LEST WE FORGET.

A WORD ON WAR MEMORIALS.

An old friend of mine, who was a boy at Rugby under the kindly, orthodox and dignified Dr. Goulburn, told me that on his first evening at that great school, a bewildered and timid little creature, after he had been much catechised and derided by a lot of cheerful youngsters, and with a terrible perspective before him of endless interviews with countless strange and not necessarily amiable mortals, a loud bell rang, and all trooped down to prayers. He sat on a bench in a big bare hall with a timbered roof, a door opened and a grave butler appeared, carrying two wax candles in silver candlesticks, followed by the Headmaster in silk gown and bands, in unimaginable state. The candles were set down on a table. The Headmaster opened a great Bible, and in a sonorous voice read the twelfth chapter of the Book of Joshua, a gloomy enough record, which begins, ‘Now these are the kings of the land, which the Children of Israel smote,’ and ends up with a sinister catalogue, ‘The king of Jericho, one; the king of Ai, one’—and so on for many verses, finishing up with ‘The king of the nations of Gilgal, one; the king of Tirzah, one; all the kings, thirty and one.’ After which pious and edifying exercise, the book was closed, and prayer offered.

My old friend was an impressionable boy, and it seemed to him, he said, that there was a fearful and ominous significance in this list of slaughtered monarchs, depicting and emphasizing the darker side of life. But I have often thought that a few words from the Headmaster, on the vanity of human greatness and the triumph of the divine purpose, might have turned these lean and bitter memorials of the dead into an unforgettable parable. What, for instance, could be more profoundly moving in the scene of the ‘Passing of Arthur,’ where the knight steps slowly in the moonlight from the ruined shrine and the place of tombs:

That seems to lend the last touch of mystery and greatness to a scene of human endeavour, that the earth beneath the living feet should cover the bones, the hardy and heroic limbs of those who had lived and fought worthily. As the dying king, with the poignant accent of passion cries aloud:

For nothing surely in the world can be so utterly and simply moving as the record of dead greatness—unless perhaps it be the oblivion which is the end of all greatness at the last. There is a place on the bleak top of the South Downs, a great tumulus, with an earth-work round it, all grassy now and tufted with gorse, the sheep grazing over it, which looks for miles north and east and west over the fertile weald, with shadowy hills on the horizon; and to the south, where the great ridges fold together, you can catch through the haze a golden glint of the sea. I never pass the place without a deep and strange thrill. It is called the Mound of the Seven Kings; it looks over a grassy space which is known as ‘Terrible Down,’ and of what day and what doom it is the record, who shall say?

It seems impossible to us now, just as it seemed to the old hill-men who raised that tumulus, that as the world welters and widens onward, the great tragedies and losses and sacrifices which we have seen with our eyes, and the thought of which has so possessed our souls with a sense of grief and glory combined, should become but a tale that is told. But it is one of the thoughts which lie deepest and noblest in the mind and soul of man, the thought of old and infinite strife and endeavour, pain and death, courage and hope so richly blended, till it seems too great for the heart to hold. The mystery of it is that, as the Psalmist says: ‘I see that all things come to an end; but Thy commandment is exceeding broad.’ The thought, if I can define it, leaps like fire from crumbling ashes—all this great pageant of energy and heroism and fame fading farther and farther into the past—and yet, in spite of the hush of the tolling bell and the solemn music, the certainty that it is all worth doing and enduring, that we must wrest the great values out of life and make of it a noble thing; and that while memory fades and honour seems to perish, yet the seed once sown, it springs up again and again in life and beyond death, beyond all possibility of extinction.

One of the things for which, in a great time like the present—great for all its sadness, and perhaps because of its sadness—one of the things for which I thank God is that this war has revealed as nothing else could have done the latent heroism of our nation. If only it could make us poets and cure us of being prophets! I have often been ashamed to the bottom of my heart of the cries of panic-mongers and crabbed pessimists shrieking in our ears that we were a nation sunk in sloth and luxury and indifference. I have lived all my life among the young, and if ever there was a thing of which I was certain, it was that our youth was brave and modest and manly—as this long and bitter fight has daily and hourly proved.

