Shall some memorial of Herbert Spencer be erected in the Abbey, or rather in what journalists love to call the ‘National Valhalla,’ the ‘English Pantheon,’ or the ‘venerable edifice,’ where, as Macaulay says, the dust of the illustrious accusers, et cetera——? The question was once agitated in a daily paper. It seems that the Dean, when approached on the subject, acted like one of his predecessors in the case of Byron. The Dean is in a very difficult position, because any decision of his must be severely criticised from one quarter or another. The Abbey retains, I understand, some of its pre-Reformation privileges, and is not under the jurisdiction of Bishop or Archbishop. Yet no one who has ever visited the Chapel of St. Edward the Confessor on October 13th, the festival of his translation, can accuse the Abbey authorities of bigotry or narrow-mindedness. Only a few years ago I fought my way, with other Popish pilgrims, to the shrine of our patron Saint (as he was, until superseded by Saint George in the thirteenth century), and there I indulged in overt acts of superstition violating Article XXII. of ‘the Church of England by law established.’ A verger, with some colonial tourists, arrived during our devotions, but his voice was lowered out of regard for our feelings. Indeed, both he and the tourists adopted towards us an attitude of respectful curiosity (not altogether unpleasant), which was in striking contrast to the methods of the continental Suisse routing out worshippers from a side chapel of a Catholic church in order to show Baedeker-ridden sightseers an altar-piece by Rotto Rotinelli.

Thoughts of Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley irresistibly mingled with my devotions. What had the poor fellows burnt for, after all? Here we were ostentatiously ignoring English history and the adjacent Houses of Parliament; outraging the rubrics by ritual observations for which poor curates in the East End are often suspended, and before now have been imprisoned. I could not help thinking that the Archbishop of Westminster would hardly care to return these hospitalities, by permitting, on August 24th, a memorial service for Admiral Coligny in Westminster Cathedral. . . . I rose from my knees a new Luther, with something like a Protestant feeling, and scrutinised severely the tombs in Poets’ Corner. Even there I found myself confronted with an almost irritating liberalism. Here was Alexander Pope, who rejected all the overtures of Swift and Atterbury to embrace the Protestant faith. And there was Dryden, not, perhaps, a great ornament to my persuasion, but still a Catholic at the last. Dean Panther had not grudged poet Hind his niche in the National Valhalla (I knew I should be reduced to that periphrasis). And here was the mighty Charles Darwin, about whose reception into the English Pantheon (I have fallen again) I remember there was some trouble. Well, if precedent embalms a principle, I venture to raise a thin small voice, and plead for Herbert Spencer. ‘The English people,’ said a friendly French critic, ‘do not admire their great men because they were great, but because they reflect credit on themselves.’ So on the score of national vanity I claim space for Herbert Spencer. Very few Englishmen have exercised such extraordinary influence on continental opinion, which Beaconsfield said was the verdict of posterity. On the news of his death, the Italian Chamber passed a vote of condolence with the English people. I suppose that does not seem a great honour to Englishmen, but to me, an enemy of United Italy, it seemed a great honour, not only to the dead but to the English people. Can you imagine the Swiss Federal Council sending us a vote of condolence on the death of Mr. Hall Caine or Mr. Robert Hichens?

Again, though it is ungrateful of me to mention the fact after my experiences of October 13th, the Abbey was not built nor endowed by people who anticipated the Anglican form of worship being celebrated within its walls, though I admit it has been restored by the adherents of that communion. The image of Milton, to take only one instance, would have been quite as objectionable to Henry III. or Abbot Islip as those of Darwin or Spencer. The emoluments bequeathed by Henry VII. and others for requiem masses are now devoted to the education of Deans’ daughters and Canons’ sons. Where incensed altars used to stand, hideous monuments of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries wound the Gothic air with their monstrous ornaments and inapposite epitaphs. St. Paul’s may fairly be held sacred to Anglicanism, and I do not think any one would claim sepulture within its precincts for one who was avowedly hostile to Christian or Anglican sentiment. But I think the Abbey has now passed into the category of museums, and might well be declared a national monument under control of the State. The choir, and possibly the nave, should, of course, be severely preserved for whatever the State religion might be at the time. Catholics need not mourn the secularisation of the transepts and chapels, because Leo XIII. renounced officially all claims on the ancient shrines of the Catholic faith, and High Churchmen might console themselves by recalling the fact that Abbots were originally laymen.

