Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/371

 a May 3, 1872. THE BUILDING NEWS. 349 THE BUILDING NEWS. —_@__—__ LONDON, FRIDAY, MAY 3, 1872. THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION. ee magnificent display at the Albert Hall and in its annexes is still incomplete and partially unarranged ; but it may be hoped that a very short time will suffice for reduc- ing the remaining chaos to order. The Fine Arts, Discoveries and Inventions, and Manu- factures are already fairly illustrated, though additions in each department may be antici- pated, and most of all, perhaps, in the range and variety of machines, and in the far dif- ferent show of jewellery, which, it is to be hoped, will be for the public a lesson at once in knowledge and taste. We propose in this notice to observe rather upon the spirit and principles by which the Commissioners have been guided, and the general advance made in the matter of International Exhibitions within the last twenty-one years, than to travel through details as yet imperfect—their teachings are simply by example. Would you know where the richest ores, the cost- liest gems, the largest diamonds, the rarest jewels, the finest flax, wool, or cotton, the most subtle inventions of every kind, the balance that is turned by the thousandth part of a grain’s weight, or the beam that hoists a monster gun, are to be found, this is the index to be consulted. It points to every quarter of the civilised world. It is poised upon the very watch-tower of intellectual and material progress, and industry becomes more and more of a science as these emulative exhibi- tions multiply. Those who remember the experiment of 1851 will not have forgotten the objects aimed at by the Commissioners in selecting the design for an edifice—economy of construction, facilities for the reception, classification, and display of goods; conve- nient circulation for visitors, arrangements for grand points of view, and some peculiar characteristic of the building genius of the time. Now, however, these questions are put aside. The structure is ready to hand, and the series will be held under the same roof until a.p. 1880. But if it be anywhere supposed that the original enterprise, to which all others refer, was barren of results, the idea is perfectly untenable ; indeed, some of the results have been very remarkable in- deed. As the French mariner, clinging to life ona raft that floated along a desolate coast, saw an infallible sign of civilisation in a gibbet, so a traveller in a Red Indian camp, noting a scalping hatchet, with a pipe-bow] at one end, bearing a Birmingham trade-mark, would be convinced that British commerce was upon the increase. We no longer pay the rough islanders of the Pacific in money for the oil of the sperm whale; we barter our wares against that commodity ; we traffic for gum on the banks of the Senegal and the Gambia, and was not the King of Dahomey an exhibitor in 1851? and has he not been ever since a speculator in British cargoes ? We owe our Indian Empire mainly to the pepper plant; our intercourse with China to our preference for tea over opium; and what of our wealth to the flocculent bulbs of the bombax gossypium and other species of the cotton-plant ? An International Exhibition 1s, as it were, a universal sample and pattern- book; it improved the daguerreotype into the photograph ; It armed cotton with the ex- plosive forces of gunpowder—that is, it gave scope to these inventions: it actually pro- duced the invaluable amorphous match—un- accountably so named, but a great fact in vulcanic chemistry. This discovery came to us from Austria. Higher in the scale, we have the vast improvements in naval architecture, the tremendously - increased power of machinery, the thousand-and- one new applications of steam, the extrac- tion of paraffin, or solid oil, from coal, of soda from salt, and the utilising of muriatic acid through the agency of guttapercha. Such are among the lessons taught timidly twenty-one years ago, but more distinct, emphatic, and far-reaching at the present day. We have profited by the exhibitions— subsequent to the imperial structure which rose from the turf in Hyde Park—at Dublin, at New York, at Manchester, in Paris—even at Sydenham, and in London again in 1862 and 1872. There are no Renaissance arcades in brick, no terra-cotta mimicries of the Lateran cloisters, no curvilinear patterns coloured with sea-sand, pounded coal, and burnt clay dust, no triads of cupolas or boiler-roofs—although many an unsightly appendage will have to be removed. The huge dome is far more and better than a tumid bubble of glass, uncouthly shaped and spiked atop; we are not offended by a beggarly tambour of iron clap-boarding, painted of a gooseberry green; externally, the lofty mass cuts clear against the sky, an opaque body, as all domes and cupolas should be, and have been, when architects have reared them, from the days of Augustus downwards. In fact, the lighting a dome has always been a crucial test of the archi- tect’s capacity, but to make it all window was monstrous. It was as if some original genius had proposed to dignify Westminster Abbey by a crystal spire. Especially, too, a glass dome above an opaque structure, or a solid dome to crown a Crystal Palace. Well, we have, for once, escaped these sins and their penalties. It is agreeable to pass from criticisms to praises. It is impossible not to note the wondrous developments that have taken place, and are illustrated here; the substitution of electricity for casting, and the costly old methods of gilding and silvering ; the new dyeing processes ; the rise of industry, pure and simple, to the border lands of art; the comparative absence of puffery and shop- piness; of Australian gold models and Rus- sian malachite slabs stupendously untasteful ; of such intricate furniture as the Austrians sent, which was sumptuous