The difference between two great nations can be illustrated by the
coincidence that at this moment both France and England are engaged in
discussing the memorial of a literary man. France is considering the
celebration of the late Zola, England is considering that of the
recently deceased Shakspere. There is some national significance, it
may be, in the time that has elapsed. Some will find impatience and
indelicacy in this early attack on Zola or deification of him; but the
nation which has sat still for three hundred years after Shakspere’s
funeral may be considered, perhaps, to have carried delicacy too far.
But much deeper things are involved than the mere matter of time. The
point of the contrast is that the French are discussing whether there
shall be any monument, while the English are discussing only what the
monument shall be. In other words, the French are discussing a living
question, while we are discussing a dead one. Or rather, not a dead
one, but a settled one, which is quite a different thing.
When a thing of the intellect is settled it is not dead: rather it is
immortal. The multiplication table is immortal, and so is the fame of
Shakspere. But the fame of Zola is not dead or not immortal; it is at
its crisis, it is in the balance; and may be found wanting. The French,
therefore, are quite right in considering it a living question. It is
still living as a question, because it is not yet solved. But Shakspere
is not a living question: he is a living answer.
For my part, therefore, I think the French Zola controversy much more
practical and exciting than the English Shakspere one. The admission of
Zola to the Panthéon may be regarded as defining Zola’s position. But
nobody could say that a statue of Shakspere, even fifty feet high, on
the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, could define Shakspere’s position. It
only defines our position towards Shakspere. It is he who is fixed; it
is we who are unstable. The nearest approach to an English parallel to
the Zola case would be furnished if it were proposed to put some
savagely controversial and largely repulsive author among the ashes of
the greatest English poets. Suppose, for instance, it were proposed to
bury Mr. Rudyard Kipling in Westminster Abbey. I should be against
burying him in Westminster Abbey; first, because he is still alive (and
here I think even he himself might admit the justice of my protest);
and second, because I should like to reserve that rapidly narrowing
space for the great permanent examples, not for the interesting foreign
interruptions, of English literature. I would not have either Mr.
Kipling or Mr. George Moore in Westminster Abbey, though Mr. Kipling
has certainly caught even more cleverly than Mr. Moore the lucid and
cool cruelty of the French short story. I am very sure that Geoffrey
Chaucer and Joseph Addison get on very well together in the Poets’
Corner, despite the centuries that sunder them. But I feel that Mr.
George Moore would be much happier in Pere-la-Chaise, with a riotous
statue by Rodin on the top of him; and Mr. Kipling much happier under
some huge Asiatic monument, carved with all the cruelties of the gods.
As to the affair of the English monument to Shakspere, every people has
its own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to be
said for ours. There is the French monumental style, which consists in
erecting very pompous statues, very well done. There is the German
monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues,
badly done. And there is the English monumental method, the great
English way with statues, which consists in not erecting them at all. A
statue may be dignified; but the absence of a statue is always
dignified. For my part, I feel there is something national, something
wholesomely symbolic, in the fact that there is no statue of Shakspere.
There is, of course, one in Leicester Square; but the very place where
it stands shows that it was put up by a foreigner for foreigners. There
is surely something modest and manly about not attempting to express
our greatest poet in the plastic arts in which we do not excel. We
honour Shakspere as the Jews honour God—by not daring to make of him a
graven image. Our sculpture, our statues, are good enough for bankers
and philanthropists, who are our curse: not good enough for him, who is
our benediction. Why should we celebrate the very art in which we
triumph by the very art in which we fail?
England is most easily understood as the country of amateurs. It is
especially the country of amateur soldiers (that is, of Volunteers), of
amateur statesmen (that is, of aristocrats), and it is not unreasonable
or out of keeping that it should be rather specially the country of a
careless and lounging view of literature. Shakspere has no academic
monument for the same reason that he had no academic education. He had
small Latin and less Greek, and (in the same spirit) he has never been
commemorated in Latin epitaphs or Greek marble. If there is nothing
clear and fixed about the emblems of his fame, it is because there was
nothing clear and fixed about the origins of it. Those great schools
and Universities which watch a man in his youth may record him in his
death; but Shakspere had no such unifying traditions. We can only say
of him what we can say of Dickens. We can only say that he came from
nowhere and that he went everywhere. For him a monument in any place is
out of place. A cold statue in a certain square is unsuitable to him as
it would be unsuitable to Dickens. If we put up a statue of Dickens in
Portland Place to-morrow we should feel the stiffness as unnatural. We
should fear that the statue might stroll about the street at night.
But in France the question of whether Zola shall go to the Panthéon
when he is dead is quite as practicable as the question whether he
should go to prison when he was alive. It is the problem of whether the
nation shall take one turn of thought or another. In raising a monument
to Zola they do not raise merely a trophy, but a finger-post. The
question is one which will have to be settled in most European
countries; but like all such questions, it has come first to a head in
France; because France is the battlefield of Christendom. That question
is, of course, roughly this: whether in that ill-defined area of verbal
licence on certain dangerous topics it is an extenuation of indelicacy
or an aggravation of it that the indelicacy was deliberate and solemn.
Is indecency more indecent if it is grave, or more indecent if it is
gay? For my part, I belong to an old school in this matter. When a book
or a play strikes me as a crime, I am not disarmed by being told that
it is a serious crime. If a man has written something vile, I am not
comforted by the explanation that he quite meant to do it. I know all
the evils of flippancy; I do not like the man who laughs at the sight
of virtue. But I prefer him to the man who weeps at the sight of virtue
and complains bitterly of there being any such thing. I am not
reassured, when ethics are as wild as cannibalism, by the fact that
they are also as grave and sincere as suicide. And I think there is an
obvious fallacy in the bitter contrasts drawn by some moderns between
the aversion to Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the popularity of some such joke
as “Dear Old Charlie.” Surely there is nothing mysterious or
unphilosophic in the popular preference. The joke of “Dear Old Charlie”
is passed—because it is a joke. “Ghosts” are exorcised—because they
are ghosts.
This is, of course, the whole question of Zola. I am grown up, and I do
not worry myself much about Zola’s immorality. The thing I cannot stand
is his morality. If ever a man on this earth lived to embody the
tremendous text, “But if the light in your body be darkness, how great
is the darkness,” it was certainly he. Great men like Ariosto,
Rabelais, and Shakspere fall in foul places, flounder in violent but
venial sin, sprawl for pages, exposing their gigantic weakness, are
dirty, are indefensible; and then they struggle up again and can still
speak with a convincing kindness and an unbroken honour of the best
things in the world: Rabelais, of the instruction of ardent and austere
youth; Ariosto, of holy chivalry; Shakspere, of the splendid stillness
of mercy. But in Zola even the ideals are undesirable; Zola’s mercy is
colder than justice—nay, Zola’s mercy is more bitter in the mouth than
injustice. When Zola shows us an ideal training he does not take us,
like Rabelais, into the happy fields of humanist learning. He takes us
into the schools of inhumanist learning, where there are neither books
nor flowers, nor wine nor wisdom, but only deformities in glass
bottles, and where the rule is taught from the exceptions. Zola’s truth
answers the exact description of the skeleton in the cupboard; that is,
it is something of which a domestic custom forbids the discovery, but
which is quite dead, even when it is discovered. Macaulay said that the
Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but
because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Of such substance also was
this Puritan who had lost his God. A Puritan of this type is worse than
the Puritan who hates pleasure because there is evil in it. This man
actually hates evil because there is pleasure in it. Zola was worse
than a pornographer, he was a pessimist. He did worse than encourage
sin: he encouraged discouragement. He made lust loathsome because to
him lust meant life.