I need only mention one other of my public activities, which remains a legitimate boast; it was a Private Member’s Bill, brought forward by myself, that procured the erection of the great statue of Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street. I pointed out that London was now the only European capital which had no statue of the kind, and the plaque on No. 221B Baker Street was a quite inadequate recognition of the famous detective’s services. The question whether he had ever existed did not affect, or ought not to affect, the feelings of veneration with which we regarded him. When the bill passed, I was elected a member of the Committee which was to decide between the various designs sent in. The prevailing taste at the moment was Futuribilism, but none of the artists then in vogue seemed to have treated his subject adequately. Several of them represented the head merely as a square block of stone, on the ground that all attempts to imitate the features in sculpture were a violation of the canons of Art. Another, on the same ground, represented the figure as strictly globular. I am glad to say that it was at my instigation the Committee chose the design sent in by Wrightman, then quite unknown, but destined to become famous as one of the leaders of the neo-classical school in the sixties. The conception is a noble one, and if some have found fault with the pipe as out of keeping with the classical draperies in which the figure is represented, it is not for us to complain. “We must approach Art,” Burstall used to say, “as a goddess demanding a sacrifice; and the victim she asks of us is the Actual.”
Well, the old days of Parliament are dead; and we no longer see St. Stephen’s presenting the appearance it used to present on “voting nights,” when helico after helico landed in the great square outside and legislatress after legislatress passed into the building to record her decision upon the affairs of the nation: when, by a quaint old survival, they used to bow to one another as they passed, while the opposing platforms bore them into the opposing lobbies; or when, on the occasion of some important speech, as many as five hundred auditors would assemble in the dictaphone room, to catch, in awestruck silence, the very tones of a Hopedale or a Holroyd before they passed into the receiver. Those of us who belonged to those older Parliaments will look back with some regret at the pomp and circumstance which used to attend legislation in those days; and perhaps even suspect that some of our modern indifference to political issues is due to the disappearance of that pageantry which is so dear to English hearts. There is still an old-world enchantment that lingers about the House itself: and you might almost fancy that those voiceless figures which sit there now, admirably as the Tussaud family has caught the likenesses of our present-day legislators, were the ghosts of a distant past, when the voice of a Burke would stir his contemporaries to indignation and to endurance, or the receiving funnels vibrated to the delicate soprano of a Pulbrooke.