My whole scheme would be a return to the practice of the Primitive Church, when priests were only allowed on sufferance inside abbeys at all. The Low Church party need not be considered, because they can have no sentiment about what they regard as relics of superstition and Broad Churchmen could hardly complain at the logical development of their own principle. The Nonconformists, the backbone of the nation, could not be otherwise than grateful. The decision about admitting busts, statues, or bodies into the national and sacred ‘musÉe des morts’ (as the anti-clerical French might call it under the new constitution) would rest with the Home Secretary. This would be an added interest to the duties of a painstaking official, forming pleasant interludes between considering the remission of sentences on popular criminals: it would relieve the Dean and Chapter at all events from grave responsibility. The Home Secretary would always be called the Abbot of Westminster. How picturesque at the formation of a new Cabinet—‘Home Secretary and Abbot of Westminster, the Right Hon. Mr. So-and-So.’ The first duty of the Abbot will be to appoint a Royal Commission to consider the removal of hideous monuments which disfigure the edifice: nothing prior to 1700 coming under its consideration. A small tablet would recall what has been taken away. Herbert Spencer’s claim to a statue would be duly considered, and, I hope, by a unanimous vote some of the other glaring gaps would be filled up. If the Abbey is full of obscurities, very dim religious lights, many of the illustrious names in our literature have been omitted: Byron, Shelley, Keats—to mention only these. There is no monument to Chatterton, one of the more powerful influences in the romantic movement, nor to William Blake, whose boyish inspiration was actually nourished amid that ‘Gothic supineness,’ as Mr. MacColl has finely said of him. Of all our poets and painters Blake surely deserves a monument in the grey church which became to him what St. Mary Redcliffe was to Chatterton. A window adapted from the book of Job (with the marvellous design of the Morning Stars) was, I am told, actually offered to, and rejected by, the late Dean. To Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the wonderful movement of which he was the dynamic force there should also be a worthy memorial; to Water Pater, the superb aside of English prose; to Cardinal Manning, the Ecclesiastic of the nineteenth century; and Professor Huxley, that master of dialectics.

A young actor of my acquaintance, who bore the honoured name of Siddons, was invited to take part in the funeral service of the late Sir Henry Irving. His step-father was connected by marriage with the great actress, and he was very proud of his physical resemblance to her portrait by Reynolds. He had played with great success the part of Fortinbras in the provinces, and Mr. Alexander has assured me that he was the ideal impersonator of Rosencrantz. It was an open secret that he had refused Mr. Arthur Bourchier’s offer of that rÔle in a proposed revival of Hamlet at the Garrick. Since the burial of Sir Henry Irving in the Abbey, he has never been seen: though I saw him myself in the funeral cortÉge. All his friends remember the curious exaltation in his manner a few days before the ceremony, and I cannot help thinking that in a moment of enthusiasm, realising that this was his only chance of burial in the Abbey, he took advantage of the bowed unobservant heads during the prayer of Committal and crept beneath the pall into the great actor’s tomb. What his feelings were at the time, or afterwards when the vault was bricked up, would require the introspective pen of Mr. Henry James and the curious imagination of Mr. H. G. Wells to describe. I have been assured by the vergers that mysterious sounds were heard for some days after this historical occasion. Distressed by the loss of my friend, I applied to the Dean of Westminster and finally to Scotland Yard. I need not say that I was met with sacerdotal indifference on the one hand and with callous officialism on the other. I hope that under the Royal Commission which I have appointed the mystery will be cleared up. Not that I begrudge poor Siddons a niche with Garrick and Irving.

(1906.)

To Professor James Mayor, Toronto University.