Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 7

economic, the works of the English Wedgwoods and Mintons, infinite in variety of style and utility, and often pleasing in design. Italy, though supplying from her ancient stores so many of the models and so much of the inspiration of the countries named, seems to have forgotten Faenza and Etruria, and to prefer solid stone as a material to preparations of clay and flint. Her Venetian glass has markedly declined, at the same time that glass elsewhere--notably, the stained windows of Munich and the smaller objects of France and Bohemia--shows a great advance in perfection of manufacture and manageability for art purposes.
In that debatable land where the artistic and the convenient meet at the fire-side and the tea-table, English invention, enterprise and solicitude for the comfort and presentability of home shone conspicuous. Domestic art finds in the island a congenial home, and helps to make one for the islanders. English interiors, often incongruous and sombre in their decorations, at least produce the always pleasant sensation of physical comfort, the attainment of which the average Briton will class among the fine arts. Lovely as the Graces are, they need a little editing to harmonize them with a coal fire.
This halfway house of the nineteenth century, the house of glass in which it boldly ensconced itself to throw stones at its benighted relations, will ever be a landmark to the traveler over the somewhat arid expanse of industrial and commercial history. Its humblest statistics will be preserved, and coming generations will read with interest that 42,809 persons visited it, on an average, each day, that these rose on one day to 109,915, and that there were at one time in the building 93,224, or six thousand more than Domitian's most tempting and sanguinary bill of theatrical fare could have drawn into the Coliseum. Its length, by the way, was exactly equal to the circumference of the Flavian amphitheatre--1848 feet.
A new home (of progress)! who'll follow? "I," quoth New York. The British empire had taken three years in preparation: New York was ready with less than two. Not quite ready, either, we are apt to say now, but most creditably so for the time and the means of a few enterprising private men bestowed upon it. And up to this time the display of '53 under the Karnak-like shadow of the Croton Reservoir has not been equaled on our soil.
Architecturally, the building was superior to that of London, and showed itself less cramped by the peculiarities of the novel material. The form was that of a Greek cross, with a central dome a hundred and forty-eight feet high, and eight towers at the salients of seventy feet. The space, including galleries, did not reach a third of that afforded by its prototype, but proved equal to the demand.
Considering the absence of any formal public character in the movement and the brief notice, foreign exhibitors came forward in tolerable force. They could not expect to address through this display each other's commercial constituencies, as very few visitors would traverse the Atlantic: they could reach only the people of the United States. This difficulty must interfere--though much less now than twenty years ago, when the means of ocean-travel were but a fraction of what they are at present--with the strictly international complexion of any exposition in this country. If, however--as we are already assured beyond peradventure will be the case with the Centennial--our neighbors over the way send us a full representation of their products, and a delegation of visitors from their most intelligent classes, not inferior in numbers, for example, to the Germans who went to London, and the English who repaired in '73 to Vienna, we shall claim a cosmopolitan character for our exposition, and hold that it well fills its place in the line of progress.
What Europe did send to New York sufficed to prove the superiority of our own artisans in such labor-saving contrivances as suited the conditions of the country. The foreign implements and machines were more cumbrous in both complexity and weight of parts than ours. In the finer departments of manufacture, the Gobelin tapestry, the French glass, porcelain and silks, the broadcloths of England and Prussia, and a host of other such articles, could expect no rivalry here. The slender contributions of statuary and paintings hardly sufficed to illustrate the conceded superiority of the Old World in art. Crawford and Powers did very well by the side of the other, disciples of the antique, their chief opposition coming from some indifferent plaster-casts of Thorwaldsen's Twelve Apostles. In point of popularity, Kiss's spirited melodramatic group of the Amazon and Tiger threw them all into the shade. Its triumph at London was almost as marked, and the innumerable reductions of it met with everywhere show it to be one of