Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous.  Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring.  And public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to teach.  Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great deal more public than they are at present.  We are too fond nowadays of committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence.  We have forgotten the old and wholesome morality of the Book of Proverbs, ‘Wisdom crieth without; her voice is heard in the streets.’  In Athens and Florence her voice was heard in the streets.  They had an outdoor life of war and argument, and they had what modern commercial civilization has never had—­an outdoor art.  Religious services, the most sacred of all things, have always been held publicly; it is entirely a new and debased notion that sanctity is the same as secrecy.  A great many modern poets, with the most abstruse and delicate sensibilities, love darkness, when all is said and done, much for the same reason that thieves love it.  The mission of a great spire or statue should be to strike the spirit with a sudden sense of pride as with a thunderbolt.  It should lift us with it into the empty and ennobling air.  Along the base of every noble monument, whatever else may be written there, runs in invisible letters the lines of Swinburne: 

  ’This thing is God: 
  To be man with thy might,
  To go straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live
      out thy life in the light.’

If a public monument does not meet this first supreme and obvious need, that it should be public and monumental, it fails from the outset.

There has arisen lately a school of realistic sculpture, which may perhaps be better described as a school of sketchy sculpture.  Such a movement was right and inevitable as a reaction from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary.  Perhaps the most hideous and depressing object in the universe—­far more hideous and depressing than one of Mr. H.G.  Wells’s shapeless monsters of the slime (and not at all unlike them)—­is the statue of an English philanthropist.  Almost as bad, though, of course, not quite as bad, are the statues of English politicians in Parliament Fields.  Each of them is cased in a cylindrical frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking garment over the arm that might be either a bathing-towel or a light great-coat.  Each of them is in an oratorical attitude, which has all the disadvantage of being affected without even any of the advantages of being theatrical.  Let no one suppose that such abortions arise merely from technical demerit.  In every line of those leaden dolls is expressed the fact that they were not set up with any heat of natural enthusiasm for beauty or dignity.  They were set up mechanically, because it would seem indecorous or stingy if they