6 JULY 1861, Page 15

THE EXHIBITION OF 1862.

TEE preparations for the Great Exhibition of 1862 are advancing rapidly towards completion. The Commissioners have succeeded in obtaining guarantees for almost all the money required; and backed as they are by royal and aristocratic favour, there is little fear for the remainder. The building as been commenced by energetic men, and, in spite of strikes, there seems little doubt that the work will be com- pleted before the contract has expired. The mighty cathedral nave, thirteen hundred feet in length, which is Captain Fowkes's notion of a Palace of Art, is already visible in South Kensington. The brick walls, the slowest part of the work, are already thirty feet above the ground; and as for the iron and glass-work, we all know with what rapidity structures of those materials can be erected. Any marvel of speed is possible when the principle of a building is the infinite reduplication of parts, all of a mathematical uniformity, all transportable, and all, owing to those two circumstances, capable of manufacture at many and widely distant points. It takes less time to produce fifty thousand sets of plates of one pattern, than one set in which the pattern differs on each plate. We entertain little doubt that the building will be completed, and as little that, despite the astounding ugliness of the design—which resembles nothing so much as an overgrown parish-church without a steeple, and with a dome at each end put there by mistake—the element of exceptional and unique vastness will make the interior effective. The exterior is a hopeless affair. Nothing bat a centre, bearing some sort of propor-

tion in height to the extent of the base, could make such a structure striking to the eye, and the enormous expense that addition would have entailed justified the architect in striking it from his plan. Still the building unites many requisites for its purpose, immense capacity, a cost so low as to strike architects with alarm for the dig- nity of their profession, and so much of originality as cheapness and vastness, each in its extreme degree, necessarily secure. The pre- parations for filling it are also in satisfactory condition. The project has been received on the Continent "with fervour," which means, we presume, with a working willingness to please the English Court and advertise continental manufactures. Rome, Turkey, and Morocco are the only States which have declined to apply for space ; Turkey, because she was dissatisfied with the last Exhibition ; Morocco, be- cause her merchants are too poor this year to afford the necessary outlay, and Rome, became Papal wares are not easy of visible dis- play. Belgium has asked for twice the space she will receive, and France, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, Italy, and Spain are energetic in their claims. Six thousand English exhibitors have already applied for space, and every day new applications are received. The ten years which have elapsed since the last international exposition have been years of inventiveness, and there will be quite enough of novelty in the display to save it from the charge of being a mere or inferior reproduction of 1852. There is every chance, therefore, of the project at last awakening public enthusiasm, and bringing down, as its first fruit, another cata- ract of nonsense about the marvellous progress of the nineteenth century. The time is not yet ripe for the language which in 1851 disgusted all men of common self-restraint, but it is drawing near, and already heavy indents are made on the dictionary of praise. To believe the penmen of that day, the entire history of earth had i

culminated n a collection of curiosities packed together in a glass house. The shopocracy of Europe had sent their best wares to a big bazaar, and therefore a new era was about to dawn upon the world, an era of peace and plenteousness in which, if the lion did not lie down with the lamb, the beast would, at least, trade his claws for his timid friend's comfortable skin. War was to be henceforth impossible, commerce was to link all nations together in a band of gold, governments, softened by the spectacle of so much refinement, were to cease to oppress, and even nations beyond the pale of civilization, appalled by so artistic a display of wealth, were to betake themselves at once to humanizing trade. Hate and re- venge, lust and cupidity, the thirst for aggrandizement, and all other incitements to evil, were to disappear in the beneficent influence of the great glass shop, and the only vice suffered to remain was that pride of life it is now the fashion to call "enlightened appreciation of the nineteenth century." Even those who opposed the work did so on the ground that it resembled the Tower of Babel too nearly, and might bring down the vengeance of the Almighty. One would, to read the articles then written, have thought the gigantic conservatory a forc- ing-house for humanity. The trash talked was perfectly intolerable, and exceeded in quantity, we verily believe, all the nonsense circulated since printing multiplied folly as well as wisdom. We protest in advance against any repetition, or approach to repetition, of this ex- hibition of ignorance and bad taste. The Palace of Art did not stop two bloody wars between four of the nations who competed, or a fearful civil war within a fifth; did not check the massacre of half the exhibitors in India, nor diminish the danger of exhibitors in New Zealand; did not promote invention, nor lessen the number of the poor, nor dissipate false beliefs, nor diminish crime, nor greatly increase commerce, nor aid humanity perceptibly in any one way; nor will the Cathedral of Art either. Even though the building be the "finest structure the world has yet seen," and the rapidity of the contractors "wonderful," and their machinery "amazing," and the progress "in- credible," and exhibitors "grasping for space," and the design "magnificent," it will not do one whit more for progress than any other fair on a very large scale. The benefit of the Exhibition will be limited to results perfectly appreciable without any considerable draft on the imagination, and counterbalanced by other results not by any means of so satisfactory a character. First and foremost among the benefits tp be received, is the acqui- sition of a permanent building large enough to serve as a Palace of Art worthy of such a metropolis as London. At present we have no- thing of the kind. The Museum has no space to exhibit its treasures, engraved gems are stowed away in rarely opened chests, priceless relies of antiquity are relegated to the cellar, and ancient Carthage is stored in a wooden hut under the portico. The Kensington Museum, though its ugliness is supposed to be redeemed by its considerable space, is rapidly filling up. Marlborough House has been resumed for other purposes, and the National Gallery cannot exhibit statuary in any but a dim religious light, or find space for half the collection of pictures the nation ought to form. The new Palace, with the gardens by its side, will supply these requirements, and without an appeal to Par- liament for a grant which might be refused, and would certainly be misspent. The great collection within it will also, if peace is pre- served—a somewhat doubtful contingency—afford an opportunity to craftsmen of all kinds to compare their work with the best work of their foreign rivals, and some few lessons may be acquired in this

