in a botanic collection. Eminently a place of exile; or
worse, of captivity, for all this people of marble: these athletes and
nymphs and satyrs, and warriors and poets and gods, who once stood, each
in happy independence, against a screen of laurel or ilex branches,
or on the sun-heated gable of a temple, where the grass waved in the
fissures and the swallows nested, or in a cresset-lit, incense-dim
chapel, or high against the blue sky above the bustle of the market
place; poor stone captives cloistered in monastic halls and cells, or
arranged, like the skeletons of Capuchins, in endless rows of niche,
shelf, and bracket. Galleries are necessary things, to save pictures and
statues (or the little remaining of them) from candle smoke, sacristans'
ladders, damp, worms, and street boys, but they are evil necessities;
and the sense of a sort of negative vandalism always clings to them,
specially to the galleries of statues, so uninhabited, so utterly
sepulchral. Going to a gallery of sculpture, we must be prepared to
isolate what we wish to enjoy, to make for it a fitting habitation in
our fancy: it is like going to read a page of Homer, or the Georgics,
or Shelley, in some great musty, dusty library, redolent of crumbling
parchment and forgotten rubbish. Such is this Vatican, even for us
accustomed to it and knowing what we do and do not want: for us grown-up
creatures, familiar with such matters, and with powers of impression
quite deadened by culture. What, therefore, must not this Vatican be
for a child: a quite small, ignorant barbarian such as has never before
set its feet in a gallery, to whom art and antiquity have been mere
names, to whom all this world of tintless stone can give but a confused,
huge, overpowering impression of dreariness and vacuity. An impression
composed of negative things: of silence and absence of colour, of
lifelessness, of not knowing what it all is or all means; a sense of
void and of unattractive mystery which chills, numbs the little soul
into a sort of emotionless, inactive discomfort. What we were, how we
felt, how we understood and vaguely guessed things, as children, we can
none of us know. The recollection of ourselves when we were so different
from ourselves, this tradition handed down from a dim, far-off creature
of whom we know, without feeling it, that he, was our _ego_, this
mysterious tradition remains to us only in fragments, has been printed
into our memory only by desultory