[Illustration: THE STATUE OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCE CONSORT.
_J. H. FOLEY_, Sculptor.]
TRAVELS
IN
SOUTH KENSINGTON
WITH
Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture
in England
BY
MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY
AUTHOR OF
“THE SACRED ANTHOLOGY,” “THE WANDERING JEW,” “THOMAS CARLYLE,” ETC.
_ILLUSTRATED_
LONDON
TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL
1882
[_All rights reserved_]
Ballantyne Press
BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO.
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM
DECORATIVE ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND
BEDFORD PARK
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM 19
DECORATIVE ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 115
BEDFORD PARK 215
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
The Statue of His Royal Highness the
Prince Consort _Frontispiece_
South Kensington Museum 21
Sir Henry Cole, K.C.B. 36
South Kensington Museum--Ground
Plan 39
Diagram showing Glitter Points in a
Picture-gallery 40
Sir Philip Cunliffe Owen, Director of
South Kensington Museum 42
North Court, North-west Corner, Showing
Casts of the Biga (or Two-horse
Chariot), from the Original in Marble
at the Vatican, and of the Pulpit
by Giovani Pisano, formerly in the
Cathedral at Pisa 44
South Court, Showing the Prince Consort’s
Gallery 45
Chinese Potters at Work--Window in
the Ceramic Gallery 47
Italian Majolica (Urbino). Sixteenth
Century 51
Lamp from an Arabian Mosque. Fourteenth
Century 53
Palissy, the Potter--Window in the Ceramic
Gallery 54
Sèvres Porcelain Vase. Modern 55
Henri Deux Candlestick 56
Henri Deux Salt-cellar 58
Michael Angelo’s Eros 62
Marble Cantoria. By Baccio D’Agnolo 65
Tabernacle. Andrea Ferrucci 66
Altar-piece--the Virgin with the Infant
Saviour.--Enamelled Terra-cotta, or
Della Robbia, in High Relief. By
Andrea Della Robbia 67
Hercules, the Duke of Ferrara 70
Ashantee Relics 72
The Cellini Sardonyx Ewer, Mounted in
Enamelled Gold, and Set with Gems--Italian.
Sixteenth Century 73
Châsse, or Reliquary--Limoges Enamelled.
Thirteenth Century 75
Pastoral Staves--Ivory and Enamel.
Fourteenth Century 82
Elkington’s Mark 85
Franchi and Son’s Mark 85
Modern Persian Ewer (Copper-coated,
with White Metal) 94
Old Persian Earthenware (Water-bottle) 95
Persian Kaliān 96
Ancient Persian Incense-burner (Pierced
and Chased Brass) 97
Modern Persian Incense-burner (Brass) 98
Andrea Gritti, Doge of Venice--Italian.
Ascribed to Vittore Camelo. Sixteenth
Century 99
Tazza--Algerian Onyx and Enamel.
Modern French 100
Salt-cellar--Silver Gilt; Italian. Fifteenth
Century 100
Ivory Tankard--Augsburg. Seventeenth
Century 101
Finest Raised Venetian Point Lace--Floral
Design. Italian. Seventeenth
Century 104
Nettle in its Natural State 109
Nettle in Geometrical Proportions 109
Plan of Top of Henri Deux Salt-cellar 111
Assize Court, Manchester 122
Minton Tile 124
Kidderminster Carpet--Fern Design 127
Minton Tiles for Mantel 129
Albert Memorial, Hyde Park 131
Albert Memorial. Europe 133
Albert Memorial--East Front. Painters 134
Albert Memorial--Continuation of East
Front. Painters 136
Albert Memorial--South Front. Poets
and Musicians 138
Albert Memorial--Continuation of South
Front. Musicians 140
Spandrel Picture 147
Owen Jones 153
Ebony Serving-table, Mr. Lehmann’s
House 162
Top of Serving-table, Mr. Lehmann’s
House 164
Pot Designed by Miss Lévin 167
William Morris 185
Moulding over Dado 186
Chippendale Mahogany Moulding, Belmont
House 187
Drawing-room of Bellevue House 188
Library in Bellevue House 191
Drawing-room in Townsend House 194
A Grate of One Hundred Years Ago 198
Grate made for Baron Rothschild 199
Boyd’s Grate 200
L. Alma Tadema.--[From a Bust by J.
Dalou] 207
Candelabra, Townsend House 209
View from a Balcony 217
Dining-room in Tower House 222
Queen Anne’s Gardens 224
Co-operative Stores and Tabard Inn 225
Tower House and Lawn-tennis Grounds 226
Reading and Billiard Room, Club-house 227
A Fancy-dress party at the Club 229
An Artist’s Studio 233
[Illustration]
PROLEGOMENA.
