Originally published in Belgravia (John Maxwell) vol.2 #8 (Jun 1867).
A thing of beauty is, as I think we have been told, a joy for ever.
The great Palace of Art and Industry in the Champ de Mars is, I fear, neither.
A thing of beauty not even its most enthusiastic admirer could call it; for it is flat as a pancake and ugly as a warming-pan. A joy for ever it can scarcely be; for I am informed the officials mean to pull it down as soon as they can turn out their present tenants. Probably in ten months the toga will have entirely yielded to arms, and forty or fifty thousand soldiers will be listening to the voice of the charmer who says "Right shoulders forward!" "Halt!" "As you were!" instead of the pleasant appeal of Messrs. Spiers and Pond, which suggests pale ale through the media of some three dozen young ladies with golden hair and good looks such as Paris rarely sees. But I fear I am getting far below the level of Belgravia. Still I confess that this material advantage was the first thing which struck me when I entered this much-reviled—much and unfairly reviled—Exhibition.
Why has the press of London gone raving mad about the shortcomings of the Emperor's Exhibition? Who is old enough to remember our first? Nobody, of course. Then let us appeal to their ancestors or their executors. Was everything quite perfect? No; everything was unfinished. I remember well dining with the Life-Guards on the Sunday previous to the opening, and the Duke of Blank saying he had just come from Hyde Park, and there was no chance of opening it for a month. "Bet fifty it's opened on the day," said Boots of that regiment. He shot his grace, and landed the fifty. The opening here was rather a dull proceeding. You see, if you circulate you cannot go straight. So in our iron contrivance nobody can see you for above twenty yards. This is, in fact, the great drawback of the building. If you want to be amused, you must go to be amused by the Exhibition—not by the people who come to see it.
I confess I think this is a great drawback as far as the general and non-artistic public is concerned. People, after all, will come here to be pleased; and having stared their full at the wonders, will like to be treated to the beauties of the Great Exposition. When Mr. Kinglake, that most bitter and charming of writers, was only Eöthen, and had not been eastwards to abuse the allies of his country and the once friends of his bosom, he told us very nicely how he once "bathed his eyes in green forest" after passing a desert. Is not the metaphor quite refreshing—refreshing and charming and true? Some of us must remember coming back from aridity to vegetation. Now here, I think, we have too much desert, too little oasis.
Still I think that nothing can be much grander or more practical than the inner circles of this vast bazaar. You know I never undertook to describe it in detail.
Describe it in detail! Why, it would take one number of Belgravia to tell its readers my idea of the way to the building, and at least two more to say what I thought of its "outward and visible sign."
How to describe any of it? That is the question. About November or December we flatter ourselves we shall be quite au fait; to be sure it will be about to be pulled down. Still, meglio tarde che mai.
I think, as far as one can judge from a necessarily hasty examination of an even yet very unfinished display, that there is a vast mine of wealth locked up in the iron embrace of that curious building, the ugliness of which exceeds its size, and which seems to me to combine the two properties of being colder and wetter, and hotter and dustier than any place to which a somewhat erratic life has yet taken me. Hot indeed it is!
"We have been there, and still may go;"
but I can assure my readers that it is not the least like a "little heaven below;" indeed, it is quite the reverse.
How to describe it? That is the question. One Englishman declares that he has always started with a fixed idea from the grand entrance, and found himself, day after day, exhausted and wayworn, still in the British Exposure, as our kind other-side-of-Atlantic cousins call it. I think I will begin outside. It is very ugly to look at, this building, which we cannot call an erection; yet turn ere you enter, and look back at the scene behind you—the destroyed Trocadero, the heights of Passy, the site of the Marble Palace, which was to have been built for the residence of that poor youth who was born king of Rome and died an Austrian officer. The scene is picturesque, very. Up a great flight of stone steps crowds of all classes are mounting and descending the Trocadero, where there is now a staircase surpassing that of any giant's we may have met in our wanderings. Beneath you flashes the Seine; around glows Paris, looking as only Paris can look in early summer—dissipation later kills its city as its inhabitants; and if it happens to you, my reader, as it often happens to me, to pass that Pont de Jéna towards sunset, you will see a sight unequalled in any exhibition. The God of Gladness goes to rest in Paris in early summer almost with as gorgeous an array as he does when watched from Centa or the civic magistrate's quarters at Gib.
