Passages from the English Notebooks, Volume 2

December 7th. – This being a muddy and dismal day, I went only to the

BRITISH MUSEUM,

which is but a short walk down the street (Great Russell Street). I have now visited it often enough to be on more familiar terms with it than at first, and therefore do not feel myself so weighed down by the many things to be seen. I have ceased to expect or hope or wish to devour and digest the whole enormous collection; so I content myself with individual things, and succeed in getting now and then a little honey from them. Unless I were studying some particular branch of history or science or art, this is the best that can be done with the British Museum.

I went first to-day into the Townley Gallery, and so along through all the ancient sculpture, and was glad to find myself able to sympathize more than heretofore with the forms of grace and beauty which are preserved there, – poor, maimed immortalities as they are, – headless and legless trunks, godlike cripples, faces beautiful and broken-nosed, – heroic shapes which have stood so long, or lain prostrate so long, in the open air, that even the atmosphere of Greece has almost dissolved the external layer of the marble; and yet, however much they may be worn away, or battered and shattered, the grace and nobility seem as deep in them as the very heart of the stone. It cannot be destroyed, except by grinding them to powder. In short, I do really believe that there was an excellence in ancient sculpture, which has yet a potency to educate and refine the minds of those who look at it even so carelessly and casually as I do. As regards the frieze of the Parthenon, I must remark that the horses represented on it, though they show great spirit and lifelikeness, are rather of the pony species than what would be considered fine horses now. Doubtless, modern breeding has wrought a difference in the animal. Flaxman, in his outlines, seems to have imitated these classic steeds of the Parthenon, and thus has produced horses that always appeared to me affected and diminutively monstrous.

From the classic sculpture, I passed through an Assyrian room, where the walls are lined with great slabs of marble sculptured in bas-relief with scenes in the life of Senmacherib, I believe; very ugly, to be sure, yet artistically done in their own style, and in wonderfully good preservation. Indeed, if the chisel had cut its last stroke in them yesterday, the work could not be more sharp and distinct. In glass cases, in this room, are little relics and scraps of utensils, and a great deal of fragmentary rubbish, dug up by Layard in his researches, – things that it is hard to call anything but trash, but which yet may be of great significance as indicating the modes of life of a long-past race. I remember nothing particularly just now, except some pieces of broken glass, iridescent with certainly the most beautiful hues in the world, – indescribably beautiful, and unimaginably, unless one can conceive of the colors of the rainbow, and a thousand glorious sunsets, and the autumnal forest-leaves of America, all condensed upon a little fragment of a glass cup, – and that, too, without becoming in the least glaring or flagrant, but mildly glorious, as we may fancy the shifting lines of an angel's wing may be. I think this chaste splendor will glow in my memory for years to come. It is the effect of time, and cannot be imitated by any known process of art. I have seen it in specimens of old Roman glass, which has been famous here in England; but never in anything is there the brilliancy of these Oriental fragments. How strange that decay, in dark places, and underground, and where there are a billion chances to one that nobody will ever see its handiwork, should produce these beautiful effects! The glass seems to become perfectly brittle, so that it would vanish, like a soap-bubble, if touched.

Ascending the stairs, I went through the halls of fossil remains, – which I care little for, though one of them is a human skeleton in limestone, – and through several rooms of mineralogical specimens, including all the gems in the world, among which is seen, not the Koh-i-noor itself, but a fac-simile of it in crystal. I think the aerolites are as interesting as anything in this department, and one piece of pure iron, laid against the wall of the room, weighs about fourteen hundred pounds. Whence could it have come? If these aerolites are bits of other planets, how happen they to be always iron? But I know no more of this than if I were a philosopher.