Homely and Comely were sisters. Their parents were in humble
circumstances, and depended mainly on the care and economy of these
two daughters--their entire family. They were persons of some social
position, and it had constituted a problem how they might preserve
some relation to the community and at the same time maintain comfort
at home: Youth required the former, Age needed the latter. It was
settled in a way which this historian cannot commend: the arrangement
was that one of the girls should attend to the external, the other to
the internal affairs of the family. So soon as this was resolved, there
was no difficulty in determining which of the girls should go out and
which stay at home. There was about Comely a certain ease and address,
as well as personal attractiveness, which seemed to make society her
natural sphere; while the shyness and plainness of Homely made the
task of remaining at home congenial. Homely was content with homespun
clothes in order that Comely might wear silk. Whenever there was a ball
or a festival, Comely was sure to come, and Homely stayed at home.
Gradually, however, this distribution of parts appeared not to have
the happiest results. Comely grew so fond of the gay world that her
home became distasteful; she demanded, too, more and more of the family
resources for her fashionable attire, and the concession deprived the
house of everything but the barest utensils. On the other hand, Homely
had stayed withindoors so much that she became slovenly, and, as she
had to wear her homespun till it was threadbare, in order that her
sister might keep up with the fashions, she became unlovely to look
upon. Comely came at length to despise her sister. Homely became a
peevish drudge. The family by degrees became unhappy, without being
very clear as to the cause of their troubles.
One night Comely came home from a ball in unusual agitation. Her sister
was aroused to hear the confidence that a lover of rank, handsome and
charming, had discovered his interest in Comely. Any differences the
sisters may have had were quite forgotten in the renewal of their
natural sympathy caused by this incident.
The next morning a messenger arrived to announce that his master, Lord
Deeplooke, was on his way to visit Comely and the family in their
own home, and would arrive in an hour. Here was a sensation! The
two sisters set themselves to work--even Comely using her hands for
once--to make the chief room of the house neat. But Comely looked on
the blank walls with dismay, and said, “Surely there used to be some
pictures.” “Yes,” replied Homely, “but you are wearing the last of them
now.” Comely blushed--and the blush was becoming--at this; but the
sisters gathered some beautiful flowers and decorated the room as well
as they could. When this was attended to Comely was about to repair to
her room to decorate herself, and called her sister to do the same;
but Homely declared she already had on her very best gown. Comely was
shocked at this, and entreated her sister to conceal herself during the
nobleman’s visit. This Homely was quite willing to do.
When Lord Deeplooke arrived, Comely met him in the finest array she had
next to the ball-dress. She introduced him to her venerable parents;
but a shade of anxiety passed over her face when she observed his
lordship presently looking around as if he expected some one else. She
then remembered that the messenger had announced that he was coming to
visit not her alone but the family, and that on the evening before,
at the ball, she had casually mentioned her sister. With a quick wit
Comely anticipated the inquiry she knew would be made and left the
room, remarking, as she did so, “I pray your lordship to excuse
me while I seek my sister.” Another moment and the two girls were
hurriedly investing Homely in Comely’s second-best dress.
It was a novel experience for Homely to be dressed in a pretty gown; it
was equally novel for her to be introduced to a gentleman, much less a
lord; and the two novelties together had an almost transforming effect
upon her. Home-work and early hours had kept her in perfect health; her
manners had no chance to be other than simple; and as no experiences of
fashionable life had made her _blasé_, her face was suffused with an
exquisite color, and her eye bright with delight, when she entered the
room and was introduced to his lordship.
The reader must not be kept in suspense for another instant. It was not
Comely but Homely that Lord Deeplooke ultimately married. Homely having
discovered the secret that lay in a becoming dress, chiefly from its
effect on the feeling of the wearer, stoutly refused to be slovenly any
more; and all her serviceable virtues, thus set in a fit frame, were
found to have touched her countenance into unconventional beauty. On
the other hand, Comely, though at first jealous and angry, gradually
appreciated the lesson she had been taught. She did not, indeed, forget
the magical effect wrought on her sister by a beautiful dress; but she
pondered deeply the qualities fostered at home which she had supposed
incongruous with such raiment, but now saw particularly harmonious with
it; and thenceforth, even before Homely was married, Comely devoted
herself to household work. Need I say that in this Comely was far more
successful than her sister had been? All the beauty she had seen in the
gay world, an occasional visit to which she still enjoyed, now became
available. Pictures reappeared on the walls, which her sister had
supposed were just as useful without them. Touches of color, a ribbon
on the curtain which had hitherto been tied with a string, a hundred
refinements which required only a cultured taste, gradually transformed
the house, just as Comely’s dress had transformed Homely. For these
improvements Comely had been glad to part with her mere finery, though
she never forgot that a slovenly mistress makes a slatternly home.
Comely subsequently married an artist, who, beginning life as a
sign-painter, was made a knight for the best example of domestic
decoration exhibited at the Great Exposition of 18--, a model which,
he frankly confessed, was suggested by the house in which he found his
bride.
* * * * *
There are, indeed, few words in our language of more peculiar, or even
pathetic, import than the word “homely.” It has gradually come to bear
the significance of coarseness or even ugliness, as if these were quite
appropriate to the home. It is, indeed, fortunate that the home can
supply affection for things and persons not very presentable; but it is
none the less true that the word has gradually come to represent the
impression that beauty is for outside show, and that anything will do
for home purposes.
