THE CENOTAPH IN WHITEHALL. [COMMUNICATED.]
UNLESS there is backsliding in high places, we are to have the Cenotaph in Whitehall preserved as a permanent memorial. That an official body should come to a decision so eminently wise with such small delay and with so little goading from the Press, is a matter for as much satisfaction as surprise. For once the right thing is to be done in the right way, in the right place, at the right time. Yet already there is an appreciable opposition. Certain Members of Parliament will have none of it because, so they allege, it impedes the traffic, and because it does not " go " with the adjoining architecture.
The first accusation is not without foundation, as there are, under present arrangements, four streams of traffic in Whitehall owing to the street lamps and refuges being disposed in a confusing double line. If these were planned on a more genercu scale and plabed centrally, in line that is with tho Duke of Cambridge's statue and the Cenotaph, both vehicles and pedestrians would traverse the thoroughfare with greater confidence and a smaller fear of accidents. If and when the change is made, is it too Utopian to suggest that even the lamp-posts of this historic highway should be lifted above the tedious paltriness of their kind ? Give him the word, and Sir Edwin Lutyens will, with a few passes of his magic pencil, lend a new and happier meaning to the sullied name of "lamp-post." Indeed, there could hardly' be a less fatiguing exercise for the imagination than the conceiving of lamp-posts more fit and comely than the current fashion. For instance, the lattice pylons erected along the Mall, with their gilded lantern-like finials, are suggestive of street-lamps as they might be—in a better world.
The complaint that the Cenotaph is aesthetically incongruous
with the adjoining architecture may be true. The allegation is not worth the combating, as, even if true, it is of no consequence. Such criticism merely provokes the obvious retort : "So much the worse for adjoining architecture!" As a matter of fact, the present position of the monument was probably quite accidentally and arbitrarily dictated by the disposition of the existing double row of lamps and refuges, that it was compelled to avoid. There would seem no special reason for its permanent replica occupying precisely the same spot as the paste-board model. Indeed, that is the great virtue and usefulness of a model. You may move it about and modify it and turn it this way and that, and be completely satisfied that the best possible has been achieved in the rehearsal, before irretrievable things are perpetrated and perpetuated in imperishable stone and bronze.
It is notorious that we have rarely achieved anything even tolerable in the way of public monuments, and this process of public "trying on" might be suggested as an expedient likely to promote success in the embellishment of our cities.
Did we give the same serious consideration to the monuments with which we are from time to time confronted as very properly goes to the choosing of a new suit, the tale of London's monumental misfits would be astonishingly reduced and the ranks of her statues thinned to a mere handful. From the temporary embellishment of a street has sprung the Cenotaphs monument instantly hailed by public acclaim as too fit and apt and expressive an emblem to be swept away with the mat of the Peace procession trappings. It symbolized ideas and feelings that are now for ever a part of us, and which must in no wise be suffered to decrease. It symbolized them well— fitly, restrainedly, yet boldly. Rarely, if ever, will any monument so stir the public imagination or so profoundly engage the public attention. But all public monuments should be matters of public interest and concern, and the public should have the right of seeing what every projected monument is really going to look like, before the thing is irretrievably done. The money saved by the black-balling of unpopular candidates would more than pay for the making and erecting of the necessary "try-on" models.
Such occasions as the recent Peace Celebrations should, one suggests, be utilized for this civic rehearsing of all proposed monuments, statues, and embellishments whatsoever. The public have a right to know what is afoot, and to see and to criticize before it is finally committed, and the taste and good sense of the public cannot well lead us further astray than have the advice and judgments of "Select Committees" and Royal Academicians. The frying-pan is worth the quest. The public's intuition and instant recognition of merit in the case of the Cenotaph do seem to show that in the people themselves we may yet find a new and better aesthetic tribunal.
It has been urged with some vehemence that the permanent Cenotaph must at all costs occupy the exact site of the temporary one, lest the sentiment and the historical association now attaching to it should not survive the transplantation, but wither away and die. But surely that is a matter merely of degree. Certainly it should stand in Whitehall ; most certainly it should be reared up in the middle of the way, breasting the tide of traffic, as at present. But what are a few score yards up or down the street ? Might it not be moved with some gain a little up Whitehall to where it would have as background on the East the screen of trees before Montagu House, and on the West the low and pillared front of the Treasury buildings ? The spell is surely not so slight as to suffer from so small a removal of the emblem.
CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLLS.
Previous page