Then I went through rooms of shells and fishes and reptiles and tortoises, crocodiles and alligators and insects, including all manner of butterflies, some of which had wings precisely like leaves, a little withered and faded, even the skeleton and fibres of the leaves represented; and immense hairy spiders, covering, with the whole circumference of their legs, a space as big as a saucer; and centipedes little less than a foot long; and winged insects that look like jointed twigs of a tree. In America, I remember, when I lived in Lenox, I found an insect of this species, and at first really mistook it for a twig. It was smaller than these specimens in the Museum. I suppose every creature, almost, that runs or creeps or swims or flies, is represented in this collection of Natural History; and it puzzles me to think what they were all made for, though it is quite as mysterious why man himself was made.

By and by I entered the room of Egyptian mummies, of which there are a good many, one of which, the body of a priestess, is unrolled, except the innermost layer of linen. The outline of her face is perfectly visible. Mummies of cats, dogs, snakes, and children are in the wall-cases, together with a vast many articles of Egyptian manufacture and use, – even children's toys; bread, too, in flat cakes; grapes, that have turned to raisins in the grave; queerest of all, methinks, a curly wig, that is supposed to have belonged to a woman, – together with the wooden box that held it. The hair is brown, and the wig is as perfect as if it had been made for some now living dowager.

From Egypt we pass into rooms containing vases and other articles of Grecian and Roman workmanship, and funeral urns, and beads, and rings, none of them very beautiful. I saw some splendid specimens, however, at a former visit, when I obtained admission to a room not indiscriminately shown to visitors. What chiefly interested me in that room was a cast taken from the face of Cromwell after death; representing a wide-mouthed, long-chinned, uncomely visage, with a triangular English nose in the very centre. There were various other curiosities, which I fancied were safe in my memory, but they do not now come uppermost.

To return to my to-day's progress through the Museum; – next to the classic rooms are the collections of Saxon and British and early English antiquities, the earlier portions of which are not very interesting to me, possessing little or no beauty in themselves, and indicating a kind of life too remote from our own to be readily sympathized with. Who cares for glass beads and copper brooches, and knives, spear-heads, and swords, all so rusty that they look as much like pieces of old iron hoop as anything else? The bed of the Thames has been a rich treasury of antiquities, from the time of the Roman Conquest downwards; it seems to preserve bronze in considerable perfection, but not iron.

Among the mediaeval relics, the carvings in ivory are often very exquisite and elaborate. There are likewise caskets and coffers, and a thousand other Old World ornamental works; but I saw so many and such superior specimens of them at the Manchester Exhibition, that I shall say nothing of them here. The seal-ring of Mary, Queen of Scots, is in one of the cases; it must have been a thumb-ring, judging from its size, and it has a dark stone, engraved with armorial bearings. In another case is the magic glass formerly used by Dr. Doe, and in which, if I rightly remember, used to be seen prophetic visions or figures of persons and scenes at a distance. It is a round ball of glass or crystal, slightly tinged with a pinkish hue, and about as big as a small apple, or a little bigger than an egg would be if perfectly round. This ancient humbug kept me looking at it perhaps ten minutes; and I saw my own face dimly in it, but no other vision. Lastly, I passed through the Ethnographical Rooms; but I care little for the varieties of the human race, – all that is really important and interesting being found in our own variety. Perhaps equally in any other. This brought me to the head of one of the staircases, descending which I entered the library.

Here – not to speak of the noble rooms and halls – there are numberless treasures beyond all price; too valuable in their way for me to select any one as more curious and valuable than many others. Letters of statesmen and warriors of all nations, and several centuries back, – among which, long as it has taken Europe to produce them, I saw none so illustrious as those of Washington, nor more so than Franklin's, whom America gave to the world in her nonage; and epistles of poets and artists, and of kings, too, whose chirography appears to have been much better than I should have expected from fingers so often cramped in iron gauntlets. In another case there were the original autograph copies of several famous works, – for example, that of Pope's Homer, written on the backs of letters, the direction and seals of which appear in the midst of "the Tale of Troy divine," which also is much scratched and interlined with Pope's corrections; a manuscript of one of Ben Jonson's masques; of the Sentimental Journey, written in much more careful and formal style than might be expected, the book pretending to be a harum-scarum; of Walter Scott's Kenilworth, bearing such an aspect of straightforward diligence that I shall hardly think of it again as a romance; – in short, I may as well drop the whole matter here.

