primitive spirit which still characterizes the inhabitants
of those islands, especially of Martha's Vineyard,
insure their dead friends a longer and dearer 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
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.
Grave-stones, 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, cross-bones,
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
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 tomb-stones; 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 work-shop.
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 grave-yards 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
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 life-long 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
earthly 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
should be ornamented with a carved border of
marine plants, intertwined 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 grave-stones 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,
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 grave-stones 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
dew-drops 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
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 work-shop 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
`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 rose-bud of a
daughter, came to select a grave-stone 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 of a treasure which she
had not always possessed, and therefore had been
aware that it might be taken from her; but the daughter
evidently had no real knowledge of what death's
doings were. Her thoughts knew, but not her heart.
It seemed to me, that by the print and pressure which
the dead sister had left upon the survivor's spirit, her
feelings were almost the same as if she still stood side
by side, 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 its sister-smile had
faded forever, soon grew confusedly overshadowed.
Perchance her consciousness was truer than her reflection
— perchance her dead sister was a closer companion
than in life. The mother and daughter talked
a long while with Mr. Wigglesworth about a suitable
epitaph, and finally chose an ordinary verse of ill-matched
rhymes, which had already been inscribed
upon innumerable tomb-stones. But, when we ridicule
the triteness of monumental verses, we forget
that Sorrow reads far deeper in them than we can,
and finds a profound and individual purport in what
by her. She makes the epitaph anew, though the selfsame
words may have served for a thousand graves.
`And yet,' said I afterwards to Mr. Wigglesworth,
`they might have made a better choice than this.
While you were discussing the subject, I was struck
by at least a dozen simple and natural expressions
from the lips of both mother and daughter. One of
these would have formed an inscription equally original
and appropriate.'
`No, no,' replied the sculptor, shaking his head,
`there is a good deal 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 to fit a small one.'
It was not seldom that ludicrous images were excited
by what took place between Mr. Wigglesworth and
his customers. A shrewd gentlewoman, who kept a
tavern in the town, was anxious to obtain two or three
grave-stones for the deceased members of her family,
and to pay for these solemn commodities by taking the
sculptor to board. Hereupon a fantasy arose in my
mind, of good Mr. Wigglesworth sitting down to dinner
at a broad, flat tomb-stone, carving one of his own
plump little marble cherubs, gnawing a pair of crossbones,
and drinking out of a hollow death's-head, or
perhaps a lacrymatory vase, or sepulchral urn; while
his hostess's dead children waited on him at the ghastly
banquet. On communicating this nonsensical picture
to the old man, he laughed 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 no small quantity of slate and marble.'
`Hard fare!' rejoined I, smiling; `but you seemed
to have found it excellent of digestion, too.'
A man of fifty, or thereabouts, with a harsh, unpleasant
countenance, ordered a stone for the grave of
his bitter enemy, with whom he had waged warfare
half a lifetime, to their mutual misery and ruin. The
secret of this phenomenon was, that hatred had become
the sustenance and enjoyment of the poor wretch's
soul; it had supplied the place of all kindly affections;
it had been really a bond of sympathy between himself
and the man who shared the passion; and when
its object died, the unappeasable foe was the only
mourner for the dead. He expressed a purpose of
being buried side by side with his enemy.
`I doubt whether their dust will mingle,' remarked
the old sculptor to me; for often there was an earthliness
in his conceptions.
`Oh yes,' replied I, who had mused long upon the
incident; `and when they 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 an Indian of Chabbiquidick, one of the
few of untainted blood remaining in that region, and
said to be an hereditary chieftain, descended from the
sachem who welcomed Govenor Mayhew to the Vineyard.
Mr. Wigglesworth exerted his best skill to
carve a broken bow and scattered sheaf of arrows,
in memory of the hunters and warriors whose race
to denote that the poor Indian had shared the Christian's
hope of immortality.
`Why,' observed I, taking a perverse view of the
winged boy and the bow and arrows, `it looks more
like Cupid's tomb than an Indian chief's!'
`You talk nonsense,' said the sculptor, with the
offended pride of art; he then added with his usual
good-nature, `how can Cupid die when there are such
pretty maidens in the Vineyard?'
`Very true,' answered I, — and for the rest of the
day I thought of other matters than tomb-stones.
