Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume I Part 2

THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE [Footnote: From "Notes on England." By arrangement with the publishers, Henry Holt & Co.]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

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, cla.s.sics 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tles 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 circ.u.mference and has three stories of prodigious height; it would easily hold five or six buildings like our Palace of Industry, and it is of gla.s.s; 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 gla.s.s 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 circ.u.mference. 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 d.i.c.kENS [Footnote: From "A Pickwickian Pilgrimage." The persons mentioned in Mr. Ha.s.sard's Pilgrimage to the Temple and its neighborhood will be recognized as characters In the novels of Charles d.i.c.kens. By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1881.]

BY JOHN R.G. Ha.s.sARD

The Temple is crowded with the ghosts of fiction. Here were the neglected chambers, lumbered with heaps and parcels of books, where Tom Pinch was set to work by Mr. Fips, and where old Martin Chuzzlewit revealed himself in due time and knocked Mr. Pecksniff into a corner. Here Mr. Mortimer Lightwood's dismal office-boy leaned out of a dismal window overlooking the dismal churchyard; and here Mortimer and Eugene were visited by Mr.

Boffin offering a large reward for the conviction of the murderer of John Harmon; by that honest water-side character, Rogue Riderhood, anxious to earn "a pot o' money" in the sweat of his brow by swearing away the life of Gaffer Hexam; by Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam; by "Mr. Dolls,"

negotiating for "three-penn'orths of rum."

It was in Garden Court of The Temple, in the house nearest the river, that Pip, holding his lamp over the stairs one stormy night, saw the returned convict climbing up to his rooms to disclose the mystery of his Great Expectations. Close by the gateway from The Temple into Fleet Street, and adjoining the site of Temple Bar, is Child's ancient banking house, the original of Tellson's Bank in a "Tale of Two Cities." The demolition of Temple Bar made necessary some alterations in the bank, too; and when I was last there the front of the old building which so long defied time and change was boarded up.

Chancery Lane, opposite The Temple, running from Fleet Street to Holborn--a distance only a little greater than that between the Fifth and Sixth Avenues in New York--is the princ.i.p.al pathway through the "perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law." At either end of it there are fresh green spots; but the lane itself is wholly given up to legal dust and darkness. Facing it, on the farther side of Holborn, in a position corresponding with that of The Temple at the Fleet Street extremity, is Gray's Inn, especially attractive to me on account of the long gra.s.sy enclosure within its innermost court, so smooth and bright and well-kept that I always stopt to gaze longingly at it through the railed barrier which shuts strangers out--as if here were a tennis lawn reserved for the exclusive vise of frisky barristers.

At No. 2 Holborn Court, in Gray's Inn, David Copperfield, on his return from abroad near the end of the story, found the rooms of that rising young lawyer, Mr. Thomas Traddles. There was a great scuttling and scampering when David knocked at the door; for Traddles was at that moment playing puss-in-the-corner with Sophy and "the girls." Thavies' Inn, on the other side of Holborn, a little farther east, is no longer enclosed; it is only a little fragment of shabby street which starts, with mouth wide open, to run out of Holborn Circus, and stops short, after a few reds, without having got anywhere. The faded houses look as if they belonged to East Broadway; and in one of them lived Mrs. Jellyby....

The buildings within the large enclosure of Lincoln's Inn are a strange mixture of aged dulness and new splendor; but the old houses and the old court-rooms seem to be without exception dark, stuffy, and inconvenient.

Here were the chambers of Kenge and Carboy, and the dirty and disorderly offices of Sergeant Snubbin, counsel for the defendant in the suit of Bardell against Pickwick. Here the Lord Chancellor sat, in the heart of the fog, to hear the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

At the back of the Inn, in the shabby-genteel square called Lincoln's Inn Fields, Mr. Tulkinghorn was murdered in his rusty apartment. The story of "Bleak House" revolves about Lincoln's Inn. The whole neighborhood has an air of mystery and a scent like a stationer's shop. Always I found Mr.

Guppy there, with a necktie much too smart for the rest of his clothes, and a bundle of doc.u.ments tied with red tape. Jobling and young Smallweed sometimes stopt to talk with him. The doors of the crowded court-rooms opened now and then, and gentlemen in gowns and horsehair wigs came out to speak with clients who waited under the arches....

The climax of "Bleak House" is the pursuit of Lady Dedlock, and the finding of the fugitive, cold and dead, with one arm around a rail of the dark little graveyard where they buried the law-copyist, "Nemo," and where poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper, came at night and swept the stones as his last tribute to the friend who "was very good" to him. There are three striking descriptions of this place in the novel. "A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene--a beastly sc.r.a.p of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Kafir would shudder at. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate--with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life; here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in corruption to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together."