Decoration (_decus_) means the bestowal of honor. Beauty followed
honor. Because man honored his deity, grand temples and cathedrals
arose and altars blazed with gems; and because he honored the prince
and the noble, palaces were decked with splendor. All this time the
home remained homely, for religion denied its sanctity and aristocracy
despised it as the dwelling-place of a serf. The wealthy called their
residences palaces, châteaux, castles, villas, seats, anything but
“homes.” The “Home” came to mean some common asylum of the poor.
But at last two mighty forces invaded Europe--Democracy and Heresy.
Sternly they forbade man longer to spend his strength and his honor
on allied Tyranny and Superstition. Then the Arts declined, because
the convictions which had inspired them were shaken. Several of the
grandest cathedrals were struck by a sort of paralysis and could never
get finished, and palaces had to continue their grandeur on terra-cotta
and tinsel.
And now the cunning workman, having struck work upon shrines and
thrones, began to think of his own mind, so long left vacant that
temples might be adorned, of his wife and child, so long stinted
that palaces might be luxurious. The first expression of this new
reflection was not outward: it was in the decoration of men’s minds
with furniture of another kind--with science, poetry, and literature.
Enamored of these deeper pleasures, man almost despised and hated the
outward arts which symbolized his long thraldom. And perhaps it was
necessary that the ancient splendors which invested a departed era
should fade, and that man should retire as into an ugly shell to mature
the pearl of an inner life. The old artists, artisans, potters--the
Bellinis, Angelos, Palissys, Della Robbias--reappeared in Rousseau,
Milton, Bunyan--artists of an invisible beauty, disowning Art while
frescoing the mind with ideals.
For a time the work of imagination went on in humble dwellings
amidst Puritan plainness. But finally, even in the beginning of this
generation, it began to be asked in England whether the mind and
heart thus formed might not be honored with a fit environment of
beauty. To this end London established its great School of Design and
Decoration. Thereto have gravitated the fragments of a Past that has
crumbled--images, altars, shrines, decorations lavished by genius on
ideals ere they hardened to idols; imperial services, jewels, sceptres,
wrought before kings became survivals and phantasms. It is England,
land of beautiful homes, reviving the art of decoration for the Age
of Humanity. She will no longer have the home to be homely. Her call
has gone round the world, and temples and palaces deliver up their
treasures that they may gather in London, there to teach the millions
how they may beautify the latter-day temple, which is the Home, and
refine the latter-day king, which is Man.
* * * * *
It is said that the Londoner may be known, in any part of the world
where he may die, if his lungs are examined--they being of a sooty
color. So much of his great metropolis he is doomed to carry with him
wherever he may journey. London itself must forever bear, through
and through, the effect of its fogs and its climate. Rain was its
architect and Smoke its decorator. But let no one hastily conclude
that their work has been all unlovely. John Ruskin has pointed it out
as a characteristic of the greatest English artist, Turner, that
there was nothing so ugly about England but he could bring beauty out
of it; but that fine artist, Necessity, worked long before Turner
in transmuting apparent disadvantages to advantages. “It is,” said
Charles Kingsley, “the hard gray English climate which has made hard
gray Englishmen.” There is as little _terra-cotta_ on the Englishman’s
house as on his character. It has been determined for him by Rain and
Fog that he shall seek his pleasures by the fireside instead of in
public gardens and fêtes. What beauty he can afford must be of the
interior. Without, gray dirty brick and wall; within, every comfort and
refinement: such are the decree of his superficially dismal decorators.
Of course the wealthy Londoners have always fought against their hard
climatic environment, and against the ever-encroaching ugliness which
is the attendant shadow of millions massed together in the struggle
for existence on a small island. There are still a few mansions, only
a little way from the present centre of London, which attest the fine
taste which its wealthy citizens have always tried to cultivate in
the direction of architectural beauty. About two hundred and fifty
years ago Northumberland House was described as “in the village of
Charing.” That is now Charing Cross, the heart of the metropolis; a
street runs over the site of Northumberland House. Where once was
Charing hermitage is now a huge hotel and railway station. About two
hundred years ago, when the Earl of Burlington was building Burlington
House on Piccadilly, about half a mile west of Charing Cross, he was
asked why he was building so far away in the country, and replied, “I
am resolved to have no house beyond me.” The earl’s resolution was
not kept. He lived to find himself amidst a noisy thoroughfare, and
now one may travel five miles to the westward of his old country-seat
without leaving the avenue of brick and mortar which passes its door.
This migration of dwellings to ever-extending suburbs is, indeed,
traced in much grander buildings than the tasteful old mansions which
are being swallowed up because of their uneconomical occupancy of
space: so much general stateliness is secured by the vast increase and
diffusion of wealth; but the rarity with which the unique beauties of
the older mansions are imitated, and the utter absence of any attempt
at individuality in even the wealthiest new quarters--such as Belgrave
Square--would seem to indicate that the Londoners have finally adopted
it as a creed that external architecture and gardens must no longer be
sought for by individuals, but possessed by all in communal forms, as
public edifices, squares, and parks. It is now usual, in the new parts
of London, for the grandest mansions of a terrace to own a large garden
in common, to which each has entrance by a back gate, and to whose
maintenance and ornamentation each family contributes a small sum per
annum.
