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.
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