By R. H. Titherington.
“Let the sound of those he wrought for,
And the feet of those he fought for,
Echo round his bourne forevermore.”
Tennyson’s lines on the Duke of Wellington may well be applied to the monument that Brooklyn has set up to commemorate her greatest citizen and the foremost of all American preachers. The recently unveiled statue of Beecher could hardly be better placed than at the junction of two main arteries of traffic, and facing the City Hall. It stands at the heart of Brooklyn, as in another sense Beecher stood, during his life, at the heart of Brooklyn and of the nation. Its location is in keeping with the character of the statue, and with those sides of the great man’s nature which it especially typifies. It should, perhaps, have been set so as to face away from the City Hall, rather than toward it. It is certainly somewhat unfortunate that that which meets the eye of most of those who see it should be the back of the statue, draped in the folds of a heavy cloak.
THE STATUE IN FRONT OF THE BROOKLYN CITY HALL.
The monument itself, as may be inferred from the mention of John Quincy Adams Ward as its designer, is one that shows intelligent and conscientious work besides much technical skill. It is animated by a definite conception of its subject, and partakes of the character of an ideal group as well as that of an actual likeness. The subsidiary portion is of course wholly ideal; while the central figure itself is something more than a reproduction of the form and features of its original. Those who remember Mr. Beecher only in the last few years of his life may be inclined to think that the lines of the statue’s face are too deep and emphatic, that its expression has too much positiveness and strength, and too little gentleness and benignity. There is truth in this criticism, if criticism it can be called. The sculptor prepared for his task by taking a death mask of Mr. Beecher’s face; but from the more rounded outlines of the preacher’s later years he deliberately went back to show him as he was in the prime of life, in those stirring times when he led the vanguard of freedom’s forces. The statue is Beecher as he will live in the grateful memory of posterity, rather than as he lives in the affectionate recollection of surviving friends. It is the Beecher of history.
HENRY WARD BEECHER.