Название: Travels in South Kensington with Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England
Автор: Moncure Daniel Conway
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Документальная литература
isbn: 4064066186005
isbn:
As for the matter of payment, it certainly constitutes the gravest problem besetting institutions of this character. The best work done for literature, art, and science (so far as they are connected with the state) is done on small salaries, a thousand pounds being considered a vast sum for great men. Even such men as Tyndall and Lockyer get less than that by their official positions. But these gentlemen all feel the danger that might arise if such work became so well paid as to allure the incompetent, and its offices become objects of political intrigue. At present no country is better served in such matters than England, such men as those mentioned being content with small salaries because of the ample means of research afforded them. And indeed it would appear enough to prevent the offices for scientific and other work of an intellectual character being sought for gain, if some clever statesman would invent a way of paying the additional sums needed “in kind,” but in some kind, also, not transmutable into values for other than the learned. It must be admitted that thus far no English minister has appreciated the necessity that scholars should have salaries sufficiently large to raise them above anxiety, and to render unnecessary the too frequent frittering away of invaluable time and power in a multiplicity of extraneous and lucrative employments.
The redemption of the British Museum, so far as it has proceeded, as well as the establishment of nearly every institution of importance to art or science in the country, was largely due to the instruction by example represented in the South Kensington Museum. This institution, it is important to remember, did not grow out of any desire to heap curiosities together or to make any popular display; it grew out of a desire for industrial art culture, and the germ of it was the School of Design which opened in a room of Somerset House, June 1st, 1837. This poor little school is now a thing to make fun of. It took over a month for it to obtain the eight pupils with which it began. The first act of its regulators seems to have been a rule that “drawing the human figure shall not be taught to the students.” Haydon insisted that there could be no training without the human figure. The government did not want artists, but men who could draw such patterns as should render it no longer necessary for English manufacturers to go to Lyons and Paris for such. Etty and Wilkie sat in the council beside silk-weavers and portly warehousemen. Fine-art students were actually excluded—this mainly because of the cry that the government would otherwise be taking bread out of the mouths of private teachers—and the School of Design in 1842 consisted of 178 pattern-drawers. Schools of a similar character were gradually established in some of the provincial manufacturing cities. And there had been about ten years of this sort of thing when the great Exhibition of 1851-52 took place.
Queen Victoria has described the May day when the Palace of Glass was opened in Hyde Park as the happiest of her life. She had witnessed one of those noble victories which leave no tears behind but such as may welcome glad tidings of good-will, and she had seen her hero wearing the only crown he coveted—that of success in a great achievement for European civilization. It is sad indeed that only as a widow does she live to realize the latest results of that day on her country.
The great Exhibition may be termed, so far as English art is concerned, the great revolution. Such a display of “florid and gorgeous tinsel,” to use Redgrave’s description, was never seen, unless in the realms of King Coffee. The articles from the Continent were glittering and showy enough, but those of Great Britain outglittered all, exciting the laughter of cultivated foreigners to such an extent that English gentlemen were scandalized and abashed without knowing precisely what was the matter. The Prince Consort, who was especially ashamed at the general disgust manifested for this tawdry English work, had brought with him from his careful training in Germany and at Brussels one excellent habit—that of deferring to the judgment of accomplished men in matters relating to their own specialties. When he found himself, as Chief Commissioner of the great Exhibition, the hero of a great aesthetic failure and of a great financial success—blushing for the fame of the country which had bestowed its highest honor upon him, and at the same time contemplating a net surplus of £170,000—the idea took possession of him that the least the money could do would be to begin the task of raising English work from the abyss of ugliness which had been so admirably disclosed; and that idea led him to consult artists of ability and men of taste, and to mediate between them and her Majesty’s complacent ministers, whom he managed to rouse into a happy state of bewilderment, which resulted in action.
The Prince Consort was, during his brief life, a fortunate man in many respects, but in nothing was he so fortunate as when, inspired by the best artistic minds in England, he induced the Queen to set apart some rooms at Marlborough House (now the residence of the Prince of Wales) for an industrial art collection and for art training, and when he persuaded her ministers to devote £5000 to the same purpose. He has thus made the great head-quarters of British art in some sense his monument. In 1852 the small collection of the School of СКАЧАТЬ