And instinctively, as my eye travelled up, my hand leapt to the salute;
for I stood before the veiled image of a dead king, and had been guilty
of a misconception that dishonoured him.
Standing respectfully at one angle and another, I was able to form, by
the outlines of the grey sheeting that enveloped him, some rough notion
of his posture and his costume. Round what was evidently his neck the
sheeting was constricted by ropes; and the height and girth of
the bundle above--to half-closed eyes, even now, an averted
poke-bonnet--gave token of a tall helmet with a luxuriant shock of
plumes waving out behind. Immediately beneath the ropes, the breadth and
sharpness of the bundle hinted at epaulettes. And the protrusion that
had seemed to be that of a wind-blown crinoline was caused, I thought,
by the king having his left hand thrust well out to grasp the hilt of
his inclined sword. Altogether, I had soon builded a clear enough
idea of his aspect; and I promised myself a curious gratification in
comparing anon this idea with his aspect as it really was.
Yes, I took it for granted that the expectant statue was to be unveiled
within the next few days. I was glad to be in time--not knowing in how
terribly good time I was--for the ceremony. Not since my early childhood
had I seen the unveiling of a statue; and on that occasion I had struck
a discordant note by weeping bitterly. I dare say you know that statue
of William Harvey which stands on the Leas at Folkestone. You say you
were present at the unveiling? Well, I was the child who cried. I had
been told that William Harvey was a great and good man who discovered
the circulation of the blood; and my mind had leapt, in all the
swiftness of its immaturity, to the conclusion that his statue would be
a bright blood-red. Cruel was the thrill of dismay I had when at length
the cord was pulled and the sheeting slid down, revealing so dull a
sight...
Contemplating the veiled Umberto, I remembered that sight, remembered
those tears unworthy (as my nurse told me) of a little gentleman. Years
had passed. I was grown older and wiser. I had learnt to expect less of
life. There was no fear that I should disgrace myself in the matter of
Umberto.
I was not so old, though, nor so wise, as I am now. I expected more than
there is of Italian speed, and less than there is of Italian subtlety.
A whole year has passed since first I set eyes on veiled Umberto. And
Umberto is still veiled.
And veiled for more than a whole year, as I now know, had Umberto been
before my coming. Four years before that, the municipal council, it
seems, had voted the money for him. His father, of sensational memory,
was here already, in the middle of the main piazza, of course. And
Garibaldi was hard by; so was Mazzini; so was Cavour. Umberto was
still implicit in a block of marble, high upon one of the mountains of
Carrara. The task of educing him was given to a promising young sculptor
who lived here. Down came the block of marble, and was transported to
the studio of the promising young sculptor; and out, briskly enough,
mustachios and all, came Umberto. He looked very regal, I am sure, as
he stood glaring around with his prominent marble eyeballs, and snuffing
the good fresh air of the world as far as might be into shallow marble
nostrils. He looked very authoritative and fierce and solemn, I am sure.
He made, anyhow, a deep impression on the mayor and councillors, and
the only question was as to just where he should be erected. The granite
pedestal had already been hewn and graven; but a worthy site was to
seek. Outside the railway station? He would obstruct the cabs. In the
Giardino Pubblico? He would clash with Garibaldi. Every councillor had a
pet site, and every other one a pet objection to it. That strip of waste
ground where the fishermen sat pottering? It was too humble, too far
from the centre of things. Meanwhile, Umberto stayed in the studio.
Dust settled on his epaulettes. A year went by. Spiders ventured to
spin their webs from his plumes to his mustachios. Another year went
by. Whenever the councillors had nothing else to talk about they talked
about the site for Umberto.
Presently they became aware that among the poorer classes of the town
had arisen a certain hostility to the statue. The councillors suspected
that the priesthood had been at work. The forces of reaction against the
forces of progress! Very well! The councillors hurriedly decided that
the best available site, on the whole, was that strip of waste ground
where the fishermen sat pottering. The pedestal was promptly planted.
Umberto was promptly wrapped up, put on a lorry, wheeled to the place,
and hoisted into position. The date of the unveiling was fixed. The
mayor I am told, had already composed his speech, and was getting it
by heart. Around the pedestal the fishermen sat pottering. It was not
observed that they received any visits from the priests.
But priests are subtle; and it is a fact that three days before the date
of the unveiling the fishermen went, all in their black Sunday clothes,
and claimed audience of the mayor. He laid aside the MS. of his speech,
and received them affably. Old Agostino, their spokesman, he whose face
is so marvellously wrinkled, lifted his quavering voice. He told the
mayor, with great respect, that the rights of the fishermen had been
violated. That piece of ground had for hundreds of years belonged to
them. They had not been consulted about that statue. They did not want
it there. It was in the way, and must (said Agostino) be removed. At
first the mayor was inclined to treat the deputation with a light good
humour, and to resume the study of his MS. But Agostino had a MS. of his
own. This was a copy of a charter whereby, before mayors and councillors
were, the right to that piece of land had been granted in perpetuity to
the fisherfolk of the district. The mayor, not committing himself to any
opinion of the validity of the document, said that he--but there, it is
tedious to report the speeches of mayors. Agostino told his mayor that
a certain great lawyer would be arriving from Genoa to-morrow. It were
tedious to report what passed between that great lawyer and the
mayor and councillors assembled. Suffice it that the councillors were
frightened, the date of the unveiling was postponed, and the whole
matter, referred to high authorities in Rome, went darkly drifting into
some form of litigation, and there abides.
