'Farewell, Dear Friend!'

“The whole insincere suggestion of most churchyards now is that life has been spent in a vale of tears: a long tribulation, merely a preparation for another and better world. But we know that that is not usually the case, and we know that many lives, although unrelated to graveyard ideas of decorum and insurance, are happier than not.” 

More than thirty years ago I tramped around a small cemetery in the Schoharie Valley in upstate New York, its dozen or so gravestones, most inscribed with the same surname, surrounded by two walls – one of field stones, the other of densely packed wild asters. The place had been neglected and some of the stones had been partially erased by time and acid rain. A cemetery is another opportunity to read and Dr. Johnson considered epitaphs compressed biographies. In his “Essay on Epitaphs” (1740) he writes:

 

“Though a sepulchral inscription is professedly a panegyrick, and, therefore, not confined to historical impartiality, yet it ought always to be written with regard to truth. No man ought to be commended for virtues which he never possessed, but whoever is curious to know his faults must inquire after them in other places; the monuments of the dead are not intended to perpetuate the memory of crimes, but to exhibit patterns of virtue.”

 

The author of the passage at the top is E.V. Lucas (1868-1938), the enormously prolific English critic who edited Charles Lamb’s essays and wrote his biography. It’s taken from a brief essay titled “On Epitaphs” collected in Adventures and Enthusiasms (1920). He’s right. The inscriptions on many stones I encountered in upstate New York betrayed a Puritan inheritance, including winged skulls and death’s heads, and warnings from the departed that visitors will soon join them – a rather aggressive variation on the memento mori. One inscription I appreciated enough to record in a notebook. I remember it was for a man but I don’t remember his name. It dates from the nineteenth century: “God ensures that life is good. Death holds no terrors.” I remember wondering if the departed wrote the epitaph or was it composed by an inspired friend or relative.

 

Lamb’s epitaph in the Edmonton churchyard is verbose doggerel composed by the essayist’s friend, the Rev. H.F. Cary, translator of Dante and Pindar:

 

“Farewell, dear friend!—that smile, that harmless mirth,

No more shall gladden our domestic hearth;

That rising tear, with pain forbid to flow—

Better than words—no more assuage our woe.

That hand outstretch’d from small but well-earned store

Yield succour to the destitute no more.

Yet art thou not all lost: through many an age,

With sterling sense and humour, shall thy page

Win many an English bosom, pleased to see

That old and happier vein revived in thee.

This for our earth; and if with friends we share

Our joys in heaven, we hope to meet thee there.”

 

You would never suspect Lamb was an appealingly comic writer, with a very modern sense of absurdity. Best to read his letters and Essays of Elia for a more fitting epitaph.