The Apostle and the Wild Ducks/Statues

Monuments last for ever. Therefore the mistakes of monuments last forever. That is what the modern world does not understand about the ancient dignity of marble or of stone. If I make a mistake in writing an article, I can cross it out. But if I make a mistake in carving a colossal figure of Rameses the Seventh (if there was a Rameses the Seventh) there is a tendency for that mistake to remain, and become unalterable; you cannot cross it out. If in carving Rameses you have given that slight curl to the nostril which suggests that his cynicism was cruel (as his enemies unreasonably maintained) rather than kindly (as those who knew him best are quite prepared to assert emphatically), in that case it is to be feared that your mistake about Rameses will remain, and be perpetuated for ever in that face of marble. If you have done him any injustice, you have done him an eternal injustice. If you have slandered him at all, you have slandered him forever.

Of course there is the method of smashing every statue you see. Personally I am in favour of it. I agree with the ancient Jews that the graven image has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind. That is, it has too hypnotic and horrible an influence on mankind if mankind has no religion; and I am speaking of the modern world. Moreover, the ordinary statue has a curious power of falsifying the ordinary person. There was a great deal to be said for the old eighteenth century method of making monumental statues of great men. The eighteenth century method of making a statue of a great man was quite simple. You simply made the statue of the great man as unlike the great man as possible; you then gave him bare shoulders and a Roman toga, and you called it the classical style, which perhaps it was. There is something to be said for this classical style. There is also something to be said for the modern realistic style of Monsieur Rodin, in which you leave out a man's leg or arm at random, to indicate that you have forgotten it in the frenzy of your genius. Both these styles have real ideas behind them; but I think there was an unfortunate period between them, especially in England, and that this period gave rise to the general disposition to smash statues which exists in all the healthy-minded English. I wonder if all the statues were as bad at the time when the army of Oliver Cromwell had finally defeated the army of Charles I. If they were as bad it would go a long way to explain the iconoclasm of the Puritans. We feel reasonably angry with them because they smashed to pieces many beautiful and celebrated images. Still, we never saw the images.

Perhaps the most pathetic instance of this English sculpture applied to the wrong purpose can be found in the five or six statues which stand in the square opposite the Houses of Parliament. The personality of the politician is there not expressed even in the smallest degree. Punch's caricatures of Palmerston make him more dignified than his statue makes him. Punch, which hated Disraeli, represented him as a more real and admirable creature than the shapeless one before whom bunches of primroses are offered on Primrose Day. If the spirit of these statesmen could return they would prefer the fleeting caricatures of the comic papers to these everlasting caricatures in stone. They would prefer the thing drawn in ill-nature by their enemies to this thing conceived in adoration by their friends. And yet the definition of the deficiency is not quite easy to state. The figures are reasonably well designed; reasonably well dressed. There are no mistakes in costume or in anatomy that the eye of a layman can detect or denounce. Lord Palmerston wears a frock-coat; I suppose he did wear a frock-coat. He holds out his hand; I suppose that from time to time in the course of his animated and interesting career he did sometimes hold out his hand. He has whiskers; I presume he had whiskers. Sometimes, in a dark dream of ecstasy, I venture to hope not such whiskers; still I never saw him, and it may be so. There is nothing essentially unreasonable or unlikely about any part of his appearance or the appearance of the other stone statesmen who share with him that sacred and most impressive place. And yet when one thinks what a place it is, one suddenly sees that all those figures are hopelessly and incurably comic. If there is any England, this is the high historic Senate of England. If there is any England, there runs the sacred English river. And when we think of England as anything everlasting, even when we think of England as anything moderately lasting, those Victorian stone figures become suddenly like silly dolls. There must be some reason for this. And I think the reason is exactly that the men who put up those statues did not really feel as if they were putting up anything permanent at all; as if there was nothing in Palmerston (or at least, in their view of Palmerston), as if there was nothing in Beaconsfield (or at least, in their admiration of Beaconsfield), that suggested any line that was eternal, any grouping or massing that seemed able to endure the open day. For this is the real and final test of a statue. Its test is in two forms of trial. First, it must be able to endure publicity. Second, it must be able to endure solitude. One must be able to think of it as abandoned. The epic of war is for the feast of great princes; the old wives' tale is for the circle of gossips and rustics; the picture is for the inhabited room; the miniature is for the locket. Even the carved church is mostly conceived for a common need, and even a common comfort. But the stone statue is something that one can leave alone under the stars.

It would be a strange thing if, after all, those four or five stone figures expressed all that has been wrong with England for so long a time. It would be strange if the bad carving of Lord Palmerston's frock-coat were the only thing that really expressed what is wrong with the Party system. Yet I fancy that it is exactly there or thereabout that the truth lies. We admire our Party leaders. We do not believe in them. We praise them for making so much of our case, as if all the time it were really a bad case. They are all advocates and they were better in the eighteenth century, when they all wore wigs. You cannot make an enduring statue of an advocate, for you cannot make a statue unless you have an idea; and the essence of an advocate is that he has any ideas or all ideas. Exactly what men admired in Palmerston is exactly what men cannot carve in stone; his easy variety, his quickness to leap, which seemed almost like omnipresence. `What a faculty that fellow has,' said Macaulay admiringly, `for falling on his feet!' It is a splendid capacity, doubtless, to fall on one's feet; but if one is a statue it is dangerous to fall on anything else.

What people admired in Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, was simply his jumpiness. But jumpiness cannot be expressed in stone. I am aware that Monsieur Rodin and others have brought the eccentricity of statuary to a high point; but even they have not yet succeeded in making a statue of a man who has jumped clean off the ground. It was the whole point of Beaconsfield that he jumped clean off the ground. Seriously speaking, I am not sure that he had ever been on the ground; hence he was a subject inappropriate for statuary, and his statue in front of the Houses of Parliament is simply a great gown with a goatish face on top of it. But indeed the sculptors are scarcely to be blamed if they showed inadequate results, for their art can only express eternal ideas, and they were called upon to deal with personalities whose whole boast was that no ideas could be eternal. What could the best sculptors do when they were told to make characteristic statues of six acrobats?