Technically, then, neither side may claim that it has won. The
statue has not been unveiled. But the statue has not been displaced.
Practically, though, and morally, the palm is, so far, to the fishermen.
The pedestal does not really irk them at all. On the contrary, it and
the sheeting do cast for them in the heat a pleasant shadow, of which
(the influence of Fleet Street, once felt, never shaken off, forces
me to say) they are not slow to avail themselves. And the cost of the
litigation comes not, you may be sure, out of their light old pockets,
but out of the coffers of some pious rich folk hereabouts. The Pope
remains a prisoner in the Vatican? Well, here is Umberto, a kind of
hostage. Yet with what a difference! Here is no spiritual king stripped
of earthly kingship. Here is an earthly king kept swaddled up day after
day, to be publicly ridiculous. The fishermen, as I have said, pay him
no heed. The mayor, passing along the road, looks straight in front of
him, with an elaborate assumption of unconcern. So do the councillors.
But there are others who look maliciously up at the hapless figure. Now
and again there comes a monk from the monastery on that hill yonder. He
laughs into his beard as he goes by. Two by two, in their grey cloaks
and their blue mantillas, the little orphan girls are sometimes marched
past. There they go, as I write. Not malice, but a vague horror, is in
the eyes they turn. Umberto, belike, is used as a means to frighten them
when, or lest, they offend. The nun in whose charge they arc crosses
herself.
Yet it is recorded of Umberto that he was kind to little children.
This, indeed, is one of the few things recorded of him. Fierce though he
looked, he was, for the most part, it must be confessed, null. He seldom
asserted himself. There was so little of that for him to assert. He had,
therefore, no personal enemies. In a negative way, he was popular, and
was positively popular, for a while, after his assassination. And this
it is that makes him now the less able, poor fellow, to understand and
endure the shame he is put to. ‘Stat rex indignatus.’ He does try to
assert himself now--does strive, by day and by night, poor petrefact,
to rip off these fell and clownish integuments. Of his elder brother in
Paris he has never heard; but he knows that Lazarus arisen from the tomb
did not live in grave-clothes. He forgets that after all he is only a
statue. To himself he is still a king--or at least a man who was once a
king and, having done no wrong, ought not now to be insulted. If he had
in his composition one marble grain of humour, he might... but no, a
joke against oneself is always cryptic. Fat men are not always the best
drivers of fat oxen; and cryptic statues cannot be depended on to see
cryptic jokes.
If Umberto could grasp the truth that no man is worthy to be reproduced
as a statue; if he could understand, once and for all, that the
unveiling of him were itself a notable disservice to him, then might his
wrath be turned to acquiescence, and his acquiescence to gratitude, and
he be quite happy hid. Is he, really, more ridiculous now than he always
was? If you be an extraordinary man, as was his father, win a throne by
all means: you will fill it. If your son be another extraordinary man,
he will fill it when his turn comes. But if that son be, as, alas, he
most probably will be, like Umberto, quite ordinary, then let parental
love triumph over pride of dynasty: advise your boy to abdicate at the
earliest possible moment. A great king--what better? But it is ill
that a throne be sat on by one whose legs dangle uncertainly towards the
dais, and ill that a crown settle down over the tip of the nose. And
the very fact that for quite inadequate kings men’s hands do leap to
the salute, instinctively, does but make us, on reflection, the more
conscious of the whole absurdity. Even than a great man on a throne
we can, when we reflect, imagine something--ah, not something better
perhaps, but something more remote from absurdity. Let us say that
Umberto’s father was great, as well as extraordinary. He was accounted
great enough to be the incarnation of a great idea. ‘United Italy’--oh
yes, a great idea, a charming idea: in the ‘sixties I should have been
all for it. But how shall I or any other impartial person write odes to
the reality? What people in all this exquisite peninsula are to-day the
happier for the things done by and through Vittorio Emmanuele Liberator?
The question is not merely rhetorical. There is the large class of
politicians, who would have had no scope in the old days. And there are
the many men who in other days would have been fishing or ploughing, but
now strut in this and that official uniform. There passes between me and
the sea, as I write--how opportunely people do pass here!--a little man
with a peaked cap and light blue breeches and a sword. His prime duty
is to see that none of his fellow peasants shall carry home a bucket of
sea-water. For there is salt in sea-water; and heavily, because they
must have it or sicken, salt is taxed; and this passing sentinel is to
prevent them from cheating the Revenue by recourse to the sea which,
though here it is, they must not regard as theirs. What becomes of
the tax-money? It goes towards the building of battleships, cruisers,
gunboats and so forth. What are these for? Why, for Italy to be a Great
European Power with, of course. In the little blue bay behind Umberto,
while I write, there lies at anchor an Italian gunboat. Opportunely
again? I can but assure you that it really and truly is there. It has
been there for two days. It delights the fishermen. They say it is
‘bella e pulita com’ un fiore.’ They stand shading their eyes towards
it, smiling and proud, heirs of all the ages, neglecting their sails and
nets and spars of wood. They can imagine nothing better than it. They
see nothing at all sinister or absurd about it, these simple fellows.
