Part 1 / Book 2 — CHAPTER II. A GROUP OF CLASSICAL ARCHÆOLOGISTS AND EXPLORERS. (continued 2)

The marbles thus obtained are confessedly inferior to those of the Parthenon; but they possess great beauty, as well as great archæological value. Both acquisitions, in their place, have contributed to increase historic knowledge, not less conspicuously than to develop artistic power, or to enlighten critical judgment, both in art and in literature. It would not be an easy task to estimate to what degree a mastery of the learning which is to be acquired only from the marbles of Attica and of Arcadia, and their like, has tended to make the study of Greek books a living and life-giving study.

To the sculptures brought from Phigaleia into England in 1815, several missing fragments have been added subsequently. A peasant living near Paulizza had carried off a piece of the frieze to decorate, or to hallow, his hut. This fragment was procured by Mr. Spencer Stanhope in 1816. 400The Chevalier Bröndsted added other fragments in 1824. Only one entire slab of the original sculpture is wanting.

Purchase of the second Towneley Collection, 1814.

Almost contemporaneously with the accessions which came to the Museum as the result of the explorations in 1814 of Mr. Cockerell and his fellow-travellers in Arcadia, a considerable addition was made to the Towneley Gallery by the purchase of a large series of bronzes, gems, and drawings, and of a cabinet of coins and medals, both Greek and Roman, all of which had been formed by the Collector of the Marbles. These were purchased from Mr. Towneley’s representatives for the sum of eight thousand two hundred pounds. Among other conspicuous additions, made from time to time, a few claim special mention. Among these are the Cupid, acquired from the representatives of Edmund Burke; the Jupiter and Leda, in low relief, bought of Colonel de Bosset; and the Apollo, bought in Paris, at the sale of the Choiseul Collection.

Minor Antiquities of the Elgin Collection.

Among the minor Greek antiquities which came to the British Museum in 1816, along with the sculptures of the Parthenon, are the fine Caryatid figure, and the very beautiful Ionic capitals, bases, and fragments of shafts, from the double temple of the Erectheium and Pandrosos at Athens,—part of which, like the Temple of Neptune, was used by the Turks, in Lord Elgin’s time, as a powder-magazine. Acquisitions still more valuable than these were the grand fragment of the colossal Bacchus in feminine attire, which Lord Elgin brought from the Choragic monument of Thrasyllus; the statue of Icarus (identified by comparison with a well-known low-relief in rosso antico formerly preserved in the Albani Collection); and the noble series of casts from the frieze of the Theseium and from that of the 401Choragic monument of Lysicrates. The Collection also included many statues’ heads and fragments of great archæological interest, but of which the original localities are for the most part unknown, and a considerable series of sepulchral urns.

After the Elgin Marbles, the next important acquisition in the Department of Antiquities was that made by the purchase, in 1819, of the famous ‘Apotheosis of Homer.’ This marble had been found, almost two centuries before, at Frattocchi (the ancient ‘Bovillæ’), about ten miles from Rome on the Appian road, and had long been counted among the choicest ornaments of the Colonna Palace. It cost the Trustees one thousand pounds. Then, in 1825, came the noble bequest of Mr. Richard Payne Knight.

When the treasures of Mr. Payne Knight came to be added to the several Collections made, during the preceding fifty years, by Hamilton, Towneley, and Elgin, as well as to those which the British army had won in Egypt, or which were due, in the main, to the research and energy of our travelling fellow-countrymen, the national storehouse may fairly be said to have passed from its nonage into maturity. The Elgin Collection had, of itself, sufficed to lift the British Museum into the first rank among its peers. But the antiquarian treasures of the Museum showed many gaps. Some important additions, indeed, had been made, from time to time, to the class of Egyptian antiquities. And a small foundation had been laid of what is now the superb Assyrian Gallery. Rich in certain classes of archæology, it remained, nevertheless, poor in certain others. In 1825, it came to the front in all.

The Life, Writings, and Collections, of R. Payne Knight.

Richard Payne Knight is one of the many men who, in all probability, would have attained more eminent and enduring distinction had he been less impetuous and more 402concentrated in its pursuit. He went in for all the honours. He aimed to be conspicuous, at once, as archæologist and philosopher, critic and poet, politician and dictator-general in matters of art and of taste. He was ready to give judgment, at any moment, and without appeal, whether the question at issue concerned the decoration of a landscape, the summing-up of the achievement of a Homer, or a Phidias, or the system of the universe.

Mr. Knight was born in 1749, and was the son of a landed man, of good property, whose estates were chiefly in Wiltshire, and who possessed a borough ‘interest’ in Ludlow. His constitution was so weakly, and his chance of attaining manhood seemed so doubtful, that his father would not allow him to go to any school, or to be put to much study at home. It was only after his father’s death, and when he had entered his fourteenth year, that his education can be said to have begun. Within three years of his first appearance in any sort of school, he went into Italy; substituting for the university the grand tour. Only when he was approaching eighteen years of age did he fairly set to work to learn Greek. But he studied it with a will, and to good purpose.

