For my part, therefore, I think the French Zola controversy much more
practical and exciting than the English Shakspere one. The admission of
Zola to the Pantheon may be regarded as defining Zola's position. But
nobody could say that a statue of Shakspere, even fifty feet high, on
the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, could define Shakspere's position. It
only defines our position towards Shakspere. It is he who is fixed; it
is we who are unstable. The nearest approach to an English parallel to
the Zola case would be furnished if it were proposed to put some
savagely controversial and largely repulsive author among the ashes of
the greatest English poets. Suppose, for instance, it were proposed to
bury Mr. Rudyard Kipling in Westminster Abbey. I should be against
burying him in Westminster Abbey; first, because he is still alive (and
here I think even he himself might admit the justice of my protest); and
second, because I should like to reserve that rapidly narrowing space
for the great permanent examples, not for the interesting foreign
interruptions, of English literature. I would not have either Mr.
Kipling or Mr. George Moore in Westminster Abbey, though Mr. Kipling
has certainly caught even more cleverly than Mr. Moore the lucid and
cool cruelty of the French short story. I am very sure that Geoffrey
Chaucer and Joseph Addison get on very well together in the Poets'
Corner, despite the centuries that sunder them. But I feel that Mr.
George Moore would be much happier in Pere-la-Chaise, with a riotous
statue by Rodin on the top of him; and Mr. Kipling much happier under
some huge Asiatic monument, carved with all the cruelties of the gods.

As to the affair of the English monument to Shakspere, every people has
its own mode of commemoration, and I think there is a great deal to be
said for ours. There is the French monumental style, which consists in
erecting very pompous statues, very well done. There is the German
monumental style, which consists in erecting very pompous statues, badly