Museum Musings.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 732, 8 April 1933, Page 8

Museum Musings.

Out of the Past.

Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot . . . nr. SAY that Shakespeare in his time kept strange company in taverns and with stable-boys, but that can hardly have created a precedent for putting him posthumously among the mammals. There he stands inside the door watching for ever the bloody slaughter of an antelope whose moth-eaten coat is most dramatically incarnadined. And opposite to him with equal fixity old Linnaeus, the botanist, has only the bare bones of elephants and lions to look at in lieu of mountain specimens. Von Haast is there, too, but with valid excuse, giving a perpetual welcome within the Museum for which he worked. The delicate Raphael stands in the hall and facsimile of the very head that Newton’s apple hit rests near the entrance, while the trees drop chestnuts beyond the portico.

And this overflow of busts from the statuary gallery suggests that there must be a galaxy of ancients in the room upstairs. Even Carlyle and Darwin, though fraternising near the landing, have not the aura of antiquity thick enough about them to admit them to the more classic company that also waits in exile for appreciation. Plato, one can see, probably has some reason to be a little droopy at the mouth, but Socrates’ retrousse nose suggests that the great cross-examiner could enjoy a little cheerful irony, even here. Homer is exactly what’ one would imagine, a wrinkled old nobleman quite unaffected by the demure looks of Clytie, the bewitched sea-nymph on her blossomy pedestal. But it is not so much on the fate of these old friends that one speculates as on the ultimate destination of Venus de Milo and her more problematical Venus sisters in their airy nothings Their loveliness is half lost in this stuffy room where colossal figures and :statuettes are all. hampered by a cramped perspective. There was, indeed, a little while ago a vague hope that a few at least of this company might be removed to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, but even in a corner or two where there might have been room for some the dead whiteness of the casts would have created such a disharmony against the mellow walls of the gallery that the selectors wisely refrained from putting them there.

Yet the suspicion remains that their continued seclusion in this museum garret may be a discreet expression of the puritanical mind which certainly would not exhibit them out of doors as the Parisians display their statuary in the Tuileries Gardens. We are not French. We have more of the traditions of the Victorians, who went by night and draped all the nude figures in the Crystal Palace Gardens in that laughable age of serious burlesque. Our mind does not turn to grottoes in the garden, yet there is a Boy Extracting a Thorn and another Boy and Goose who would not blush in the sunlight, and Diana Robing would seem quite a nice person if one met her anywhere. As it is there is something sad about that upper room. Cramped from the first, the figures are more huddled together since the inclusion of the Seager collection. For ages Venus and Apollo, Cupid and Psyche have been admired, but now they're quite despised. —B.E.S.