And we have a task before us—to see that the memory of those who have fought for us and died for us should be as stably and as durably commemorated as possible. It is not that I think of a memorial as being in any sense a reward for the honoured dead. If there is one thing which our heart tells us, it is that they have a nobler reward than that. A new life, doubtless, a passing from strength to strength. But as Shelley so immortally said, ‘Fame is love disguised,’ and we owe it to our love and gratitude not only to remember, but to commemorate. I defy anyone, however simple and stolid, to set foot in our great Abbey, and not be thrilled with the thought, ‘After all, humanity is a splendid thing, so full of devotion and greatness as it is!’ Statesmen, monarchs, writers, artists, men of science, men of learning, there they sleep; there is a generous glow in many young hearts, which may thus be kindled. The poet of boyhood makes the boy, just disengaging himself from the beloved school and stepping into the world, say to himself:

This, then, is our present task—to see that our dead are worthily commemorated for our own sakes and for the sake of those who come after. How shall we do it?

In the first place, we must not do it idly and carelessly—we must take thought, have a plan and a purpose, not be in too great a hurry. Hurry is the worst foe of memorials. We have a national habit—I think it is rather a sign of greatness—not to do anything until we are obliged; but the result of that often is a loss of grace and fineness; because people who must act, and are a little ashamed of not having acted, accept any solution.

What I hope we shall do is to take careful thought where our memorials shall be set, so that they may be most constantly and plainly seen; and then how they may best fulfil their purpose, which is to remind us first, and next to kindle emotion and imagination. We have an ugly habit of combining, if we can, local utility with a memorial, as in the well-known story of the benevolent clergyman who read out the announcement of the death of a great statesman and added, ‘That is just what we wanted! We have long needed a new water supply!’ That is like using a grandfather’s sword to trim a privet-hedge with! I do not believe in fitting things in. If we commemorate, let us commemorate by a memorial which arrests and attracts the eye, is long and gratefully remembered, and by an inscription which touches the heart, and does not merely merge a man among the possessors of all human gifts and virtues. I remember a Georgian monument in a cathedral, where a lean man in a toga peeped anxiously out of an arbour of fluted columns, and of whom it was announced that in him ‘every talent which adorns the human spirit was united with every virtue which sustains it.’ How different is the little tablet in a church I know on which a former choir-boy is commemorated! He had joined the army, and had won a Victoria Cross in the Boer War which he did not live to receive. The facts were most briefly told; and below were the words, which I can hardly read without tears:

‘Thou hast put a new song in my mouth.’

What we want, then, are beauty, dignity, simplicity, and force. We want what appeals directly to the eye, and then darts a strong emotion into the heart, an emotion in which gratitude and hope are blended.

I must not here attempt to unfold a wide technical scheme; indeed I could not if I would; but I may perhaps outline a few principles.

First comes the difficulty that places like to manage their own affairs; and that the men who administer local interests, however devotedly and industriously, do not acquire their influence by artistic tastes. The next difficulty is that our artistic instinct in England is not widely diffused. When Walter Pater’s attention was called to some expensive tribute, and he became aware that an expression of admiration was required, he used to say in his soft voice, ‘Very costly, no doubt,’ and this was always accepted as an appropriate compliment, he said. A third difficulty is the deep-seated mistrust in England of the expert—it is all part of our independence—but the expert is often regarded simply as a man who lets you in for heavier expense than you had intended.

It would be well if some central advisory board could be established—a central authority can hardly be expected, and indeed would not even be desirable. The nature of memorials should be carefully scrutinised. We are always weak in allegorical representation, and perhaps for that very reason have a great fondness for it. Our civic heraldry, for instance, is woefully weak, not by excess of symbolism, so much as by a desperate inclusiveness of all local tradition, till the shield becomes a landscape in which a company of travellers have hung their private property on every bush.

