Just as a memorial, just to perpetuate in one's mind the dead man in
whose image and honour it has been erected, this statue is better than
any that I have seen.... No, pedantic reader: I ought not to have said
`than any other that I have seen' Except in shrouded and distorted
outline, I have not seen this statue.
Not as an image, then, can it be extolled by me. And I am bound to say
that even as an honour it seems to me more than dubious. Commissioned
and designed and chiselled and set up in all reverence, it yet serves
very well the purpose of a guy. This does not surprise you. You are
familiar with a host of statues that are open to precisely that
objection. Westminster Abbey abounds in them. They confront you
throughout London and the provinces. They stud the Continent. Rare
indeed is the statue that can please the well-wishers of the person
portrayed. Nor in every case is the sculptor to blame. There is in the
art of sculpture itself a quality intractable to the aims of personal
portraiture. Sculpture, just as it cannot fitly record the gesture of
a moment, is discommoded by personal idiosyncrasies. The details that
go to compose this or that gentleman's appearance--such as the little
wrinkles around his eyes, and the way his hair grows, and the special
convolutions of his ears--all these, presentable on canvas, or
evocable by words, are not right matter for the chisel or for the
mould and furnace. Translated into terms of bronze or marble,
howsoever cunningly, these slight and trivial things cease to be
trivial and slight. They assume a ludicrous importance. No man is
worthy to be reproduced as bust or statue. And if sculpture is too
august to deal with what a man has received from his Maker, how much
less ought it to be bothered about what he has received from his
hosier and tailor! Sculpture's province is the soul. The most
concrete, it is also the most spiritual of the arts. The very
heaviness and stubbornness of its material, precluding it from happy
dalliance with us fleeting individual creatures, fit it to cope with
that which in mankind is permanent and universal. It can through the
symbol give us incomparably the type. Wise is that sculptor who, when
portray an individual he must, treats arbitrarily the mere actual
husk, and strives but to show the soul. Of course, he must first catch
that soul. What M. Rodin knew about the character and career of Mr.
George Wyndham, or about the character and career of Mr. Bernard Shaw,
was not, I hazard, worth knowing; and Mr. Shaw is handed down by him
to posterity as a sort of bearded lady, and Mr. Wyndham as a sort of
beardless one. But about Honore' de Balzac he knew much. Balzac he
understood. Balzac's work, Balzac's soul, in that great rugged figure
aspiring and indeflexible, he gave us with a finality that could have
been achieved through no other art than sculpture.
There is a close kinship between that statue of Balzac and this statue
of which I am to tell you. Both induce, above all, a profound sense of
unrest, of heroic will to overcome all obstacles. The will to compass
self-expression, the will to emerge from darkness to light, from
formlessness to form, from nothing to everything--this it is that I
find in either statue; and this it is in virtue of which the Balzac
has unbeknown a brother on the Italian seaboard.
Here stands--or rather struggles--on his pedestal this younger
brother, in strange contrast with the scenery about him. Mildly,
behind his back, the sea laps the shingle. Mildly, in front of him, on
the other side of the road, rise some of those mountains whereby the
Earth, before she settled down to cool, compassed--she, too--some sort
of self-expression. Mildly around his pedestal, among rusty anchors
strewn there on the grass between road and beach, sit the fishermen,
mending their nets or their sails, or whittling bits of wood. What
will you say of these fishermen when----but I outstrip my narrative.
I had no inkling of tragedy when first I came to the statue. I did not
even know it was a statue. I had made by night the short journey from
Genoa to this place beside the sea; and, driving along the coast-road
to the hotel that had been recommended, I passed what in the starlight
looked like nothing but an elderly woman mounted on a square pedestal
and gazing out seaward--a stout, elderly, lonely woman in a poke
bonnet, indescribable except by that old Victorian term `a party,' and
as unlike Balzac's younger brother as only Sarah Gamp's elder sister
could be. How, I wondered in my hotel, came the elder sister of Sarah
Gamp to be here in Liguria and in the twentieth century? How clomb
she, puffing and panting, on to that pedestal? For what argosy of gin
was she straining her old eyes seaward? I knew there would be no sleep
for me until I had solved these problems; and I went forth afoot along
the way I had come. The moon had risen; and presently I saw in the
starlight the `party' who so intrigued me. Eminent, amorphous,
mysterious, there she stood, immobile, voluminous, ghastly beneath the
moon. By a slight shoreward lift of crinoline, as against the seaward
protrusion of poke bonnet, a grotesque balance was given to the
unshapely shape of her. For all her uncanniness, I thought I had never
seen any one, male or female, old or young, look so hopelessly common.
I felt that by daylight a noble vulgarity might be hers. In the
watches of the night she was hopelessly, she was transcendently
common.
Little by little, as I came nearer, she ceased to illude me, and I
began to think of her as `it.' What `it' was, however, I knew not
until I was at quite close quarters to the pedestal it rose from.
There, on the polished granite, was carved this legend:
A UMBERTO Ių
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 he 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 dai"s, 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.
---------------------------------------
-THE END-
Max Beerbohm's essay: Mobled King (1911)
From the book 'Even Now'(Max Beerbohm's essays collection)
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