MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IN a newspaper the other day I read a report that the directors of. Madame Tussaud's exhibition of waxworks, being desirous of producing a portrait group of Mr. Churchill's Cabinet, were disconcerted to find that, owing to the shortage of raw material, one of these gentlemen would have to be omitted. The problem, so the report stated., could be solved only by removing the effigy of a former Minister from the group of Mr. Attlee's Cabinet and melting the poor man down. Although interested in the mutability of human fortune, I do not, I trust, take any harsh delight in the liquefaction of the eminent. Yet I was curious to discover the identity of the Minister who had been chosen by the directors of Madame Tussaud's as best suited to disappear from the group of illustrious statesmen who had graced the Government of Mr. Attlee, and to reappear in altered form as a statesman, equally illustrious, in the Cabinet of Mr. Winston Churchill. I therefore took the Underground to Baker Street. I was disappointed to find that the feelings of fear and mystery which used to assail me when taken to Madame Tussaud's were no longer operative. I had not visited the exhibition since the fire of 1925 ; the restored premises appeared to me to have lost something of the magic of those dim old halls and to have taken on the garish illumination of an Atlantic liner. True it is that the fixed stance, the unflinching eyes, the pert pink com- plexions of those immobile and staring effigies do even today arouse a sense of wonder. It is frightening to think of these men and women, when night descends upon them, still gazing snund- . less at each other in the dark. Yet I was unable to recapture the same fear that I recall from my younger days. I observed them with a cold gaze, comparing their taut lips, their pendant waxen hands, with the resonant voices and the alert personal movements of these men as I know them, or have known them, in life. It was encouraging to feel how much more charming and persuasive they are when one hears them speaking or watches them as they move. ' * * * *- I found my way to the stand on which the Labonr leaders are grouped around the figure of Mr. Attlee. Some of them were immediately recognisable. Mr. Herb& Morrison, in wax, retained something of his entrancing effervescence ; Lord Jowitt was there in all his Roman gravitas; Mr. Dalton was easily identifiable, although his wonted geniality had been replaced by an expression of discouraged melancholy, such as is worn by an elderly vicar whose services are ill-attended. Mr. Chuter Ede seemed to have suffered some change, and to have lost in the process the incisive authority that has endeared him to two Parliaments. Mr. John Strachey of all his colleagues remained most himself. Calm, and withal forcible, he stared furiously in front of him towards the engaging figure of Mr. Morrison, with eyes that were both spiritual and enraged. I like, when the fog creeps over our London squares and the street-lamps are blurred, to think of Mr. Strachey still staring angrily among all those benign souls ; as formidable in his fury as the statue of Pompey the Great, and with a truly wonderful complexion. I observed that No. 51 was missing from the stand. I consulted my cata- logue and realised that the missing effigy represented a statesman who has rendered the State great service. I was shocked by the idea that such a man could be liquefied. I was glad to learn, on studying a notice placed in his empty place, that the report I had read in the newspaper must have been incorrect. The notice informed me that the missing Minister had merely been " removed for alteration." I heaved a sigh of relief. * * * * I wandered on among the other stands and exhibits. Here again I was struck by the fact that, whereas some statesmen or heroes lend themselves readily to accurate reproduction in wax, the personalities of others seem to elude that medium. Mr. Lloyd George, for instance, managed to transfer his ebullient genius to this delicate material ; Mr. Asquith failed for some reason to suggest himself. Although Mr. Neville Chamberlain is instantly recognisable, although some faint suggestion of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's true appearance and expression is certainly con- veyed, the semblance of Lord Salisbury is an unfortunate affair ; whereas Mr. Bonar Law ought certainly to be " removed for alteration." It may be that the latter was never suited to the modelling of Madame Tussaud's artists ; he would droop with modesty and hang his head in gloom ; but never, to my recol- lection, did he impersonate a draper's dummy in a 1910 shop- window at Torquay. What is it that renders Lord Portal, Lord Mountbatten, Lord Alexander of Tunis, and Lord Montgomery so impervious to the Tussaud's art, whereas Dr. Crippen's nervous precision is so vividly conveyed ? Lord Wootton, I was saddened to observe, had, since I last saw him, lost considerable weight ; nor was I aware, until I saw him in Baker Street, that Mr. Anthony Eden had adopted an auburn perruque. Some of the smaller groups are striking in their awkwardness. King Haakon, looking very ill indeed, is seated in grim clothes at a table, while beside him Queen Juliana of the Netherlands flaunts her decorations and her youth. What on earth can these two have to say to each other when the night descends ?
I do not think that Maria Grosholtz of Berne, subsequently Madame Tussaud, can have been an attractive woman. When she first came to Paris she received great kindness from the Royal Family, especially from Madame Elisabeth, and was invited to stay at Versailles. It was not, therefore, very delicate of her to model those terrible heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette after they had been decapitated. In after years she would explain that she had been forced to take these gruesome death-masks by the Jacobins, who stood round her in menacing attitudes while she did her work. I have never believed that tale ; nor have I been moved by the story that, when Madame Tussaud was a little old woman in black mittens, the very mention of Madame Elisabeth would induce floods of tears. It is unlikely that the same Jacobins would have enforced upon her the task of modelling death-masks from the severed heads of such disparate politicians as Marat, Robespierre and Jean Baptiste Carrier. Photographs of these models still exist, and it is evident to any eye that they were fashioned, not under compulsion, but with all the relish of artistic freedom. More- over, when Burke and Hare were executed for body-snatching, Madame Tussaud went the whole way up to Scotland to take their death-masks after they were hanged. She cannot 'pretend that any Jacobins obliged her to do that. Her uncle again, Dr. Curtius, who started the whole business, strikes me as a sinister figure. It was he who conceived the idea of a Chamber of Horror"; below his "Cabinet de Cire" in the Boulevard du Temple there was a "Cavern des Grands Voleurs" in which instruments of torture, Nuremberg maidens and famous criminals were tastefully arranged. Not a nice man, evidently ; nor was it very winsome of his niece to wheedle out of Sanson the original blade and chopper of the guillotine. There is one question that I should have liked to ask the widow of Baker Street, " What, madam," I should have asked her, " what did you do to Monsieur Tussaud ? " His married life, while it lasted; must have been as humiliating as that of Dr. Masoch. I am glad that they separated so soon. * * * * The heirs and assigns of Dr. Curtius and Madame Tussaud, while retaining the excellent business instincts of the founders, have introduced an afterhoon-tea tone. From the ashes of the great fire of 1925 has emerged an exhibition that the most nervous infant can visit without affright ; there is no need to descend to the " Caverne," and even that is now gentle compared to what I remember from Edwardian days. Would Maria Grosholtz have had the delicacy, when boiling down a Minister, to affix to his empty place the soothing notice, " Removed for alteration ? " No.
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