Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 6

though not all of it
warranted to stand the washing-test that would be imposed by the briny
part of the circuit.
And yet there were visible in the American department germs of
original inventions and adaptations, the development and fructification
of which in the near future were foreseen by acute observers. Our
metallic life-boats were then unknown to other countries, those of
England being all of wood. The screw-propeller was quite a new thing,

though the Princeton had carried it, or been carried by it, into the
Mediterranean ten years before. Engines designed for its propulsion
attracted special attention. The side-wheel reigned supreme among
British war-steamers, although some of the altered liners which cut
such an imposing figure till the Sebastopol forts in '55 checked, and
iron-clads in '62 finished, their career, were under way. A model of one
of them, The Queen, was exhibited as the highest exemplification of
"the progress of art as applied to shipbuilding during the last eighteen
centuries"--a progress entirely eclipsed by that of the subsequent
eighteen years.
We sent no steam fire-engines, no locomotives, and no cars. Our great
printing-presses, since largely borrowed from and imported by Europe,
were scarcely noticed. Not so with "a most beautiful little machine" for
making card wire-cloth, copied from America. Recognition of the
supreme merits of the pianos of Chickering, Steinway and the rest was
still wanting, Erard's Parisian instruments bearing the bell. Borden's
meat-biscuit--to revert to the practical--caused quite a sensation, the
Admiralty being overloaded with spoiled and condemned preserved
meat. The American daguerreotypes on exhibition were pronounced
decidedly superior to those of France, and still more to those of
England. Whipple displayed the first photograph taken of the moon,
thus securing to this country the credit of having broken ground for the
application of the new art to astronomy. No photograph of a star or of
the sun had been obtained. The distance between the United States and
Europe in the application and improvement of photography cannot be
said, notwithstanding our advantage in climate, to have been since
widened. A field of competition still lies open before them in the fixing
of color by the camera and the sensitive surface. The sun still insists on
doing his work with India ink and keeping his spectral palette strictly to
himself. For cheap and popular renderings of color man was then, as
now, fain to have recourse to the press. The English exhibited some
chromatic printing, far inferior to the chromo-lithographs of today.
And this brings us to art. One out of thirty in the programme, it was, as
it always will be on these occasions, nearer thirty to one in the
estimation of assembled sight-seers. The dry goods and machinery,
even the bald, shadeless and ugly (however comfortable) model
cottages of the inevitable Prince Albert, failed to draw like the things

which flattered the lust of the eye; as the pigs and pumpkins of an
"agricultural horse-trot" attract but a wayside glance from the
procession to the grand stand. We are all dwellers in a vast
picture-gallery, with frescoed dome above and polychromed sculpture
and mosaic pavement on the floor below. Its merits we perceive, enjoy
and interpret according to our individual gifts and education. But it
makes amateurs in some sort of every mother's son or daughter, of us;
and we hasten to plunge, confident each in his particular grammar of
the beautiful, into the study of what imitative gallery may be offered us.
Though the financial idea may have been uppermost in the minds of the
devotees of the Mountain of Light, and their pleasure in the march past
that of a stroll through the vaults of the Bank of England, they also
expected to see in it the combined brilliance of all diamonds. Not
finding that, we dare say few of them paid it a second visit, but, led by
a like craving for dazzle, sought more legitimate intoxication in marble,
canvas, porcelain and chased and cast metals.
There they saw the diamond put into harness by the Hindus and used
for drilling gems as it is now for drilling railway tunnels. In the carpets
and shawls of the same region was to be traced an exact and unfaltering
instinct for color, the tints falling into their proper places like those of
the rainbow--the result not a picture, any more than the rainbow is a
picture, but a blotted study rubbed up with the palette-knife, or what in
music would be a fantasia.
[Illustration: MUNICH EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1854.]
From the Asiatic display, more complete by far than any before known,
the eye passed to the works of the more disciplined hand and fancy and
the more scholastic color-notions of Europe. There was young Munich
with Müller's lions and the anti-realistic figures of Schwanthaler;
Austria with Monti's