Chapter 18

This name is derived from a story long current, that the monument was built by Demosthenes as a place of retirement. It was in reality a monument erected in honour of Lysicrates, and the musicians or actors who carried off the palm in musical or dramatic entertainments. This monument is interesting as being the oldest existing specimen of the Corinthian order of architecture. The frieze, of which there are specimens before the visitor, represents the story of the revenge Bacchus indulged in towards some Tyrrhenian corsairs, who endeavoured to convey him to Asia to sell him as a slave. It is related that discovering their infamous project, he transformed the masts and oars of the vessel into snakes. The frieze is divided into nine compartments, and the central figure is Bacchus seated with his panther before him, a vessel in his hand, and attendant fauns. The fantastic punishment of the pirates is forcibly depicted. Here one bound to a rock finds the cord changed into a powerful serpent; there men leaping into the sea are already half changed to dolphins; and others are receiving severe castigation. Having examined these curious sculptures, the visitor may rapidly review the rest of the relics which he will care to examine. Passing the inscriptions (all interesting to the antiquarian), the votive altars, and other fragments, he may halt here and there before various interesting bas-reliefs. Among these are a bas-relief representing Vesta and Minerva crowning a young man (375); a bas-relief of Jupiter and Juno; a bas-relief representing a sacrifice before an altar (380); an imperfect bas-relief representing three goddesses (383); a lion's head from the roof of the Parthenon (393); a fragment from Mantell's collection, of a female figure found on the plains of Marathon (397); the upper part of a female figure, in bas-relief, from Athens (419); two women and a child making offerings found in Laconia (430); another bas-relief from Laconia (431); a curious subject in bas-relief from Athens, representing the upper part of a youth holding something, supposed to be a lantern, with a boy near him, and a cat on a column (432); a cast from a tablet representing in bas-relief Pan seated on a rock with a draped nymph, supposed to be Echo, before him (433); a cast of the tablet of Euthydia, daughter of Diogenes, who is taking leave of friends (435); and lastly, a bas-relief representing the shape of a shield, on which the names of the _ephebi_ of Athens, under Alcamenes, are inscribed. This is said to have belonged originally to the Parthenon. And here the visitor will close his inspection of the Elgin Saloon. That he will return to these fine relics of the old Greeks, if he have the opportunity, is certain. He may come again and again, and each time gain something in the contemplation of these classical models; noble thoughts before the masterly figure of Theseus, a keen sense of beauty near the beautiful forms of the Parthenon frieze. Of all the glorious monuments of antiquity that have reached us of the proud nineteenth century, none have so noble a significance as the broken marbles collected in this room. The contemplative man, seeing their perfect beauties, asks himself in their presence many puzzling questions. But perhaps the first that rises in the mind is wonder at the contrast between the development of art and the poorness of science in this splendid antiquity. No steam then to wield the hammer; only the most limited knowledge of the earth: the west an indescribable region of harmony and glory; the world a flat surface; fearful mariners hugging the shore close at home, and trusting to the stars; and England a savage place where wolves rent the air at night; and a heathen mythology the faith of the most civilised people of the earth. Under these barbarous circumstances, the poetry that dwells in the heart of all people who cultivate some affinity to nature, fashioned the mould of a Phidias for the people of Athens. A man with a stern soul, an eye large and grand, a frame built to realise the soul's tasks--we see this Phidias of the Greeks as he hovered about the foundations of the Parthenon, when the name of Pericles was every Greek's watchword, four centuries and a half before our Christian era. The man appears to have been of colossal parts in every way. Versed in history, a poet given to study fables (as all poets are), keen in sifting the subtleties of geometry, a passionate reader of Homer; this was indeed the sculptor of the gods! Of the high estimation in which the sculptures of the Parthenon should be held, it is superfluous to say more than all writers on art have agreed in saying. Here we have master-pieces, beyond which the sculptors of the many ages that have passed away since Phidias laboured at his Jupiter in the Olympian grove have never reached. High praise this to say of a man who has been twenty-two centuries in his grave, that he accomplished in the utmost perfection those ideals to which his imitators have vainly aspired. It appears that Phidias had his troubles, knew the force of a frown from men in power, and in exile produced his master-piece. Whether he died in disgrace and by foul means are points upon which the dust of ages has settled for ever. We know thus much of him and no more. But the visitor who has probably been more impressed with the contents of the Elgin Saloon than with the massive coarseness of the Egyptian antiquities, will be glad to hear a few general words--an authoritative summing up of the matter from a pen more clearly authorised to touch the subject than ours can be. A brief summary, a terse description, analytical and picturesque, of a field of speculation or a region of wonder, systematises the spectator's impression, and with the view of fastening the proper contemplation of these master-pieces upon the visitor's mind, we quote a few pointed sentences on the sculptures of the Elgin Saloon, from the pen of Sir Henry Ellis.

