To-day one is diffident about directing any choice; as the old guardian said, “Most people ’as their fancies!” They may lie in the direction of the mummy rooms, where the prehistoric man, so startlingly like a modern, crouches in his grave, with his stone flints within reach, or in the room of gold ornaments and gems, where lie the necklaces that rose and fell on breasts dead these thousand years, necklaces that differ nowise from the amethyst and jade trinkets to be seen in Bond Street to-day.
Or you may like best to stroll in that pleasant place the King’s Library—a long, gracious apartment where the sunlight gilds the warm brown of the lovely tooled bindings of George III.’s books.
Into this spacious room come all sorts of people—small boys in knickerbockers anxious to consult the postage stamp collections, artists to pore over delicately illuminated pages of fifteenth-century manuscripts, students to worship at the shrine of first editions of Shakespeare and Spenser, and people who are touched with the human interest of poignant letters like that of Mary Queen of Scots to “ma bonne sœur et cousine Elizabeth.”
But when I am fancy-free, and come to the British Museum, perhaps with only an hour to spare and no very definite idea about what I want to see, I choose one of two courses. Either I spend the entire hour in walking briskly through the galleries and taking a sort of bird’s-eye view of the different kinds of treasures that the museum guards, without making an attempt at intimacy with any one of them—or I turn to the left of the big entrance hall, pass through the Roman and Greco-Roman rooms and spend the whole time in the western wing, because there I can see the art of three great nations of the ancient world and the greatest of all the museum’s treasures—the Elgin Marbles. In the galleries surrounding them are the stupendous sculptures of Egypt and Assyria; statues of the Egyptian kings who lived 3000 years ago; colossal bulls, human-headed, that once guarded the gate of the palace that belonged to the father of one Sennacherib, King of Assyria, who “came up against all the defenced cities of Judah and took them,” and fragments from his own great palace of Nineveh.
Théophile Gautier’s words:
Tout passe.—L’art robuste
Seul a l’étérnité:
Le buste
Survit à la cité,
come into one’s mind, for the bas-reliefs show the effect of the fire of the Babylonians and Medes when they destroyed “Nineveh that great city” in 609 B.C., yet they survived and the city is as dust! What a people they must have been, the folk who built the Lycian tombs, you can see best when you are half-way down the steps into the Mausoleum room, where lie the tremendous fragments of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—the tomb that his wife and sister built for Mausolos, Prince of Caria, in a little town in Asia Minor some 2275 years ago.
Traces of another of the seven wonders are in the Ephesus room, where remains of the vast Temple of Artemis, “Diana of the Ephesians,” are gathered, and this room leads to the greatest wonder of them all, the pediment groups of statues from the Parthenon at Athens, that most of us call tout court the Elgin Marbles.
I believe that a great many people have a vague idea that Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, did a little “scrounging” when he was British ambassador to the Porte in 1801, and that our possession of these sculptures is due to a mixture of luck and audacity.
It is really due to the common sense, artistic perception and generosity of a statesman who at great inconvenience and a cost to himself of £70,000, only half of which sum he later received from the English Government, removed the treasures that were daily being destroyed by the Turkish bombardment and that, but for his action, would have been irretrievably lost to the world.