After remaining on the Continent about six or seven years, Mr. Payne Knight removed to England, and went to live at Downton Castle. He took delight in the management of his land, proved himself to be a kind landlord as well as a skilful one, and convinced his neighbours that a man might love Greek and yet ride well to hounds. When returned to Parliament for the neighbouring borough, he attached himself to the Whigs, and more particularly to that section of them who supported Burke in his demands for economical reform. When in London, he gave constant attention to his parliamentary duty, and when in the 403country, foxhunting, hospitality, and the improvement of his estate, had their fair share of his time. But, at all periods of life, his love of reading was insatiable. When there was no hunting and no urgent business, he could read for ten hours at a stretch.

He had reached his thirty-sixth year before he made the first beginning of his museum of antiquities. The primitive acquisition was a head, unknown—probably of Diomede—which was discovered at Rome in 1785. It is in brass, of early Greek work, and was bought of Jenkins. Despite the doubt which exists as to the personage, there are many known copies of this fine head upon ancient pastes and gems. In the following year, Mr. Knight made his first appearance as an author.

Early Writings of Mr. Payne Knight.

The Inquiry into the remains of the Worship of Priapus, as existing at Isernia, in the Kingdom of Naples, treated of a subject which scarcely any one will now think to have been well chosen, as the first fruits or earnest of a scholarly career. When a French critic said of it ‘a maiden-work, but little virgin-like (peu virginal)’ he expressed, pithily, the usual opinion of the very small circle of readers at home to whom the book became known. The author eventually called in the impression, so far as lay in his power, and the book is now one of the many ‘rarities’ which might well be still more rare than they are.

In 1791, he gave to the world another work on a classical subject which possessed real value, and, amongst scholars, attracted much attention. The Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet is a treatise which, in its day, rendered good service to grammatical learning, and led to more. It was followed, in 1794, by The Landscape, a Poem.

‘The Landscape’ is an elaborate protest against the then fashionable modes of gardening, which sought to ‘improve’ 404nature, almost as much by replacement as by selection. On many points the poem is marked by good sense and just thought, as well as by vigour of expression, but its reasoning is far superior to its poetry. What is said of the choice and growth of trees shows thorough knowledge of the subject and true taste. But it needs no poet to convict ‘Capability Brown’ of ignorance in his own pursuit when he insisted on ‘the careful removal of every token of decay’ as a cardinal maxim in landscape-gardening. Such topics may well be left to plain prose.

The one notable feature in the poem which has still an interest is its curious indication of that peculiarity in Mr. Knight’s creed which asserted—in relation both to the works of nature and to those of art—that beauty is absolutely inconsistent with vastness. The excessive love of the minute and delicate led Mr. Knight into the greatest practical error of his public life, as will be seen presently. At this time it merely led him to the bold assertion that no mountain ought to dare to lift its head so high as to—

‘Shame the high-spreading oak, or lofty tower.’

The lines which follow are, it will be seen, curiously prophetic of that controversy about the Marbles of the Parthenon in which Mr. Payne Knight took so large a share:—

‘But as vain painters, destitute of skill,

Large sheets of canvas with large figures fill,

And think with shapes gigantic to supply

Grandeur of form, and grace of symmetry,

So the rude gazer ever thinks to find

The view sublime, when vast and undefined.

’Tis form, not magnitude, adorns the scene.

A hillock may be grand, and the vast Andes mean.

Oft have I heard the silly traveller boast

The grandeur of Ontario’s endless coast;

405Where, far as he could dart his wandering eye,

He nought but boundless water could descry.

With equal reason, Keswick’s favoured pool

Is made the theme of every wondering fool.’

Within a few months, this poem—little as it is now remembered—went through two editions. It was soon followed by a more ambitious flight. In 1796, its author published ‘The Progress of Civil Society; a didactic poem.’

The impression which had been made, in that day of feeble verse (as far as the southern part of the realm is concerned), by The Landscape, gained for The Progress of Civil Society an amount of attention of which it was intrinsically unworthy. The work deals with social progress, and it treats the convictions dearest to Christian men as being simply the conjectures of ‘presumptuous ignorance.’ It is the work of a man who writes after nine generations of his ancestors and countrymen have had a free and open Bible in their hands, and who none the less puts the worship of Nature, and of her copyists, in the place of the worship of Nature’s God. This ‘didactic poem’ is written in the land of Bacon, Milton, and Shakespeare, and it bases itself on the ‘fifth book of Lucretius.’

Not the least curious thing about the matter is the effect which was wrought by Mr. Knight’s poetic flight upon the mind of a brother antiquarian. The work absolutely inspired Horace Walpole with a serious and deep regret that he was consciously too near the grave to undertake the defence of Christian philosophy against its new assailant. Such a labour, from such a pen, would indeed have been a curiosity of literature.

Horace Walpole on the ‘Progress of Civil Society,’ 1796.