at the expense of simplicity. We see a gradual working out, in fact, of legitimate ideas, a culture of the mind to that appreciation of colour which is at once a passion and an instinct with Orientals ; there is less aping of Eastern ingenuity by Europeans, and aping of Europe by Asiatics. We all welcome in the South Kensington galleries the rich stuffs of India and the deli- cate work of Bombay; but there is no real interest in native-made pianos, settees, and tea-tables. Far more pleasant is it to look upon the silver and enamelled book-bindings of Russia, so national and so curious, with their reminiscences of Renaissance, of Byzan- tine, of the Polish Flamboyant adopted by Muscovy, and upon the splendid saints illumi- nated on golden grounds, suggesting both the history and the religion of that multitudinous race. Again, the Casarian vases of Sevres; the Italian pietra dura; the Spanish damas- cene; the Roman cameos; the Murano glass; the Campagna artificial marbles; the Castellani trinkets; the German stamped leather, porcelain, and ivory shrines; the stag’s horn-work of the Black Forest; the Belgian lace and carving; the Swiss trifles, exquisitely simple; and the Danish china- ware. Never from Greece does rich em- broidery—an art acquired from the Turks— fail, and never the sculpture, which is as though the masterpieces of Praxiteles had been dimly remembered in a dream. But, after all, the real competition invariably lies between Great Britain and France, though the latter has been sadly disqualified of late for an emulation which can only be carried on in times of political and social peace. How- ever, it will be perceived in due course how far their unavoidable failures go. We may regard the Exhibition as triple— of Fine Arts, of Manufactures, and of Scientific Discoveries, though these last are restricted to those the origin of which goes back no we are handling by itself; the second is supremely important, and the third must be left for future treatment. There are, under the head of manufactures, five classes, which, not to copy the catalogue—a most imperfect volume, as what catalogue is not ?—represent cotton, jewellery, music, acoustics, and stationery and printing. Cotton we have in all its stages—perfectly raw, carded, wound into yarns, willowed, spun as twist, dyed, printed, doubled, polished, reeled; made into candle-wicks, into hosiery, into fishing- tackle, into petticoats, into dresses, into calicoes, into velvets, into corsets ; into wad- ding, nets, velveteen, and beayerteen ; into damasks and zebra—whatever those may be— and even blankets. Not the aboriginal country yields a variety soamazing, or con- structs such a machinery for its fabrication. We pass from these marvellous cases through the grand range of pianofortes, ‘‘ organs of a thousand harmonies,” flutes, trombones (re- quiring, we should fancy, a hurricane to evoke their sweet sounds) ; clarionets, soft-toned as shepherds’ reeds ; drums enough to beat for the German armies themselves ; harmoniums, musical-boxes, and bagpipes (happily mute), and arrive among the jewels—a_ treasury to be avoided unless the visitor be monasti- cally alone, for what must be the tempta- tions of a place wherein a set of imitation jet ornaments in glass runs up to fifty guineas? From this Aladdin’s Garden, each tree of which bears golden or diadem fruit, is entered the ‘‘ annexe ”’—a barbarous word, of Brompton coinage—which displays rag- pulping machines, machines for composing and distributing type (one of them exceed- ingly ingenious); the Walter press, built for the new process of reeling a news- paper from a continuous roll; and then, once more, jewels, most of them familiar acquaintances, both in London and in Paris ; the Howell and James’ diamonds ; the world- renowned Devonshire gems; Mr. Street’s machine-wrought jewellery, and so forth, until we emerge upon the printing and paper departments, which are nothing less than be- wildering. As usual, France is rather sump- tuous than solid, with her artificial stones, her degenerating Sevres ware, now a long way inferior to the produce of England and Italy ; her tapestries, borrowed in tint and design from Venice ; her bronzes—always fine—and her metal-work in every school, Medieval, Xenaissance, Oriental, cast, chased, or relieved with enamel. Even the famous but long faded Limoges art bids fair to be revived, and we find the French incredibly backward in their paper-hanging [our makers have in- vented curtains of that material], their mere- tricious patterns being presented in masses of gaudy, and yet thin and poor, variegation. Elsewhere, two faults may be found—heavi- ness and excess of gilding, and roughness of chiselling on metals, though their hammered figures in copper or zine are generally telling, and their fantastic application of the Algerian onyx to architecture and sculpture is of ex- cellent, though occasionally surprising, effect. It is impossible not to feel something of the surprise we speak of, standing among the grotesques adorning a show made by the people who invented the phrase ‘ridicule kills.” Moreover, a great deal of the French richness in manufacture end decoration is too stiffly dignified ; its allegories are desti- tute of moral meaning ; the exhibitors appear to have been drilled. Withmuch inferiority on the part of our own countrymen, there is more of ease and self-forgetfulness about them; and it is clearly to be seen that the alliance between art and manufactures— which was only a jargon twenty-one years ago—has become a_ reality incompar- ably valuable. Architects are studying colour as well as form, and the use of many materials besides stone and_ brick. Glass-painters who, up to ten years ago, had been at a perfect stand-still for generations past, are making a decidedly onward move ; farther than ten years. ‘The first division | furniture-makers are beginning to understand