All through the long vista of the king's library, we come to cases in which – with their pages open beneath the glass – we see books worth their weight in gold, either for their uniqueness or their beauty, or because they have belonged to illustrious men, and have their autographs in them. The copy of the English translation of Montaigne, containing the strange scrawl of Shakespeare's autograph, is here. Bacon's name is in another book; Queen Elizabeth's in another; and there is a little devotional volume, with Lady Jane Grey's writing in it. She is supposed to have taken it to the scaffold with her. Here, too, I saw a copy, which was printed at a Venetian press at the time, of the challenge which the Admirable Crichton caused to be posted on the church doors of Venice, defying all the scholars of Italy to encounter him. But if I mention one thing, I find fault with myself for not putting down fifty others just as interesting, – and, after all, there is an official catalogue, no doubt, of the whole.

As I do not mean to fill any more pages with the British Museum, I will just mention the hall of Egyptian antiquities on the ground-floor of the edifice, though I did not pass through it to-day. They consist of things that would be very ugly and contemptible if they were not so immensely magnified; but it is impossible not to acknowledge a certain grandeur, resulting from the scale on which those strange old sculptors wrought. For instance, there is a granite fist of prodigious size, at least a yard across, and looking as if it were doubled in the face of Time, defying him to destroy it. All the rest of the statue to which it belonged seems to have vanished; but this fist will certainly outlast the Museum, and whatever else it contains, unless it be some similar Egyptian ponderosity. There is a beetle, wrought out of immensely hard black stone, as big as a hogshead. It is satisfactory to see a thing so big and heavy. Then there are huge stone sarcophagi, engraved with hieroglyphics within and without, all as good as new, though their age is reckoned by thousands of years. These great coffins are of vast weight and mass, insomuch that when once the accurately fitting lids were shut down, there might have seemed little chance of their being lifted again till the Resurrection. I positively like these coffins, they are so faithfully made, and so black and stern, – and polished to such a nicety, only to be buried forever; for the workmen, and the kings who were laid to sleep within, could never have dreamed of the British Museum.

There is a deity named Pasht, who sits in the hall, very big, very grave, carved of black stone, and very ludicrous, wearing a dog's head. I will just mention the Rosetta Stone, with a Greek inscription, and another in Egyptian characters which gave the clew to a whole field of history; and shall pretermit all further handling of this unwieldy subject.

In all the rooms I saw people of the poorer classes, some of whom seemed to view the objects intelligently, and to take a genuine interest in them. A poor man in London has great opportunities of cultivating himself if he will only make the best of them; and such an institution as the British Museum can hardly fail to attract, as the magnet does steel, the minds that are likeliest to be benefited by it in its various departments. I saw many children there, and some ragged boys.

It deserves to be noticed that some small figures of Indian Thugs, represented as engaged in their profession and handiwork of cajoling and strangling travellers, have been removed from the place which they formerly occupied in the part of the Museum shown to the general public. They are now in the more private room, and the reason of their withdrawal is, that, according to the Chaplain of Newgate, the practice of garroting was suggested to the English thieves by this representation of Indian Thugs. It is edifying, after what I have written in the preceding paragraph, to find that the only lesson known to have been inculcated here is that of a new mode of outrage.

December 8th. – This morning, when it was time to rise, there was but a glimmering of daylight, and we had candles on the breakfast-table at nearly ten o'clock. All abroad there was a dense dim fog brooding through the atmosphere, insomuch that we could hardly see across the street. At eleven o'clock I went out into the midst of the fog-bank, which for the moment seemed a little more interfused with daylight; for there seem to be continual changes in the density of this dim medium, which varies so much that now you can but just see your hand before you, and a moment afterwards you can see the cabs dashing out of the duskiness a score of yards off. It is seldom or never, moreover, an unmitigated gloom, but appears to be mixed up with sunshine in different proportions; sometimes only one part sun to a thousand of smoke and fog, and sometimes sunshine enough to give the whole mass a coppery line. This would have been a bright sunny day but for the interference of the fog; and before I had been out long, I actually saw the sun looking red and rayless, much like the millionth magnification of a new halfpenny.

