CONDITION OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
THE question of the state of the British Museum has got its annual airing ; Mr. Walpole, as trustee, moving the estimateo and defending the management, and Mt. Gregory and others doing good service by urging those reforms which public opinion, slowly formed from the facts of the case, has long ago demanded. The question is simple enough for a short explanation. It has, really, only two points—firstly, the confusion in one building of collections that should be kept distinct ; and, secondly, the poor pay of the assistants. To make any institution worth anything, it must have a pecu- liar raison d'être and a distinct life of its own. It must grow naturally out of a distinct need and according to circumstances. You cannot make it at will.
Wood, branches, fruit, flowers, however numerous they are, clapped hodge-podge together, do not make up a tree ; and so no various or large aggregation of objects of curiosity will make a really good museum. The little museum in Kew Gardens is very interesting in the right way : it has unity and homogeneity ; you go to see various species of woods, and you see them. A zoological collection has the same kind of value : it is visited by people specially interested, and if complete it is instructive and eats-
factory. But the British Museum does nothing very well, be- cause it attempts too much. We do not mean to say that the many collections of the British Museum are not respectively well selected and well displayed, but they fail in their effects, owing to their being mixed up together with other and
entirely incongruous exhibitions. A mass of dusty holiday visitors stroll distractedly through the Museum. They see in one room a collection of minerals, and then are startled by the skeleton of an elk. They go from the Elgin marbles to the stuffed rhinoceros, from the collection of insects to a group of savages—and bring away a confused sense of the immensity and variety of the national institution, with a hope that they may never again have to go through such a fatiguing process. By re- moving the natural history department from the Museum it could be made a noble collection of all that appertains to literature and art, with some chances of room for the future inevitable develop- ment of the institution. The stubborn conservatism of the trustees still stands in the way, and also the want of agreement between those men of science and letters whose word on such a theme ought to be law.
The poor pay of the assistants is a much more startling anomaly. They must all be men of advanced education, and many- of them are men of extraordinary attainments. M. Prevost, who died some months ago, was said to have known some thirty languages, including the more rarely known Eastern tongues ; yet he had only 2001. a year. We merely mention his name be- cause he is deed; we know equally strong cases of present as- sistants of high accomplishments who receive salaries that a clerk of a few years' standing in the Foreign Office or Treasury would reject. But we do not wish to make any invidious selection from amongst a body of men, all sufferers from the same ill-judged parsimony. People will say that if the assistants are so very clever and so badly paid, they ought to resign and take their services to a better market. The fact is, the Government take ad- vantage of the peculiar circumstances of the case. The men who accept those situations, and who are qualified to fill them, are in the majority of cases earnest students of branches of knowledge not very popular with the paying public. In M. Prevost's case, for instance, his minute knowledge of the Chinese, Japanese, and Malay languages and dialects, was not a very marketable com- modity in Paternoster Row, but it was invaluable at the Museum. Should the Directors of a National Institution take advantage of this, and offer wretched pay because to some extent they had the man in their power ?
In another point of view the impolicy of the present system is very apparent. Twelve hundred a year is added annually to the Civil List and part of it is given in pensions to literary men. Many of the recipients would be better satisfied with a situation in the Museum, and many would fittingly fill such places. By giving decent salaries you would save your pensions inariany eases, and you would secure real service in exchange for a more honour- able reward. We would not have the situations in the Museum considered exclusively as rewards for literary men. We merely say that there is room for great improvement in that direction.
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