The exact situation of the graveyard is not defined in the novel; but it was evidently near Lincoln's Inn, and Mr. Winter told us, in one of his delightful London letters, that it was also near Drury Lane. So strangely hidden away is it among close and dirty houses that it was only after three long searches through all the courts thereabouts that I found the "reeking little tunnel," and twice I pa.s.sed the entrance without observing it. Opening out of Drury Lane, at the back and side of the theater, is a network of narrow, flagged pa.s.sages built up with tall houses. There are rag and waste-paper shops in this retreat, two or three dreadful little greengrocers' stalls, a p.a.w.nbroker's, a surprizing number of cobblers, and in the core of the place, where the alley widens into the semblance of a dwarfed court, a nest of dealers in theatrical finery, dancing-shoes, pasteboard rounds of beef and cutlets, stage armor, and second-hand play-books. Between Marquis Court on the one hand, Russell Court on the other, and a miserable alley called Cross Court which connects them, is what appears at first sight to be a solid block of tenements. The graveyard is in the very heart of this populous block. The door of one of the houses stood open, and through a barred staircase window at the back of the entry I caught a glimpse of a patch of gra.s.s--a sight so strange in this part of London that I went around to the other side of the block to examine further.

There I found the "reeking little tunnel." It is merely a stone-paved pa.s.sage about four feet wide through the ground floor of a tenement. House doors open into it. A lamp hangs over the entrance. A rusty iron gate closes it at the farther end. Here is the "pestiferous and obscene churchyard," completely hemmed in by the habitations of the living. Few of the graves are marked, and most of the tombstones remaining are set up on end against the walls of the houses. Perhaps a church stood there once, but there is none now. The burials are no longer permitted in this hideous spot, the people of the block, when they shut their doors at night, shut the dead in with them. The dishonoring of the old graves goes on briskly.

Inside the gate lay various rubbish--a woman's boot, a broken coal scuttle, the foot of a tin candlestick, fragments of paper, sticks, bones, straw--unmentionable abominations; and over the dismal scene a reeking, smoke-laden fog spread darkness and moisture.

THE TEMPLE CHURCH [Footnote: From "Walks in London."]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C. HARE

By Inner Temple Lane we reach the only existing relic of the residence of the Knights Templars in these courts, their magnificent Temple Church (St Mary's), which fortunately just escaped the Great Fire in which most of the Inner Temple perished. The church was restored in 1839-42 at an expense of 70,000, but it has been ill-done, and with great disregard of the historic memorials it contained.

It is entered by a grand Norman arch under the western porch, which will remind those who have traveled in France of the glorious door of Loches.

This opens upon the Round Church of 1185 (fifty-eight feet in diameter), built in recollection of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the only four remaining round churches in England; the others being at Cambridge, Northampton, and Maplestead in Ess.e.x. Hence, between graceful groups of Purbeck marble columns, we look into the later church of 1240; these two churches, built only at a distance of fifty-five years from each other, forming one of the most interesting examples we possess of the transition from Norman to Early English architecture. The Round Church is surrounded by an arcade of narrow Early English arches, separated by a series of heads, which are chiefly restorations. On the pavement lie two groups of restored effigies of "a.s.sociates" of the Temple (not Knights Templars), carved in freestone, being probably the "eight images of armed knights" mentioned by Stow in 1598....

Against the wall, behind the Marshalls, is the effigy of Robert Ros, Governor of Carlisle in the reign of John. He was one of the great Magna Charta barons, and married the daughter of a king of Scotland, but he was not a Templar, for he wears flowing hair, which is forbidden by the rites of the Order; at the close of his life, however, he took the Templars'

habit as an a.s.sociate, and was buried here in 1227. On the opposite side is a Purbeck marble sarcophagus, said to be that of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, but her effigy is at Fontevrault, where the monastic annals prove that she took the veil after the murder of Prince Arthur. Henry II.

left five hundred marks by his will for his burial in the Temple Church, but was also buried at Fontevrault. Gough considers that the tomb here may be that of William Plantagenet, fifth son of Henry III., who died in infancy, and (according to Weaver) was buried in the Temple in 1256.

A staircase in the walls leads to the triforium of the Round Church, which is now filled with the tombs, foolishly removed from the chancel beneath.

Worthy of especial notice is the colored kneeling effigy of Martin, Recorder of London, and Reader of the Middle Temple, 1615. Near this is the effigy--also colored and under a canopy--of Edmund Plowden, the famous jurist, of whom Lord Ellenborough said that "better authority could not be cited"; and referring to whom Fuller quaintly remarks: "How excellent a medley is made, when honesty and ability meet in a man of his profession!"

