CHAPTER XIX
MUSEUMS
The word "museum" is not one of those which explain themselves and give an indication of what the thing to which they are applied should be, when it has ceased to be what it was intended to be. In ancient Greece the word "mouseion" meant "the place of the Muses"—a grove or a temple—and there was such a place on a part of the Acropolis of Athens, the rocky temple-crowned hill around which the city was built. There were other "museums," or seats of the Muses, in ancient Greece; those on the slopes of Mount Helicon and of Mount Olympus were the most famous. In modern times a picture gallery and art collection, that of the Louvre, in Paris, is called "the Musée," whilst "the Muséum" (the Latin form of the same word) is the name distinctively applied in Paris to the collections of natural history and the laboratories connected with them in the Jardin des Plantes. In London "the British Museum," founded in 1753, originally comprised the national library as well as collections of antiquities and of natural history. In Heidelberg "the Museum" was the name, when I was there, for a delightful club, with a garden. It belonged to the professors, their families, and their friends in the town, and concerts and dances were given in it. It seems that the Heidelberg "Museum" comes nearest to the original meaning of the word as "a seat of Muses," for nearly all those mythical ladies were remarkable for their special patronage of music, dancing, and song.
Who were these goddesses, the Muses, and what were their names? What was the speciality of each, and how do they come to have to do with collections of works of art and specimens of natural history? Two learned "classical" friends whom I lately met in Paris could not help me further than by giving me the names of the first three. I was a little shocked, but the next evening discovered that these goddesses are, in modern times, very generally neglected and ignored. In an extremely amusing play, called "Le Bois Sacré"—the Sacred Grove (of the Muses)—a name applied jocosely to the Ministry of Fine Arts—I found that the minister of that department was represented as a pompous and fatuous person who completely fails to call to mind, in the course of an eloquent speech, the name of more than one. On ringing for his secretaries and airily asking them to refresh his memory, he did not succeed in extracting from them more than two doubtful additions to his list!
I am able, nevertheless (after due investigation), to put my reader in possession of the facts so unfamiliar to the modern oracles of classical mythology! Briefly, it appears that in the best period of ancient Greece nine Muses were recognised, namely, Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry; Euterpé, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry; Melpomené, of tragedy; Thalia, of comedy; Polyhymnia, of sacred hymns; Terpsichoré, of choral song and dance; Clio, of history; and Urania, of astronomy. The last two seem to have very little in common with the addiction to singing and dancing characteristic of the rest, and are the only ones who can be imagined as feeling themselves at home in a modern museum, excepting on those evenings when the authorities use the museum (as is the custom in London) for a "conversazione," enlivened by brass bands and songs.
Apollo was said to be the leader and master of the Muses, but was not related to them. They were in origin the "nymphs" or "genii" of mountain streams worshipped by an ancient bardic race (resembling our own sweet-singing Welsh folk), the Thracians. At first the number of the Muses was indefinite, and they had no names. Then three were named—one of Meditation (Meleté), one of Memory (Mnemé), and one of Song (Aöidé)—a much prettier embodiment of the impression made on a poetical mind by rock-pools and cascades and leafy gorges than the formal and redundant nine of later times. One can associate the primitive three with a museum of natural history; but the later official goddesses, each insisting on her own department of poetry, are too clearly representative of the all-appropriating pretensions of literature in modern seats of learning. They remind me of the enumeration of studies which a dear old head of an Oxford college innocently regarded as complete and reasonable when he assured me that all branches of knowledge were fairly and equally represented on the college staff. "We have," he said, "a lecturer on Greek literature, one on Latin literature, one on Greek history, one on Roman history, one on classical philology, one on modern history, one on mathematics and one on the natural sciences." What more, he asked, could you wish for?
It appears that, without any special reference to the attributes of the Muses, the word "museum" has been adopted in recent times for a building in which collections of works of art and specimens of natural history are housed, and even for the collections themselves—in consequence of the foundation by the Ptolemaic Kings of Egypt of a splendid institution at Alexandria to which the name museum (mouseion) was given. It included the great library, apparatus for the study of astronomy, anatomy, and other sciences, and collections of all kinds. The most learned men were employed in its management and were lodged there and provided with the means of study and teaching. It was a combination of university, learned academy, and temple, and was the pride of the ancient world. It survived many changes of lordship, but at last the library and collections were deliberately destroyed by Moslem invaders in 640 a.d. The precious manuscripts were served out as fuel for the public baths, and were so numerous that it took some months to consume them! The destruction of the museum of Alexandria marks the commencement of the "Dark Ages"; the ancient culture was dead. Eight centuries of submergence with strange mysterious upfloatings were its fate until the Renascence, when its fragments were recovered, and soon did more harm than good to the fetish-worshipping peoples of Europe.
The first use of the word "museum" in this country for a place in which collections of ancient works of art and specimens of natural history were stored and arranged for exhibition was in the early eighteenth century, when it was applied to the building at Oxford, erected for Mr. Ashmole's collections, presented to the University. This was called "Ashmole's Museum," or the Ashmolean Museum. Previously such a collection and its location were spoken of as "a cabinet of rare and curious objects." "Museum" was occasionally used for what we now call a "study," and even to describe lecture-rooms and library. I have not been able to discover that the word was used in its modern sense at an earlier date on the Continent than in England. The first great typical example of a "museum" was the British Museum, founded in 1753. Montagu House, in Bloomsbury, was purchased by the State to serve as a "repository" (the word used in the Act of Parliament of that date) for the vast collections of natural history made by Sir Hans Sloane, with which were associated certain valuable libraries and collections of manuscripts, of coins, and antique marbles. A large part of the money required for the undertaking was raised by a public lottery, over which the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker presided (according to the custom of those days in regard to State lotteries), and it is thus that this remarkable group of great officials became, and have remained ever since, "the Three Principal Trustees of the British Museum." Additional trustees were named (since increased to a total of nearly fifty), and provision was made for the appointment of a principal librarian and other curators of the collections. The Act declared that the collections placed in the "repository" (Montagu House) were to remain there for the benefit and enjoyment of posterity for ever—a provision which until seven years ago was misinterpreted, so as to prevent the sending out of unnamed and unstudied collections of small portable objects like insects, dried plants, and shells, to be named and compared with other specimens, by foreign naturalists. Consequently, there was a great accumulation of specimens unstudied and useless, and a great loss to knowledge. But the late Lord Chancellor (Halsbury) decided that it was not only legally within the power of the trustees temporarily to remove specimens from "the repository" for the purpose of having them named and studied, but actually their duty to do so.
We now very generally recognise in Great Britain, as in other parts of the civilised world, the value and importance of public "museums" in the sense of "repositories of collections of objects of ancient and modern art and of natural history." Museums, as at present existing, may be divided into four kinds, according to the nature of the public or private bodies by which they have been set up and carried on. There are, first of all, national museums maintained and continually increased by the expenditure of a great State, and placed in the capital city; secondly, provincial or local museums, supported by a municipality or by local munificence; thirdly, academic museums, which are those related to the instruction and investigations carried on in a university or a school, and forming part of its regular provision for study; and, fourthly, the museums of private individuals (which as a rule, become eventually transferred by gift or purchase to some existing public museum).