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THE ASSYRIAN COURT OP THE CRYSTAL PALACE.
A sense of oppression is our predominant feeling in visiting the revived Assyrian Court. We are set face to face with ghosts ; the ghosts of a people and a religion strange and unexplored at best, which are here sub- stantialized, by the newness of their getting up, in some other horrible shape," which, if it does not "draw you into madness," tends to draw or rather drive you off towards something else more genial, human, and germane to sunlight in the nineteenth century. Egypt, even as Lillipu- tianized in the Crystal Palace, is grand and noble, Greece beautiful and heroic ; the Byzantine and more modern Courts enshrine the spirits of men and our brothers ; but of the Assyrian Court we say, in the words of Coleridge, "The nightmare Life in Death is she."
This, however, is a matter of feeling. The art of Assyria is not the less venerable because it can be so placed and presented as to produce a sense of uneasiness and discomfort; nor yet is that very sense an evi- dence that the mode of presentment is wrong. Perhaps the natural in- fluence of a Ninevite ghost conjured into the nearest make-believe of life is to excite discomfort and uneasiness. The reproduction at Sydenham may be the beat possible under the circumstances, although it affords us the reverse of pleasure. We are far from supposing it ill done on that account. Saul did not like the ghost of Samuel when he saw it; but he left it to commentators to discover that the ghost was not Samuel, but the Devil.
On the other hand, while we perceive that our disrelish of the result argues nothing against the process by which that has been achieved, considering the conditions of the case, we do not hold it to be motiveless —a mere arbitrary and individual impression. In the mound of Nim- rend or Xouyunjik, the human-headed bull is a fragment of history and of art, making the waste place reecho the hum of a mighty people, and giving forth utterances—obscure, indeed, but memorable and authentic. The ghost haunts its own sepulchre and is awful. In the British Mu- seum, the fragment is still more fragmentary, the voice still vaguer, but not less authentic. The ghost is brought into the light of common day ; we feel leas awe at it, but the same surprise and curiosity. No one dreams of taking a liberty with the ghost. In the Crystal Palace, Mr. Fergusson has "struck at it with his partisan"; and, though all the cocks of Sydenham and of London are crowing their loudest around it, it cannot vanish. Mr. Fergusson puts leading questions to the ghost, which the ghost is forced to answer in Mr. Fergusson's own words. That gen- tleman, or Mr. Collman, is quite sure that, if the ghost only knew it, the colours of his particular magic-lantern are the very things to suit it ; and he projects them accordingly. He knows all about the ghost's residence, and domiciliates the ghost. Now this is what gives us a sense of oppres- sion and discomfort in the Crystal Palace from the presence of objects whose originals excite feelings higher, more unmixed, and not such as we Wish to escape from. Antiquity is antiquity, and modernism is modern- ism. These works are too old to be touched up into freshness, with any congruous or satisfactory result. It is exactly the case of an old woman Who paints. The face is not the less old. The face is as old as ever, and older by the contrast. She has only put on something which is new and conflicts with all the rest. Fossils are not made to be defossilized, nor would a mammoth whose jaws were to open by galvanism become a do- mestic animal.
The effect of colour in the Assyrian Court is hard, glaring, and uncom- bined—an opaque heavy patchwork of blues, reds, and yellows, with ghastly oases of white. It is not altogether out of keeping with the Style of the art; being massive in the parts, though not in the effect, and carried out straightforwardly, without "pottering over" attempts at deli- cacy. The eyebrows of the human-headed lion meet thick and slab hire black leeches. But when we recall the aspect of the uncoloured ori- ginals, and compare it with the painted copies,—the refinement and
im-
passive vitality of the one with the aggressive unrepose of the other,—we reckon the colour, in any teethed° sense, pure loss. For all this, we do not think that what is done has been done inju- diciously. The originals in their time-marked condition are before us elsewhere. To reproduce them as they now are, as fragments and un- restored in respects where there is reasonable ground for restoration, were mere superfluity. We possess the real thing, and need not go seek- ing for a simple copy. To have given us at Sydenham casts of isolated works, as some people appear to desire, could be of no possible value. The restoration of part of an Assyrian building, according to the best lights we have on the subject, was well worth attempting. or do we see any reason to doubt that it has been executed as suce,maTully, and with as near an approach to full accuracy, as circumstances would admit. Of course a good deal of the colour and of the construction is conjectural, and types which have been found at Susa and Persepolis did not neces- sarily exist as well in Nineveh. But what of that ? To cavil at Mr. Fergusson's production because he has not had unquestionable authority for each detail, appears to us as futile as it is easy. Mr. Fergusson has studied the subject, and acts up to his opportunities ; Dr. Layard ratifies the result with his general and particular approval. Objectors might like to try the effect of something else ; but they are not likely to know more about the matter. That we don't admire the result is a fact ; but we repeat that it was worth attempting, and that the public has every pledge of competency in the doers. Indeed, the very value of the labour bestowed upon it consists not in what is certain, which we can find better and as accessibly in the original, but in what is conjectural.
The art of Nineveh appears to be an offshoot of the art of Egypt. It has repose, but not so much in sentiment as in fact—the repose embo- died in fixity and rigidity. It shows more of the naturalistic ambition for truth in detail ; more minute observation of form, as in the muscles, the extremities, and so on ; but certainly not so high an appreciation of gene- ral form. Doubtless the Egyptian saw as much ; but he was bound still faster in the fetters of tradition, which confined him to one mode of re- presentation, and probably bowed also to the principle—true for each present generation, though obstructive to those which succeed—that it is better not to do at all that which cannot be done well. Assyrian art is more terrene; its largeness of scale partakes more of bulk and less of mass. Egyptian art teems with monsters of form and of size, and yet the abstract predominates in all its finer periods over the monstrous. The hi-form deities of Assyria are grand for fierceness, pride, and power ; but they more nearly approach the grotesque. Nevertheless, her art is true art, and honourable. It stalks the world unsurpassed as yet for national,. ism and a certain haughty self-consciousness. In its representation of brute form it is particularly noble. The half-strangled lion tearing at the colossal figure whose inexorable arm crushes the life out of him is as great, in a somewhat less majestic way, as the recumbent Egyptian lion.
Force is the essence of Assyrian art ; the physical force which strug- gles, slays, and conquers ; the moral force whose will is law. It is in- trinsically the art of a despotic king and a barbaric people ; stern, self- exalting, fixed. It delights in conflict and in gorgeousness. Its kings stand erect., or sit supreme ; its subjects fight, and swim, and besiege, and minister to their monarch, and build under rigid taskmasters : it has few women, and they mostly servile or captive ; its eagles scent the slain, its lions gnash on their triumphing hunters ; and its gods trample the ground with puissant spread wings and fronting countenance.
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