There is also a monument to James Howell (1594-1666), whose entertaining letters, chiefly written from the Fleet, give many curious particulars relating to the reigns of James I. and Charles I.... The church (eight-two feet long, fifty-eight wide, thirty-seven high), begun in 1185 and finished in 1240, is one of our most beautiful existing specimens of Early English Pointed architecture: "the roof springing, as it were, in a harmonious and accordant fountain, out of the cl.u.s.tered pillars that support its pinioned arches; and these pillars, immense as they are, polished like so many gems." [Footnote: Hawthorne.] In the ornaments of the ceiling the banner of the Templars is frequently repeated--black and white, "because," says Fawyne, "the Templars showed themselves wholly white and fair toward the Christians, but black and terrible to them that were miscreants." The letters "Beausean" are for "Beauseant," their war cry.

In a dark hole to the left of the altar is the white marble monument of John Selden, 1654, called by Milton "the chief of learned men reputed in this land." The endless stream of volumes which he poured forth were filled with research and discrimination. Of these, his work "On the Law of Nature and of Nations" is described by Hallam as among the greatest achievements in erudition that any English writer has performed, but he is perhaps best known by his "Table Talk," of which Coleridge says, "There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer."...

On the right of the choir, near a handsome marble piscina, is the effigy of a bishop, usually shown as that of Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, by whom the church was consecrated, but he left England in a fury, after Henry II. refused to perform his vow of joining the Crusades in person, to atone for the murder of Becket. The figure more probably represents Silverston de Eversdon, Bishop of Carlisle, 1255. In the vestry are monuments to Lords Eldon and Stowell, and that of Lord Thurlow (1806) by Rossi.

The organ, by Father Smydt or Smith, is famous from the long compet.i.tion it underwent with one by Harris. Both were temporarily erected in the church. Blow and Purcell were employed to perform on that of Smith; Battista Draghi, organist to Queen Catherine, on that of Harris. Immense audiences came to listen, but tho the contest lasted a year they could arrive at no decision. Finally, it was left to Judge Jefferies of the Inner Temple, who was a great musician, and who chose that of Smith.

LAMBETH--CHURCH AND PALACE [Footnote: From "Walks in London."]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C. HARE

The Church of St. Mary, Lambeth, was formerly one of the most interesting churches in London, being, next to Canterbury Cathedral, the great burial place of its archbishops, but falling under the ruthless hand of "restorers" it was rebuilt (except its tower of 1377) in 1851-52 by Hardwick, and its interest has been totally destroyed, its monuments huddled away anywhere, for the most part close under the roof, where their inscriptions are of course wholly illegible!...

Almost the only interesting feature retained in this cruelly abused building is the figure of a pedler with his pack and dog (on the third window of the north aisle) who left "Pedlar's Acre" to the parish, on condition of his figure being always preserved on one of the church windows. The figure was existing here as early as 1608.

In the churchyard, at the east end of the church, is an altar tomb, with the angles sculptured like trees, spreading over a strange confusion of obelisks, pyramids, crocodiles, sh.e.l.ls, etc., and, at one end, a hydra. It is the monument of John Tradescant (1638) and his son, two of the earliest British naturalists. The elder was so enthusiastic a botanist that he joined an expedition against Algerine corsairs on purpose to get a new apricot from the African coast, which was thenceforth known as "the Algier Apricot." His quaint medley of curiosities, known in his own time as "Tradeskin's Ark," was afterward incorporated with the Ashmolean Museum....

"Lambeth, envy of each band and gown," has been for more than 700 years the residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, tho the site of the present palace was only obtained by Archbishop Baldwin in 1197, when he exchanged some lands in Kent for it with Glanville, Bishop of Rochester, to whose see it had been granted by the Countess G.o.da, sister of the Confessor. The former proprietors.h.i.+p of the Bishops of Rochester is still commemorated in Rochester Row, Lambeth, on the site of a house which was retained when the exchange was made, for their use when they came to attend Parliament. The Palace is full of beauty in itself and intensely interesting from its a.s.sociations. It is approached by a n.o.ble Gateway of red brick with stone dressings, built by Cardinal Moreton in 1490. It is here that the poor of Lambeth have received "the Archbishops' Dole" for hundreds of years. In ancient times a farthing loaf was given twice a week to 4,000 people.

Adjoining the Porter's Lodge is a room evidently once used as a prison. On pa.s.sing the gate we are in the outer court, at the end of which rises the picturesque Lollards' Tower, built by Archbishop Chicheley, 1434-45; on the right is the Hall. A second gateway leads to the inner court, containing the modern (Tudor) palace, built by Archbishop Howley (1828-48), who spent the whole of his private fortune upon it rather than let Blore the architect be ruined by exceeding his contract to the amount of 30,000. On the left, between the b.u.t.tresses of the hall, are the descendants of some famous fig trees planted by Cardinal Pole.