"These marbles, chiefly ornamental, belong to one edifice dedicated to the guardian deity of the city, raised at the time of the greatest political power of the state, when all the arts which contribute to humanise life were developing their beneficial influence. Many of the writers of Athens, whose works are the daily textbooks of our schools, saw in their original perfection the mutilated marbles which we still cherish and admire. The Elgin collection has presented us with the external and material forms, in which the art of Phidias gave life and reality to the beautiful mythi which veiled the origin of his native city, and perpetuated in groups of matchless simplicity the ceremonies of the great national festival. The lover of beauty and the friend of Grecian learning will here find a living comment on what he reads; and as in the best and severest models of antiquity we always discover something new to admire, so here we find fresh beauties at every visit, and learn how infinite in variety are simplicity and truth, and how every deviation from these principles produces sameness and satiety. It is but just that those who feel the value of this collection should pay a tribute of thanks to the nobleman to whose exertions the nation is indebted for it; and the more so as he was made the object of vulgar abuse by many pretended admirers of ancient learning. If Lord Elgin had not removed these marbles, there is no doubt that many of them would long since have been totally destroyed; and it was only after great hesitation, and a certain knowledge that they were daily suffering more and more from brutal ignorance and barbarism, that he could prevail on himself to employ the power he had obtained to remove them to England. These marbles may be considered in two ways; first, as mere specimens of sculpture; and secondly, as forming part of the history of a people. As specimens of sculpture they serve as excellent studies to young artists, whose taste is formed and chastened by the simplicity and truth of the models presented to them. The advantage of studying the ancients in this department of art rests pretty nearly on the same grounds as those which may be given for our study of their written models. Modern times produce excellence in every department of human industry, and our knowledge of nature, the result of continued accumulations, needs not now the limited experience of former ages. The sciences founded on demonstration, though they may trace their origin to the writings of the Greeks, have advanced to a state in which nothing would be gained by constantly recurring to the ancient condition of knowledge. But it is not so with those arts which belong to the province of design; they require a different discipline, and the faculties which they employ may have received a more complete development two thousand years ago, under favourable circumstances, than they have now. Their perfection depends on circumstances over which we have little control: they cannot, in our opinion, ever become essentially popular in any country but one where the climate favours an out-of-door life, and where they are intimately blended in the service of religion. If then a nation has existed whose physical organisation, whose climate, and whose religion all combined to develop the principles of beauty, and taught man to choose from nature those forms and combinations which give the highest and most lasting pleasure, we of the present day who do not possess these advantages must follow those who were the first true interpreters of nature. Their models possess the advantage of being fixed; for without some standard universally admitted, we should run into all the extravagances of conceit and affectation.

"No work of the present time is ever universally admitted as an indisputable standard. It is only when time has placed an interval between the present and the past, wide enough to destroy all the rivalries of competition; that great works receive the full acknowledgments of their merits, and become standards to which we all appeal. Thus in the art of writing our own language, we refer to the best models of past instead of to the works of our own days; and our youth at school are chiefly trained on the written models of Greece and Home, instead of those of our own country. The advantage of this consists in having before us examples which all appeal to, not because we contend that they are in all respects the best, but because they were the best of their day, and being written in a language no longer subject to change, may be taken as an universal standard by which all civilised nations may measure their thoughts and the mode of expressing them. The frieze of the Parthenon and the dramas of Sophocles, the forms of the marble and the conceptions of the great poet, still speak to our imagination and our understanding: we recognise, in both, the beauty of proportion, the simplicity and truth of design; and we all assent to a standard which we feel to be in harmony with nature, and to which all nations will yield a more ready obedience than to any other that we can name.

