discussing only what the
monument shall be. In other words, the French are discussing a living
question, while we are discussing a dead one. Or rather, not a dead one,
but a settled one, which is quite a different thing.

When a thing of the intellect is settled it is not dead: rather it is
immortal. The multiplication table is immortal, and so is the fame of
Shakspere. But the fame of Zola is not dead or not immortal; it is at
its crisis, it is in the balance; and may be found wanting. The French,
therefore, are quite right in considering it a living question. It is
still living as a question, because it is not yet solved. But Shakspere
is not a living question: he is a living answer.

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 commemo