Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 4

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 induvi? 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.
[Illustration: CORK EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.]
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.
The articles displayed were ranged under thirty heads. The preponderance of matter of fact was shown in the concession of four of these to raw material, nineteen to manufactures, and one to the fine arts. Twenty-nine atoms of earth to one of heaven! Of course the one-thirtieth whereinto the multiform and elastic shape of genius was invited, like the afreet into his chest, to condense itself, had to be subdivided--an intaglio and a temple, a scarab?us and a French battle-picture, being very different things. This was accomplished, and the Muses made as comfortable as could be expected. They soon asserted the pre-eminence theirs by right divine, and came to be the leading attraction of the affair, next to the Koh-i-noor. On this barbaric contribution of the gorgeous East the French observers, a little jealous perhaps, were severe. One of them says: "They rely on the sun to make it sparkle," and, when the fog is too thick, on gas. The curiosity about it, in the eyes of this incisive Gaul, was "not the divinity, but the worshipers." All day long a crowd filed solemnly by it under the supervision of a detachment of police, each pilgrim bestowing upon the fetish, "an egg-shaped lump of glass," half a second's adoration, and then moving reluctantly on. Thousands of far more beautiful things were around it, but none embodying in so small a space so many dollars and cents, and none therefore so brilliant in the light of the nineteenth century. As this light, nevertheless, is that in which we live, move and have our being, we must accept it, and turn to substantials, wrought and unwrought.
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