DEAN STANLEY ON THE NAPOLEON MONUMENT.
IT is making much of a trifle, to be zealous on the subject of the monument to Prince Napoleon in Westminster .A.bbey at all. We suppose, if the truth were known, the explanation of that blunder of the Dean's would be that the Empress Eugenie is a friend of the Royal Family of Great Britain, and that in this matter the Dean very naturally reflects not so much the wishes of the people, as the wishes of the Throne. That is not a good reason for putting an historical monument into our great Abbey, but it is a sufficiently natural reason ; and, after all, as even the good Homer sometimes nods, the best of Deans may sometimes admit a statue to Westminster Abbey which would be more in place at Chislehurst, or amongst the young artillerymen of Woolwich. It is a blunder in taste, inter- national, historical, and moral ; but we must not forget that there is a proportion in human things, and that it is not well to be as earnest against a blunder in taste as it is against a great national crime, or against a blunder the effect of which will go on multiplying itself by the creation of a false standard of thought or sympathy. When the statue of the Prince Imperial is once placed in Westminster Abbey, it will stand there very quietly, without doing much, we dare say, to excite any sympathy for the Imperial 9'4gime in France that would not otherwise have been given to it, or to undermine the ground on which the French Republic now stands secure. Mr. Cremer went a little too far in threatening the Dean of Westminster with loss of confidence from the working-men of England, for this error of his. The working-men of England will be very exigeant, if they cannot pardon a blunder of this kind,—a blunder, no doubt, generous in its origin, and only deserving condemnation now, because it has been persisted in against the reasonable wishes of a great majority of thinking people, very moderately and sensibly expressed. Still, it is much easier to make a generous mistake of this kind than to repair it, and though we wish the Dean had. retired from his false position last July, when he ought to have seen that the reasons against his purpose were far more solid and far safer guides for action in future than the reasons advanced in favour of it, we do not wish that a little mistake should be exaggerated into a political crime. It is quite true that, con- sidering what is known of the Prince Imperial's object in going to South Africa, our friendly feeling towards Republican France should alone have prevented us from conferring anything like national honour on his memory. He fought on our side, but he fought on our side for his own reasons, and those reasons were not friendly to the duration of the present re'g'ime in France. If it had been proposed to give his father a public monument in Westminster Abbey, every reasonable man would have condemned so great an error of taste and judgment. This is a much less mistake, but it is a mistake of the same sort. The Prince would never have gone to South Africa, had he not unfortunately got it into his head that a display of gallantry would favour his pretensions to the throne of France. In a small way, therefore, he was engaged in the Napoleonic cause when he met his death ; and it would have been much better for us, while pitying his fate, not to go out of our way to express our admiration for his career. A memorial in Westminster Abbey to the Duke of Mont- pensier was unfortunate enough. But a monument to a Prince who risked and sacrificed his life in the endeavour to attract to his person the admiration of the Imperialist party in France is much more unfortunate, as it implies at least that Englishmen either took no account at all of the hopes which animated him in his last enterprise,—which, in those who are erecting a monument of that enterprise, would be an act of historical and artistic vandalism ; or, taking account of those hopes, had found in them nothing which it was at least undesirable that they should commemorate with their approbation. Still, while we are entirely opposed to the Dean's decision, as a great lapse of international good-taste, it seems to us absurd to make
too much of it. The mistake could not have been well repaired at so late a stage. As long ago as July, he might and should have changed his mind. Now, with his word pledged, and the monument far advanced, it was hardly possible. Let us bear lightly on a fault which has certainly never been committed by the Dean of Westminster before, and we hope never may be again.
But what is more curious than the Dean's rather pardonable error, is the crop of reasons he finds for persisting in his error. There is, first, the statement that a good many names of authority are absent from the memorial against this monu- ment. Of course they are. Considering the extraordinarily little faith which men of the world have in the efficacy of memorials, and the quantity of business they have to attend to, the only strange thing is that you can find so many good names on any memorial dealing with a matter of any public interest, not that ninety-nine out of a hundred names are absent. It is mere accident that, in a world so busy as ours, a man of the slightest influence with a taste for works of supererogation like getting up memorials should be found at all; or that when found, he should get the opportunity of canvassing any considerable number even of his acquaintances. Explaining the absence of a name from such a memorial, which was what the Dean of Westminster devoted his energy to doing, is like explaining carefully to a friend how it was that you did not happen to meet him in London, though you both happened to be there on the same day. Then the Dean says, next, that questions of this kind should be submitted to men of education, and not to men who are not educated; which was, we suppose, a hit at the working-men's deputation, for he can hardly have meant this remark to illustrate his satisfaction that when the memorial against the Napoleon monument had been circulated in any of the great Public Schools, the under-masters had usually signed it, while the head master had not. Of course, he did not mean that the head master was educated and the under-masters were not, for it is indeed much truer to say that education tells much more on the judgment of the young and rising men, than it does on the judgment of the old and risen men. When a man becomes a social power, he begins to rely less on his culture and more on those social traditions,— Philistine traditions they often are,—which set culture at defiance. But the Dean had hardly fired off this innuendo against the working-men's deputation as too uneducated to form a judgment on the subject, than he contradicted himself in the matter, by giving out the doctrine that you must think of other things in choosing the memorials for the Abbey besides educated appreciation. The Abbey, he said, had a heart as well as a head; and it was the heart of the Abbey, it seemed, which attached the most interest to the tombs of persons of no great significance in history, whose mere story had touched the popular imagination, such as the Princes murdered in the Tower, and, he implied, Prince Napoleon. Well, but if the Abbey has a heart as well as a head, and, we are to gratify that heart as well as the head, why did the Dean lay it down so cavalierly that "it was not his opinion that an educated man ought to be influenced by the opinion of the uneducated P" In the next five minutes we find him saying that on this matter an educated man ought to be influenced very much by the opinion of the uneducated, namely, by the tip.ste of "the humblest classes "in relation to the Abbey monuments. The truth seems to be, that he himself is influenced by the opinion of the "humblest classes" as to what they like to see, but not by their opinion as to what they do not like to see. The working-men objected, and objected, we think, very wisely, that a memorial to a foreign Prince, who had done nothing in the world except die in the rash pursuit of a fame by which he hoped to eclipse the popularity of the Republic in France, had no business in Westminster Abbey, and that to put one there savoured at least of the same sort of error of judgment as commemorating the author of the coup d'etat in the same way would have indicated. Had it not been for the coup d'etat, Prince Napoleon would never have been heard of. Had it not been for the coup d'etat,
he would have had no opportunity 'of attracting the atten- tion of his country, even by his feats on the battle-field.
And any public honour rendered to his name is therefore felt as, in some sense at least, a. sort of connivance at the coup d'aal. That may not be a very defensible logical judgment. But if the Abbey has a heart as well as a head, as the Dean asserts, it is
the sort of judgment the heart of the Abbey might be expected to deliver. And we must say we think it a better kind of judgment, and one deserving more respect, than that of ignorant people who flock either to Madame Tussaud's or to Westmin- ster Abbey, to stare at any effigy connected with horrible stories they have gaped to hear. The Dean's blunder was very par- donable. but we cannot say that his excuses for it improved his case. They rather showed how exceedingly weak his case was.
Previous page
