Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 4

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 induviæ 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 scarabæus 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