But I wander. As you enter the garden there is on one side a photographic establishment, on the other a club. I do not think that Brooke's, White's, or Boodle's, or any well-known established club, will suffer from that damp stucco, which will not be dry before an imperial decree dissolves this mercantile meeting. A little further on you see an imperial pavilion on the left, and a watch-tower on the right. Quite like Byron, is it not?
"A palace and a prison on each hand."
The outworks of this great fortress of art and industry are carried, strangely enough, by the commissariat—(we who served in the Peninsula never saw anything like that, did we, Sir Joshua Standstill, K.C.B., with the cross of the Order of St. Somewhere in Spain?)—but it is true. Art, science, skill, music, mechanism are involved in what I would not willingly call a vicious circle of sandwiches and pale ale, of ices and sorbets, of sweet cakes and lemonade (may cholera be lenient to them!). Nor is this unnecessary; for four hours of exhibition would kill a gladiator, and refreshment is as necessary as air. But to begin to see the Exhibition.
Eh bien! Shall we go up to the top of that watch-tower—it might be a clock-tower, it is so high? No? Well, perhaps you are right. We will wait till all is finished, and then we will not go up. Regard that Mosque, and put that down on the reserved list. Shall we enter that tomb—(tomb of Tarquinius Superbus, think you)? No; we will wait. Shall we enter the Russian stables and coach-houses? Ah, voilà M. de Thal, that amiable commissioner, and he will show us everything. Friend from the shires joins us here, and asks us to dinner first (gives us a deuced good English sort of dinner at Entresol's—he was with Lord Rapid, you remember, and has got some of his old claret), of course. Hospitality of English growth seems to be forced in France; and one resident of my acquaintance declares that if one other old friend from England asks him to dinner, he shall really be reluctantly obliged to ask him not to receive him in the evening, but to send a friend in the morning. Of course, however, we welcome Sir Early Crops, and proceed together to see what they call a stable in Russia.
"I suppose the horses are toys," says our baronet, "since they keep them in such boxes."
Anything prettier than the wooden stables erected by the Russians, at an expense which, not having the actual-figures before me, I hardly like to write, it is difficult to conceive. They are built of pine wood, nearly perfectly white, being highly decorated as to carving and elaborate cameo and intaglio work, if you can so write of a poor plain pine. The floors of this stable are better than the halls of most family mansions. The ceilings are more lofty, and the bedrooms—I mean the boxes, for they are all boxes—more airy than those at the Hôtel de Tout le Monde (Entresol, ninety-five francs; service, two francs), and the whole scene is radiant with equine health, and free from equine smell. "And the horses?" naturally exclaims an irritable and elderly man at the Travellers', who is taking a crumpet (very good, but unwholesome) with his tea. He is right. Now let us write about the horses—the horses of the Czar. To an English eye these horses, which are evidently a picked lot, are not good-looking; they all look like machiners; their shoulders are heavy, their legs straight, and their tails touch the ground; they have grand action, though, and can trot very fast. There are two of the Emperor's pet chargers, but there is not one hack of that class, mounted on one of which in London in June you would be safe to catch the heiress of the season. The condition is splendid, and several of the horses are valued at 350l., 400l., and 500l. The stable consists entirely of loose boxes, is exquisitely clean and tidy; and as the stablemen are got up in black and red velvet, I believe the Russian stable will be one of the most popular booths in this Vanity Fair.
