Evening Post SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 1928. "HOUSE FULL AT THE ABBEY"

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 23, 28 January 1928, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 1928. "HOUSE FULL AT THE ABBEY"

The funeral of Thomas Hardy has recalled attention to a problem which was being keenly discussed only a few weeks previously. "House Full at the Abbey" is the title under which a correspondent of the "Nation" reviewed the findings of the Cathedral Commission regarding the congestion of the noble building which has become the national mausoleum, and the death of Hardy brought another guest to whom the nation agreed with the Dean of Westminster in considering it impossible to refuse admission, i Westminster Abbey, said Dean Stanley, stands alone amongst the buildings of the world. There are, it may be, some which surpass it in beauty or grandeur; there are others certainly which surpass it in depth and sublimity of association; but there is none which has been entwined by so many continuous threads with the history of a whole nation. This glorious continuity, which now includes the Empire as well as the nation, is threatened by the lack of space. The time is close at hand when it will be impossible to find room even for the worthiest unless some change is made. "Leave the Abbey alone" was the almost unanimous comment with which the report of the Cathedral Commission was received, and the instinct which recoils from the proposal to allow any modern architect to add a new north aisle to the venerable building, or an ambulatory and a series of new cloisters, as verging on sacrilege and vandalism is doubtless sound in the main. To break with the history of so many centuries by destroying the identity of Westminster Abbey as we know it would be nothing short of a national disaster, but the history of the future has also to be considered, and the breach with that, which is the inevitable penalty of complete inaction, would be almost equally intolerable. Though the difficulty of the problem has of course been aggravated by every passing year, it has long been acute. Nearly forty years ago Queen Victoria appointed a Royal Commission to inquire into the facilities offered by the Abbey "for the interment and otherwise preserving the memory of the most illustrious of our subjects, in the manner which has been customary for many centuries." The report of the Commission, which was presented in 1891, included historical matter of much interest and value, but its conclusions were brief, indecisive, and dilatory: That space might probably be found beneath the floor of the Abbey for interment for at least 100 yeaTS to come, if the duty of granting such burial were discharged sparingly and with careful regard for tho greatness of tho national honour thereby conferred; but that no room remained in the interior of the building for important monuments. The economy by which the .Commissioners were confident that the saturation point might be postponed for another century has not proved equal to the task. After the lapse of a little more than a third of a century the crisis is at hand. Nor can it be said that the authorities have recently been lax in their administration. During the last seventy years covered by die report of the Commission (1820-1890) the burials in Westminster Abbey had "hardly exceeded an average of one in each year." Since then the average has fallen, yet as the "Manchester Guardian" says, There is room in the Abbey for no more statues, and only a few square feet in a dark corner are left for memorial tablets. A fraction of those few square feet has since been claimed by Thomas Hardy. Even for a second Shakespeare there will soon be not even a square inch to spare. But even in 1890 the problem was an old one. In 1854 a report on proposals for "providing at the Abbey an additional place for memorials" was laid before Mr. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, but nothing came of it. About a century earlier (1758) complaints were made that the Abbey was being "loaded with marble," and the burials grew fewer. Laxity seems to have reached its climax towards the close of the previous century, when in ten years (1681-1690) there were no less than 100 burials in the Abbey itself and 125 within the precincts. The results of this crowding of the Abbey with the non-illustrious dead were vividly portrayed by Addison, and his account is not made any the less impressive by the complacency with which he "entertains" himself and draws his moral: — Upon my going into the church I entertained myself with the digging of a grave; and saw in every shovelful of it that was thrown np, the fragment of a bone or skull intermixed with a kind of fresh mouldering earth, that some time or other had a place in the composition of a human body. Upon this I began to consider with myself what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty, strength, and youth, with old ago, weakness, ana deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter. An obvious remedy for the disgusting state of affairs revealed by Addison would have been cremation, but the matter has proceeded too far for that remedy, even if it were other-

wise practicable. "Of actual burial in the Abbey," says the "Manchester Guardian," "an end has already been made, but now there is not space even for ashes." Another point made by Addison in the same essay suggests what appears to be the only practicable remedy. He deplored the bad taste of both the monuments and the inscriptions which were finding their way into the Abbey. Sir Cloudesly Shovel's monument has, ho writes, very often given mo great offence; instead of tho brave, rough English Admiral, which was tho distinguishing character of that plain, gallant man, ho is represented ou his tomb by the figure of a beau, dressed in a long periwig, and reposing himself upon velvet cushions under a canopy of state. The inscription is answerable to the monument. But Sir Cloudesley Shovel's monument was but an item iv the immense load of marble with which the florid taste of the day continued to cumber the Abbey for half a century or more after Addison's protest, and under which the Abbey still groans. This aspect of the case for reform is admirably put by Mrs. E. T. Cook in her description of what those huge and hideous monuments have done for the Abbey. Here, she writes in her "Highways and Byways iv London," are now no more the simple tombs and effigies of tho earliest time, no more the rich, imposing magnificence of tho medieval shrines, but a latter efflorescence of sculpture and ornament, an efflorescence differing as widely from the severity of former ages, aa the laudatory epitaphs differ from the simplicity and humanity of the early inscriptions. Justice and Mercy, Neptune and Britannia, cherubs and clouds, are generally very painfully in evidence, and in their vast size and depressing übiquity testify to the false taste of their day. Nor are the monuments always deserved. "Some day," said Carlyle, cynically, "there will be a terrible gaol-delivery in Westminster Abbey!" The worst of such theatrical sculpturo is, also, that it always takes up so much room; we, in our day, should often be glad of the space of one cloudlet —of one unnecessary virtue —for tho modest perpetuation, of a great man's memory." Though the problem is difficult and the Cathedrals Commission has definitely pronounced against "removing the existing monuments to make room for new ones," this "terrible gaol-delivery" has to be faced. When the monuments of unworthy men and the unworthy monuments of great men have been removed, there will be room in the Abbey for the reasonable commemoration of the greatness of the nation and the Empire for centuries to come.