A snatch maybe of ancient song,
Some breathings of a deathless mind;
Some love of truth; some hate of wrong.
And to myself in games I said,
“What mean the books? Can I win fame?
I would be like the faithful dead,
A fearless man and pure of blame.”’
This, then, is our present task—to see that our dead are worthily commemorated for our own sakes and for the sake of those who come after. How shall we do it?
In the first place, we must not do it idly and carelessly—we must take thought, have a plan and a purpose, not be in too great a hurry. Hurry is the worst foe of memorials. We have a national habit—I think it is rather a sign of greatness—not to do anything until we are obliged; but the result of that often is a loss of grace and fineness; because people who must act, and are a little ashamed of not having acted, accept any solution.
What I hope we shall do is to take careful thought where our memorials shall be set, so that they may be most constantly and plainly seen; and then how they may best fulfil their purpose, which is to remind us first, and next to kindle emotion and imagination. We have an ugly habit of combining, if we can, local utility with a memorial, as in the well-known story of the benevolent clergyman who read out the announcement of the death of a great statesman and added, ‘That is just what we wanted! We have long needed a new water supply!’ That is like using a grandfather’s sword to trim a privet-hedge with! I do not believe in fitting things in. If we commemorate, let us commemorate by a memorial which arrests and attracts the eye, is long and gratefully remembered, and by an inscription which touches the heart, and does not merely merge a man among the possessors of all human gifts and virtues. I remember a Georgian monument in a cathedral, where a lean man in a toga peeped anxiously out of an arbour of fluted columns, and of whom it was announced that in him ‘every talent which adorns the human spirit was united with every virtue which sustains it.’ How different is the little tablet in a church I know on which a former choir-boy is commemorated! He had joined the army, and had won a Victoria Cross in the Boer War which he did not live to receive. The facts were most briefly told; and below were the words, which I can hardly read without tears: