TRAFALGAR SQUARE AND GREAT ENGLISHMEN

London's finest site Nelson The French salutes Trafalgar Day The Steeple-jack St. Martin's-in-the-Fields The Gymnast-- Screevers" Bands The Cenotaph London's Statues The National Portrait Gallery.

OF Trafalgar Square London has every right to be proud. Here at any rate, one feels, is a genuinely national attempt at a grandoise effect. The National Gallery facade is satisfactory in its British plainness and seriousness ; St. Martin's Church, with its whiteness emerging from its grime, is pure London ; the houses on the east and west sides of the square are commendably rectangular and sturdy ; the lions (although occupied only in guarding policemen's waterproofs) are imposing and very British: while the Nelson Column is as tall and as commanding as any people, however artistic or passionately patriotic, could have made it. It is right. I am not sure but it touches sublimity. Apart, I mean, altogether from the crowning figure and all that he stands for in personal valour, melancholy and charm, and all that he symbolises : conquest itself more than conquest, deliverance. Indeed, with the idea of Nelson added, there is no question at all of sublimity; it is absolute. I like the story of the French sailors who visited London in 1905 rising to salute it as they were driving past on their lay to the West End. Would they have saluted Wellington's statue at Hyde Park Corner, I wonder? May be; but certainly not with the involuntary spontaneity that marked the Trafalgar Square demonstration. (Fortunately, exhaustive as was our hospitality, they were not taken to the grave of Sir Hudson Lowe at St. Mark's in North Audley Street.)

Every now and then the Nelson Column is festooned in honour of Trafalgar Day, and for a while its impressiveness is lost. Wreaths at the foot were better. Patriotism and hero-worship, however, do not resent broken lines ; and the ropes of evergreens that twine about the pillar draw thousands of people to Trafalgar Square every day. I remember the first time I saw the preparations in progress. Turning into the square from Spring Gardens, I was aware of a crowd of upturned faces watching a little black spot travelling up the pillar. It reached the top, disappeared and appeared again, waving something. It was a Steeplejack, an intrepid gentleman from the north of England, if I recollect aright, who had the contract for the decorations, and with whom, on his descent, it was the privilege of several newspaper men to have interviews.

I was tempted after reading one of these to seek him myself, and either induce him to take me to the top with him, or hand him a commission to describe the extent of Nelson's view from that altitude, which, under the title "What Nelson Sees," would, I thought, make a seasonable and novel Trafalgar Day article. But I dared neither to converse with the living hero nor climb to the dead one, and that article is still unwritten. On a clear day Nelson must have a fine prospect to the south not quite to his ancient element, of course, but away to the Surrey hills, and east and west along the winding river.

St. Martin's Church the real name of which is St. Martin's-in-the-Fields (how far from fields to-day!) stands upon its hill as proudly almost as St. Paul's, and has not a little of St. Paul's grave dignity. From its steps many Londoners get their impression of State pageants : I was standing there on the only occasion that I have ever seen a Shah. Among those who lie beneath this church is Nell Gwynn, and Francis Bacon was christened there.

St. Martin's spire was once used for a strictly secular purpose, when, in 1727, Violanti, an Italian acrobat, fastened one end of a rope three hundred yards long to its summit, and the other to a support in the Royal Mews beyond St. Martin's Lane, and descended upon it head foremost with his arms and legs outstretched, among the crowd being "the young princesses with several of the nobility." The pavement to the north and south used to be the canvas of two very superior "screevers" as the men are called who make pastel drawings on paving-stones. London has fewer "screevers" than it used, and latterly I have noticed among such of these artists as remain a growing tendency to bring oil paintings (which may or may not be their own work) and lean them against the wall, supplying themselves only the minimum of scroll work beneath. To such go no pennies of mine unless of course the day is dripping wet. On a dry pavement the "screever" must show us his pictures in the making: they must, like hot rolls, be new every day. We will have no stamping in this art.

If "screevers" are fewer, bands are far more numerous. The German band, naturally, is no more; but in its place have sprung up scores and scores of performers of home-growth, often ex-service men, who rattle their collecting boxes with a determination that the discordant Teuton never dared. Returning for a moment to the "screever," I have observed that he rarely now depicts cutlets and sections of salmon, but relies rather upon landscape and portraits of celebrities.

Trafalgar Square, with Nelson and the surrounding figures of stone, notable among them the beautifully easy presentment of Gordon, brings us to the general consideration of London statues, of which there are many here and there, although, since we are not naturally a statue-erecting or statue-valuing people, as the French are, for the Most part they escape notice. Among the French, indeed, wherever you go, a livelier love of country and a more personal pride in it are to be found.

The old gibe against that nation that it has no word for home, and no true sense of home, might be met by the reminder that France itself is the home of the French in a way that England can never be called the home of the English. An Englishman's home is the world; a Frenchman's France; and he is never wearied in beautifying that home, and praising it, and keeping it homely. Such pride has he in it that there is hardly a place in the whole country without its group of statuary in honour of some brave or wise enfant of the State, which is decorated at regular intervals and whose presence is never forgotten. It is impossible to do anything for France and escape recognition and tribute. With the English, patriotism is taken for granted; but the French nourish it, tend it like a favourite flower, enjoy every fresh blossom.

The War certainly made a change in this matter of respect and memory in England and few, if any, of the Memorials that have been piously set up all over the country are neglected. In London the beautiful Cenotaph in Whitehall has fresh flowers laid at its foot every day, and so has many another the Cross of Sacrifice in Sloane Square in particular springs to mind.

But for statues as statues we still do not much care. It is true that on certain anniversaries we also decorate some of our statues--Beaconsfield's, Gordon's, Nelson's ; but we do so, I fear, less as a people than as a party. Charles the First's statue facing Whitehall has its wreaths once a year, but they come from a small body of "Legitimists"; the Gladstone statue in the Strand will no doubt be decorated too for a few years, but it will not be a national duty, and none of those who take primroses to Parliament Square on April 19 will be represented.

THE ENTOMBMENT,

AFTER THE PICTURE BY DIRK BOUTS IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

In "London Revisited" I endeavoured to make a complete list of London public statues, but the list extends continually. Among the latest, not including War Memorials, is that of Edward VII, just by the York Column, displacing Sir William Napier who is now to be found opposite Queen's Gate in Kensington Gardens the gate that is made memorable by the exquisite figures of deer on each side. Opposite Sir John Franklin's memorial, also in Waterloo Place, is now a statue of Captain Scott, the more recent and equally ill-fated Arctic explorer, the work of his widow. On the little lawn under the National Gallery is a life-size figure of George Washington, very modest. Near by at the foot of the Charing Cross Road is the Cavell Memorial, with a charming maternal figure at the apex. Opposite the entrance of Dean's Yard is a replica of St. Gaudens' famous figure of Abraham Lincoln, with the great, lonely but impressive chair behind him. In Portland Place is a statue of Field Marshal Sir George Stuart White, and Clive has been moved from his old position to the St. James's Park end of King Charles's Street.