In its journey of eighteen centuries, from being that small
trading-village mentioned by Tacitus--“not yet dignified with the
name of colony”--to its present dimensions, covering 125 square
miles, London has been formed by forces of use, by world-historical
movements--powers not to be criticised. But we may admire in some of
the characteristics of its mighty growth some of that beauty which
ever works at the heart of the hardest utility. For example, in its
expansion London is said to have swallowed up and built over more
than three hundred villages; but in every case the village-green has
been spared, and these are now represented by those beautiful and
embowered squares which everywhere adorn the metropolis, constitute
with the seven large parks its lungs, and make it the healthiest city
of the world in proportion to its population. Though the ancient
houses built by the wealthy were beautiful, and, wherever remaining,
bring such large prices that one wonders why they should not be
imitated, yet the homes of the lower classes in old times were far
uglier than now. Especially were they made dismal by that barbarous
“tax on light,” whose monuments may frequently be observed in windows
walled up to avoid the window-tax. The poor had to live in houses
illuminated from one or two windows, until the clever gentlemen of
the Exchequer perceived the costliness of this means of revenue. As
the Swiss mountaineers have come to admire goitres, unless belied by
rumor, and as the city man, from having to put up with “high” game, has
gradually come to prefer it, so the London builders for a long time
placed few windows in houses, and seem to have thought the effect solid
and “English,” as contrasted with the light and airy style of French
houses. The newest streets of London show, however, that light on this
subject has dawned upon the English architectural mind, through that
into the homes of the people, to such an extent that the tax is now
upon darkness. It is now accepted as a principle that as Smoke has had
its way with the outside of the London habitation, hereafter the first
decorator of the interior is to be--Light.
* * * * *
In these fragmentary first pages of a fragmentary work, it has been
the author’s aim to outline certain general ideas and historical
facts, which may illustrate their own illustrations as written in
the following pages. It will be best seen, when approached from the
historical side, what may be regarded as a necessary factor in English
art or architecture, and what may be considered as experiment. This
is the more important for the American, who is, in an especial sense,
“heir of all the ages,” while not limited to the grooves prescribed by
any. It is in America that we are to have the great Art of Arts--that
whose task is to utilize the Arts of other lands and ages as pigments,
to be combined into new proportions for unprecedented effects, and
to invest fairer ideals. For America the author has written these
contributions toward a knowledge of what has been done, and is being
done, in England; but he would prefer now to burn his work rather
than have it aid the retrogressive notion that Art in America is to
copy the ornamentation or duplicate the work of other countries, much
less of other ages. These things can mean for the artists and people
of the United States nothing more than culture; and culture means not
a mere eclectic importation of select facts and truths, but their
recombination, in obedience to a new vital principle related to a
further idea and wider purpose.
THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM.
[Illustration: SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM.]
THE SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM.
“Come,” said my friend, Professor Omnium, one clear morning, “let us
take an excursion round the world!” My friend is a German, and he has
such a calm familiarity with the unconditioned and the impossible, that
a suggestion which, coming from another, would appear astounding, from
him appears normal. This time, however, I look through his spectacles
to see if his eyes have not a merry twinkle: they are quite serene.
Visions of the Parisian play entitled _Round the World in Eighty Days_,
thoughts of Puck and excursion tickets, rise before me, and I gravely
pronounce the word “Impossible!”
“But,” says the professor, “Kant declares that it is too bold for any
man, in the present state of our knowledge, to pronounce that word.”
“My dear friend,” said I, “it is among my dreams one day to visit
India, China, Japan, California; but at present you might as well ask
me to go with you to the moon.”
“You misunderstand,” replies Professor Omnium: “I do not propose to
leave London. We can never go round the world, except in a small
limited way, if we leave London. How much does an excursionist in India
see of that country? Only a few cities, a few ruins, and the outside
of some old temples, and he only sees a little of them. I stayed in
Rome three days once--all the time I had there--trying to get a glimpse
of some antiquarian treasures in the Bocca della Verita Church: first
day, the church was closed to all outsiders by regulation; second day,
the building was occupied by a pious crowd, and services were going
on from daybreak to midnight; third day was so dark and rainy that I
couldn’t see anything. On my way back I met an archæologist who had
been in Nuremberg a week trying to scrutinize an old shrine; he had
seen many priests, but only caught glimpses through railings of the
shrine (St. Sebald’s, which exists in full-sized fac-simile at South
Kensington), and the net result of his journey was represented in
fifty photographs, just a little inferior to my own collection of the
same--bought in Regent Street. I tell you, sir, there are few greater
humbugs than this travelling about to see Objects (with a big O) of
Interest. It’s expensive. Somebody says most travellers carry ruins to
ruins, but the purses they carry away are the worst ruins of all. A man
may well travel to see the world of men and women; but so far as art
and antiquity are concerned, he who goes away from London shall have
the experience of the boy in the fable, who dreamed about the beautiful
blue hills on the horizon until he left his own flinty hill-side and
journeyed to them; he found them flintier than his own, and, looking
back, saw his own hill to be bluest after all.”