The visitor to the Exhibition goes, as a rule, I find, direct to his own country. We will certainly do it, if only to watch the French watching us. The picture-gallery is a great tournament-ground for the two nations. I confess that as to oil paintings I am rather disappointed in the show of English artists which you have sent us. True, I see Mr. Eaton has sent over his Landseer—"Taming the Shrew," a host in itself; but the majority did not strike me. The water-colours, however, are simply splendid, and take away the breath of the French beholder.
Writing of pictures reminds me of a criticism uttered a few days ago in the French court. The picture has "all that there is of most French"—a very nightmare of colour. A murdered brother weltering in his blood, the affianced bride kneeling by him, and M. Cain laughing in his sleeve. Awful! "Ah," remarks my critic, "here is one which is wanting in gaiety!" I also in the English section heard a French gentlemen pointing out the bust of our dear friend Speke as "that mister who found the Nile!" In the elegant and useful you should see how well England holds its own. The china is exquisite, and even Sèvres has to do all it can to beat Minton, Copeland, &c. The glass, too, is splendid, and here the French rather fail: they fail in size, and that, you know, is a fault—don't you dislike a little wine in a little glass? If it is good wine, it is not so good; and if it is bad wine, it is worse. No, a magnum bottle and a maximum glass. Well, here the French fail. They also fail, I think, in shape, preferring height and narrowness to width, and tables are never so prettily decorated in Paris as in London. While on this festive subject I will record a remark made to me last week. "Do you know that C—y is over here as a commissioner and juror to report on cheap food for the poor?" said my friend: "I give you my word the cheapest thing he ever eat was a truffle."
The English display of jewels, too, is very fine; Harry Emmanuel, Hancock, Hunt and Roskell having the most dazzling exhibitions. To be sure Lady Dudley has contributed to this part of the entertainment, and that is enough, almost enough, to turn the exhibition scale in favour of England. They should have got Madame Rimsky Korsakow to have dressed all in her best, and then walked abroad into the Exhibition—her jewels are really wonderful.
Mr. Harry Emmanuel's "Swan," which I suppose everybody in London knows, is a great attraction here.
"The cygnet proudly walks the waters,"
and admiring crowds watch it swallowing a fish. Tiens que c'est grand! says elderly provincial party. But talking of provincial remarks, I have heard of nothing yet to come up to that of an English visitor, who looking into a restaurant, saw a person eating brown bread. "Ah!" cried she (as they used to say in old books); "the bread of the country! How interesting!"
The Italian sculpture is one of the most attractive sections of this great display. There may be perhaps many specimens which are not art—that is, are rather pretty than grand; but then they are charming, and after all, for the exoteric world, that is better.
Vela's statue of the last days of the First Napoleon is splendid. When the Emperor first saw it he was greatly impressed, and I see has now bought it. Le petit Caporal, wrapped up in a dressing-gown, is reclining in an arm-chair; and it seems to me that you can read on that marble face the records of regret for great errors—for badly conceived designs—for excessive ambition—in a word, a desire to live his life in. I have never been so struck by a modern statue. But I hardly think I must lecture on art; for as all your readers are sure to come to Paris and see the objects exposed, forming their own opinion of them—and mind, your own opinion, like other things, is generally all the better for being your own—I shall destroy their delight. "Cut off Charles the First's head, did they?" asked the elderly student of the history of England. "I am very sorry you told me, for you have spoiled all the interest in the book." Now I do not wish to decapitate Charles the First, or spoil anybody's interest in anything.
Next month I hope to give you not my opinion, but the opinion of that great critic, the British Tourist, on the exposures of the Exhibition. By that time MM. Tom, Dick, and Harry will have arrived, and I have a great respect for Messrs. T., D., and H. They represent public opinion:—public opinion is often wrong—so, for that matter, is private opinion, but still it affords an amusing study. I remember at the first and only English Exhibition at which I ever "assisted," I heard a lady, evidently a cook, say to another lady, evidently a housekeeper, "Can't be, I'm sure; she'd never do it!" They had lost their way in the catalogue, and gazing at the nude beauty of Hiram Powers's Greek Slave, were looking at a number which indicated Queen Victoria!