Ghosts
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.