Highways and Byways in London

by Emily Constance Baird Cook

The South Kensington Museum, now officially, by order of the late Queen, termed "the Victoria and Albert Museum," is well known to all dwellers in, and visitors to, London. The large and wonderful collections that it contains have been for many years so overcrowded and so irregularly arranged, as to lose half their attraction. For long it existed partly in shanties and temporary buildings, and a hideous iron structure, nicknamed the "Brompton Boilers," was for long the disgrace of a rich and a beauty-loving nation. All these have at length been swept away; the terribly inadequate main entrance (in the Brompton Road) is being done away with, and a new façade is rising, which will soon effect great changes and improvements. Mr. Ruskin, who was always a victim of moods, was apparently in his day made very cross by the general muddle, and expressed his feelings on the subject in the following burst of pathetic eloquence:

"At South Kensington" (he says), "where I lost myself in a Cretan labyrinth of military ironmongery, advertisements of spring blinds, model fish-farming, and plaster bathing nymphs with a year's smut on the noses of them; and had to put myself in charge of a policeman to get out again."

Indeed, in its vast size, its involved construction, and its encyclopædic scope, the South Kensington Museum much resembles a maze, and, once inside it, it is difficult indeed to know the points of the compass. Yet, everything can be seen here, if only you know where to look for it. It is, itself, a "General Exhibition" on no mean scale. And here is more than ever exemplified the great truth, that the most beautiful objects lose in effect in proportion to the unsuitableness of their immediate surroundings. Even the model of the Pisan pulpit, crowded as it is among so many incongruous objects, seems here a sort of glorified stove-pipe, while the carved front of Sir Paul Pindar's old house almost suggests a magnified dolls'-house awaiting sale, and plaster casts jostle on all sides with the valuable treasures of antiquity. Here again are the groups of feminine students with their guides, and also many isolated toilers, "working up" some special branch of knowledge in the different sections, such as Ivories, Porcelain, Lace, Musical Instruments, or Italian woodwork. (The students are here, I may add, a trifle better dressed than those at the British Museum; they are also, on an average, a thought cleaner, and their hair has, perhaps, a tendency to be neater.) The "omnium-gatherum," as it has been called, of South Kensington, should, like any other Exhibition, be taken piecemeal, and on the first visit the stranger should merely try, if possible, to see the historic Raphael cartoons, and those most interesting pictures of the British School that form the famous "Sheepshanks" collection.

The neighbouring Natural History Museum, Waterhouse's vast edifice of terra-cotta, is, internally, a most beautifully planned building, and the arrangement of its various classes of specimens is no less excellent. Nothing could be better done, either for purposes of entertainment or of instruction, than the groups in the Great Hall of the building, where animals, birds, and insects, are shown charmingly mounted and in their own natural surroundings; and where, by careful and well-selected illustration, such strange living mysteries as "melanism" and "albinism" are demonstrated and explained. One of the most striking glass cases of all is that which illustrates "Protective Resemblances and Mimicry," a subject which is attracting much notice at the present day among naturalists (see the late Professor Henry Drummond's Tropical Africa for further curious information on this interesting subject). Some of the strange natural imitations shown here, such as of dead leaves by butterflies, or of bits of straw by insects, are wonderful indeed.

The new Tate Gallery, raised by the munificence of one of our merchant princes for the enshrinement of modern British Art, is a building of quite another kind. This edifice, in the Greek style, was built by the late Sir Henry Tate, on the site of old Millbank Prison, at Westminster. When this Gallery was first opened, in July, 1897, its approaches were always thronged by private carriages, and powdered footmen waited in the muddy, half-finished roads (for the whole locality was then in a state of incompleteness). But this was in the early days of its fame; the vagaries of fashion are of short duration, and although even yet "smart" people are to be met with occasionally in the Tate Gallery, they are now in a decided minority; they have, most likely, betaken themselves to the still newer exhibition of Hertford House.

It is the artisan, the small shopkeeper, the great "lower middle-class," that frequent chiefly the Tate Gallery. Not by any means the same class, for instance, that you see at the National Gallery; the visitors to the Tate Gallery are mainly the lovers of "the human interest" in a picture, and not the earnest students. Here the sightseers roam, like butterflies, from flower to flower; not so much to gather the honey, as just to enjoy the moment. Therefore, at Millbank, they are but rarely gowned in angular "art serge," and are but seldom be-spectacled and be-catalogued. Neither are the Hypatia-like girl-lecturers at all evident. Sir Henry Tate used to take an evident pleasure in walking about the galleries that his munificence had provided. Only a short time before his death, he was to be seen there, benevolent and urbane as ever, the type of what Mr. Ruskin has called "the entirely honest merchant."

The Tate Gallery is considered, administratively, as part of the National Gallery; and many pictures of the modern British school have, as every one knows, been removed to Millbank from the older collection. But the earlier pictures of the British School, and the Turners, are still in Trafalgar Square.

The wealth of foreign pictures now to be seen in the National Gallery of London renders it the Mecca of every visitor, both from our own country, and from overseas. The National Gallery, fine as it is, is but a comparatively modern growth. Founded in 1824 by the purchase of the Angerstein Collection, it slowly, very slowly at first, crept into fame and distinction. Only some forty-five years ago, Mr. Ruskin said of it that it was "an European jest!" Since 1887 its pictures have nearly doubled in number and it is now, if not one of the finest, at least one of the most representative, collections in the world. The internal arrangement of the Gallery leaves little to be desired, and its spacious entrance hall and staircase, adorned with coloured marbles, has a solid dignity, with a cheerfulness and brightness usually somewhat lacking in London. A fine bust of Egyptian porphyry, called the "Dying Alexander," (a copy of one in the Uffizi), presented by Mr. Henry Yates Thompson, forms an effective centre-piece for the Entrance Vestibule.

Once inside the magic portals of the National Gallery, a very paradise is opened to the art-loving visitor. He will soon forget, revelling in those soft Italian skies, that glowing southern colour, that outside his shelter hums the London of the twentieth century. The pictures are finely arranged, and they are not crowded. A hint has been taken from the Louvre, and the famous "Blenheim Raphael," the Ansidei Madonna (bought by the nation for such a tremendous price from the Duke of Marlborough), greets the entering visitor from the far end of a long vista. The walls on which the pictures are hung are covered in Pompeian red or sober green, with a wall-covering that has the soothing effect of rich Venetian brocade, and that even improves in tone with years.