“Ah, then,” I put in--when Omnium is talking it is well to put in when
one can--“you begin by asking me to go round the world, and end with
sneering at all my dreams of India and Japan--”
“Not a bit of it,” cried the professor; “but ten thousand people and
a dozen governments have been at infinite pains and expense to bring
the cream of the East and of the West to your own doors: you turn your
back, and pine for the skim-milk. Yesterday I was talking with Dr.
Downingrue, an amiable and learned gentleman, who has been an official
in the India House here for twenty years, and was lately given furlough
for a year. That year he passed in Turkey and Persia. He told me that
he wished to see a certain sacred book, written in ancient Zend,
curiously illustrated with the most ancient pictures in the world, one
of them possibly a portrait of the great Zoroaster himself. It was,
he had heard, kept in the archives of the city of Bam Buzel, and he
went a journey of three days and nights in a wagon to see and examine
its text. Fancy his disgust at finding only an entry that the volume
in question had been removed by order of the Shah in 1855, and that
the Keeper of the Archives knew nothing whatever of its whereabouts. I
took Downingrue by the hand, led him up one flight of stairs, and took
down the old Zend book from its shelf there in Downing Street, where
it had remained quietly, twenty feet over his head, while he worked
twenty years for freedom to go searching for it in Persia! Now I heard
you talking a few evenings ago about your hopes of one day seeing
Shiraz and Mecca, the Topes in India, and the great Daiboots Buddha in
Japan. I have called this morning to say, firstly, Don’t! secondly,
Come, go round the world with me here in London! There is in the South
Kensington Museum as noble a Buddha as that at Daiboots, which hundreds
of thousands of pilgrims have journeyed for weeks to see: you have
only to walk fifteen minutes to see it--not a copy either, but the
huge bronze itself. You may travel through Mexico, Peru, and Chili for
ten years, and in all that time never see one-hundredth part of the
vestiges of their primitive life and history which you shall see in the
British Museum. Greece?--and be captured by brigands. Professor Newton
has Greece under lock and key, from Diana’s Temple to the private
accounts of Pericles. Assyria?--you go, and find that the human heart
of it has migrated; you come back, and George Smith reconstructs it for
you--”
There was no sign that Omnium was ever coming to an end: the only
way of stopping him is surrender; and it was not long before we were
making our pilgrimage through Stone Age and Bronze Age, as recovered
by the ages of Iron and Gold, and still more by the ages of Art and
Science. The professor held a very positive theory that to travel round
the world profitably you must first travel up to it, assimilating
its past ages. Two recent stories had taken a strong hold on his
imagination: one was about a learned historian of his own Germany,
who had resolved that it was essential to the complete culture of
his little son that the child should begin where the world began,
believe implicitly in its fetiches, follow them till they changed to
anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, these again till the Christian
wand transformed them to fairies and demons, and so on. By this means
the historian meant that his boy should bear in his individual periods
of life corresponding periods in the growth of the race, and sum up
at last the long column in a total of rational philosophy; but the
boy is now growing old, and at last accounts had got only as far as
Roman Catholicism, and there--stuck! The other story which haunted
Omnium’s mind came from California, and was to the effect that upon
the head of a woman in mesmeric sleep there was laid the fossil tooth
of a mammoth, whereupon she at once gave as graphic a description of
the world the extinct animal had inhabited when alive as could have
been given by any paleontologist. “Both good stories, eh?” said the
professor, with a hearty laugh; “almost as good as Pilpay’s fables:
both of them fictitious notions ending in fantasies; but both, so
to speak, prophetic types of what real science with real materials
enables us to do to-day. We can, indeed, ‘interview’ the mammoth, as
you Americans say; we can hang his portrait on our walls along with
our other ancestors; and we can assimilate the education of the human
race, not by beginning with being assimilated by its embryonic ages,
risking failure to pick through the egg-shell at last, but by bringing
to bear the lens of imagination, polished by science, and carrying so a
cultured human vision through all the buried City of Forms.”
