RELIC-KEEPING.
NO small amount of excitement was produced in Paris during the past week by rumours, first, that the remains of the great Napoleon had been stolen from the sarcophagus at the Invalides, where, by a strange irony, they were laid with such pomp, not by the Third Napoleon, but by a Bourbon King ; and secondly, that the heart which had been separately embalmed and preserved was not in reality that of the Emperor, but merely a sheep's heart. It is almost needless to say how utterly absurd was the rumour that the body had been stolen from its tomb. The weight of the lid of the sarcophagus is some ten tons, and without machinery it would have been utterly impossible to remove the remains, which, again, are guarded by a specially selected body of old soldiers. The question whether the heart is real or not, is, of course, one of evidence. The allegation, which was made many years ago, is, that before the post-mortem examination could be completed, darkness overtook the surgeons of St. Helena, who accordingly left the Emperor's body with the heart and viscera separated from the trunk. On returning next morning to finish their task, they are said to have found that rats had eaten the heart, and in order to avoid the scandal of the accident, they procured a sheep's heart, and passed it off as the Emperor's.
Whether this story is true or false, might seem at first eight to matter very little. After all, none ever saw the heart after its sepulture, nor, if they did, would they be able to detect the im- posture,—unless, indeed, they should happen to have the special knowledge which, it is alleged, compelled the great German anatomist to spring from an ecstasy of devotion before the relics of the Three Kings at Cologne, with the exclamation, "Good heavens ! they are calves' bones !” Yet, notwithstand- ing this, who is there who would not feel a touch of regret if undoubted evidence were brought to show that Shakespeare's body does not rest beneath his tomb at Stratford ? Nobody sees it, but all like to think it is there. All men love material links with the past, and are reasonable in loving. The imagination may be strong, but who can deny that it works more strongly when face to face with some actual relic of the gone? A grass-covered barrow on some lonely ridge of down is in itself nothing ; but who is there who does not find that the great scroll of those ages before history was, in which lie hidden the secrets of primeval existence', rolls back more widely and shows a clearer record, when his very feet are pressing the ground that those ancient mourners pressed, as, with dread solemnities of feast and sacrifice, they laid the warrior chieftain in his grave ? But if the mind grows passionate at the sight of a link that it can directly connect with the nameless, formless past, or with some mere material object, how much more so when the link is with a man or woman who has lived, and whom we know by name and by record as certainly as we know those who are living to-day but whom we have not neon! Theoretically, as we have seen neither, we know Cromwell as well as we know Prince Bismarck; and yet the fact that the former is not living makes him far more shadowy and dubious to us. One may argue indefinitely that the evidence that Cromwell lived is quite as good as that Prince Bismarck lives ; but the fact always remains that the man who is alive takes an infinitely more definite shape in the mind than the man who is but a memory. It is not strange, then, that to actually touch the glove or the helmet which Cromwell wore gives us a sense of security in his exist- ence which can hardly be obtained in any other way. How much more should we feel this security were we to touch the hand itself. Most of all should we realise his existence, if we saw him in his habit of a man as he stood in his audience-chamber at Whitehall, or as he lectured his Par- liaments on the nation's needs, standing, sword on thigh, before his chair of state in Westminster Hall. Is there any one who does not wish that Cromwell, and all those who ruled England before and since his time, could have been preserved by those arts the great Florentine embalmers have discovered, by which the flesh of human bodies can be petrified and rendered
as solid and as able to resist the action of the air as if the life were still in them P What would one not give to be able to see the burial-place of our Kings and Queens as a vast church, where, each enthroned, the Sovereigns of England should, in the likeness of the living, show to us and our descendants the very bodies of the men and women who ruled over us ? Pictures that preserve the expression, and have caught the character that shines from the eyes or larks in the set of the month, may in reality give us far better portraits, be more true to the men and women as they lived, than such embalmed figures ; but would not one infinitely prefer to see the bodies of Henry VIII. and Charles I. fresh from their tombs, and for a moment unspoiled by the air—as George IV. saw them at Windsor—than all their pictured on the canvasses of Holbein and Vandyke ?
