were not set up.  They were even set up sulkily, in a utilitarian age which was haunted by the thought that there were a great many more sensible ways of spending money.  So long as this is the dominant national sentiment, the land is barren, statues and churches will not grow—­for they have to grow, as much as trees and flowers.  But this moral disadvantage which lay so heavily upon the early Victorian sculpture lies in a modified degree upon that rough, picturesque, commonplace sculpture which has begun to arise, and of which the statue of Darwin in the South Kensington Museum and the statue of Gordon in Trafalgar Square are admirable examples.  It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it must be striking; it must be in the highest sense of the word sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalogue has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.

The two modes of commemorating a public man are a statue and a biography.  They are alike in certain respects, as, for example, in the fact that neither of them resembles the original, and that both of them commonly tone down not only all a man’s vices, but all the more amusing of his virtues.  But they are treated in one respect differently.  We never hear anything about biography without hearing something about the sanctity of private life and the necessity for suppressing the whole of the most important part of a man’s existence.  The sculptor does not work at this disadvantage.  The sculptor does not leave out the nose of an eminent philanthropist because it is too beautiful to be given to the public; he does not depict a statesman with a sack over his head because his smile was too sweet to be endurable in the light of day.  But in biography the thesis is popularly and solidly maintained, so that it requires some courage even to hint a doubt of it, that the better a man was, the more truly human life he led, the less should be said about it.

For this idea, this modern idea that sanctity is identical with secrecy, there is one thing at least to be said.  It is for all practical purposes an entirely new idea; it was unknown to all the ages in which the idea of sanctity really flourished.  The record of the great spiritual movements of mankind is dead against the idea that spirituality is a private matter.  The most awful secret of every man’s soul, its most lonely and individual need, its most primal and psychological relationship, the thing called worship, the communication between the soul and the last reality—­this most private matter is the most public spectacle in the world.  Anyone who chooses to walk into a large church on Sunday morning may see a hundred men each alone with his Maker.  He stands, in truth, in the presence of one of the strangest spectacles in