Here lies that Man, who, whilst he was in Breath
Made our great Mother tremble that her skill
Was overmastered, who now, by his Death,
Fears her own Powers may grow forever still. [28]
Beneath this is written
This stone is dedicated to Randolph Henry Ash, a great poet and a true and kind husband, by his sorrowing widow and wife of more than 45 years, Ellen Christiana Ash, in the hope that "one short sleep past, we wake eternally"[29] where there is no more parting.
Later critics have expressed amusement or scorn at the "bathos"[30] of comparing this prolific Victorian poet to the great Raphael, though both, in the early part of this century, were out of favour. It is perhaps more surprising that there is no contemporary record either of disapproval that the Stone should have no mention of the Christian faith, or possibly, conversely, admiration for the tact with which Ellen had avoided this. What her choice of citation does is to link her husband, through his own poem and Raphael and Bemba, to the whole ambiguous Renaissance tradition, exemplified in the circular Pantheon, a Christian church which was originally in the form of a classical temple. It is not to be supposed that these thoughts were necessarily in her mind, although they may have discussed these matters together.
We cannot avoid speculating about what was contained in the box which was buried with Randolph Ash, and was observed to be still intact when his widow's casket was lowered beside him seven years later.[31] Ellen Ash shared her generation's prudery and squeamishness about the publication of private papers. The claim is frequently made-not least by Ellen herself[32] -that Randolph participated in these scruples. Fortunately for us he left no testamentary indications to this effect, and even more fortunately for us, his widow's carrying out of his supposed injunctions was patchy and haphazard. We do not know what invaluable evidence is lost to us, but we have seen, in these pages, the ample richness of what remains. Nevertheless we cannot help wishing that those who disturbed his rest in 1893 had seen fit at least to open the hidden box, survey it and record for posterity what it contained. Such decisions to destroy, to hide, the records of an exemplary life are made in the heat of life, or more often in the grip of immediatepost-mortem despair, and have little to do with the measured judgment, and desire for full and calm knowledge, which succeed these perturbations. Even Rossetti thought better of burying his poems with his tragic wife and had to demean himself and her in disinterring them. I think often of what Freud said about the relations of our primitive forebears to the dead, who could be seen ambivalently as demons and ghosts, or as revered ancestors:
"The fact that demons are always regarded as the spirits of those who have died recently shows better than anything the influence of mourning on the origin of belief in demons. Mourning has a quite specific psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the survivors' memories and hopes from the dead. When this has been achieved, the pain grows less and with it the remorse and self-reproaches and consequently the fear of the demon as well. And the same spirits who to begin with were feared as demons may now expect to meet with friendlier treatment; they are revered as ancestors and appeals are made to them for help."[33]
Might we not argue, in extenuation of our desire to behold what is hidden, that those whose disapproval made demons of them to their nearest and dearest, are now our beloved ancestors, whose relics we would cherish in the light of day?
-------------------------------------------
[22] Recorded by Swinburne in a letter to Theodore Watts-Dunton. A. C. Swinburne, CollectedLetters, Vol. V, p. 280. Swinburne's poem, "The Old Ygdrasil and the Churchyard Yew," is supposed to have been inspired by his emotions on the passing of R. H. Ash
[23] Reported in The Times, November 30th 1889. The reporter remarked "several comely young maidens, in floods of unembarrassed tears and a large gathering of respectful working men, beside the Literary Lions."
[24] Ellen Ash, in a letter to Edith Wharton, December 20th 1889, reprinted in The Letters of R. H. Ash ed. Cropper, vol. 8, p. 384. A similar expression of her intention occurs in an unpublished passage of her Journal, written two nights after the poet's death. The Journal is shortly (1967) to appear, edited by Dr Beatrice Nest, of Prince Albert College, London University.
[25] I have spent long hours walking in this countryside, and have observed the way the earth characteristically lies in layers, and throws up the dark flints embedded in the white chalk, which shine in the ploughed fields like snow.
[26] This Shakespeare, and those violets, repose now in the Stant Collection in Robert Dale Owen University, where they are preserved.
[27]See, for instance, the letter to Tennyson, in the Stant Collection (August 24th 1859), which is wholly bordered by a series of such formalised trees, the roots and branches intermingling, not unlike a William Morris repeating pattern. Stant MS no 146093 a.
[28] The Latin is Ille hic est Raphael timuit quo sospite vinci rerum magna parens et moriente mori.
[29] John Donne, "Death Be Not Proud," Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner, p.9
[30] An irritable comment of F. R. Leavis in Scrutiny, vol. XIII, pp. 130-31:"That the Victorians took Randolph Ash seriously as a poet is sufficientlyevinced by the seriousness of their obituary panegyrics, which claimed, like his bathetic tombstone, supplied by his wife, that he was the equal of Shakespeare, Milton, Rembrandt, Raphael and Racine."
[31] Recorded by Patience Meredith in a letter to her sister Faith, now in thepossession of Marianne Wormald, great-granddaughter of Edmund Meredith.
[32] See above, note 24, and in the unpublished Journal, November 25th 1889.
[33] Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, Works (Standard edn 1955), vol. 13, pp. 65-6.
NOVEMBER 27TH 1889
The old woman trod softly along the dark corridors, and climbed the stairs, standing in uncertainty on various landings. From the back-we are going to see her clearly now-from the back and in the shadow, she might still have been any age. She wore a velvet dressing-gown, and soft embroidered slippers. She carried herself upright and without creaking, though her body was comfortably fleshed out. Her hair hung in a long pale plait between her shoulders; in the light of her candle, it could have been palest gold, though it was creamy white, a soft brown turned.
She listened to the house. Her sister Patience was sleeping in the best spare room, and somewhere on the second floor her nephew George, now an aspiring young barrister, slept too.
In his own bedroom, his hands crossed, his eyes closed, Randolph Henry Ash lay still, his soft white hair framed by quilted satin, his head pillowed on embroidered silk.
When she found she could not sleep, she had gone to him, opened his door quietly, quietly, and stood, looking down, taking in the change. Immediately after death, he had looked like himself, gentled and calmed after the struggle, resting. Now he was gone away, there was no one there, only an increasingly carved and bony simulacrum, the yellowing skin stretched taut over peaks of bone, the eyes sunk, the jaw sharp.
She looked at these changes, murmured a prayer into the blanket of silence, and said to the thing on the bed, "Where are you?" The whole house smelled, as it did every night, of extinguished coal fires, cold grates, old smoke.