Since the few mornings when I had the pleasure of rambling with my
German friend in the museums of London, and listening to his raptures,
I have passed a great deal of time in those institutions, and with a
growing sense that his enthusiasm was not misplaced. Indeed, so far
as the museum at South Kensington is concerned--to which the present
paper is especially devoted--to study it with care, and then stand in
it intelligently, must, one would say, convey to any man a sense of his
own eternity. Vista upon vista! The eye never reaches the farthest end
in the past from which humanity has toiled upward, its steps traced
in fair victories over chaos, nor does it alight on any historic
epoch not related to itself: the artist, artisan, scholar, each finds
himself gathering out of the dust of ages successive chapters of his
own spiritual biography. And even as he so lives the Past from which he
came over again, he finds, at the converging point of these manifold
lines of development, wings for his imagination, by which he passes
on the aerial track of tendency, stretching his hours to ages, living
already in the Golden Year. There is no other institution in which an
hour seems at once so brief and so long. A few other European museums
may surpass this in other specialties than its own; though, when the
natural history collections of the British Museum are transferred to
their magnificent abode at South Kensington, one will find at the door
of this museum a collection of that kind not inferior to the best with
which Agassiz and others have enriched the Swiss establishments; but
no other has so well classified and so well lighted an equal variety
and number of departments, and objects representing that which is its
own specialty--Man, as expressed in the works that embody his heart and
genius.
The museum has been in existence about twenty-five years (1882). Its
buildings and contents have cost the nation about one million pounds:
an auction on the premises to-day could not bring less than twenty
millions. Such a disproportion between outlay and outcome has led some
to regard South Kensington as a peculiarly fortunate institution; but
there has been no luck in its history. Success, as Friar Bacon reminds
us, is a flower that implies a soil of many virtues. If magnificent
collections and invaluable separate donations have steadily streamed
to this museum, so that its buildings are unceasingly expanding for
their reception, it is because the law of such things is to seek such
protection and fulfil such uses as individuals can rarely provide for
them. I remarked once to a gentleman, who did as much as any other
to establish this museum, that I had heard with pleasure of various
American gentlemen inquiring about it, and considering whether such an
institution might not exist in their own country, and he said: “Let
them plant the thing and it can’t help growing, and most likely beyond
their powers--as it has been almost beyond ours--to keep up with it.
What is wanted first of all is one or two good brains, with the means
of erecting a good building on a piece of ground considerably larger
than is required for that building. The good brains will be sure to
recognize the fact that we have been doing a large part of their work
for them at South Kensington. It is no longer a matter of opinion or
of discussion how a building shall be constructed for the purpose of
exhibiting pictures and other articles. The laws of it are as fixed as
the multiplication table. Where there have been secured substantial,
luminous galleries for exhibition, in a fire-proof building, and these
are known to be carefully guarded by night and day, there can be no
need to wait long for treasures to flow into it. Above all, let your
men take care of the interior, and not set out with wasting their
strength and money on external grandeur and decoration. The inward
built up rightly, the outward will be added in due season.”
There is no presumption in the high claims of the curators and
architects of the South Kensington Museum for the principle and method
of their building. For it must be borne in mind that every difficulty
that could conceivably present itself had to be solved by them in its
extreme form: they had to deal with the gloomiest and dampest climate
and the smokiest city in the world, and, _a fortiori_, they have solved
every difficulty that can arise under less dismal skies. Nevertheless,
this museum need not rest upon the claims made in its behalf by any
authority. No statement can be so instructive and impressive as its own
history, so far as that history exists; for, great as is the success
it has attained, there is no one aspect of it which, if examined, does
not reveal that it is rapidly growing to a larger future. I applied to
a man who sells photographs of such edifices for pictures of the main
buildings. He had none. “What, no photograph of the South Kensington
Museum!” I exclaimed, with some impatience. “Why, sir,” replied the
man, mildly, “you see, the museum doesn’t stand still long enough to
be photographed.” And so, indeed, it seems; and this constant addition
of new buildings, and of new decorations on those already erected, is
the physiognomical expression of the rapid growth and expansion of the
new intellectual and æsthetic epoch which called the institution into
existence, and is through it gradually climbing to results which no man
can foresee.
From a valuable paper on local archæological museums, contributed to
the _Building News_, June 11th, 1875, I gather some of the following
facts relating to the origin of the chief English museums. In the
middle of the seventeenth century there was formed at Lambeth, in
London, the first place that could be described as a museum. It was
called “Tradescant’s Ark.” It consisted of objects of natural history
collected in Barbary and other states by Tradescant, sometime gardener
to Queen Elizabeth. This valuable collection was bequeathed, in 1662,
by the younger Tradescant to Elias Ashmole, who gave it to Oxford in
1667, and it was the basis of the now valuable Ashmolean Museum of that
place. Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, after graduation in 1585, associated
with the antiquaries of his day, Joscelin, Lambard, Camden, and Noel,
and collected rare books and antiquities, which became the nucleus
of the British Museum. Sir Hans Sloane died one hundred and twenty
years ago, and by will offered his collection of MSS. and artistic
and natural curiosities (for which he had paid £50,000) to the nation
for £20,000. In 1753 the Harleian collection was purchased. When a
place in which to deposit these treasures was sought, Buckingham
House (now Buckingham Palace) was offered for £30,000; but an offer
by Lord Halifax of Montague House (built by Hooke, the mathematician)
for £10,000 was accepted, and so the museum stands at Bloomsbury.