I was bound towards Bennoch's; for he had written a note to apologize for not visiting us, and I had promised to call and see him to-day.

I went to Marlborough House to look at the English pictures, which I care more about seeing, here in England, than those of foreign artists, because the latter will be found more numerously and better on the Continent. I saw many pictures that pleased me; nothing that impressed me very strongly. Pictorial talent seems to be abundant enough, up to a certain point; pictorial genius, I should judge, is among the rarest of gifts. To be sure, I very likely might not recognize it where it existed; and yet it ought to have the power of making itself known even to the uninstructed mind, as literary genius does. If it exist only for connoisseurs, it is a very suspicious matter. I looked at all Turner's pictures, and at many of his drawings; and must again confess myself wholly unable to understand more than a very few of them. Even those few are tantalizing. At a certain distance you discern what appears to be a grand and beautiful picture, which you shall admire and enjoy infinitely if you can get within the range of distinct vision. You come nearer, and find only blotches of color and dabs of the brush, meaning nothing when you look closely, and meaning a mystery at the point where the painter intended to station you. Some landscapes there were, indeed, full of imaginative beauty, and of the better truth etherealized out of the prosaic truth of Nature; only it was still impossible actually to see it. There was a mist over it; or it was like a tract of beautiful dreamland, seen dimly through sleep, and glimmering out of sight, if looked upon with wide-open eyes. These were the more satisfactory specimens. There were many others which I could not comprehend in the remotest degree; not even so far as to conjecture whether they purported to represent earth, sea, or sky. In fact, I should not have known them to be pictures at all, but might have supposed that the artist had been trying his brush on the canvas, mixing up all sorts of hues, but principally white paint, and now and then producing an agreeable harmony of color without particularly intending it. Now that I have done my best to understand them without an interpreter, I mean to buy Ruskin's pamphlet at my next visit, and look at them through his eyes. But I do not think that I can be driven out of the idea that a picture ought to have something in common with what the spectator sees in nature.

Marlborough House may be converted, I think, into a very handsome residence for the young Prince of Wales. The entrance from the court-yard is into a large, square central hall, the painted ceiling of which is at the whole height of the edifice, and has a gallery on one side, whence it would be pleasant to look down on a festal scene below. The rooms are of fine proportions, with vaulted ceilings, and with fireplaces and mantel-pieces of great beauty, adorned with pillars and terminal figures of white and of variegated marble; and in the centre of each mantel-piece there is a marble tablet, exquisitely sculptured with classical designs, done in such high relief that the figures are sometimes almost disengaged from the background. One of the subjects was Androcles, or whatever was his name, taking the thorn out of the lion's foot. I suppose these works are of the era of the first old Duke and Duchess. After all, however, for some reason or other, the house does not at first strike you as a noble and princely one, and you have to convince yourself of it by examining it more in detail.

On leaving Marlborough House, I stepped for a few moments into the National Gallery, and looked, among other things, at the Turners and Claudes that hung there side by side. These pictures, I think, are quite the most comprehensible of Turner's productions; but I must say I prefer the Claudes. The latter catches "the light that never was on sea or land" without taking you quite away from nature for it. Nevertheless, I will not be quite certain that I care for any painter except Murillo, whose St. John I should like to own. As far as my own pleasure is concerned, I could not say as much for any other picture; for I have always found an infinite weariness and disgust resulting from a picture being too frequently before my eyes. I had rather see a basilisk, for instance, than the very best of those old, familiar pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; and most of those in the National Gallery might soon affect me in the same way.

