I have letters of introduction and a ticket of admission to the British
Museum. About the Grecian marbles, the original Italian drawings, about
the National Gallery, the Hampton Court galleries, the pictures at
Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and the private collections, I shall
say nothing. Still, what marvels and what historical tokens are all these
things, five or six specimens of high civilization manifested in a perfect
art, all differing greatly from that which I now examine, and so well
adapted for bringing into relief the good and the evil. To do that would
fill a volume by itself.
The Museum library contains six hundred thousand volumes; the reading-room
is vast, circular in form, and covered with a cupola, so that no one is
far from the central office, and no one has the light in his eyes. All the
lower stage of shelves is filled with works of reference--dictionaries,
collections of biographies, classics of all sorts--which can be consulted
on the spot, and are excellently arranged. Moreover, a small plan placed
on each table indicates where they are placed and the order in which they
stand.
Each seat is isolated; there is nothing in front but the woodwork of the
desk, so that no one is annoyed by the presence of his neighbor. The seats
and the tables are covered with leather, and are very clean; there are two
pens to each desk, the one being steel, the other a quill pen; there is
also a small stand at the side, upon which a second volume, or the volume
from which the extracts are being copied may be placed. To procure a book,
the title is written on a form, which is handed to the central office. The
attendant brings the book to you himself, and does so without delay. I
have made trial of this, even in the case of works seldom asked for. The
holder of the book is responsible till he has received back the form
filled up when he applied for it. For ladies a place is reserved, which is
a delicate piece of attention.
What a contrast if we compare this with our great library at the Louvre,
with its long room, with half of the readers dazzled by the light in their
eyes, the readers being packed together at a common table, the titles of
the books being called out in loud tones, the long time spent in waiting
at the central office. The French Library has been reformed according to
the English model, yet without being rendered as convenient. Nevertheless,
ours is the more liberally conducted; its doors are opened to all comers.
Here one must be a "respecable" person; no one is admitted unless vouched
for by two householders. This is said to be enough; as it is, those gain
admission who are worse than shabby--men in working clothes, and some
without shoes--they have been introduced by clergymen. The grant for
buying new books is seven or eight times larger than ours. When shall we
learn to spend our money in a sensible way?
In other matters they are not so successful, such as the Crystal Palace at
Sydenham, for instance, which formed the building for the Great
Exhibition, and which is now a sort of museum of curiosities. It is
gigantic, like London itself, and like so many things in London, but how
can I portray the gigantic? All the ordinary sensations produced by size
are intensified several times here. It is two miles in circumference and
has three stories of prodigious height; it would easily hold five or six
buildings like our Palace of Industry, and it is of glass; it consists,
first, of an immense rectangular structure rising toward the center in a
semicircle like a hothouse, and flanked by two Chinese towers; then, on
either side, long buildings descend at right angles, enclosing the garden
with its fountains, statues, summer houses, strips of turf, groups of
large trees, exotic plants, and beds of flowers. The acres of glass
sparkle in the sunlight; at the horizon an undulating line of green
eminences is bathed in the luminous vapor which softens all colors and
spreads an expression of tender beauty over an entire landscape.
Always the same English method of decoration--on the one side a park and
natural embellishments, which it must be granted, are beautiful and
adapted to the climate; on the other, the building, which is a monstrous
jumble, wanting in style, and bearing witness not to taste, but to English
power. The interior consists of a museum of antiquities, composed of
plaster facsimiles of all the Grecian and Roman statues scattered over
Europe; of a museum of the Middle Ages; of a Revival museum; of an
Egyptian museum; of a Nineveh museum; of an Indian museum; of a
reproduction of a Pompeiian house; of a reproduction of the Alhambra. The
ornaments of the Alhambra have been molded, and these molds are preserved
in an adjoining room as proofs of authenticity. In order to omit nothing,
copies have been made of the most notable Italian paintings, and these are
daubs worthy of a country fair.
There is a huge tropical hothouse, wherein are fountains, swimming
turtles, large aquatic plants in flower, the Sphinx and Egyptian statues
sixty feet high, specimens of colossal or rare trees, among others the
bark of a Sequoia California 450 feet in height and measuring 116 feet in
circumference. The bark is arranged and fastened to an inner framework in
such a manner as to give an idea of the tree itself. There is a circular
concert room, with tiers of benches as in a Colosseum. Lastly, in the
gardens are to be seen life-size reproductions of antediluvian monsters,
megatheriums, dinotheriums, and others. In these gardens Blondin does his
tricks at the height of a hundred feet.
I pass over half the things; but does not this conglomeration of odds and
ends carry back one's thoughts to the Rome of Caesar and the Antonines? At
that period also pleasure-palaces were erected for the sovereign people;
circuses, theaters, baths wherein were collected statues, paintings,
animals, musicians, acrobats, all the treasures and all the oddities of
the world; pantheons of opulence and curiosity; genuine bazaars where the
liking for what was novel, heterogeneous, and fantastic ousted the feeling
of appreciation for simple beauty.
In truth, Rome enriched herself with these things by conquest, England by
industry. Thus it is that at Rome the paintings, the statues, were stolen
originals, and the monsters, whether rhinoceroses or lions, were perfectly
alive and tore human beings to pieces; whereas here the statues are made
of plaster and the monsters of goldbeater's skin. The spectacle is one of
second class, but of the same kind. A Greek would not have regarded it
with satisfaction; he would have considered it appropriate to powerful
barbarians, who, trying to become refined, had utterly failed.
THE TEMPLE'S GALLERY OF GHOSTS FROM DICKENS [Footnote: From "A Pickwickian
Pilgrimage." The persons mentioned in Mr. Hassard's Pilgrimage to the
Temple and its neighborhood will be recognized as characters In the novels
of Charles Dickens. By arrangement with, and by permission of, the
publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1881.]