I often wonder how many Londoners have been inside No. 13, Lincoln's
Inn Fields!
Here we have the most remarkable museum in this and probably any
other country. Sir John Soane, the architect who designed the Bank
of England, died eighty-eight years ago, and left an instruction in
his will that his house, packed with treasures, should be thrown open
to the public in the condition in which he left it. The furniture
has hardly been moved, the pictures hang in the same positions, and
if old Sir John could come back he would enter his library and go
over to his desk, hardly knowing that over three-quarters of a
century have intervened since he said good-bye to the things he loved
with all his heart and soul.
If ever the presence of a dead man printed itself on a house, this is
the house. I went there the other day and found the shutters drawn.
It was after closing time, but the caretaker asked me inside and
courteously took me round.
It was like entering a house when a family is away. I had to pull
myself together and realize that this family was eighty-eight years
away. There is a certain air about a house whose contents have been
arranged by someone who loves it. No museum curator could imitate
it. I could, in imagination, see Sir John pottering round with one
of his latest treasures, wondering where to put it. He looks in
bewilderment. The rooms are so crowded! He finds a place, not the
best place, but his place; and there it has remained and will remain
down the ages.
Another ghost. Lady Soane. Dear woman, she loved these things too,
so the biographers say, but it must have given her feminine heart
many a twinge to see Roman pillars, gigantic stone fragments from
Greek temples, life-size statues, a cast of the Apollo Belvedere,
and, at last, the biggest and finest stone coffin ever taken from an
Egyptian tomb, enter her home one by one.
"Oh, John," her ghost said, "how full the house is. Where are we
going to live?"
And John, beaming and running his hand over a smooth green bronze,
replied, pointing to something new:
"Isn't that perfectly lovely. I think I'll have to knock down the
dining-room wall!"
No woman in the history of housekeeping has ever endured such an
overwhelming artistic invasion.
* * *
Sir John began life as the son of a bricklayer. What an
encouragement to all collectors of the antique! As he got on in life
he collected more precious things, spent two thousand pounds on an
object the British Museum could not afford, and gradually surrounded
himself with one of the choicest collections any private individual
has possessed.
How many things enthusiasm can accomplish in one lifetime! It is
inspiring to walk through this old house and realize that everything
was collected by one man while he built up his career.
Pictures--notably Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress"--antique gems,
bronzes, manuscripts, books, ancient glass, bas-reliefs, the first
three folio editions of Shakespeare, and thousands of other things
came to him as steel to a magnet. It is not a house: it is a curio
shop.
He must have puzzled over space. You would never guess unless you
were shown how he made one wall do the work of two or three. He
devised walls in many a room which opened like the leaves of a book,
each leaf, or side, being hung with pictures. Clever Sir John; and
how Lady Soane must have praised him as the tide of treasure rose
higher and higher round her tea-table.
* * *
Down in the basement he kept the splendid alabaster coffin of the
Pharaoh Seti I, a marvellous thing cut from one solid lump of
alabaster. This was the object that Belzoni saw gleaming in the dark
tomb in those days when no man could read the weird hieroglyphs with
which it is entirely covered.
What a beautiful thing it is. As I looked at it I remembered
Belzoni's account of its discovery in that vain, amusing, yet always
interesting, "Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries
within the Pyramids, Temples, and Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and
Nubia," published in 1820. This man's adventures among the tombs of
Egypt at a time before Egyptology was a science are sufficient to
make any modern archæologist lie down and howl with envy at his
opportunities and burn with rage at the opportunities he missed.
After describing the location of the tomb, and how the debris of
three thousand years was cleared, Belzoni pictures his entry, his
progress through columned halls, his discovery of a rope that fell to
dust when touched. He wandered for days like a boy in a fairy tale
through this tomb, the most splendid in the Theban Necropolis.
"But the description of what we found in the centre of the saloon and
which I have reserved till this place," wrote Belzoni, "merits the
most particular attention, not having its equal in the world, and
being such as we had no idea could exist. It is a sarcophagus of the
finest Oriental alabaster, nine feet five inches long, and three feet
seven inches wide. Its thickness is only two inches; and it is
transparent when a light is placed inside of it. It is minutely
sculptured within and without with several hundred figures which do
not exceed two inches in height, and represent, as I suppose, the
whole of the funeral procession and funeral ceremonies relating to
the deceased.... I cannot give an adequate idea of this beautiful
and invaluable piece of antiquity, and can only say that nothing has
been brought into Europe from Egypt that can be compared with it."
Just as the reports of the late Lord Carnarvon's discovery sped
through Thebes like wildfire, so did Belzoni's luck circulate, with
the result that one day the Turkish authorities rode up, headed by
Hamed Aga of Keneh. Then, as now, antiquities to the native meant
simply gold. The Aga, after glancing vaguely round the tomb, ordered
his soldiers to retire, then, turning to Belzoni he said:
"Pray where have you put the treasure?"
"What treasure?" asked poor Belzoni.
The Aga then told him a story--so like those in circulation at Luxor
in 1923, when it was rumoured by natives that every woman visitor to
the tomb of Tutankhamen came away with gold jewellery concealed in
her skirts! Belzoni denied the rumours of fabulous wealth and of a
reported large golden cock crammed with diamonds and pearls! The Aga
was crestfallen.
"He seated himself before the sarcophagus," wrote Belzoni, "and I was
afraid he would take it into his head that this was the treasure and
break it to pieces to see whether it contained any gold."
Fortunately he did not. He merely delivered himself of the
remarkable observation that the tomb of Seti I "would be a good place
for a harem, as the women would have something to look at," and then,
happily for Egyptology and the Soane Museum, departed.
* * *
"Is this place haunted?" I asked the caretaker, just to see what he
would say.
"No, sir!" he replied scornfully. "I've heard noises, but it's mice.
There isn't such a thing as ghosts, believe me."
But he's wrong; for I saw old Sir John as plainly as anything in
those high, leisurely rooms, arranging things, prying into them with
a cut crystal, and touching them with fingers that caressed.