The public was first “admitted to view” (the phrase is still used at
the museum) the collections in 1759. George II. presented the old
Royal Library, founded by Henry VII., containing monastic spoils. The
Lansdowne MSS. were bought in 1807 for £4925; the Burney collection,
eleven years later, for £13,500; and in 1820 Sir J. Banks bequeathed
his library of natural history. At the time of the foundation of the
British Archaeological Association in 1844 there were outside of London
but three museums, namely, at Oxford, York, and Salisbury. Now nearly
every large town has its museum in which to treasure the monumental
relics and natural curiosities of its neighborhood. York has the
sarcophagi, tessellated pavements, and altars of _Eboracum_, Salisbury
the spoils of _Uriconium_, Colchester the remains of _Camulodunum_,
Bath those of _Aquae Solis_, and Cirencester those of _Corinium_. The
Brown Museum at Liverpool is rich in Anglo-Saxon remains, and the
important collection described by Wylie in his _Fairford Graves_ is in
the Ashmolean at Oxford. The Brown Museum derives its name from Sir W.
Brown, who not only added to it a large building, but his collection
(which cost him £50,000) of consular diptychs, Etruscan jewelry,
Limoges enamels, Wedgwood pottery, and important Roman and Saxon
antiquities. The Scarborough Museum has interesting British relics,
among them a tree coffin of great rarity. The Exeter Museum has a good
set of Celtic pottery, and bronze implements found in Devon. Wisbech
possesses superb examples of mediaeval art and important Egyptian
antiquities. In the Torquay Museum may be found the vast collection of
flint implements found in the famous Kent’s Cavern through the industry
of Mr. Pengelly, the geologist, along with remains of extinct animals
discovered beside them. The Halifax Museum, in which Professor Tyndall
passed his early scientific apprenticeship, is rich in the curiosities
of the coal measures, and has important Egyptian as well as Roman
remains. There are many other museums in the country--indeed, hardly
any important town is without one; but I must not fail to mention a
very interesting one at Canterbury. It contains Roman tessellated
pavements; a large number of ancient terra-cotta forms, presented by
the late Viscount Strangford, who brought them from the Greek isles,
Egypt, and Asia Minor; two extremely interesting Runic stones found
near Sandwich; and many such interesting antiquities as the “Curfew
Bell” and “Couvre Feu;” and some very odd ones--for instance, the
severed hand of Sir John Heydon, who was killed by Sir Robert Mansfield
in a duel, anno 1600.
In a graphic article published some years ago Sir Henry Cole described
(what it is almost impossible for the Londoner of to-day to realize)
the condition of this metropolis at the beginning of the century.
The only institution which then existed for preserving any object of
art or science was the British Museum, which was founded in 1753, in
which year a sum of £300,000 was raised by lottery to purchase certain
collections--as that of Sir Hans Sloane, and the Cotton MSS.--over the
drawing of which lottery (100,000 tickets at three pounds each), at
Guildhall, the Lord Chancellor, the Speaker of the House of Commons,
and the Archbishop of Canterbury presided! But this sole institution
excited the very smallest interest in the country, and so late as
forty years ago Croker jeered in Parliament at Bloomsbury as a _terra
incognita_, and Carlyle’s brilliant friend and pupil, Charles Buller,
wrote an article describing a voyage of exploration he had made to
that region, with some account of the curious manners and customs of
the inhabitants. “About a hundred visitors a day on an average,” says
Sir Henry Cole (there are now as many visitors to the British Museum
per hour), “in parties of five persons only, were admitted to gape
at the unlabelled ‘rarities and curiosities’ deposited in Montague
House. The state of things outside the British Museum was analogous.
Westminster Abbey was closed except for divine service, and to show a
closet of wax-work. Admittance to the public monuments in St. Paul’s
and other churches was irksome to obtain, and costly: even the Tower
of London could not be seen for less than six shillings. The private
picture-galleries were most difficult of access, and, for those not
belonging to the upper ten thousand, it might be a work of years to get
a sight of the Grosvenor and Stafford collections. No national gallery
existed, and Lord Liverpool’s government refused to accept the pictures
now at Dulwich, offered by Sir Francis Bourgeois, even on condition
of merely housing them. The National Portrait Gallery, the South
Kensington Museum, and the Geological Museum were not even conceived.
Kew Gardens were shabby and neglected, and possessed no museum. Hampton
Court Palace was shown, by a fee to the house-keeper, one day in the
week. No public schools of art or science existed in the metropolis or
the seats of manufacture. The Royal Academy had its annual exhibition
on the first and second floors of Somerset House, in rooms now used by
the Registrar-general, whose functions then had no existence. It was
only at the British Institution or at Christie’s auction-rooms that
a youthful artist like Mulready could chance to see the work of an
old master, as he has often told us. Dr. Birkbeck had not founded the
present Mechanics’ Institute in Southampton Buildings, and the first
stone of the London University, in Gower Street, was not laid. Not
a penny of the public taxes was devoted to national education. Hard
drinking was as much a qualification for membership of the Dilettanti
Society as the nominal one of a tour in Italy. Men’s minds were more
anxiously engaged with bread riots and corn laws, Thistlewood’s
conspiracy and Peterloo massacres, Catholic emancipation and rotten
boroughs, than with the arts and sciences, for the advancement of
which, in truth, there was hardly any liking, thought, or opportunity.”
