MOURNING CUSTOMS.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 819, 17 May 1910, Page 5

MOURNING CUSTOMS.

HOW KINGS ARE LAMENTED. STRANGE MANNERS OF PAST TIMES. [By If the spirit of King Edward, "blows along a wandering \viud/' could look down to-day upon his late dominions, ho might bo touched with the sincerity of the decent mourning worn by Wellington for his demise. The very sobriety of the display of grief, general, hut temperate, might bo expected to impress the King, who knew the weakness and the worth of pageantry. The general black and purple trappings of facades and windows are not extravagant; frequent marks 1 of individual mourning are not ostentatious; public speeches have not tended to become hysterical; everything is seemly. If the display of public sorrow was more demonstrative, it might be possible to question its sincerity, but the reserve of grief is sacred and convincing. .Men and women mourn a loss, not personal in the acutest sense, but real and deep, and so much is expressed by word and symbol. The drooping, halfmast flags are emblems of joy's real declension at this hour. Fictitious Internationa! Observances. Probably the British nation, with ita heart in its mourning for King Edward, is not so much to be pitied as it has been on some former occasions, when it has been called upon to make a show of grief without having any real feeling of bereavement. Even to the most sympathetic natures it would bo difficult to feol protracted sorrow because a foreign ruler died, whom one had hardly heard of, and M'lien there happened, to be a iiumber of such deaths occurring at short intervals, the pretence of solemn mourning would naturally become a strain. An old "Spectator" article makes light of suoh fictitious national observances. "Whatever compliments may be made on these occasions, it declares, *'thfc true mourners are the mercers, lace-men, and/ milliners. ' A prince of a merciful and royal disposition would reflect with great anxiety upon the prospect of his death if he considered *vhat numbers would be reduced to misery by that accident alone. He would think a general mourning to be in a leas degree the same ceremony which : is practised in barbarous nations • of killing their slaves to. attend the , obsetjuies of their kings." And as illustrating the frequency and vanity of these occasions of English mourning the article gives the following droll account of a saving person, supposed to be an acquaintance of the author:—"He made a new black suit upon the death of the King of Spain, he turned it for the King of Portugal, and he now keeps his chamber whiie it is scouring for the Emperor (of Austria). Ho is a good economist in his expenditure, and makes only a fre6h .black button upon his iron-grey suit for any potentate of small territories, but now-a-days has crape on his hat-band for a prince whoso exploits he has admired in the Gazette/' Kings Without Dignity. Even for British sovereigns it has not inlwavfi been* easy to mourn with any genuine feeling. Grief was really ceremonial in the most barren sense when several of the Georges died. The epitaph which a wag made for Frederick, Prince 'of Wales, father of George 111, would have been the truest word for more than one of the earlier rulers of hia House: — Here lies Fred, Who was alive, and is dead. , Had it been his father, I had much rather. ' But since 'tis only - Fred, "Who was alive, and is dead/ There's no more to be said. But there is a convention due to kings* and afficialdom, at least, was not content with such cold justice. George I was a dull man, whose subjects never gave him more affection than he merited, and George II was a bad man, equally unloved. Yet iu presenting to the sec»nd George an address of condolence on his father's death Sir Robert Walpolo could declare the demise of George I to be "a loss to this nation which Your Majesty alone could possibly repair." and add transparently, "your immediate succession to the throne has banished all our grief." When George II died the thin pTetence of public grief was ridiculed by the wits and essayists, and Goldsmith, ra the "Citizen of the World," made his Chinese observer of English customs say: "For my part, I have no conception or this new manner of mourning and rejoicing in a breath, of being merry and sad, of mixing the funeral procession with ,a jig and a bonfire. At least, it would have been just that they who flattered the king while he lived for virtues which he had not, should him dead for those he really had." Some Extravagant Customs. At least, the forms of grief which these false mourners had to bear were not so severe as would have fallen to their lot in times .more primitive. For the extravagance of mourning rites it is not necessary to go to the Hawaiian [slanders, who, when a chief died, used, to pretend a frenzied madness, in which the entire nation would commit murders md other crimes as the ceremonial expression of a sorrow which had driven them frantic. Over half Europo there are towers and castles known Is the White Queen's tower," "the White Queen's castle"—pathetic monuments of a tyrannic custom. When a king died in the Middle Ages his queen, wearing white for mourning, was expected to immure herself in suoh a tower for a whole year, _ never leaving her apaitments. When a duchess wa6 in deep mourning, she was required to lie dowif an a bed covered with a white sheet, ami to continue lying their for six : regretful, or resentful, weeks. Ladies of lets rank were allowed to get up off the bed after nine days, and for the rest of the six weeks they were required to remain standing in front of it on a black sheet. In Queen Anne s day even private mourning was a very elaborate, artificial, costly, and, 110 doubt, often hypocritical performance, and Dick Steele burlesques in a merry comedy customs which survived his. raillery till they succumbed to the stronger ridicule of Dickens. "Come you that are to bo mourners in t-ho house, put on youi sau looks, .and walk by me that I may sort you," cries the undertaker to his hirelings in Steele's play, "Ho you a little more upon the dismal. -This foliohas a good mortal look, place him near the corpW And the undertaker upbraids one of his men because the more he pays him to look sorrowful the gladder he agpears! Mourning Colours. Purple has not always been tho mourning colours for kings and queens, and black is not used everywhere to denoto private mourning. 'No have seen that in tho Middle Ages white was worn by bereaved queens, and Henry whito for poor Anne Boleyn. In China white has always been the mourning colour, uale-brown is the hue in Persia, vellow in Egvpt and in Burmah. But in evorv country there are mourning customs", and mourning colours of some sort, for everywhere Death "is an imjjprtuiiaW guest, and will not be said nay."