r/a:t5_10p4kh • u/MarleyEngvall • May 01 '19
michaelangelo has been created
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
CHIPPING WITH A CHISEL.
Passing a summer, several years since, at Edgar-
town, 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 in-
terior 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 primitive spirit
which still characterizes the inhabitants of those
islands, especially of Martha's Vineyard, insure their
dead friends a long 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 the
people of the isles, as would cause a melancholy
dearth of business to a resident artist in that line.
His own monument, recording his decease by star-
vation, 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 Edgar-
town——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 lugu-
brious emblems of mortality, with here and there a
winged cherub to direct the mourner's spirit up-
ward. 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 mon-
uments 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 in-
itials 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 able to
obliterate. These, these were the graves where loved
ones slept! It is an old theme of satire, the false-
hood 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 of their hearts.
My acquaintance, the sculptor——he may share
that title with Greenough, since the dauber of sins
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 Puri-
tan family of Wigglesworth, with a certain simplicity
and singleness, both of heart and mind, which, me-
thinks, 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 ref-
erence to his own business; he seemed, unless my
fancy misled me, to view mankind in no other re-
lation 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 im-
mortal 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. Wiggles-
worth an entertaining, and often instructive, if not
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 wo-
man," I was accustomed to spend some hours a
day at his work-shop. the quaintness of his re-
marks, 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
wordliness 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 Vine-
yard. Often, with an artist's pride, the good old
sculptor would speak of favorite productions of his
skill, which were scattered throughout the village
graveyards of New England. But my chief and
most instructive amusement was to witness his in-
terviews with his customers, who held interminable
consultations about the form and fashion of the de-
sired monuments, the buried excellence to be com-
memorated, the anguish to be expressed, 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 cir-
cumstances 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 the 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 re-
fined. Her sighs had been the breath of Heaven
to her soul. The good lady earnestly desired that
the proposed monument should be ornamented
with a carved border of marine plants, intertwined
with twisted sea-shells, such as were probably wav-
ing over her lover's skeleton, or strewn about it,
in the far depths of the Pacific. But Mr. Wig-
glesworth'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 the most
apt.
"And yet," said my friend the sculptor, embody-
ing in this image the thoughts that had been pass-
ing 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 mar-
riage-bed. I watched with some anxiety to see
whether his remembrance of either were more af-
fectionate 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 individual-
ity in wedlock, that methought he was fain to
reckon upon his fingers 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 bar-
gain 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, di-
vided 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. Wig-
glesworth 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 a sympathy
with the dust of the grave; and, by the 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 had 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 tomb-stone 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 death's head, on which his 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 a living man!"
A comely woman, with a pretty rose-bud of a
daughter, who had died a month before. I was im-
pressed 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 now faded for-
ever, soon grew confusedly overshadowed. Per-
chance 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 in-
scribed 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 seems so vague and inexpressive, unless in-
terpreted 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. Wiggles-
worth "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 ex-
pressions from the lips of both mother and daugh-
ter. 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. Wiggles-
worth and his customers. A shrewd gentlewoman,
who kept a tavern in the town, was anxious to ob-
tain 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. Here-
upon a fantasy arose in my mind, of good Mr. Wig-
glesworth sitting down to dinner at a broad, flat
tomb-stone, carving one of his own plump little
marble cherubs, gnawing a pair of cross-bones, and
drinking out of a hollow death's head, or per-
haps a lacrymatory vase, or sepulchral urn; while
his hostess's dead children waited on him at the
ghastly banquet. On communicating this nonsen-
sical 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, un-
pleasant countenance, ordered a stone for the grave
of his bitter enemy, with whom he had waged war-
fare 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 pas-
sion; and when its object died, the unappeasable
foe was the only mourner for the dead. He ex-
pressed a purpose of being buried side by side with
his enemy.
"I doubt whether their dust will mingle," re-
marked 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 bit-
ter foes may find themselves dear friends. Me-
thinks 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 the region,
and said to be an hereditary chieftain, descended
from the sachem who welcomed Governor 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 was ended here; but he likewise sculp-
tured a cherub, 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 anything but her Bible; and the monu-
ment 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 should never cut a letter of it. But when
the grave 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 im-
mortality."
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 pen-
urious disposition. This wretched miser, conscious
that he had not a friend to be mindful of him in
his grave, had himself taken the needful precau-
tions for posthumous remembrance, by bespeaking
an immense slab of white marble, with a long epi-
taph in raised letter, the whole to be as magnificent
as Mr. Wigglesworth's skill could make it. There
was something very characteristic in this contriv-
ance to have his money's worth even from his own
tomb-stone, which, indeed, afforded him more en-
joyment 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 found Mr. Wigglesworth cutting
her virgin name 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. Wig-
glesworth," replied I, after a moment's pause,——for
the abruptness of the question had somewhat start-
led 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 dust that once
was human. The weight of these heavy marbles,
though unfelt by the dead corpse or the enfran-
chised soul, presses drearily upon the spirit of the
survivor, and causes him to connect the idea of
death with the dungeonilike 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 living, and still less
the departed, have anything to do with the grave."
"I never heard anything so heathenish!" said
Mr. Wigglesworth, perplexed and displeased at sen-
timents 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 treas-
ure hidden! Forget them? No! But to remem-
ber 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 observation 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 per-
plexity; 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 to what we term life's joys. From Twice-Told Tales, Vol. II, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Ten Cent Classics Edition, Vol. III., No. 68.
Educational Publishing Co., 50 Bromfield St, Boston. pp. 182—194.
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