And simple Umberto, their captive, strives to wheel round on his
pedestal and to tear but a peep-hole in his sheeting. He would be glad
could he feast but one eye on this bit of national glory. But he remains
helpless--helpless as a Sultana made ready for the Bosphorus, helpless
as a pig is in a poke. It enrages him that he who was so eminently
respectable in life should be made so ludicrous on his eminence after
death. He is bitter at the inertia of the men who set him up. Were he
an ornament of the Church, not of the State that he served so
conscientiously, how very different would be the treatment of his
plight! If he were a Saint, occluded thus by the municipality, how
many the prayers that would be muttered, the candles promised, for his
release! There would be processions, too; and who knows but that there
might even be a miracle vouchsafed, a rending of the veil? The only
procession that passes him is that of the intimidated orphans. No
heavenly power intervenes for him--perhaps (he bitterly conjectures) for
fear of offending the Vatican. Sirocco, now and again, blows furiously
at his back, but never splits the sheeting. Rain often soaks it, never
rots it. There is no help for him. He stands a mock to the pious, a
shame and incubus to the emancipated; received, yet hushed up; exalted,
yet made a fool of; taken and left; a monument to Fate’s malice.
From under the hem of his weather-beaten domino, always, he just
displays, with a sort of tragic coquetry, the toe of a stout and
serviceable marble boot. And this, I have begun to believe, is all that
I shall ever see of him. Else might I not be writing about him; for else
had he not so haunted me. If I knew myself destined to see him--to see
him steadily and see him whole--no matter how many years hence, I could
forthwith think about other things. I had hoped that by this essay I
might rid my mind of him. He is inexcutible, confound him! His pedestal
draws me to itself with some such fascination as had the altar of
the unknown god for the wondering Greek. I try to distract myself
by thinking of other images--images that I have seen. I think of
Bartolommeo Colleoni riding greatly forth under the shadow of the
church of Saint John and Saint Paul. Of Mr. Peabody I think, cosy in his
armchair behind the Royal Exchange; of Nelson above the sparrows, and of
Perseus among the pigeons; of golden Albert, and of Harvey the not red.
Up looms Umberto, uncouthly casting them one and all into the shade.
I think of other statues that I have not seen--statues suspected of
holding something back from even the clearest-eyed men who have stood
beholding and soliciting them. But how obvious, beside Umberto, the
Sphinx would be! And Memnon, how tamely he sits waiting for the dawn!
Matchless as a memorial, then, I say again, this statue is. And as a
work of art it has at least the advantage of being beyond criticism. In
my young days, I wrote a plea that all the statues in the streets
and squares of London should be extirpated and, according to their
materials, smashed or melted. From an aesthetic standpoint, I went
a trifle too far: London has a few good statues. From an humane
standpoint, my plea was all wrong. Let no violence be done to the
effigies of the dead. There is disrespect in setting up a dead man’s
effigy and then not unveiling it. But there would be no disrespect, and
there would be no violence, if the bad statues familiar to London were
ceremoniously veiled, and their inscribed pedestals left just as they
are. That is a scheme which occurred to me soon after I saw the veiled
Umberto. Mr. Birrell has now stepped in and forestalled my advocacy.
Pereant qui--but no, who could wish that charming man to perish? The
realisation of that scheme is what matters.
Let an inventory be taken of those statues. Let it be submitted to
Lord Rosebery, and he be asked to tick off all those statesmen, poets,
philosophers and other personages about whom he would wish to orate.
Then let the list be passed on to other orators, until every statue
on it shall have its particular spokesman. Then let the dates for the
various veilings be appointed. If there be four or five veilings every
week, I conceive that the whole list will be exhausted in two years or
so. And my enjoyment of the reported speeches will not be the less keen
because I can so well imagine them.... In conclusion, Lord Rosebery said
that the keynote to the character of the man in whose honour they were
gathered together to-day was, first and last, integrity. (Applause.)
He did not say of him that he had been infallible. Which of us was
infallible? (Laughter.) But this he would say, that the great man
whose statue they were looking on for the last time had been actuated
throughout his career by no motive but the desire to do that, and that
only, which would conduce to the honour and to the stability of the
country that gave him birth. Of him it might truly be said, as had
been said of another, ‘That which he had to give, he gave.’ (Loud and
prolonged applause.) His Lordship then pulled the cord, and the sheeting
rolled up into position...
Not, however, because those speeches will so edify and soothe me, nor
merely because those veiled statues will make less uncouth the city I
was born in, do I feverishly thrust on you my proposition. The wish in
me is that posterity shall be haunted by our dead heroes even as I am
by Umberto. Rather hard on posterity? Well, the prevision of its plight
would cheer me in mine immensely.