Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 3

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.
[Illustration: NEW YORK EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.]
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 prolétaries 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