At our next meeting I found him chiseling an open
book upon a marble head-stone, and concluded that it
was meant to express the erudition of some black-letter
clergyman of the Cotton Mather school. It
turned out, however, to be emblematical of the scriptural
knowledge of an old woman who had never read
any thing but her Bible; and the monument was a
tribute to her piety and good works, from the Orthodox
Church, of which she had been a member. In strange
contrast with this Christian woman's memorial, was
that of an infidel, whose grave-stone, by his own direction,
bore an avowal of his belief that the spirit
within him would be extinguished like a flame, and
that the nothingness whence he sprang would receive
him again. Mr. Wigglesworth consulted me as to the
propriety of enabling a dead man's dust to utter this
dreadful creed.
`If I thought,' said he, `that a single mortal would
read the inscription without a shudder, my chisel
speaks such falsehoods, the soul of man will know the
truth by its own horror.'
`So it will,' said I, struck by the idea: `the poor
infidel may strive to preach blasphemies from his
grave; but it will be only another method of impressing
the soul with a consciousness of immortality.'
There was an old man by the name of Norton, noted
throughout the island for his great wealth, which he
had accumulated by the exercise of strong and shrewd
faculties, combined with a most penurious disposition.
This wretched miser, conscious that he had not a
friend to be mindful of him in his grave, had himself
taken the needful precautions for posthumous remembrance,
by bespeaking an immense slab of white marble,
with a long epitaph in raised letters, the whole to
be as magnificent as Mr. Wigglesworth's skill could
make it. There was something very characteristic in
this contrivance to have his money's worth even from
his own tomb-stone, which, indeed, afforded him more
enjoyment in the few months that he lived thereafter,
than it probably will in a whole century, now that it
is laid over his bones. This incident reminds me of
a young girl, a pale, slender, feeble creature, most
unlike the other rosy and healthful damsels of the
Vineyard, amid whose brightness she was fading away.
Day after day did the poor maiden come to the sculptor's
shop, and pass from one piece of marble to another,
till at last she penciled her name upon a slender
slab, which, I think, was of a more spotless white
than all the rest. I saw her no more, but soon afterwards
into the stone which she had chosen.
`She is dead — poor girl,' said he, interrupting the
tune which he was whistling, `and she chose a good
piece of stuff for her head-stone. Now which of
these slabs would you like best to see your own name
upon?'
`Why, to tell you the truth, my good Mr. Wigglesworth,'
replied I, after a moment's pause, — for the
abruptness of the question had somewhat startled me,
— `to be quite sincere with you, I care little or nothing
about a stone for my own grave, and am somewhat
inclined to skepticism as to the propriety of
erecting monuments at all, over the dust that once
was human. The weight of these heavy marbles,
though unfelt by the dead corpse or the enfranchised
soul, presses drearily upon the spirit of the survivor,
and causes him to connect the idea of death with the
dungeon-like imprisonment of the tomb, instead of
with the freedom of the skies. Every grave-stone
that you ever made is the visible symbol of a mistaken
system. Our thoughts should soar upward with
the butterfly — not linger with the exuviæ that confined
him. In truth and reason, neither those whom
we call the living, and still less the departed, have
any thing to do with the grave.'
`I never heard anything so heathenish!' said Mr.
Wigglesworth, perplexed and displeased at sentiments
which controverted all his notions and feelings, and
implied the utter waste, and worse, of his whole life's
labor, — `would you forget your dead friends, the
moment they are under the sod!'
`They are not under the sod,' I rejoined; `then
why should I mark the spot where there is no treasure
hidden! Forget them? No! But to remember them
aright, I would forget what they have cast off. And
to gain the truer conception of DEATH, I would forget
the GRAVE!'
But still the good old sculptor murmured, and stumbled,
as it were, over the grave-stones amid which he
had walked through life. Whether he were right or
wrong, I had grown the wiser from our companionship
and from my observations of nature and character,
as displayed by those who came, with their old
griefs or their new ones, to get them recorded upon
his slabs of marble. And yet, with my gain of wisdom,
I had likewise gained perplexity; for there was
a strange doubt in my mind, whether the dark shadowing
of this life, the sorrows and regrets, have not as
much real comfort in them — leaving religious influences
out of the question — as what we term life's
joys.
| Twice-told tales | |