T O be asked for an honour, and to refuse it,
is a delicate matter for any person in authority. To be asked eagerly, almost confidently, for the highest honour that the nation can bestow, and to have to refuse that, must always entail so serious a commotion that it is not hard to understand the dread which any one in a position to grant great favours may feel of bringing the inevitable din about his ears. Never- theless, we wish that the Dean of Westminster bad felt himself able to refuse the request made to him that the remains of the late Sir Henry Irving might be interred within the Abbey; for only by such a refusal, we believe, made at the death of some popular favourite, will the public be brought to realise the tremendous inheritance which they possess in the few feet that still remain ,available for burial in those historic tombs. We desire to say nothing ungracious to the memory of Sir Henry Irving, nor do we wish in any degree to belittle his calling, for we hold it right that Garrick should lie at the foot of Shakespeare's monument. But we believe that time will bring with it doubts, even among the most enthusiastic, whether the late actor was the equal of Garrick, or of less than Garrick ; and if so, whether any name less than Garrick's ought to be written among the dead in a burial-place already so crowded. We suppose that question has hardly been considered, for there is a readiness to demand an addition to the roll of the great men buried in Westminster Abbey, and a reluctance to refuse the demand, which are evidence that there is little public thinking as to what standard has been, or should be, set up in making these unalterable decisions.
It may be urged that if public opinion is at fault in demanding for Sir Henry Irving interment in the great national burial-place, public opinion has been wrong in the past, is likely to be wrong again in the future, and is none the less worth chronicling. It may be argued, and with
some measure of justice, that as it is impossible to prophesy with certainty that the publics opinion of one age will endorse the public opinion of another, the only possible or practical thing to do is to let public opinion have its say, and leave time to pass verdict on it afterwards. It has been by following out this policy, successive Deans of Westminster might be supposed to argue, that the national burial-place has assumed its own character. Thirty years ago Dean Stanley pointed out "how extremely unequal and uncertain is this commemoration of our celebrated men. It is this," he wrote, "which renders the interment or notice within our walls a dubious honour, and makes the Abbey, after all, but an irregular monument of greatness. But it is this also," he goes on, "which gives to it that perfectly natural character of which any artificial collection is entirely destitute. In the Valhalla of Bavaria, every niche is carefully portioned out, and if a single bust is wanting from the catalogue of German worthies, its absence becomes the subject of a literary con- troversy, and the vacant space is at last filled. Not so in the Abbey: there, as in English institutions generally, no fixed rule has been followed. Graves have been opened or closed, monuments erected or not erected, from the most various feelings of the time. It is the general wave only that has borne in the chief celebrities." The absences are eloquent, it may be of the desires of the dead, who chose to be buried as Pope was buried at Twickenham, with the epitaph over him composed "for one that would not be buried in Westminster Abbey." Or they are eloquent of the prejudices and passions of the time or, it may be, "eloquent also of the strange caprices of the British public." How strange those caprices have been, and how widely the opinions and tastes even of the best educated and most studious critics may differ from those of their predecessors and successors, the records of contemporary writers show with impressive reiteration.