"Though the artist and the student may examine the sculptures of the Parthenon with somewhat different views, their studies are more nearly allied than is generally supposed. The artist who looks at them merely as delineations of form, without reference to the ideas which gave them their existence, loses half the pleasure and the profit; and the student who merely names and catalogues them, without connecting them with the written monuments of Grecian genius, that is with the illustration of ancient texts, is also pursuing a barren study."

And now the visitor's way lies through the sculpture galleries, back to the grand entrance. He has accomplished the labour of examining all that is exhibited to the public generally of the contents of the national museum. He may wander into the eastern wing of the building (if it be open to the general visitor), and through the northern, where the vast library of printed books and manuscripts are deposited; but these are only accessible to the public under special regulations. This remark is applicable also to the print-room.

The visitor, however, cannot leave the British Museum, having wandered over it and examined its various curiosities, without getting something from his journey. It is full of suggestive matter, which, with a little direction, may be turned to useful account by large classes of the people. It affords glimpses into the mysteries of the Animal Kingdom, with all its varieties, its wonders, its traceable progresses, its past and extinct forms, its promises of future developments. Then the mineralogical galleries afford the general visitor a peep at the formations of the earth; the various developments of minerals; the natural state of ores and stones which most men see only in their manufactured state. From the mineralogical tables the visitor stepped aside to examine the wondrous revelations of extinct animal life recovered from the bowels of the earth; he saw the colossal megatherium, the towering mastodon, and the great Irish elk. He understood something of the progress of animal life, from the fishes and the saurians. Then he passed into the Egyptian room, and found himself surrounded with the preserved bodies of the ancient Egyptians; he examined their household gods; he pried into their coffins; he saw their food; he was familiarised with their apparel. Still proceeding onward, he came to the beautiful bronzes; and then he saw the wonders that the ancient tombs of Etruria disgorged. He still advanced in the galleries, till he came to a room that was a little museum in itself--an exhibition of the curious industries of many different countries. Here were Buddhist temples; Chinese chopsticks; marvels from savage islands; a tortoise-shell bonnet; a Chinese bell;--in short, a room packed from the ceiling to the floor with a compact mass of curiosities. And then he left the upper floor of the building, after having spent two days there, through two towering cameleopards. He came a third time, and at once passing many things that tempted him by the way, he passed on into the great and wonderful Egyptian Saloon. Here he lingered for hours over ancient Egyptian tombstones; before colossal sarcophagi; thinking of the tough work Belzoni must have had of it with the young Memnon; endeavouring to realise the approach to the ancient Egyptian temples through rows of colossal and majestic sphinxes. Next he passed on to the ruins of Nineveh, and its mystic mounds. Here he was with Layard for a time, dreaming of the ancient Assyrians and their winged bulls. Hence he passed into the Lycian room, and saw something of the strange remains of the Xanthus of old; and then, probably, he went home to dream of these great marvels of the times gone by. But he came again; and this time hovered throughout the day amid the ruins of the arts of ancient Greece. And now he has examined these; and he may leave the national museum, assured that he has some useful knowledge of the curiosities which scientific men have gathered from the remote parts of the world, for the benefit of the learned resident in England.

The tens of thousands who flock to the museum in holiday times prove its attractions; and it is with the hope that these attractions may be enhanced by the help of a methodical and homely guide, chattering to the visitor various bits and scraps of pertinent information as he passes from one object to another, that these four visits have been presented to the public. They do not pretend to be scientific books, but simply companions of the hour, that urge little points of information while the mind is particularly impressible; and showing the kind of interest that attaches to objects which, for the want of a timely word, the visitor would have passed unnoticed.

