Travels in South Kensington / with Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England

by Moncure Daniel Conway

Public interest in the treasures of art and science in London—whose extent was unknown to any one—first manifested itself in 1835, when Parliament caused an inquiry to be made into the state of the British Museum; a second committee inquired in 1847, a third in 1859. The result of these inquiries was a series of ponderous Blue-books, which few ever saw, but which that few studied very carefully. It finally burst upon the country that the British Museum and its collections had, up to 1860, cost three millions of pounds, and that it was “in hopeless confusion, valuable collections wholly hidden from the public, and great portions of others in danger of being destroyed by damp and neglect.” The commissioners of 1859 who made this report also pointed out the cause of the evils they recognized. The museum was in the hands of forty-seven trustees, each of whom seemed to think that there were plenty to manage the affair without his concerning himself individually in the matter. Never was costlier broth so near being spoiled by multiplicity of cooks, when Panizzi, by a sort of coup d’état, brought a strong executive control to bear upon it. It is a singular fact that even now the British government does not formally adopt the British Museum. The vote for supplies of its ways and means is given each year on a motion made by a member sitting on the opposition benches. During Mr. Gladstone’s administration it was made by the Right Hon. S. Walpole, a trustee of the museum; when Lord Beaconsfield was in power it was made by the Right Hon. Robert Lowe, also a trustee. The money is supplied grudgingly. There can hardly be found elsewhere men of such eminence in their own departments as Professor Newton, Reginald Stuart Poole, and Story-Maskelyne (the mineralogist); there can be found none who have done such enormous work in bringing order out of chaos in the British Museum; yet they receive salaries of six hundred and fifty pounds each for labors that deserve a thousand. The condition of this museum has much improved of late. The vast growth of its collections had crowded its literary and scientific employés into miserable unventilated cells, and their murmurings of years have until now been unheeded. When the first victim, the Talmudic scholar, Emanuel Deutsch, was dying, he said, “Perhaps when I am gone they will do something.” This was the hope of the thirty-eight scholars buried alive in the printed-book department. He died, and nothing was done. Then fell the second victim, Mr. Warren, head of the transcribing department. This caused a panic. The readers of the reading-room, many of whom suffer from the now medically recognized “Museum headache,” took the matter up. The trustees visited the room where the two scholars had perished, and condemned it. But several rooms only a little better were still used, and another able assistant, an eminent author, barely saved his life by resigning a post he had held in the museum for over twenty years. The principal librarian, Bond, and keeper of printed books, Bullen, have done much to improve the state of things: but there is still a great want of private rooms for the assistant librarians, who generally have to sit in draughty galleries, where no open fires are to be got at. That this huge building should have become absurdly inadequate for its contents and its original purpose indicates the vast progress of English science in recent years. The keepers of antiquities felt themselves bound to declare that there were valuable Egyptian, Assyrian, and Greek monuments and inscriptions, in the crypts and corners of the museum, quite as useless for scientific purposes as if they had remained buried in the lands where they were exhumed. Much relief, both to the assistants and to the scholars who have had to dig like Schliemann for some of the museum’s treasures, will follow the removal of the vast zoological collections to South Kensington. The final result will be that the British Museum will be specialized, and become the treasury of the national archives and the national library.

As for the matter of payment, it certainly constitutes the gravest problem besetting institutions of this character. The best work done for literature, art, and science (so far as they are connected with the state) is done on small salaries, a thousand pounds being considered a vast sum for great men. Even such men as Tyndall and Lockyer get less than that by their official positions. But these gentlemen all feel the danger that might arise if such work became so well paid as to allure the incompetent, and its offices become objects of political intrigue. At present no country is better served in such matters than England, such men as those mentioned being content with small salaries because of the ample means of research afforded them. And indeed it would appear enough to prevent the offices for scientific and other work of an intellectual character being sought for gain, if some clever statesman would invent a way of paying the additional sums needed “in kind,” but in some kind, also, not transmutable into values for other than the learned. It must be admitted that thus far no English minister has appreciated the necessity that scholars should have salaries sufficiently large to raise them above anxiety, and to render unnecessary the too frequent frittering away of invaluable time and power in a multiplicity of extraneous and lucrative employments.

The redemption of the British Museum, so far as it has proceeded, as well as the establishment of nearly every institution of importance to art or science in the country, was largely due to the instruction by example represented in the South Kensington Museum. This institution, it is important to remember, did not grow out of any desire to heap curiosities together or to make any popular display; it grew out of a desire for industrial art culture, and the germ of it was the School of Design which opened in a room of Somerset House, June 1st, 1837. This poor little school is now a thing to make fun of. It took over a month for it to obtain the eight pupils with which it began. The first act of its regulators seems to have been a rule that “drawing the human figure shall not be taught to the students.” Haydon insisted that there could be no training without the human figure. The government did not want artists, but men who could draw such patterns as should render it no longer necessary for English manufacturers to go to Lyons and Paris for such. Etty and Wilkie sat in the council beside silk-weavers and portly warehousemen. Fine-art students were actually excluded—this mainly because of the cry that the government would otherwise be taking bread out of the mouths of private teachers—and the School of Design in 1842 consisted of 178 pattern-drawers. Schools of a similar character were gradually established in some of the provincial manufacturing cities. And there had been about ten years of this sort of thing when the great Exhibition of 1851-52 took place.

