Those great schools and
Universities which watch a man in his youth may record him in his death;
but Shakspere had no such unifying traditions. We can only say of him
what we can say of Dickens. We can only say that he came from nowhere
and that he went everywhere. For him a monument in any place is out of
place. A cold statue in a certain square is unsuitable to him as it
would be unsuitable to Dickens. If we put up a statue of Dickens in
Portland Place to-morrow we should feel the stiffness as unnatural. We
should fear that the statue might stroll about the street at night.
But in France the question of whether Zola shall go to the Pantheon when
he is dead is quite as practicable as the question whether he should go
to prison when he was alive. It is the problem of whether the nation
shall take one turn of thought or another. In raising a monument to Zola
they do not raise merely a trophy, but a finger-post. The question is
one which will have to be settled in most European countries; but like
all such questions, it has come first to a head in France; because
France is the battlefield of Christendom. That question is, of course,
roughly this: whether in that ill-defined area of verbal licence on
certain dangerous topics it is an extenuation of indelicacy or an
aggravation of it that the indelicacy was deliberate and solemn.
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