The Mode in Monuments

STRAY THOUGHTS IN HIGHGATE CEMETERY

On a sharp, sunlight morning, when the white clouds are drifting swiftly
across the luminous blue sky, there is no finer walk about London than
the Highgate ridge. One may stay awhile on the Archway looking down upon
the innumerable roofs of London stretching southward into the haze, and
shining here and there with the reflection of the rising sun, and then
wander on along the picturesque road by the college of Saint Aloysius to
the new Catholic church, and so through the Waterlow Park to the
cemetery. The Waterlow Park is a pleasant place, full of children and
aged persons in perambulators during the middle hours of the day, and in
the summer evening time a haunt of young lovers; but your early wanderer
finds it solitary save for Vertumnus, who, with L.C.C. on the front of
him, is putting in crocuses. So we wander down to the little red lodge,
whence a sinuous road runs to Hampstead, and presently into the close
groves of monuments that whiten the opposite slope.

How tightly these white sepulchres are packed here! How different this
congestion of sorrow from the mossy latitude of God's Acre in the
country! The dead are crammed together as closely as the living seemed
in that bird's-eye view from the Archway. There is no ample shadow of
trees, no tangled corners where mother earth may weave flower garlands
over her returning children. The monuments positively jostle and elbow
each other for frontage upon the footways. And they are so rawly clean
and assertive. Most of them are conspicuously new whitened, with
freshly-blackened or newly-gilt inscriptions, bare of lichen, moss, or
mystery, and altogether so restless that it seems to the meditative man
that the struggle for existence, for mere standing room and a show in
the world, still rages among the dead. The unstable slope of the hill,
with its bristling array of obelisks, crosses and urns, craning one
above another, is as directly opposed to the restfulness of the village
churchyard with its serene outspreading yews as midday Fleet Street to a
Sabbath evening amidst the Sussex hills. This cemetery is, indeed, a
veritable tumult of tombs.

Another thing that presently comes painfully home to one is the lack of
individuality among all these dead. Not a necessary lack of
individuality so much as a deliberate avoidance of it. As one wanders
along the steep, narrow pathways one is more and more profoundly
impressed by the wholesale flavour of the mourning, the stereotyping of
the monuments. The place is too modern for _memento mori_ and the
hour-glass and the skull. Instead, Slap & Dash, that excellent firm of
monumental masons, everywhere crave to be remembered. Truly, the firm of
Slap & Dash have much