THE CRYSTAL PALACE OPENED.
Saturday more than fulfilled the promise of its morning. There was more crushing at the railway-station, (if that is an advantage,) .a more densely-packed crowd in the glass building, and a better filled intenor, than people expected ; and more speechifying and presenting than they wanted, for the matter of that. The day was finer and more uniformly fine than could have been prognosticated from any other day of the week; and, if the sun did go off during the chief part of the ceremony, he ushered it in and reappeared at its close, and the interval did nothing worse than abate the beat and vary the atmospheric effect. The opening was certainly a success. The works had been pushed forward in preparation for it with the greatest vigour, and an appear- ance of completeness—comparatively speaking, most satisfactory—was the result Every step between the descent from the train and the ar- rival at the great transept through the Southern nave showed us how much activity had prevailed since the preceding Monday. The setting. down at a terminus communicating direct by a sheltered path with the South wing of the building was itself a most convenient innovation. Then came the orderly bustle of the refreshment-rooms, in readiness for the disorderly bustle which was to ensue when famished sightseers, shaking themselves after their three or four hours' constraint, melted down hard-fought ices, or spoiled ladies' dresses with hastily-clutched coffee, or sent the white-muslined attendants skurrying about the room for provisions of one kind or another. The ethnological collection of Dr. Latham had got itself into a state of uniform propriety by the addition of cloaks and blankets and swathings, for whose correctness in all cases we suspect the Doctor would be sorry to vouch ; but the Archbishop of Can- terbury must have beheld with satisfaction the fruits of the admonition delivered by himself and his right reverend brethren. Great progress had been made with the painting and decoration of the several courts ; that which had looked bare and unsightly at the beginning of the week now formed a consistent item in the general effect. Parterres had sprung up, vases and pendent baskets had filled with flowers, fresh statues studded the nave; and, looking on to the Northern extremity, one could discern the bronzes of Monti's fountain.
What are the points in the opening ceremony itself which remain upon the memory ? The chief is a sense of lightness, and air, and brilliant crowded colours, and the swarm of a human beehive; of which not much can be expressed in words. We remember a lengthy and tedious dumb- 'how; the Chairman of the Company, Mr. Laing, reading a wordy ad- dress, just about three times too long, and which was absolutely inaudi- ble; Lord Palmerston banding in a "gracious answer of her Majesty," which her Majesty graciously delivered—also inaudibly, save for a tone now and then. A lengthy and tedious presentation of a baker's dozen of handbooks by a baker's dozen of handbook-compilers—each of whom was introduced with a flourish of inaudible trumpets by Mr. Laing to the Queen; who, inconsiderately, and, we think, somewhat indecorously, was made to stand it all out. Why could not Sir Joseph Paxton, as- sisted, if needful, by some light porter of the establishment, have pre- sented the entire batch in a lump? His reception, we are sure, would have been none the less flattering than it was; the light porter would have illus- trated that which flags labelled "Honour to Labour" purported to honour; and her Majesty and her Majesty's devoted subjects would have been spared the titter or the frown which greeted the splay-footed retrogression or uneourtly back-turning of learned or literary celebrities in their descent from the dais. Mr. Digby Wyatt might have taught the paces to some of his fellow presentees; or, better still, the Archbishop of Canter- bury, who not only executed the crablike descent from the steps in the first style, but kept the position even after he had attained the lower floor and back the whole way to his own place. We remember spurts rather than bursts of cheering along the Queen's path in the procession,--for indeed the loyalty of Britons does not need to pump itself empty on every slight occasion, to prove that it exists; and the procession itself lives in our mind's eye as rather a straggling one. The music had begun with "God save the Queen," in which the sustained clearness and tunefulness of Clara Novello's solo notes may well be remembered, heard, as we are told they were, at the extremities of the building more distinctly than the "thousand-voiced" chorus ; and the majesty of that chorus in the Hundredth Psalm, and its glory in the Hallelujah, are not things to be forgotten,—sixteen hundred performers vocal and instrumental, the la- dies a picturesque entanglement of gay colours en masse against the black and white of the gentlemen ; and those sixteen hundred scarcely felt as anything in the total number present, and their blended voices, swelling., indeed, and nobly sonorous, but heard, even in the central transept, witli something of a distant boom. The more credit to the Archbishop of Can- terbury for having made himself heard with tolerable distinctness in the delivery of his prayer,—a prayer, be it said without irreverence, some- what too long, like other details of the proceedings. Apything open to exception was, however, a minor matter in the grand total ; the open- ing, we repeat, was a decided success.
