As much of our knowledge must necessarily be gained from museums, and as they now form such an important feature of educational machinery, I think it will be well to devote a word or two of special notice to the drawbacks which accompany their many advantages. This I propose to do in the following chapter.
False Impressions Fostered by Fragmentary Exhibits--Environment as Important as Handicraft--Works Viewed as Records of Character--Carvers the Historians of their Time.
A new world of commerce and machinery, having slain and forgotten a past race of artist craftsmen, makes clumsy atonement by sweeping together the fragments of their work and calling the collection a museum. From the four corners of the earth these relics have been gathered. Our hungry minds are bidden to make choice according to fancy, for here is variety of food! Here are opportunities, never before enjoyed by mortal, for an intellectual feast!--and of a kind which might be considered god-like, were it not for the suspicion of some gigantic joke. That out of all this huge mass of chaotic material we have not as yet been able to make for ourselves some living form of art, must indeed be to the gods a continual subject of merriment.
Museums of art are in no respect the unmixed blessings which they appear to be. They have, to be sure, all the advantages of handy reference; but at the same time, on account of the great diversity in the character of their exhibits, they tend to encourage the spread of a patchy kind of knowledge, far from being helpful to the arts in the interests of which they are established. It must be remembered that, in these collections, all specimens of architecture and architectural carving are invariably seen in false positions. All have been wrenched from their proper settings, and placed, more or less at random, in lights and relationships never contemplated by their designers. To the environment of a piece of architecture, and the position and surroundings of carved decorations, are due quite half of their interest as works of art. Deprive them of these associations, and little is left but fragmentary specimens of handicraft, more or less unintelligible in their lonely detachment, misleading to the eye, and dangerous as objects of imitation, in proportion to the dependence they once had upon those absent and unknown associations.