The absence of artists and sculptors from the roll of the great dead is remarkable ; but it is not so remarkable as the judgments which have been passed from time to time, by men of weighty intellect, on the monuments and effigies with which the dead are commemorated. The monument erected to Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, for instance, with its repellent figure of Death issuing from an open tomb, probably would not appeal to the taste of one man in a hundred to-day. Yet it was Burke who wrote of it that "Mrs. Nightingale's monument has not been praised beyond its merit. The attitude and expression of the husband in endeavouring to shield his wife from the dart of Death is natural and affect- ing"; and it was Wesley who exclaimed of the sculptor's work in the Abbey : "What heaps of unmeaning stone and marble ! But there was one tomb which showed common
sense : that beautiful figure of Mr. Nightingale Here, indeed, the marble seems to speak, and the statues appear only not alive." The taste of the period was for these statues that" meant" something, that told a story, or drew the observer's attention to the careful fashion in which all the details had been thought out. Read, for instance, the letter which Aaron Hill wrote to Pope describing the monument which he intended to erect to his wife in the Abbey Cloisters. Alter speaking of the "low and unmeaning lumpishness " of the vulgar style, he goes on to describe how, in the splendid piece of stonework he means to erect for his wife, "about half-way up a craggy path, on the black mountain below, will be the figure of Time in white marble, in an attitude of climbing, obstructed by little Cupids of the same colour; some rolling stones into his path from above, some throwing nets at his feet and arms from below; others in ambuscade, shooting at him from both sides ; while the Death you see in the draught will seem, from an opening in the hills in relievo, to have found admission by a shorter way, and prevented Time at a distance." Could anything be more absolutely at variance with the severity preferred by the better taste of to-day! But if it is hardly fair to insist too much on the artistic notions of Aaron Hill, at all events Addison's ability, to speak for his generation in matters of taste and selection would not be denied; yet the marine monstrosities which were piled up to decorate the tombs of our Admirals were too severely simple for him. He would have liked "that our naval monuments might, like the Dutch, be adorned with rostral courses and naval ornaments, with beautiful festoons of seaweed, shells, and coral." But it was not only in its judgment of the artistic and decorative that public opinion could go so strangely astray ; it was in its judgment of what is worthiest in letters. It was not until years after Spenser had died that it dawned upon one of the band of poets who wrote elegies over him, and who threw the pens with which they were written into his open tomb, that there was a writer greater than he, and one better deserving Spenser's title of "Prince of Poets." But perhaps the strangest instance of lack of recognition is that of Milton. - Over the grave of one John Philips, an obscurity now for- gotten, there was originally carved the inscription, Uni Milton° secundus primoque paene par, the deceased poetaster being an admirer of Milton's work. Shortly after the inscrip- tion was carved it was ordered to be obliterated. That, how- ever, was not because it struck any impartial authority that it was ludicrous, but because the Dean, who was a violent Royalist. would not have the name of a regicide inscribed on the walls of Westminster Abbey. The Milton monument was, of course, admitted in a more tolerant day. But if the names of Milton and Shakespeare lacked the immediate recognition which was their right, what is to be said of the taste, or sense of proportion, which readily admitted lesser names 14 It is impossible to read without astonishment, and a little bitterness, the long lists of writers, soldiers, and sailors who have been awarded the honour which is valued so highly to-day,---though not, as we think, highly enough. Yet even in the bitterness with which we may deplore the broad and obvious errors of judgment of our forefathers, surely one thought ought to arise,—that we, at all events, will not be blamed by posterity for too easy an acquiescence in the momentary moods of the nation, but will have it said of our age that in it there was a severe and honest endeavour to realise the splendour and dignity of the kingdom of our great dead, and that into that kingdom only he might enter of whom posterity would admit that he slept primus inter pares in Westminster Abbey.
Our forefathers, who laid under the Abbey's stones so many whose names died with their generation, had at least the excuse that for them Westminster Abbey was neither so old, nor, for them, so honoured. In the tumultuous years of the Reformation it was possible for Cromwell to have Blake buried in the Abbey, and for the savage violence of the Restoration to disinter his bones. Yet the King still needed officers for his Navy, and Blake had been honoured of set purpose. "To encourage his officers to venture their lives, he was, with all the solemnity possible, and at the charge of the public, interred in. Harry the Seventh's Chapel, among the monuments of the Kings." There was not the same deep sanctity attached then to a building which could be so easily desecrated as belongs to it in our time, and perhaps the lightness with which orders were given to disturb its stones reacted also upon the public opinion which so readily admitted the small and the insignificant within its walls. But we have no such excuse to make to-day for lightly bestowing the honours left to us to give the dead. For us there can be but one standard by which any shall be judged worthy to enter into the great company who lie in a burial- place so royal and so narrow. The "eighteen inches of square ground" belong only to those who, each in his separate sphere, are royal beyond dispute or cavil. Every name added to those already ennobled by the Abbey ought to be chosen so that still, in our own day, Donne's imagined verger, guiding the stranger through the tombs,
"Prom king to king and all their kin can walk.
Your ears shall hear nought but kings ; your eyes meet Kings only?'
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