Read Ebook: Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17 No. 099 March 1876 by Various

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THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.

LIFE-SAVING STATIONS by REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

CONVENT LIFE AND WORK by LADY BLANCHE MURPHY.

LOVE'S SEPULCHRE by KATE HILLARD.

LETTERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA by LADY BARKER.

A SYLVAN SEARCH by MARY B. DODGE.

THE SONGS OF MIRZA-SCHAFFY by AUBER FORESTIER.

TO CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN by SIDNEY LANIER.

CHARLES KINGSLEY: A REMINISCENCE by ELLIS YARNALL.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A WOMAN'S OPINION OF PARIS AND THE PARISIANS by L.H.H.

THE COLLEGIO ROMANO by T.A.T.

TRADES UNIONISM IN ITS INFANCY.

MORAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

THE EARLIEST PRINTED BOOKS by M.H.

FLOWERS VS. FLIES.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Books Received.

THE GREAT ANNUAL FAIR AT NIZHNEE-NOVGOROD.

CRYSTAL PALACE--LONDON EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1851.

INTERIOR VIEW OF THE TRANSEPT OF CRYSTAL PALACE.

NEW YORK EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.

CORK EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.

DUBLIN EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.

MUNICH EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1854.

MANCHESTER EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1857.

FLORENCE EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1861

PARIS EXPOSITION BUILDING AND GROUNDS, 1867.

GRAND VESTIBULE OF THE PARIS EXPOSITION BUILDING, 1867.

VIENNA EXPOSITION BUILDING AND GROUNDS, 1873.

ROTUNDA OF THE VIENNA EXPOSITION BUILDING, 1873.

MUSSULMAN WOMAN OF BHOPAL.

A NAUTCH-GIRL OF ULWUR.

A NAUTCHNI OF BARODA.

THE CATHACKS OF BHOPAL.

TOMB OF ALLUM SAYED.

PEASANTS OF THE DOUAB.

LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE

MARCH, 1876.

THE CENTURY--ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.

The last of these periods comes nearest to our standard. The first had undying brilliance in certain fields, but the scope of its influence was geographically narrow, and its excessively active thought was not what we are wont to consider practically productive, its conquests in the domain of physical science being but slender. The second was in no sense originative, mankind being occupied, quietly and industriously, in making themselves comfortable in the pleasant hush after the secular rattle of spear and shield. The third was certainly full of results in art, science and the diffusion of intelligence through the upper and middle strata of society. It might well have celebrated the first centennial of the discovery of printing or of the discovery of America by assembling the fresh triumphs of European art, so wonderful to us in their decay, with the still more novel productions of Portuguese India and Spanish America. But the length of sea--voyages prosecuted in small vessels with imperfect knowledge of winds and currents, and the difficulties of land-transportation when roads were almost unknown, would have restricted the display to meagre proportions, particularly had Vienna been the site selected. Few visitors could have attended from distant countries, and the masses of the vicinage could only have stared. The idea, indeed, of getting up an exhibition to be chiefly supported by the intelligent curiosity of the bulk of the people would not have been apt to occur to any one. The political and educational condition of these was at the end of the century much what it had been at the beginning. Labor and the laborer had gained little.

To us it seems odd that in the days when an autocratic decree could summarily call up "all the world" to be taxed, and when, in prompt obedience to it, the people of all the regions gathered to a thousand cities, the idea of numbering and comparing, side by side, goods, handicrafts, arts, skill, faculties and energies, as well as heads, never occurred to rulers or their counselors. If it did, it was never put in practice. The difficulties to which we have before adverted stood in the way of that combination of individual effort to which the great displays of our day are mainly indebted for their success; but what the government might have accomplished toward overcoming distance and defective means of transport is evidenced by the mighty current of objects of art, luxury and curiosity which flowed toward the metropolis. Obelisks, colossal statues, and elephants and giraffes by the score are articles of traffic not particularly easy to handle even now.

At the annual exposition of the Olympic games we have the feature of a distribution of prizes. They were conferred, however, only on horses, poets and athletes--a conjunction certainly in advance of the asses and savants that constituted the especial care of the French army in Egypt, but not up to the modern idea of the comprehensiveness of human effort. While our artists confess it almost a vain hope to rival the cameo brooch that fastened the scanty garment of the Argive charioteer, or the statue spattered with the foam of his horses and shrouded in the dust of his furious wheel--while they are content to be teachable, moreover, by the exquisite embroidery and lacework in gold and cotton thread displayed at another semi-religious and similarly ancient reunion at Benares,--they claim the alliance and support of many classes of craftsmen unrepresented on the Ganges or Ilissus. These were, in the old days, ranked with slaves, many of whom were merchants and tradesmen; and they labor yet in some countries under the social ban of courts, no British merchant or cotton-lord, though the master of millions, being presentable at Buckingham Palace, itself the product of the counting-room and the loom. Little, however, does this slight appear to affect the sensibilities of the noble army of producers, who loyally rejoice to elevate their constitutional sovereign on their implements as the Frankish prol?taries did upon their shields.

The family of expositions with which we are directly concerned is, like others of plebeian origin, at some loss as to the roots of its ancestral tree. We may venture to locate them in the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1756-57 the London Society of Arts offered prizes for specimens of decorative manufactures, such as tapestry, carpets and porcelain. This was part of the same movement with that which brought into being the Royal Academy, with infinitely less success in the promotion of high art than has attended the development of taste, ingenuity and economy in the wider if less pretentious field.

