Chesterton on monuments

More from Chesterton’s essay collection The Defendant, specifically “A Defence of Publicity.” In response to criticism of the public monuments of his day as “pompous,” Chesterton writes:

Properly speaking, of course, a public monument ought to be pompous. Pomp is its very object; it would be absurd to have columns and pyramids blushing in some coy nook like violets in the woods of spring. And public monuments have in this matter a great and much-needed lesson to teach. Valour and mercy and the great enthusiasms ought to be a great deal more public than they are at present. We are too fond nowadays of committing the sin of fear and calling it the virtue of reverence.

I think the trend he describes is still current—quite clearly—though we have other euphemisms for this sin, reverence being a largely unknown concept nowadays.

Later, on the purpose of memorializing anything (a live question now as then):

It is not enough for a popular monument to be artistic, like a black charcoal sketch; it must be striking; it must be in the highest sense of the word sensational; it must stand for humanity; it must speak for us to the stars; it must declare in the face of all the heavens that when the longest and blackest catalogue has been made of all our crimes and follies there are some things of which we men are not ashamed.

These observations may pair well with this, which I recently recommended, and most especially this.