The fate of all such things.
Glance back into Chaucer and note how they have thriven on their own
merits and not on professorial recommendations; thriven, or perished, or
put on new faces!
I would make an exception to this rule. Foreign importations which do
not belong to us by right, idioms we have enticed from over the sea for
one reason or another, ought to remain, as it were, stereotyped. They
are respected guests and cannot decently be jostled in our crowd; let
them be jostled in their own; here, on British soil, they should be
allowed to retain that primal signification which, in default of a
corresponding English term, they were originally taken over to express.
What prompts me to this exordium is the discovery that a few pages back,
with a blameworthy hankering after the picturesque, I have grossly
misused a foreign word. Those cats in Trajan's Forum at Rome are nowise
a "macabre exhibition"; they are not macabre in the least; they are sad,
or saddening. The charnel-house flavour is absent.
My apologies to the French language, to the cats, and to the reader....
Now whoever wishes to see a truly macabre exhibition at Rome may visit
the Peruvian mummies in the Kircher Museum. It is characteristic of the
spirit in which guide-books are written that, while devoting long
paragraphs to some worthless picture of a hallucinated venerable, they
hardly utter a word about these most remarkable and gruesome objects.
Those old Peruvians, like the Egyptians, had necrophilous leanings. They
cultivated an unwholesome passion for corpses, and called it religion.
Many museums contain such relics from the New World in various attitudes
of discomfort; frequently seated, as though trying to be at rest after
life's long journey. No two are alike; and all are horrible of aspect.
Some have been treated with balsam to preserve the softer parts; others
are shrivelled. Some are filled with chopped straw, like any stuffed
crocodile in a show; others contain precious coca-leaves and powdered
fragments of shell, which were doubtless placed there so that the
defunct might receive nourishment up to the time when his soul should
once more have rejoined the body. Every one knows, furthermore, that
these American ancients were fond of playing tricks with the shape of
the skull - a custom which was forbidden by the Synod of Lima in 1585 and
which Hippocrates describes as being practised among the inhabitants of
the Crimea. [26] It adds considerably to their ghastly appearance.
One looks at them and asks oneself: what are they now, these gentle
Incas who loved the arts and music, these children of the Sun, whose
civic acquirements amazed their conquerors?
