ABSTRACT
THERE was a letter in a morning paper some time ago in which a clergyman complained that one of his wealthier parishioners had spent some three hundred pounds on his funeral; and the writer held with some justice that the money could have been better spent on providing food for the living. And yet our instinct to live with the dead, to attribute sensation to the dead body, to ‘extend our memories by monuments’ is one of the commonest. It is a mark of our own adolescence; the description of American funeral customs in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One reveals a terrifying exploitation of this instinctive emotion for commercial ends. 1 The pompes funèbres are commoner on the continent than here: but many of us remember seeing ‘the long funerals blacken all the way’, the black horses, the Dead March in Saul, and all the dutiful respect that masked, perhaps, the truth: Only the dead can be forgiven: But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone. 2