France's first exhibition of industry took place in 1798. It was followed by others under the Consulate and Empire in 1801, 1802, 1806. In 1819 the French expositions became regular. Each year attested an advance, and drew more and more the attention of adjacent countries. The international idea had not yet suggested itself. The tendency was rather to the less than the more comprehensive, geographically speaking. Cities took the cue from the central power, and got up each its own show, of course inviting outside competition. The nearest resemblance to the grand displays of the past quarter of a century was perhaps that of Birmingham in 1849, which had yet no government recognition; but the French exposition of five years earlier had a leading influence in bringing on the London Fair of 1851, which had its inception as early as 1848--one year before the Birmingham display.

The getting up of a World's Fair was an afterthought; the original design having been simply an illustration of British industrial advancement, in friendly rivalry with that which was becoming, across the Channel, too brilliant to be ignored. The government's contribution, in the first instance, was meagre enough--merely the use of a site. Rough discipline in youth is England's system with all her bantlings. She is but a frosty parent if at bottom kindly, and, when she has a shadow of justification, proud. In the present instance she stands excused by the sore shock caused her conservatism by the conceit of a building of glass and iron four times as long as St. Paul's, high enough to accommodate comfortably one of her ancestral elms, and capacious enough to sustain a general invitation to all mankind to exhibit and admire.

Novelty and innovation attended the first step of the great movement. The design of the structure made architects rub their eyes, and yet its origin was humble and practical enough. The Adam of crystal palaces, like him of Eden, was a gardener. When Joseph Paxton raised the palm-house at Chatsworth he little suspected that he was building for the world--that, to borrow a simile from his own vocation, he was setting a bulb which would expand into a shape of as wide note as the domes of Florence and St. Sophia. And the cost of his new production was so absurdly low--eighty thousand pounds by the contract. The cheapness of his plan was its great merit in the eyes of the committee, and that which chiefly determined its selection over two hundred and forty-four competitors. This new cathedral for the apotheosis of industry resembled those of the old worship in the attributes of nave, aisles and transepts; and these features have been, by reason in great degree of the requirements of construction, continued in its successors. Galleries were added to the original design to secure space additional to what was naturally deemed at first an ample allowance for all comers. Before ground had been well broken the demands of British exhibitors alone ran up to four hundred and seventeen thousand superficial feet instead of the two hundred and ten thousand--half the whole area--allotted them. The United States were offered forty thousand feet; France, fifty thousand, afterward increased to sixty-five; the Zollverein, thirty thousand, and India the same. A comparison of the whole number of exhibitors, as distributed between Great Britain and other countries, indicates that the equal division of the superficial space was a tolerably accurate guess. They numbered 7381 from the mother-country and her colonies, and 6556 from the rest of the world. Certainly, a change this from the first French exhibition, held in the dark days of the Directory, when the list reached but 110 names. We shall dismiss the statistics of this exhibition with the remark that it has precedence of its fellows in financial success as well as in time, having cleared a hundred and seventy-odd thousand pounds, and left the Kensington Museum as a memorial of that creditable feat, besides sending its cast-off but still serviceable induviae to Sydenham, where it enshrines another museum, chiefly of architectural reproductions in plaster, in a sempiternal coruscation of fountains, fireworks and fiddle-bows. The palace of industry has become the palace of the industrial--abundantly useful still if it lure him from the palace of gin. The chrism of Thackeray's inaugural ode will not have been dishonored.

The first of the great fairs, in so many respects a model to all that came after, was beset at the outset by the same difficulty in arrangement encountered by them. How to reconcile the two headings of subjects and nations, groups of objects and groups of exhibitors, the endowments and progress of different races and the advance of mankind generally in the various fields of effort, was, and is, a problem only approximately to be solved. It was yet more complicated in 1851 from the compression of the entire display into one building of simple and symmetrical form, instead of dispersing certain classes of objects, bulky and requiring special appliances for their proper display, into subsidiary structures--the plan so effectively employed in Fairmount Park. A sort of compromise was arrived at which rendered possible the mapping of both countries and subjects, especially in the reports, and to some extent in the exhibition itself, without making the spectacle one of confusion. The visitor was enabled to accomplish his double voyage through the depths of the sea of glass without a great deal of backing and filling, and to find his log, after it was over, reasonably coherent.

On our way to this feast of solids we must step for a moment into St. Paul's and listen to the great commemorative concert of sixty-five hundred voices that swept all cavilers, foreign and domestic, off their feet, brought tears to the most sternly critical eye, and caused the composer, Cramer, to exclaim, as he looked up into the great dome, filled with the volume of harmony, "Cosa stupenda! stupenda! La gloria d'Inghilterra!"

A transition, indeed, from this to coal and iron--from a concord of sweet sounds to the rumble into hold, car and cart of thirty-five millions of tons of coal and two and a half millions of iron, the yearly product at that time of England! She has since doubled that of iron, and nearly trebled her extract of coal, whatever her progress in the harvest of good music and good pictures. Forced by economical necessity and assisted by chemistry, she makes her fuel, too, go a great deal farther than it did in 1851, when the estimate was that eighty-one per cent. of that consumed in iron-smelting was lost, and when the "duty" of a bushel of coal burnt in a steam-engine was less than half what it now is. The United States have the benefit of these improvements, at the same time that their yield of coal has swelled from four millions of tons at that time to more than fifty now, and of iron in a large though not equal ratio. The Lake Superior region, which rested its claims on a sample of its then annual product of one hundred tons of copper, now exports seven hundred thousand tons of iron ore.

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