Thus with our taste for representing and explaining and accounting and cataloguing, our memorials become architectural first, with every cornice loaded with precarious figures, like the painting described by Dickens of six angels carrying a stout gentleman to heaven in festoons with some difficulty. Our inscriptions become biographies. Again, the surrounding scene is little regarded. A statesman in a bronze frock-coat and trousers reading aloud a bronze manuscript behind the railings of a city square, embowered in acacias, has no power over the mind except the power of a ludicrous sense of embarrassment. A statue, majestic enough in a pillared alcove, is only uncomfortable in a storm of wind and rain.

We ought, I believe, to fight shy of elaborate designs, because the pantomime of allegory at once begins. What we rather need is simplicity of statement, with perhaps a touch of emblem, no more, of characteristic material, of perfect gravity, so that the gazer can see at once that the matter recorded is great and significant, and desires to know more. It is said that an inscription was once to be seen in India, marking one of the farthest points of the advance of Alexander the Great. It was a slab with the words:

ΕΝΤΑΥΘΑ · ΕϹΤΗΝ

‘Here I stood’—upon it. What could be more impressive, what more calculated to sow a seed of wonder in an imaginative mind?

These memorials should, I believe, evoke the spirit of the artist, as a craftsman, rather than as a designer. Alike in inscriptions and in representations, the wholesome and humble appeal must be direct and personal, avoiding rhetoric and over-emphasis, as well as elaborate conventions which other hands will dully and mechanically reproduce. If, as in cast metal-work, reproduction is natural and inevitable, let the designs be perfectly simple and sincere; if again it be painter, sculptor, carver, or builder that is called upon to create a memorial, let the responsibility and originality of the craft be his, and not be superseded or overruled by the authority of the design—for this indeed is, as Professor Prior said wittily to me the other day, as though a surgeon should provide a specification and an estimate for an operation, and leave the execution of it to other hands.

But we must not suppose that we can insist upon any particular form of memorial in any particular place. What we may desire is that the memorial, whatever it is, of this great and heroic trial through which we are passing, should grow up out of the minds of the inhabitants of a city or a town, and should be made by the hands of inhabitants as well. I do not desire that they should be too costly. Indeed it may well be that we shall have given so much of our resources to the prosecution of the war that we shall have but little left for adorning our trophies. I do not desire that they should be constructed to serve other uses, at least not primarily. They are to tell their own story, a story of noble deeds, and provide alike a dedication of our dead to honour, and a dedication of ourselves to gratitude and future effort.

I hope too most earnestly that we shall not accumulate resources on one national monument, to astonish tourists and to feed our vanity; but that as many places as possible should have a record of a great fact which has penetrated our national life more deeply than any historical event in the whole of our annals.

Forethought, then, simplicity, naturalness, eloquence of emotion rather than of word, native feeling, these will, I hope, be the notes of our memorials. Let us try for once to express ourselves, not to cover up truth with turgid verdicts, but to say what we mean and what we feel as simply and emphatically as we can.

We are not likely to forget the war; but what we may forget is that the result of it is the outcome of modest, faithful, loyal services done with no flourish or vanity, by thousands of very simple, straightforward people, who did not argue themselves into indignation, or reflect much about what they were doing, but came forward, leaving comfort and home and work and love, without any balancing of motives, but just because they felt that they must take their place in the battle of liberty and right with intolerable pride and aggression. That is the plain truth; and that is the best and only proof of the greatness of a nation that it should prefer death, if need be, to all the pleasant business of life. If this or any of this can be recorded, if this national impulse can be kept alive in our children, we need not fear either life with all its complications, or death with all its mysteries. The nation will live; and the memorials of these dark and great days will stand to witness to our far-off sons and daughters that their old forefathers did not live to no purpose and did not die in vain.