Woe betide the novice whose evil star leads him to one of these gentlemen's special haunts! Of course there are a few smart visitors and a modicum of mere "fribblers" (some years ago, indeed, so many damsels repaired to the reading-room to skim recent novels, that a rule was passed forbidding the issue of any recent work of fiction), but the dowdy, plodding type forms the vast majority. In many cases the toilers are simply slaves sent by some absentee literary taskmaster to ferret out knotty points, or to look up references. Sometimes they are clergymen in search of detail for sermons; sometimes they are learned Casaubons or untiring Jellybys working on their own account.... A kind Government provides pens, ink, often tracing paper, and any amount of civility and trouble, free. It has been said unkindly by West-Enders, jealous of such liberality, that Bloomsbury alone should be taxed for the British Museum; such an injustice, however, has not, so far, been perpetrated!—
That the British Museum is gradually absorbing all the houses near it, and enlarging its boundaries into a large square, is evident. The whole eastern side of Bedford Square, and part of the western side of Russell Square, will soon be amalgamated into the vast building. The little lions, those ornaments on the old outer railings, about whose disappearance such an outcry was raised some years back, have been adapted to the internal use of the Museum, and higher, stronger, more important railings substituted on the outside in their place. The large pediment of the portico, imitated—at how long an interval!—from the Greek model, is, like the statues in the squares, filled with nesting birds, and is generally also white with the pigeons' plumage. And, where this enormous building now stands, was originally Old Montague House, the "stately and ample ancient palace," adorned by Verrio and built in the "French pavilion" way, when, practically, all the rest of Bloomsbury was open country. Where the big galleries now extend were corridors adorned by fresco paintings: and where the halls now given up to statues and treasures stand, were rooms full of light, music, and dancing.
But I am wandering from the present. Yet, in the early winter twilight of the British Museum galleries, it is easy for vagrant fancies, unbidden, to arise. The vast dim galleries raise, indeed, ghosts and visions of a brilliant past, and confer almost humanity on their marble tenants, gigantic figures shining through the gloom. The Greek gods of the heroic age,—the creatures "moulded in colossal calm,"—we can almost imagine the minds who inspired, the workmen who wrought, the sculptors who fashioned, the temples that contained them. The stream of life still flows around the feet of these immortal ones, who in their calm smiling seem to scorn the poor passions of humanity; in their immortality, to rise above the feeble ebb and flow of human life. As Aurora they remain ever youthful, while we poor mortals, like Tithonus, adore their eternal youth and beauty, and ourselves grow old. Here, in the dim vestibule, is just such a Grecian Urn as that which Keats apostrophized, with its lovers whose undying youth and unsatisfied longing he envied.... "Ars longa, vita brevis," indeed! We go, but they shall endure,—to see "new men, new faces, other minds"; to have, perchance, new labels written for them by future Dryasdusts; to be invested with fresh attributes by a newer school of ambitious critics. Many of them have seen cities rise and fall; they have survived ruin, siege, burial, neglect; and now at last they have come here to the same dead level of monotony:
"Deemed they of this, those worshippers,
When, in some mythic chain of verse
Which man shall not again rehearse,
The faces of thy ministers
Yearned pale with bitter ecstasy?
"Greece, Egypt, Rome—did any god,
Before whose feet men knelt unshod,
Deem that in this unblest abode
Another scarce more unknown god
Should house with him"—
If these dead stones could feel, would they not lament their departed glory? The heroic figure of Mausolus, who, on the pinnacle of his temple, once drove his marble car, the cynosure of all eyes and the wonder of the world, outlined against the blue Aegean sky and sea, and the white-walled city; the gigantic bas-reliefs of the Parthenon, whose very existence here is the "shibboleth" of æsthetic criticism, that once adorned the ancient Athenian temple, brilliantly violet and golden against the faint blue line of the bay and hills of Salamis; the famous "Harpy Tomb," torn from its sunny Lycian height, and now glimmering dimly through London fog, guarded by a vigilant policeman,—what former beauties of surrounding nature do they not suggest or recall! We forget, in gazing, the nineteenth-century prose of Bloomsbury, the monotony of its gloomy streets; we forget that we ourselves are "the latest seed of time," the "last word" of the human race, dwelling, amid all the dull luxury of civilisation, in the greatest and richest city of the world. And, leaving the gallery by way of the vast and unique Assyrian collection of sculptures, passing through the two colossal human-headed bulls that guard its entrance, creatures whose excavation from the buried city of Nineveh forms one of the most romantic of modern discoveries; passing out into the misty sunshine and the flying doves before the pediment, we recall again Rossetti's wonderful lines, with their final suggestion of a future lost and rediscovered London—rediscovered under the dust and oblivion of future ages:
"And as I turned, my sense half shut
Still saw the crowds of kerb and rut
Go past as marshalled to the strut
Of ranks in gypsum quaintly cut.
It seemed in one same pageantry
They followed forms which had been erst;
To pass, till on my sight should burst
That future of the best or worst
When some may question which was first,
Of London or of Nineveh.
"For as that Bull-god once did stand
And watched the burial clouds of sand,
Till these at last without a hand
Rose o'er his eyes, another land,
And blinded him with destiny:—
So may he stand again; till now,
In ships of unknown sail and prow,
Some tribe of the Australian plough
Bear him afar—a relic now
Of London, not of Nineveh!"
CHAPTER XII
THEATRICAL AND FOREIGN LONDON
—"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players...."—Shakespeare.