4- THE MEMORIA_L TO THE PRINCE CONSORT. T HERE is a
very sincere desire among all classes of Englishmen to raise a monument to the late Prince Consort, worthy at once of his career and their regrets, and a very decided perplexity how to do it. A month has already been expended in discussion more or less vigorous, and still no decision has been reached, or we may say even attempted. The public meeting held at the Mansion House, on Tuesday last, was numerous, enthusiastic, and liberal. Four thousand pounds was subscribed on the spot, and the committees formed all over the country will probably bring the collection up to a figure seldom approached by a testimonial voluntarily raised in honour of a deceased Prince. But the meeting separated with only a partial decision as to the character of the memorial. It is to be "monumental," a phrase which implies, according to the explanation of the Bishop of London, that it is not to be a mere piece of utility,—a scheme, that is, for using the name of the departed Prince to levy charitable contributions on all who admired his character. The decision, so far, is a sound one, and marks, we sincerely hope, the spread of broader principles of utility among the middle classes of Great Britain. Nothing can be more offensive to any sound judgment than the unconscious c.ontem pt for individual excellence which really dictates "utilitarian" memorials, scholarships, funds, hospitals, and even, though in a less degree, monumental churches. We strive to keep green the memory of great men, not merely as an honour to them, but as the highest form of instruction for coining generations, to whom that ever living name is to be an incentive and an example. A stimulus applied to men's hearts is infinitely more valuable than any possible aid offered to their brains, or comfort to their bodies, and Nelson's name does to-day more to man our navy than a million spent on a second Greenwich Hospital could possibly have effected. Anything, therefore, which for a moment diverts the mind of the observer from its subject, which forces details upon his notice, or interferes with his true conception of the character to be honoured, tends, pro tanto, to deprive the memorial of its truest and highest utility. People squabble over a " Fund" without a thought of him in whose honour it was collected, and it is not from the Wellington College that our children will gain their conception of the hero of Waterloo. A hospital keeps no memory alive, and even a college, though a new college founded at one of the Universities for the cultivation of pure literature would, in many respects, have a special appropriateness, still brings its founder home too exclusively to a class. We want something at once original, visible, impressive, and calculated to endure for generations to come. What is it to be ?
Of all the suggestions yet put forward, we take that of importing an obelisk from Egypt to be on the whole the very worst. It has no sort of appropriateness, and its suggestiveness is of a very different kin& What bad the Prince Consort to do with Egypt, or how should a granite monolith covered with the writing of an extinct priesthood, and the figures of gods long since passed into contempt, recal the graceful patron of literature and art ? The men of the nineteenth century, moreover, cannot extinguish history, hard as they try to do it, and the Obelisk lying in the sand at Alexandria has already a name which it will take more than the vote of a Mansion- house meeting or even of a British Parliament to obliterate. Is Antony the character we wish to connect with the Prince that we should set up Cleopatra's Needle to recal him to future time ? Any granite obelisk must of necessity sug- gest Egypt, not England or Germany, the House of Pharaoh, not of Coburg, and as the former one happens in England to be the more familiar of the two, it will undoubtedly tend to erase rather than to vivify the memory of the Prince. Nor is a cathedral for the West-end much more appropriate. A cathedral can scarcely be vulgarized, and is sure to be visible, and in our London, crowded with bad statues and monuments which no one can see, those two are important advantages but it has no special appropriateness. There was much in the Prince, if only his heartfelt philanthropy, which honoured the faith, but nothing whatever to bring him within the circle of our ecclesiastical system. It is the people of England, not English churchmen, who must raise a memorial in his honour, and any church, however grand, can represent but a section of those who will gladly display their respect for the dead and their profound sympathy with the living. A Pantheon, a great and stately hall devoted to all who have illustrated English thought, would be a more fitting memorial, and one in which the Prince, as representative, not of English literature but of England's honour for the power of thought, would be in his ap- propriate place ; but history compels great Englishmen to hunger for a niche in an older, and therefore more reve- renced structure, Westminster Abbey. We cannot turn aside a national instinct. A statue is open to no objection, and a statue we doubtless shall secure, but it will not exhaust the funds. The exquisite equestrian statue of Lord Hardinge which Mr. Foley was compelled to resign to the crows of Calcutta cost but 70001., and we deprecate any attempt at marble relievos, telling a history perhaps to the artist, but always misread by the people. Memorial statues to be im- pressive should be simple and great, and perhaps the only two which really fulfil their special end—which is to recal the man and not simply to satisfy connoisseurs—are those of Peter the Great in the Russian capital, and of Napoleon on the Place Vendome. The Russian statue in particular is to the inhabitants a visible history. A mighty column, lofty as the resources would allow, and surmounted by a statue visible to all London, would perhaps be the nearest approach to a memorial simple yet grand enough to exhaust a national contribution. The only objection to such a design is the idea which reserves such a memorial rather to those who have illustrated English history than to those en- shrined in the affection of the English people. It is the reign of Victoria, not of the Prince, which history will com- memorate.
The design must be architectural, and, on the whole, we cannot but think the idea of a simple but stately Palace of Industry at Kensington, to be used for the Museum with which the Prince so eagerly connected himself, would be the best expression of the national impulse. The need of such a hall has nothing to do with the matter, but it would have every circumstance of appropriateness. It was a favourite idea of the deceased Prince one in which his multiform know- ledge and variously cultivated taste would have had full ex- pression, and one which he would have rejoiced to see carried out in his honour. The statue will then have its fitting resting-place—if sitting, as it should be, alone in the entrance-hail; if equestrian, in front of the grand doorway. The building will be one accessible to the whole body of the people, as much appreciated by a Cornishman as a Londoner, and, therefore, a fitting object for a national contribution. Above all, there will be no violent straining of the public thought, no effort required to perceive the congruity between the character of the Prince and the nation's expression of regret for the loss it has sustained. The nation looked to the Prince as the Minister of Art and Industry, and it is under that idea, so often thought and so seldom uttered, that his monument should be reared.
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