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They will not be so valuable as is supposed, for intercom- munication n trades is already rapid, and the benefits of the last dis- play arose rather from the notoriety some new articles of produce obtained than from any emulation excited among manufacturers. The show may also enable some of those whose work is visible to ascertain

the point to which the world in their departments has arrived. To say that it will enable mankind, as was said in 1851, to test the point which all art and science have attained, is a mere perversion of words. Thoughts cannot be crystallized for glass houses; and it is by thoughts, and not by the things to which thought may be applied, that progress is to be examined. No exhibition will dis- play the value of the spectrum theory, or of a new idea on elec- tric circles which would revolutionize the telegraph, or a new science of beauty which would modify all architecture, or a new estimate of forces which would abolish existing motive powers. All it can do at the uttermost is to show how much has been finished, and even this but imperfectly, for the mind in such a scene invariably prefers the showy result to the effective one. So far as the Exhibition introduces objects already created to minds unaware of their exist- ence, or imperfectly acquainted with their character, it is as bene- ficial as any other collection, but there its advantage ends. For the rest, the new Palace will afford a grand amusement to Londoners, enrich some kinds of business in London, and possibly quicken the intelligence of the few among the visitors who can see it often enough to obtain any other impression than one of gorgeous colouring and beautiful forms.

Against these advantages must be set some drawbacks, all the more serious because so little discussed. The display, to begin with, is not voluntary, and is detested by a large majority of those to whose exertions it must owe its success. To say that a manufacturer need not apply for space save of his own free will,. or that the managers are wholly without power to punish any failure to reach the highest standard of effect, is at once a truism and an obsurdity. Not to exhibit is social extinction. Not to succeed is to be branded as an incompetent or fraudulent manufacturer. The Commissioners say they will avoid the appearance of competition, and so they said in 1851. The result, all the same, was that a first-class medal was almost as useful as a patent, and that manufacturers traded on a reputation often accidentally acquired. The sole benefit to the losers was such an advertisement as the sight of their goods by thousands might secure, a result obtained at enormous ex- pense and inconvenience, and not one whit more valuable than a similar exhibition behind a shop window in the Strand. The dis- play is in all cases a failure as a test of the first of commercial re- quisites, the qualities which can only be tested by time, and can only be guaranteed by the repute of the dealers. Take an instance so well known to science that we shall not be suspected of writing an adver- tisement. Any good lens maker, with a year's warning to prepare, could probably produce a microscope equal to anything ltd.r. Ross' is able to turn out. That is no guarantee that the scientific world shall in its ordinary transactions obtain from him glasses of an invariable, and invariably equal, merit. The last is a certainty only obtainable from character, which no exhibition attempts to test, which is the result of half a century of persevering devotion to science honestly applied. Yet so far as the exhibition has a result at all, it is to diminish the result of all that care, to equalize the effect of skill and ignorance, and, pro tanto, to diminish the inducement to strive for the highest form of success. The exhibition, in fact, acts like a gigantic advertisement, which may or may not tell us the every-day truth, but in any case is no proof of that which it affirms. If this were all, it might be borne, but unfortunately this particular form of advertising is in reality an advertisement signed by men whom the public is in- clined. to trust. The popular objection to the acuteness of the examiners may be disregarded as much as the frequent accusations of bias. We are sale they will be fair, and believe they will be com- petent. But they can decide only on evidence—viz, the articles before them—and that evidence proves nothing as to the points most essential to a just decision. The gardener who has hit on an acci- dental rose obtains the prize for which the gardener who has been improving roses for a lifetime tries in vain. Add to this main source of disappointment the misery such an exhibition brings upon country tradesmen by the habit it develops of concentrating all expenditure in London, the diversion of disposable funds from a hundred other ends, and the endless waste of business time it will involve, and we may see ample cause, if not to condemn the exhibition, at least to restrict our glorification of self and the nineteenth century within the limits of decency and the Queen's English.