This being the condition of London, the state of things in other parts
of the United Kingdom may easily be inferred. There are now fifteen
important public museums and art galleries in or near London. The
ancient buildings of interest are shown without fees. More than a
million people visited a single one of these museums last year. There
are seven large schools for art training in London alone, and 151 in
the whole country, with 30,239 pupils. The number of pupils at South
Kensington Art School for the scholastic year ending July, 1880, was
824. These numbers refer exclusively to those who mean to devote their
lives to art. The official report for 1881 gives 4758 as the number
of elementary schools in which art is taught, 768,661 as the number
of children instructed, the total amount of the grants in aid of them
being £43,203 in the same year.
Public interest in the treasures of art and science in London--whose
extent was unknown to any one--first manifested itself in 1835, when
Parliament caused an inquiry to be made into the state of the British
Museum; a second committee inquired in 1847, a third in 1859. The
result of these inquiries was a series of ponderous Blue-books, which
few ever saw, but which that few studied very carefully. It finally
burst upon the country that the British Museum and its collections
had, up to 1860, cost three millions of pounds, and that it was “in
hopeless confusion, valuable collections wholly hidden from the public,
and great portions of others in danger of being destroyed by damp and
neglect.” The commissioners of 1859 who made this report also pointed
out the cause of the evils they recognized. The museum was in the hands
of forty-seven trustees, each of whom seemed to think that there were
plenty to manage the affair without his concerning himself individually
in the matter. Never was costlier broth so near being spoiled by
multiplicity of cooks, when Panizzi, by a sort of _coup d’état_,
brought a strong executive control to bear upon it. It is a singular
fact that even now the British government does not formally adopt the
British Museum. The vote for supplies of its ways and means is given
each year on a motion made by a member sitting on the opposition
benches. During Mr. Gladstone’s administration it was made by the Right
Hon. S. Walpole, a trustee of the museum; when Lord Beaconsfield was
in power it was made by the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, also a trustee.
The money is supplied grudgingly. There can hardly be found elsewhere
men of such eminence in their own departments as Professor Newton,
Reginald Stuart Poole, and Story-Maskelyne (the mineralogist); there
can be found none who have done such enormous work in bringing order
out of chaos in the British Museum; yet they receive salaries of six
hundred and fifty pounds each for labors that deserve a thousand. The
condition of this museum has much improved of late. The vast growth
of its collections had crowded its literary and scientific employés
into miserable unventilated cells, and their murmurings of years have
until now been unheeded. When the first victim, the Talmudic scholar,
Emanuel Deutsch, was dying, he said, “Perhaps when I am gone they will
do something.” This was the hope of the thirty-eight scholars buried
alive in the printed-book department. He died, and nothing was done.
Then fell the second victim, Mr. Warren, head of the transcribing
department. This caused a panic. The readers of the reading-room, many
of whom suffer from the now medically recognized “Museum headache,”
took the matter up. The trustees visited the room where the two
scholars had perished, and condemned it. But several rooms only a
little better were still used, and another able assistant, an eminent
author, barely saved his life by resigning a post he had held in the
museum for over twenty years. The principal librarian, Bond, and
keeper of printed books, Bullen, have done much to improve the state
of things: but there is still a great want of private rooms for the
assistant librarians, who generally have to sit in draughty galleries,
where no open fires are to be got at. That this huge building should
have become absurdly inadequate for its contents and its original
purpose indicates the vast progress of English science in recent
years. The keepers of antiquities felt themselves bound to declare
that there were valuable Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek monuments and
inscriptions, in the crypts and corners of the museum, quite as useless
for scientific purposes as if they had remained buried in the lands
where they were exhumed. Much relief, both to the assistants and to the
scholars who have had to dig like Schliemann for some of the museum’s
treasures, will follow the removal of the vast zoological collections
to South Kensington. The final result will be that the British Museum
will be specialized, and become the treasury of the national archives
and the national library.
As for the matter of payment, it certainly constitutes the gravest
problem besetting institutions of this character. The best work done
for literature, art, and science (so far as they are connected with the
state) is done on small salaries, a thousand pounds being considered
a vast sum for great men. Even such men as Tyndall and Lockyer get
less than that by their official positions. But these gentlemen all
feel the danger that might arise if such work became so well paid as
to allure the incompetent, and its offices become objects of political
intrigue. At present no country is better served in such matters than
England, such men as those mentioned being content with small salaries
because of the ample means of research afforded them. And indeed it
would appear enough to prevent the offices for scientific and other
work of an intellectual character being sought for gain, if some clever
statesman would invent a way of paying the additional sums needed
“in kind,” but in some kind, also, not transmutable into values for
other than the learned. It must be admitted that thus far no English
minister has appreciated the necessity that scholars should have
salaries sufficiently large to raise them above anxiety, and to render
unnecessary the too frequent frittering away of invaluable time and
power in a multiplicity of extraneous and lucrative employments.