There is, of
course, one in Leicester Square; but the very place where it stands
shows that it was put up by a foreigner for foreigners. There is surely
something modest and manly about not attempting to express our greatest
poet in the plastic arts in which we do not excel. We honour Shakspere
as the Jews honour God--by not daring to make of him a graven image. Our
sculpture, our statues, are good enough for bankers and
philanthropists, who are our curse: not good enough for him, who is our
benediction. Why should we celebrate the very art in which we triumph by
the very art in which we fail?
England is most easily understood as the country of amateurs. It is
especially the country of amateur soldiers (that is, of Volunteers), of
amateur statesmen (that is, of aristocrats), and it is not unreasonable
or out of keeping that it should be rather specially the country of a
careless and lounging view of literature. Shakspere has no academic
monument for the same reason that he had no academic education. He had
small Latin and less Greek, and (in the same spirit) he has never been
commemorated in Latin epitaphs or Greek marble. If there is nothing
clear and fixed about the emblems of his fame, it is because there was
nothing clear and fixed about the origins of it.
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