Many objects which are curiosities to the scientific man, but which could not in any way interest the casual visitor, have been passed by without hesitation.

Our main object has been to give the visitor clear impressions of the different departments or classes into which the national collection naturally divides itself, by guiding his eye consecutively to those objects which bear relation to each other. It was necessary, to make ourselves attractive as guides, to eschew all learned and stiff formalities; to class matters easily as we found them; and to sustain the visitor's interest throughout his four journeys. The monotony of a formal catalogue is repulsive to visitors chiefly bent upon enjoying a few hours amusement; therefore we chose to direct the eye to objects, and at once to interest the visitor in them, by shortly explaining their points of interest. The success which this endeavour met elsewhere has encouraged us to perform the present task; and we hope shortly to be at the elbow of visitors to other interesting buildings and exhibitions.

The popularity of the British Museum may be shown by quoting the last return of the number of visitors, &c., presented to the House of Commons. This return proves that, while the public interest in the collection is on the increase, that the guardians of the different departments look out eagerly for new curiosities:--"The number of readers--or rather of visits made by readers, in 1850, was 78,533:--or, an average of some 268 per diem:--the Reading Rooms having been kept open 291 days. The number of books returned to the shelves of the General Library from the Reading Rooms was 119,093; to those of the Royal Library, 11,252; to those of the Grenville Library, 387: to the closets in which the books are kept from day to day for the use of the readers, 110,950:--making a total of 241,682, or 830 per diem. The number of volumes added to the Library amounts to 16,208 (including music, maps, and newspapers); of which 837 were presented, 11,793 purchased, and 3575 received by copyright. The Keeper of the MSS. has been busy cleaning, cataloguing, and stamping. Eleven of the valuable Cottonian MSS. on vellum (including the Chronicle of Roger de Wendover, supposed to have been utterly destroyed), and two Old Royal as well as five Cottonian on paper, all injured in the fire of 1731, have been carefully repaired, inlaid, and rebound. The purchases include a Psalter of the tenth century, formerly belonging to the monastery of Stavelot, in the diocese of Liége,--'a remarkably fine Greek MS.' containing the works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite,--and the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzum, 'with scholia written in the year 6480 (A.D. 972);'--together with nineteen additional volumes of a series of transcripts from the Archives at the Hague, of documents relating to English history, extending from 1588 to 1614 and from 1689 to 1702.--In the 'Department of Natural History,' we find that great progress has been made in the arrangement of the contents of Room No. VI.,--its wall cases having been entirely filled with the gigantic Osseous Remains of Edentata and Pachydermata, and that the Central Room of the Northern Zoological Gallery has been devoted to a collection of the Beasts, Birds, Fish, Reptiles, Shells, Sea Eggs, Starfish, and Corals found in the British Islands. The purchases include 'a silver decadrachm of Alexander the Great,' from the collection of Colonel Rawlinson,--the first ever discovered,--'and two very rare British _gold_ coins, having on them the name TIN.'"

THE END.

NOTES

[1: Undoubtedly the finest coral is dredged from the Mediterranean; it is an important article of commerce at Marseilles.]

[2: "The shrikes, or butcher-birds (_laniadae_), are a numerous and widely-diffused assemblage, living upon the smaller birds and insects; the former of which the shrike sticks, when killed, upon thorns, as a butcher hangs up meat in his stall; hence the name of the genus."--_Vestiges of Creation_.]

[3: Vestiges of Creation.]

[4: These birds build in the crevices of precipitous rocks, and tho female lines the nest with the down plucked from her breast. From these nests natives rob the down and sell it.]

[5: Vestiges of Creation.]

[6: "Oxides are neutral compounds, containing oxygen in equivalent proportions."--_Dr. Ure_.]

[7: Sesquicarbonate of soda that is found in the west of the Delta. In Mexico there are several natron lakes.]

[8: The cuneiform character, which was used in every part of Asia Minor, up to the time of Alexander the Great, consists of a series of wedges or accents variously combined, as, [Cuneiform: *** **]].

[9: A Metope may be described as the intermediate space in a Doric frieze, between two triglyphs, or separating grooves.]