MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE third report of the Standing Commission on Museums and Galleries was published last Saturday. In the last report of the Commission, which was issued ten years ago, a programme of extension and rebuilding was announced ; these plans were to be put into effect immediately and the whole scheme of expansion was to be completed by 1947. The war put an end to all these projects ; the contents of our museums had to be evacuated and many of the buildings sustained damage. More lasting than the assaults of the Luftwaffe have proved the encroachments of Government depart- ments. It is a shocking thing to learn that the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland and a section of the National Maritime Museum are still closed to the public owing to the refusal of these depart- mental limpets to evacuate the premises in which they squatted at the beginning of the war. I should be the last to deny that we possess the finest Civil Service in the world or to throw brickbats at our bureaucrats, who are modest men and anxious to please. But when I hear of Government departments refusing to evacuate public or private property in times of peace my cheek glows with revolu- tionary fervour ; I long to turn them out by force and burn their beastly files upon the pavement. It is certainly unpardonable that a Government department should after all these years still remain in occupation of museum premises to which the public have both the need and the right of access. Nor is it sufficiently realised that we in this country, with our heritage of past wealth and culture, suffer from a comparative shortage of museum, gallery and exhibi- tion premises. It is a sad thought that in London itself there is such a dearth of exhibition buildings that when some special exhibi- tion is organised we have to crowd it into some corner of an existing museum or else hire Burlington House from the Royal Academy. In Paris any number of buildings of beauty and variety are available in which special exhibitions are continuously held. The lack of similar premises in London is a reflection upon our national enter- prise and taste.
Two years ago I described upon this page a visit to an exhibition of treaties organised by the Archives Nationales in Paris. The French Record Office possesses a superb seventeenth-century mansion in the Rue Veille-du-Temple which is known as the Hotel Rohan- Strasbourg or the Palais Cardinal. It is a magnificent building standing between its own courtyard and the formal garden behind. For this special exhibition the Archives Nationales had been able to obtain from the galleries and museums of France a number of tapestries and pictures illustrative of diplomatic occasions. In the vestibule, at the foot of the .vide staircase, stood Jean Warin's bust of Louis XIII. The walls of the staircase were hung with Gobelins, representing the reception of a Turkish Embassy in the Tuileries gardens and the renewal of the Franco-Swiss alliance of 1663.. In the several rooms in which the various treaties were displayed hung pictures of international conferences, including a remarkable painting of the Congress of Rastadt and another of the Congress of Munster. Fine pieces of furniture were shown in the several rooms, in particular the vast regence writing-table which had been used by French Foreign Secretaries from the days of Vergennes. It was seated at this table that Talleyrand received his visitors and that Clemenceau presided over the Council of Five in Paris. Many diplomatic relics were displayed in the rooms and among them the little black brief- case in which Talleyrand kept his papers. The sunlight played upon the Aubusson carpets and upon the trees of the garden outside. It was a delight to linger in those lovely rooms and to admire the taste and luxury with which the exhibition had been installed.
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Last week I visited a similar exhibition of treaties now being held at the Public Record Office in London. The contrast was astonishing. There is no reason to suppose that the officials of the Public Record Office are in any way less cultured than their colleagues of the Archives Nationales. Nobody who has had experience of the courtesy which they extend to British and foreign research students can question either their scholarship or the kind-
ness with which they execute their functions. Nor should I say that the treaties as displayed were less interesting, or less well exhibited, than those which I had examined two years ago at the Palais Cardinal. Yet compared to the lavish saloons and corridors of the Archives Nationales, the " new Exhibition Room " of the Public Record Office (I am quoting Mr. Hilary Jenkinson's own euphemistic phrase) is no more than an ungainly hutch. The exterior of the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane is a quite harmless example of collegiate Gothic ; the interior is a lamentable sample of Office of Works 1880. The chipped tessellated pavements, the sanitary tile work, the frosted glass windows, the rude iron water pipes, the brass hat racks are typical of the late Victorian Government office. A bare electric bulb casts a grim but discerning light upon the ugliness around. The Museum of the Record Office is a high baronial hall illuminated by armorial windows of dastardly design ; the " new Exhibition room " is a slim and tidy monster, far too high for its width. It is in this rectangle that the treaties are displayed. But in place of the tapestries and pictures, the carpets and the chandeliers of the Palais Cardinal, there are the austere walls, the echoing pavements, of a British Government department. It is not merely that we do not possess the sumptuous premises in which the French can display their treasures ; it is also that our national museums do not lend things to each other, that we have no rich repository to compare to the Garde Meuble. And our exhibitions thereby are rendered too self-contained, too specialised and cold.
Some of the treaties now exhibited are of great interest ; a few even are of considerable beauty. We have the treaty with Portugal signed in 1386 with its curious notarial attestation ; that assuredly was one of the most durable treaties ever signed by the hand of man. We have the lovely vellum ratification of the treaty of 163o, written in a fair italic script and signed by Philip 1V. We have the marriage contract of Caroline of Brunswick and the Prince of Wales, a most unhappy document. We have the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna as signed by Metternich and Talleyrand. We have a beautiful but rude letter from the Emperor of China to the Prince Regent complaining that Lord Amherst had refused to subject himself to the ceremony of the kowtow. We have the Articles of the Peace of Vereeniging signed by Botha and Kitchener of Khar- toum. And we have all manner of seals and ribbons, of skippets and armorial bindings. Some of these treaties have endured for centuries ; others were discarded a few years only after they were signed. Some of them reflect transactions which were not to our credit ; others, such as the Peace of Vereeniging, are memorials to our wisdom and magnanimity. It is strange to stand in that small cubby-hole, the " new Exhibition room," and to see around one the vestiges of so much effort, of so many fruitful negotiations. And to reflect that over there in the Palais de Chaillot the representatives of the Great Powers are hurling insults into the microphone, dis- regarding each others' questions, and reducing diplomacy to the level of the hustings. Assuredly we have not progressed since the days when skippets were made of gold or silver and the great seals dangled from threads of silken brocade.
* * * * I trust that my remarks about the Public Record Office will not be taken as any reflection upon the exhibition itself or upon the skill and knowledge with which the officials have arranged the treaties and compiled the informative catalogue. It is not their fault that they are not provided with a Palais Cardinal: it is not their fault that the French can display their treasures against seventeenth- century panelling and tapestries, whereas all we have are sanitary tiles ; it is not their fault that the heavy feet of the office keepers should not be muffled by Aubusson carpets but should be rendered resonant by composite pavements. But it is the fault of the British public that they should be indifferent to the setting of their exhibi- tions ; and that they should not realise that the great treasures which we have inherited could be better displayed and better housed.
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