While thus arguing that in our day one of the chief feelings connected with relics of the great dead, is the hunger for a sense of reality in connection with the men of the past, which can only be satisfied by some material link—of which a portion of the actual body is the most perfect—we must not, of course, leave out of sight the fact that in all probability the feeling that the human body is in itself sacred has a good deal to do with the sense of religion which attaches to relics of the dead. If we have an instinctive feeling towards the preservation of the human body generally, this feeling is no doubt intensified in the case of those whom we reverence from any cause ; and thus the desire to keep relics of the great dead, which still at this day survives much cynicism, is probably dimly connected, though in a way not recognised, with our religions feelings. The manner in which this instinct for preserving the body seems to have grown up in the human mind is curious. In its most intense form we find it among the Egyptians. It is not too much to say that in the Valley of the Nile half the energy of the living was devoted to the preservation of the dead. The Egyp- tians were possessed of an active belief in the existence of the soul after death. lte ultimate prospects of immortality depended, however, on whether or not the body could be pre- served. After death, the eon] passed a vast period of time in expiatory journeys in the nether world. These journeys over, it returned to occupy the body before abandoned. An imperative necessity was thus cast upon all those who valued an afterlife to prepare means of embalming so perfect and tombs so secure, that when the body was again required, the soul might find it ready. To the Greeks and Romans, to whom the nether world was but a land of shadows, the preservation of the body was not a necessity ; and accordingly, like the Hindoos, they burnt their dead. With Christianity came the idea of the resurrection of the body, and so of its sacredness, and the necessity of its preservation from destruction. Though the spiritual application which the idea soon received—that of con- tinuous identity in a non-material state—prevented the notion from having the effect it had in Egypt, there can be no doubt that in the earlier centuries of Christian history it had much to do with the growth of the worship and preservation of relics
If we turn from the more restricted theme of the relics of the dead to relics of the past in general, it is curious to notice how deeply they have often affected men's minds. The First Napoleon, who never neglected any means by which he might influence human nature so as to make it more pliable for his purposes, recognised very clearly the sentimental influence which could be exercised in this way. For instance, before setting out to Boulogne to arrange for the invasion of E ngland, he had the Bayeux tapestry - brought to Paris, and exposed to view in the Palais Royal, in order that the people of Paris might be inspired by the sight of the tapestry made to commemorate what he chose, with a fine disregard of history and enthnology, to regard as a previous conquest of England by the French. Not con. tent with this, he professed, while encamped at Boulogne, to have found a coin of Julius Cmsar and the arms of one a William the Conqueror's followers. It is grotesque to read of, but Napoleon did right not only to rely upon his soldiers' credulity, but upon the effect of touching their imaginations. It was the best possible means of bringing home to his men the lesson he desired to teach them—that Francs had con- quered England before, and would conquer her again—to show them the arms which one of the conquerors had left on the very spot from which a successful invasion had actually been made. The restoration of Napolecn's body to France helped to revive the Napoleonic cult as no other incident did, and all Germany feels the stronger and fuller of continuous life because the Emperor addresses his Parliament from the throne pressed by
the feet of Charlemagne. Plenty of other instances might be given of how great has been the effect of relics on mankind. Indeed, relic-worship, and relic-keeping, if we regard them in their true light, have an extremely important place in the world; nor is it unnatural that this should be so. As long as men reverence the past, as long as their imaginations are fired and their emotions awakened not only by the ear but by the eye and by the touch, so long will relic-keeping be customary, and when the object is a lofty one, not unwise. Nothing seems so ridiculous to some minds as an expenditure of energy in keep- ing, say, an arm of St. Peter ; but how, if the memory of St. Peter is invaluable to Christiana, and if the arm wakes that memory towards life? Why is that stupider than the preserva- tion of a photograph of the dead ?
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