THE PURITANIC VIEW OF HISTORIC MONUMENTS.
WE cannot go with those Liberals who object to a monu- ment being erected to Lord Beaconsfield at the expense of the nation, on the ground that Lord Beaconsfield, instead of being a great benefactor to the nation,led it into some of the worst of its mistakes. We hold, indeed, with absolute certainty that so it was. We believe the Afghan war to have been perhaps the most guilty, as well as pernicious, undertaking in which the British nation has engaged during the present century ; and we have never felt anything but profound disgust for the secret diplomacy which resulted in the Anglo-Turkish and Anglo-Russian Conventions. But what we have to look to in erecting historic monuments in Westminster Abbey is not the moral worth of the statesman to whom they are erected, but his historic significance. The Abbey should commemorate historic greatness in all its aspects. If Perceval, and Peel, and Palmerston are there, surely it is fitting that one who will be remembered long after Perceval is forgotten, who will be remembered for generations to come as Sir Robert,Peel's most formidable assailant and most bril- liant successor, whose various encounters with Lord Palmer- ston will be only less historic than his encounters with Mr. Gladstone, should be commemorated there also. We ought not to think of the Abbey as a convenient place for commemorating our gratitude to the dead. There are many great men buried there, and rightly buried there, towards whom the sentiment of grati- tude, except so far as one may, perhaps, feel it for every one who adds any sort of interest to the English name and the English tongue, would be absolutely impossible. Who could feel grati- tude to Mary, Queen of Scots, or even to the poet Dryden 3 If Byron had been buried there,—as we venture to think almost all Englishmen who value the Abbey wish that he had been, —who would feel any gratitude, beyond the enjoyment derived from his wonderful genius, to Byron ? What we look for in the monuments of the Abbey is not the expression of reverence or gratitude, but the expression of the historic sense that the men there commemorated were a part of the life of England, and that their monuments add new touches of reality to the many-coloured web of its national memories. Nothing seems to us less desirable than a Puritanic principle in weeding such a grove of monuments as that of Westminster Abbey. It should be a field in which all sorts of distinction are received with open arms so long only as the distinction is great enough to justify the sacrifice of space. A prudish moral spirit appropriating it to those only to whom a majority of the people for the time being feel under a debt of gratitude, would turn the Abbey from a vivid re'sund of British history into a dull record of temporary popularity. But it is said that for the nation to erect a monument to such a one as Lord Beaconsfield, whose policy it has repu- diated and condemned, is an act of evil example, tending to diminish the effect produced by that repudiation and con- demnation. We do not think so. There are many Kings buried in the Abbey to whom the English people can never feel gratitude, but none the less the English people would not wish for a moment that they had been buried elsewhere. For good or evil, their doings were identified with the history of their times, and in recalling their story we recall the history of their times. And surely if that apply to Monarchs, it applies still more to the man of genius who has made himself necessary to his Monarch, and by whose advice, in the greatest affairs of State, that Monarch has been guided. Who could maintain for a moment that Lord Beaconsfield's career does not constitute a much more curious thread in English history than, say, William IV.'s ? Who can deny that visitors to the Abbey will gaze with far deeper interest at that strange face, at once so defiant and so wary, so expressive of the pleasure felt in trampling on a de- feated foe, and so vigilant to watch where a check might perhaps be transformed into a victory, than they will ever feel for moat of the humdrum rulers, the conventional poets, and the dull luminaries of science, whom it has pleased the nation to com- memorate there ? To suppose that statesmen are deterred from reckless and unjust wars by seeing the displeasure ex- pressed by the people towards those who have engaged in them, is one thing ; but to think that that displeasure is fitly shown by ignoring the patent fact of the offenders' historic eminence, is quite another thing. Doubtless the two things are often confounded by the popular mind, Nothing has been more common than the iconoclasm dealt upon the statues of unpopular heroes or statesmen, but then nothing has been less fruitful of good result. And if the times be passed, as one would hope, when even the people would think of destroying the statue of a great man simply because they had passed even the sincerest and most heartfelt moral condemnation on his career, may we not assume that the time ought to be passed when the House of Commons at least would object to erecting a statue to a great man whose achievements were part of the very history of its own most glorious struggles, simply because he had taken what they think, and rightly think, the wrong side in those struggles I Is it not clear that the difference between the temper which destroys the statue of a great his- torical personage, and the temper which will not contribute a penny to the erection of such a statue, is really only a differ- ence of degree ? If we were Frenchmen who had condemned, as all Europe condemned, the pulling down of the stately column in the Place Vendome, should we be inclined to forbid the erection of a worthy statue of Napoleon among the great public monuments of the nation, only because we held Napoleon to be one of the most unscrupulous and selfish rulers who ever disfigured a throne ? Any one who would forbid that, ought to forbid also any deliberate reproduction or re- storation of the historical monuments of France for at least twenty years, for French history at the close of the last century and the beginning of this would be an insoluble riddle without Napoleon. It seems to us that twenty years hence men of all parties will agree that wherever English Parliamen- tary history is depicted, whether by the pen or by the chisel and the brush, there Mr. Disraeli must make a great figure ; and that all we shall have done, in voting him this monument in the Abbey, will have been to anticipate the time when the political excitement which we still quite rightly and justly feel, shall have become so far subdued, that no one would think of marking his disapproval of Mr. Disraeli by ignoring his great share in the political history of forty years. We objected to the erection of a monument to Prince Napoleon in the Abbey, because Prince Napoleon had no such share in the history of our time, and the attempt to attribute .to him such a share savoured dangerously of political partisanship with a very mischievous clique in France. No one can say this of Mr. Disraeli. Estimate him how you will,—and, indeed, the duty of not truckling to that absurd cult of his memory, which is now so fashionable, is the only tolling consideration we can think of against the proposal of tho Government,— he must be remembered wherever Peel is remembered, wherever Palmerston is remembered, wherever Gladstone is remembered ; and it seems to us that a body so justly jealous of its own dignity as the House of Commons will best sustain that dignity, not by refusing Lord Beaconsfield a great historic monument, only because they regard his influence as an influence tending to evil, but rather by frankly acknowledging that, evil or good, both its evil and its gOod were lent it by a great Party in the House of Commons, since he never could have achieved the fame he has obtained, if that great Party had not felt the need of his genius, and responded freely to the spur of his eloquent and epigrammatic imagination. It is purity, and not puritanism, to strive to the last against an evil policy ; but it is puritanism, and not purity, to ignore the past, even though it be evil, or strangely mixed with evil and good ; and it is ignoring the past, to deny that Mr. Disraeli made himself a great historic fame by his influence over the House of Commons, or that the House of Commons, in com- mon honesty, would do well to acknowledge that influence frankly.
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