God of Piccadilly

A curious wooden silhouet about 30 ft. high stood on the asphalt "safety island" in the centre of Piccadilly Circus last week between two tall stepladders. Every day workmen twisted it about while grave gentlemen with bowler hats and umbrellas inspected it, argued whether it should be a few inches higher or lower, whether it should face Shaftesbury Avenue, Haymarket, or Piccadilly. Policemen grinned under their helmets, flower women beamed over their baskets. Eros was coming back to Piccadilly. Dear to the heart of sentimental Londoners is the bronze God of Love who shot his arrows at Piccadilly pedestrians for so many years, dramatic has been his history. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury,* Victorian philanthropist, statesman and instigator of an institution known as he Ragged Schools for free popular education, died in 1885. The London County Council felt that the great man should be honored. They set aside Piccadilly Circus as the spot, chose Alfred Gilbert, then Great Britain's most famed sculptor, to design the memorial. Sculptor Alfred Gilbert was born in London in 1854, earned favors at school by carving portrait heads of his masters on walking sticks. For years he could not make up his mind whether to be sculptor, musician or surgeon. He was a pupil of the early Victorian sculptor Boehm. studied in Paris and Rome, was appointed Instructor in Sculpture to the Royal Academy the morning before a bailiff came to dispossess him for nonpayment of rent. For the memory of Lord Shaftesbury, a man who had been Lord of the Admiralty, one of the earliest proponents of prison reform and author of a ten-hour-day law. Sculptor Gilbert designed a bronze Italianate fountain, surmounted by a winged adolescent Eros poised as though firing his arrows among the passersby at his feet. For this he was awarded $17,500. The London County Council could not see the connection between Cupid and the Earl of Shaftesbury. Sculptor Gilbert inserted a bust of the whiskered Earl among the dolphins and scallop shells at the fountain's base, but the L. C. C. was still unsatisfied. Shaftesbury was removed. The L. C. C. announced that they had not the money to spend or the water to waste to pipe the elaborate squirt-work of Gilbert's original design. Sculptor Gilbert replied that rather than see his monument ruined, he would buy the bronze for its casting himself. This was in 1893. A corner in copper organized by U. S. and British tycoons sent the metal rocketing. Alfred Gilbert had to pay $15,000 for his material, and after it was erected the fountain dribbled miserably, never spouted. British art critics were as wroth over the design as their descendants were over Epstein's "Rima" in Hyde Park, 32 years later. The Times called it "a hideous structure." The Guardian: "An incoherent mass of metal with neither simplicity nor purity of design." Sculptor Gilbert was already several thousand pounds in debt. He developed violent streaks of artistic temperament. He accepted commissions, then refused to work. In 1905 Mrs. Julia Frankau, mother of Author Gilbert ("Swankau") Frankau, complained to the Royal Academy that Sculptor Gilbert had accepted 350 guineas for a memorial to her late husband, done no work. The Gilbert-Frankau case was settled out of court. Similar trouble occurred next year with the Leicester Town Council over a Boer War memorial. Official sculptor for the Clarence Memorial in the Albert Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle, Sculptor Gilbert was permitted by Edward VII to live at Windsor when bailiffs ejected him from his London studio for debt. Then tactless Gilbert outraged King Edward by smashing a bust of the Duke of Clarence, first fiance of Queen Mary, which the King had 'already approved. In 1909 Gilbert resigned from the Royal Academy in disgrace, shook the dust of England from his feet and went to Belgium to live for nearly 18 years by the quiet canals, the grey towers of Bruges, the Dead City. From exile he wrote one letter explaining why he had chosen Cupid as a memorial to the Duke of Shaftesbury: ". . . The Earl had the betterment of the masses at heart, and I know that he thought deeply about the feminine population and their employment. I designed the fountain so that some sort of imitation of foreign joyousness might find place in our cheerless London. I not only ruined myself, but I have brought on my head periodical attacks on my poor work, the best I could do in years gone by." In 1915 the London County Council took Eros away to save him from German bombs. He returned for a brief space after the Armistice, was removed again in 1925 to make way for the excavation of the Regent Street subway. With Eros gone Londoners waxed sentimental about the God of Love in the traffic jams. 'Varsity bloods repeated the tradition that you could never be arrested for kissing a girl while Eros stood in Piccadilly. Christopher Morley published a whimsey on the statue.* Stationers sold postcards of Eros and Fanny the Beautiful Flower Girl who sat for 20 years on his pedestal. Charles B. Cochran, London's Ziegfeld, devoted a section of his revue to a pageant entitled "Since Eros Went Away." Seven months ago the London County Council promised that Eros was coming back. Last week, with the silhouet again in Piccadilly Circus, there were reports that this time the base would be erected as originally designed, that the fountains would gush with the necessary vigor. Few Londoners knew it, but Alfred Gilbert was back in town, too. At the express wish of King George he returned from his voluntary exile four years ago. A grey and bitter recluse, he has been living in secret rooms in Kensington Palace, finishing the bronze, aluminum and Mexican onyx Clarence Memorial which he started 32 years ago.

* Since the 17th Century the Earls of Shaftesbury have solved the problem of nomenclature by calling their heirs Anthony Ashley Cooper. The custom still holds. * THE ARROW, Doubleday Page & Co. (1927, $1.50).

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