20 
LAND & WATER 
August 23, 1917 
admiration. For the terrible fruit of conscious and deliberate 
virtue is the unconscious crime. ^ 
Further, the responsibility was shared by every one ol us 
nt onlv bv the politicians and the finan^ers- /'i"^ f, "^ 
ereat temptation to identify mammon-worship with particular 
classes ; but in the heart of each one of us there are money- 
changers and sellers of doves. That is the full meaning ol 
tiie war monument designed by Mr. Eric Gill and Mr. Charles 
HoldeA. Though directed against the great evil of com- 
mercialism, with its unmatched power as the ultimacc cause 
of war, it is not an arraignment of a particular class— \vmcn 
would be presumptuous. It is a reminder to all ot us tnat 11 
we are to participate in the lesson of the war, and m trc 
dedication of the monument, we must purge the lempe 01 
our heiirts. Nobody can have any real conviction about 
any evil who does not confess at least a potential share in 
it. and nobodv can claim any share in victory who has not, 
at least in resolution, conquered himself . 
There can be no monument wituout a religious conviction. 
If thev are to be artistic in the true sense of the word our war 
monuments and memorials must be, in the old sentence ot 
dedication: "To the Glorj' of God," and only incidentally 
Design for L,.C.G. Memorial. By Eric Gill and 
Charles Holden 
" in memory of " such and such an event, however great 
or such and such an individual, however heroic. And by a 
re igious conviction I do not mean a sentimental idea of 
'■ Empire fellowship " such as one writer describes as an 
adequate motive for a memorial Chapel in the Charing Cross 
Improvement Scheme. Nor by ." God " do I mean such a 
being as gifted romancers collect in tidying up their souls. 
You cannot make an artistic monument out of a patent 
religion or to the glory of a synthetic God. The religion must 
be common to the people, and the God must be the God of our 
fathers. 
But, to come down to the practical — if anything could be 
more practical than the base of a monument — in order to be 
artistic our monuments must be not only to the glory of God 
but in the language of His crt-atures — the materials employed. 
It is for this reason that not the worst memorials are public 
works for some! utilitarian purpose ; a garden planted or an old 
injustice removed. Since it is not my own I can describe as 
brilliant the suggestion that a good way to commemorate thv 
\Var in London would be to pull down the railings of London 
squares, so that little children could play in them. We are 
happier artistically in our common needs than in our celebra- 
tions chiefly because we are compelled to keep cl^er to the 
t^tuff. Outside material utility our best chancglrof artistic 
safety would seem to be in spiritual utility ; some organic 
addition to churches or the revival of the Market Cross. On 
the whole the Market Cross would seem to have a peculiar 
fitness It is not a new invention, but a traditional and 
familiar form- that survives in fact in a great many places ; 
and from its position in the commercial centre of the town or 
village it would liave special advantages as a monitor, li 
the war should really bring Christ into the market-place the 
men whose names were inscribed on the pedestal of His Cross 
would not have died in vain. Apart from some definitely 
reli^^ious s\-mbol the best association is that of rest or refresh- 
ment ■ such as that of a public seat, preferably of stone, or a 
drinking fountain. The great thing in a monument or 
memorial is to avoid something that is merely to be looked 
at. We are pathetically dependent upon the sense of touch 
"for our deeper emotions. On the seat, on summer evenings, 
we should think of our dead; and names actually felt by 
little fingers would be engraved in memory beyond any telling. 
-Vnd blood shed for England could not be symbolised better 
than by the water of life. The shrine, though beautiful in 
idea, is not really rooted in the habits of our people, and most 
of the war shrines that I have seen look irrelevant. It is 
doubtful if any form can be artistic when the idea that gave 
it birth is no longer active in life. But in either case, of 
material or spiritual utility, the e\ cnt or the names could be 
embodied in the design and so commemorated in the only real 
sense of the word. 
It is when our artists, and particularly our sculptors, 
attempt to embody an idea apart from utility, material or 
spiritual, that they are apt to come to grief. They will not 
trust the material to deliver its own message. They forget 
or through vanity ignore that the first object in a memorial 
is " to set up a store." If to the dedication : " To the glory 
of God and in memory of so-and-so " were always implicitly 
added : " through His creature stone, or glass, or bronze, 
or wood," then could be said in quite large letters " by my 
hand " with no effect of conceit but only the grateful modesty 
of the collaborator. That is the great technical merit of the 
monument designed by Mr. Gill and Mr. Holden. The 
separate languages, so to speak, of bronze and 'stone are 
scrupulously obser\'ed, and their collaboration in the complete 
work is all the more organic on that account. In the model- 
ling of the figures bronze is allowed to say how it, and not 
the mere intelligence of the sculptor, conceives of the human 
figure ; and the stone is let behave squarely and fimily. 
There are the same technical virtues- in the marble relief by 
Mr. Gilbert Bayes which we are allowed to reproduce. The 
marble saves its face ; the sharp cutting giving all the neces- 
sary relief to the design, with the right accent, without 
destroying the continuity of substance, the <imooth saying, 
which is one of the delights of marble. Here, too, there is 
admirable modesty in the design itself. It is an Ulustration 
to the verse of Rupert Brooke, leaving the moral to that, 
rather than an attempt at sym.bolism by the sculptor- 
Respect for materials is as much a religious as an artistic 
virtue— if the two are separable ; it is a recognition of the 
nature of things. Utility compels this respect, and even 
when in purely commemorative work the respect is en- 
forced, as by the hardness of granite in Egyptian sculptuie, 
the results are generally better or, as we say, more monu- 
mental, than when the artist has been left to his own 
restraint. There is moral discipline as well as aesthetic 
guidance in the limitations of the stuff. The greater the 
freedom, as by our enormously increased command of materials 
the greater the need for sonie deep conviction to control the 
design ; and " style" though it may save us from the worst 
atrocities, is a poor substitute for conviction. 
The only victory we can worthily commemorate is a 
victory for God, and we should not dare to claim a \ictory 
for God that does not include a victory over ourselves. This 
should be the inspiration and meaning, clearly and firmly 
expressed, of our war monuments and memorials. For their 
execution there is plenty of talent in the country ; and the 
private heart of the nation has learnt by suffering to be sound 
upon the real meaning of the war. The problem is to bring 
them together at the right angle ; to evade the barriers of style 
and custom and let the heart of the nation speak in stone. 
Therefore, before we set up our monuments and memorials, 
or embark upon any public scheme to commemorate the 
war — circiimspicc. Let us look round at the whole meaning 
of the war, in its intimate personal reactions as well as in its 
international effects. 
Nursing Adventures, by a " F.A.N.Y." in France (Heinemann. 
3s. 6d. net), in its earlier chapters, provides an extremely realistic 
picture of the confusion attendant on the fall of and flight from 
Antwerp ; the writer has a very high opinion of the Belgian 
soldiers and their work, and in these first chapterss he shows with 
fine sense of the dramatic what that work was, incidentally also 
picturing what nursing work in the early days amounted to. 