Queen Victoria has described the May day when the Palace of Glass was opened in Hyde Park as the happiest of her life. She had witnessed one of those noble victories which leave no tears behind but such as may welcome glad tidings of good-will, and she had seen her hero wearing the only crown he coveted—that of success in a great achievement for European civilization. It is sad indeed that only as a widow does she live to realize the latest results of that day on her country.

The great Exhibition may be termed, so far as English art is concerned, the great revolution. Such a display of “florid and gorgeous tinsel,” to use Redgrave’s description, was never seen, unless in the realms of King Coffee. The articles from the Continent were glittering and showy enough, but those of Great Britain outglittered all, exciting the laughter of cultivated foreigners to such an extent that English gentlemen were scandalized and abashed without knowing precisely what was the matter. The Prince Consort, who was especially ashamed at the general disgust manifested for this tawdry English work, had brought with him from his careful training in Germany and at Brussels one excellent habit—that of deferring to the judgment of accomplished men in matters relating to their own specialties. When he found himself, as Chief Commissioner of the great Exhibition, the hero of a great aesthetic failure and of a great financial success—blushing for the fame of the country which had bestowed its highest honor upon him, and at the same time contemplating a net surplus of £170,000—the idea took possession of him that the least the money could do would be to begin the task of raising English work from the abyss of ugliness which had been so admirably disclosed; and that idea led him to consult artists of ability and men of taste, and to mediate between them and her Majesty’s complacent ministers, whom he managed to rouse into a happy state of bewilderment, which resulted in action.

The Prince Consort was, during his brief life, a fortunate man in many respects, but in nothing was he so fortunate as when, inspired by the best artistic minds in England, he induced the Queen to set apart some rooms at Marlborough House (now the residence of the Prince of Wales) for an industrial art collection and for art training, and when he persuaded her ministers to devote £5000 to the same purpose. He has thus made the great head-quarters of British art in some sense his monument. In 1852 the small collection of the School of Design in Somerset House was removed to Marlborough House, and the Board of Trade confided to Owen Jones, R. Redgrave, and Lyon Playfair the work of reorganizing the whole art training of the country. The collection transferred from Somerset House was trifling enough, but now there were added a number of articles that had been purchased from the Exhibition, and a still more remarkable collection, which has a curious history. After the French Revolution, when the infuriated people were prepared to destroy not only the noblesse, but the works associated with them, fine cabinets and beautiful china vanished out of Paris. At this time George IV.’s French cook gathered up a superb collection of old Sèvres china. This had long been distributed through the English palaces, and was even used for ordinary table service; it was now, by the Queen’s order, removed from the various palaces to Marlborough House, where it was at once recognized as the finest existing collection of a class of articles which was already exciting that competition among collectors which at present amounts to a mania. But the Queen’s best loan was her example. Ministers took up the matter with unwonted courage. Mr. Henley, of the Board of Trade, secured the Bandiuell pottery, Mr. Gladstone the Gherardini models, and the precedent was set which has since added the Bernal, Soulages, Soltikoff, Pourtalès, and other collections—one of the most curious being that of the Rev. Dr. Bock, a collection of mediaeval religious vestments. There is a myth still current that in one or two cases the secret agent of the British Museum had been bidding for some treasure against the secret agent of South Kensington; but it has no foundation. Once upon a time the British Museum and the Tower of London found themselves bidding against each other for a piece of old armor; but no similar accident could have occurred under the keen eye of Sir Henry Cole, who from first to last has been felt in the progress of this museum. Sir Henry developed a power of getting money for the museum, from the stingiest chancellors, unknown in the history of the English exchequer. He, with Mr. Richard Redgrave, explored Italy, and brought back many valuable treasures of early art.

SIR HENRY COLE, K.C.B.

In 1854 the first report of the newly-established Department of Science and Art was laid before Parliament. It was a Blue-book of 642 pages—so much being required for those interests of the country to which the Board of Trade had, in 1836, devoted the half of one page. This report and those which followed bore witness that a new enthusiasm had arisen in England for recovering its lost arts; but they increasingly proved also that the collections evoked from their hiding-places were already overflowing Marlborough House. In one sense this overflowing was of signal advantage, for it enabled the department to send a collection of four hundred beautiful specimens as a circulating museum through the provincial cities and towns—a plan which has been maintained by the museum, and also by the National Gallery of Fine Arts, with excellent results. The commissioners had not at that time, so far as their reports show, any notion of localizing the various schools of science and art at South Kensington. Indeed, no such expression as “South Kensington” had existed until 1856, when Earl Granville so christened the “Brompton Boilers,” which the government had empowered Mr. Cole to prepare for the transfer of the Marlborough House collection (voting £10,000 for the purpose), and which, with their three boiler-shaped tops, still stand as the seed-shell of the museum. It was little supposed then that the “Mr. Huxley” whom the report of 1856 speaks of as employed to collect specimens on the coast would ever be seated as he is now in a palatial science school at Kensington. There must, however, have been some very far-seeing eyes looking at things in those days, for the commissioners of the great Exhibition of 1851 persuaded the government to add to the Exhibition surplus of £170,000 enough to make £300,000, and to invest the sum in the vast Kensington Gore estate. This estate comprised between twenty-five and thirty acres of land, twelve of which belong to the museum, and has become the site of a great metropolis of science and art. The museum was opened on June 22d, 1857, by the Queen, accompanied by the Prince Consort and the Heir Apparent.