This business being over, then, it becomes time to look into the con- tents of the Crystal Palace. We hope to do so without coldness or grudg- ing on the one hand, and without puffery or mere foolish wonder on the other. The second fault has hitherto been a far more common one in this particular instance than the first. But possibly a reaction will come, which, while it cannot affect the estimation accorded to the institution in its purely pleasurable aspect, may perchance induce an under-valuation of its educational powers. The Crystal Palace Company is a private body, which has undergone considerable trouble and expense, through its officers, for the purpose of collecting and arranging a very large and miscellaneous collection of ob- jects of nature, art, science, and manufacture. It seeks to minister to recreation and instruction, and, of course, to establish a remunerative con- cern for its own benefit. Amusement it cannot fail to supply, nor a de- lightful and recherché lounge : the precise character of its instruction deserves to be considered.
We bear it suggested that a student of Pneadamite matters would de- rive more advantage from the study of actual fragments than from ever so much contemplation of Mr. Hawkins's and Professor Owen's bran-new resuscitations. No doubt of it A person already learned in the ques- tion knows all that can be shown him of it here : a thorough investigator of the question will not accept an inadequate material symbol of the re- sults of a predecessor's investigation. But it is not the less true that an uninformed person or one having a smattering of knowledge and a super- ficial interest in this subject, would neither understand nor investigate the fragments, nor even wish to do so; while he will immediately and with- out labour gain from the models in the Sydenham garden lake as tolerable an idea of the appearance, habits, and affinities of the antediluvians, as the first science of the day can put into shape. Owen and Hawkins know more of the matter than they have expressed here, and the visitor must study as hard and possess equal capacity if he wants to know the same. He will never acquire an equal amount of knowledge even by studying the models thoroughly, and he is not likely to do that ; but he will get gene- ral and distinct notions on the subject after a visit of a few hours, such as no quantity of unsystematic piecemeal reading or helpless inspection of authentic debris would have supplied him with. So with the natural history or the ethnology. Study a good book deeply, and you will know a great deal solidly ; go to the Zoological Gardens, and watch a single animal patiently and with a purpose, and you will know a little unim- peachably ; go to the Crystal Palace, and you will acquire a number of varied ideas clearly presented to and impressed upon the mind. It will not be science, but it will be information. So again with the art. The British Museum is a better mistress in Egyptian art and Greek art thtai the Sydenham Museum, but she takes a longer time in giving her curri- culum. Her facts are perfect, but they are isolated. At Sydenham you find the most striking facts prearranged for you in the most perspicuous manner; and, when you have gathered as much as serves your imme- diate purpose about the arts of Egypt and Greece, you can pass to Ninevite, and Byzantine and Saracenie, and Mecliteval, and Renaissance, and ex- isting art ; all presenting a linked chain of sequence and divergence, whose significance it is difficult to miss altogether.
The teaching of the Crystal Palace is subject to the inferiority which necessarily belongs to a copy, (the copy being, however, very often an infallible repetition,) as compared with an original. Other special ques- tionable points exist. There is the occasional difference of scale between the originals and their copies,—as, for instance, in the Colonnade of %er- ase. We think it is fairly urged, that in such cases as this, a model self. evidently and unmistakeably remote from the size of the original would be more useful, as it would both present a larger comparative view of the entire subject and eliminate all misconstruction. The catalogues, however, avail to set the unsuspecting visitor right on this head. A still more serious source of error will be, if it exists, the intentional alteration or falsification of details, vulgarly called "cooking,"—the obtaining of what is assumed to be an improved general appearance at the expense of positive fact. We are not wholly free from fear that some instances of such a procedure are discoverable in the Crystal Palace; but this is a question to be settled on detailed examination. Thirdly comes the in- fluence of individual views developed conjecturally, as in restorations and improvised polychromatism. More than one instance will occur in which the man of learning will dissent from what has been done, and the man of taste repudiate it; and when this happens, it might generally have been the best course to leave the thing as it was found—defective pos- sibly, but not false. To another point, affecting the collection of modern sculpture, we allude here because, irrespectively of ulterior considera- tions, it vitiates the plan of the undertaking. As examples of the past phases of art, objects not in themselves approveable are legitimate; but as regards living art, whatever is not good in itself is not good as a spe- cimen. A severe taste should therefore have presided over this depart- ment, and everything indifferent or bad should have been excluded : we cannot say that it has been. Whatever may be its inherent wants for teaching purposee, and whatever may prove to be the shortcomings in its execution, we hold the New Crystal Palace to be capable of real usefulness and influence. Comprehensiveness and vividness are its great qualifications for this object. It is without exaggeration unique. Other museums give the brick from Babylon; about which you must find out most things save that it is indubitably a brick and that from Babylon it certainly did come. This gives not the real brick at all, but a panorama of the Babylon, and a panorama more strik- ingly interesting and more authentic and of a wider Babylon, than was ever before shown. We believe that no other place tells so much as this will in so short a time or makes the discursiveness of its lesson so palat- able to those who cannot devote themselves to all the subjects which it embraces. Its province is an educational one; but it is that part of educa- tion which consists not so much in exhaustive teaching as in cultivation.
Previous page