From the Gallery I almost groped my way towards the city, for the fog seemed to grow denser and denser as I advanced; and when I reached St. Paul's, the sunny intermixture above spoken of was at its minimum, so that, the smoke-cloud grew really black about the dome and pinnacles, and the statues of saints looked down dimly from their standpoints on high. It was very grand, however, to see the pillars and porticos, and the huge bulk of the edifice, heaving up its dome from an obscure foundation into yet more shadowy obscurity; and by the time I reached the corner of the churchyard nearest Cheapside, the whole vast cathedral had utterly vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind," unless those thick, dark vapors were the elements of which it had been composed, and into which it had again dissolved. It is good to think, nevertheless, – and I gladly accept the analogy and the moral, – that the cathedral was really there, and as substantial as ever, though those earthly mists had hidden it from mortal eyes.

I found – in better spirits than when I saw him last, but his misfortune has been too real not to affect him long and deeply. He was cheerful, however, and his face shone with almost its old lustre. It has still the cheeriest glow that I ever saw in any human countenance.

I went home by way of Holborn, and the fog was denser than ever, – very black, indeed more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud, – the spiritualized medium of departed mud, through which the dead citizens of London probably tread in the Hades whither they are translated. So heavy was the gloom, that gas was lighted in all the shop-windows; and the little charcoal-furnaces of the women and boys, roasting chestnuts, threw a ruddy, misty glow around them. And yet I liked it. This fog seems an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London; as proper to London as that light neither of the sun nor moon is to the New Jerusalem.

On reaching home, I found the same fog diffused through the drawing-room, though how it could have got in is a mystery. Since nightfall, however, the atmosphere is clear again.

December 20th. – Here we are still in London, at least a month longer than we expected, and at the very dreariest and dullest season of the year. Had I thought of it sooner, I might have found interesting people enough to know, even when all London is said to be out of town; but meditating a stay only of a week or two (on our way to Rome), it did not seem worth while to seek acquaintances.

I have been out only for one evening; and that was at Dr. – 's, who had been attending all the children in the measles. (Their illness was what detained us.) He is a homoeopathist, and is known in scientific or general literature; at all events, a sensible and enlightened man, with an un-English freedom of mind on some points. For example, he is a Swedenborgian, and a believer in modern spiritualism. He showed me some drawings that had been made under the spiritual influence by a miniature-painter who possesses no imaginative power of his own, and is merely a good mechanical and literal copyist; but these drawings, representing angels and allegorical people, were done by an influence which directed the artist's hand, he not knowing what his next touch would be, nor what the final result. The sketches certainly did show a high and fine expressiveness, if examined in a trustful mood. Dr. – also spoke of Mr. Harris, the American poet of spiritualism, as being the best poet of the day; and he produced his works in several volumes, and showed me songs, and paragraphs of longer poems, in support of his opinion. They seemed to me to have a certain light and splendor, but not to possess much power, either passionate or intellectual. Mr. Harris is the medium of deceased poets, Milton and Lord Byron among the rest; and Dr. – said that Lady Byron – who is a devoted admirer of her husband, in spite of their conjugal troubles – pronounced some of these posthumous strains to be worthy of his living genius. Then the Doctor spoke of various strange experiences which he himself has had in these spiritual matters; for he has witnessed the miraculous performances of Home, the American medium, and he has seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own touch, those ghostly hands and arms the reality of which has been certified to me by other beholders. Dr. – tells me that they are cold, and that it is a somewhat awful matter to see and feel them. I should think so, indeed. Do I believe in these wonders? Of course; for how is it possible to doubt either the solemn word or the sober observation of a learned and sensible man like Dr. – ? But again, do I really believe it? Of course not; for I cannot consent to have heaven and earth, this world and the next, beaten up together like the white and yolk of an egg, merely out of respect to Dr. – 's sanity and integrity. I would not believe my own sight, nor touch of the spiritual hands; and it would take deeper and higher strains than those of Mr. Harris to convince me. I think I might yield to higher poetry or heavenlier wisdom than mortals in the flesh have ever sung or uttered.