Feeling that for a man who was almost an octogenarian the tasks of controversy would be too much, Walpole writes to Mason. He entreats him to expose the daring 406poetaster. His earnestness in the matter approaches passion. ‘I could not, without using too many words,’ he says, ‘express to you how much I am offended and disgusted by Mr. Knight’s new, insolent, and self-conceited poem. Considering to what height he dares to carry his insolent attack, it might be sufficient to lump [together] all the rest of his impertinent sallies ... as trifling peccadillos.... The vanity of supposing that his authority—the authority of a trumpery prosaic poetaster—was sufficient to re-establish the superannuated atheism of Lucretius!... I cannot engage in an open war with him.... Weak and broken as I am, tottering to the grave at some months past seventy-eight, I have not spirits or courage enough to tap a paper war.’

Walpole then adverts to a foregone thought, on Mason’s part, to have taken up the foils on the appearance of The Landscape. ‘I ardently wish,’ he says, ‘you had overturned and expelled out of gardens this new Priapus, who is only fit to be erected in the Palais de l’Egalité.’ |Horace Walpole to William Mason, March 22, 1796 (Letters; Coll. Edit., vol. ix, p. 462).| And he urges his correspondent not to let the present occasion slip. Irony and ridicule, he thinks, would be weapons quite sufficient to overthrow this ‘Knight of the Brazen Milk-Pot.’

The last thrust was unkind indeed. It was hard that our Collector, whatever his other demerits, should be reproached for his passion to gather small bronzes, by the builder and furnisher of Strawberry-Hill.

For, amidst all his devotion to poetry and pantheism, Mr. Knight carried on the pursuits of connoisseurship with insatiable ardour. |Spec. of Ancient Sculp., pl. 55 and 56.| Among the choicer acquisitions which speedily followed the Diomede[?] purchased in 1785, were the mystical Bacchus—a bronze of the Macedonian period—found near Aquila in 1775; a colossal head of Minerva, found near Rome by Gavin Hamilton; and a 407figure of Mercury of great beauty. The last-named bronze had been found, in 1732, at Pierre-Luisit, in the Pays de Bugey and diocese of Lyons. |Ib., 33, 34.| A dry rock had sheltered the little figure from injury, so that it retained the perfection of its form, as if it had but just left the sculptor’s hand. It passed through the hands of three French owners in succession before it was sold to Mr. Knight, by the last of them, at the beginning of the Reign of Terror.

The year 1792, in which he acquired this much-prized ‘Mercury,’ is also the date of a remarkable discovery of no less than nineteen choice bronzes in one hoard, at Paramythia, in Epirus. They had, in all probability, been buried during nearly two thousand years. The story of the find is, in itself, curious. |The hoard of Bronzes found at Paramythia, in Epirus.| It shows too, in relief, the energy and perseverance which Mr. Knight brought to his work of collectorship, and in which he was so much better employed—both for himself and for his country—than in philosophising upon human progress, from the standpoint of Lucretius.

Some incident or other of the weather had disclosed appearances which led, fortuitously, to a search of the ground into which these bronzes had been cast—perhaps during the invasion of Epirus, B.C. 167—and, by the finder, they were looked upon as so much saleable metal. Bought, as old brass, by a coppersmith of Joannina, they presently caught the eye of a Greek merchant, who called to mind that he had seen similar figures shown as treasures in a museum at Moscow. He made the purchase, and sent part of it, on speculation, to St. Petersburgh. The receiver brought them to the knowledge of the Empress Catherine, who intimated that she would buy, but died before the acquisition was paid for. They were then shared, it seems, between a Polish connoisseur and a Russian dealer. One 408bronze was brought to London by a Greek dragoman and shown to Mr. Knight, who eagerly secured it, heard the story of the discovery, and sent an agent into Russia, who succeeded in obtaining nine or ten of the sculptures found at Paramythia. Two others were given to Mr. Knight by Lord Aberdeen, who had met with them in his travels. They were all of early Greek work. Amongst them are figures of Serapis, of Apollo Didymæus, of Jupiter, and of one of the Sons of Leda. All these have been engraved among the Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, published by the Society of Dilettanti.

Few sources of acquisition within the limits which he had laid down for himself escaped Mr. Payne Knight’s research. He kept up an active correspondence with explorers and dealers. He watched Continental sales, and explored the shops of London brokers, with like assiduity. Coins, medals, and gems, shared with bronzes, and with the original drawings of the great masters of painting, in his affectionate pursuit.

In his search for bronzes he welcomed choice and characteristic works from Egypt and from Etruria, as well as the consummate works of Greek genius. His numismatic cabinet was also comprehensive, but its Greek coins were pre-eminent. For works in marble he had so little relish that he actually persuaded himself, by degrees, that the greatest artists of antiquity rarely ‘condescended’ to touch marble. But he collected a small number of busts in that material.

For one volume of drawings by Claude, Mr. Knight gave the sum of sixteen hundred pounds.

Among his later acquisitions of sculpture in brass was the very beautiful Mars in Homeric armour. This figure was brought to England by Major Blagrave in 1813. The 409Bacchic Mask (No. 35, in the second volume of the Specimens) was found, in the year 1674, near Nimeguen, in a stone coffin. It was preserved by the Jesuits of Lyons, in their Collegiate Museum, until their dissolution. From them it passed into the possession of Mr. Roger Wilbraham, from whom Mr. Knight obtained it.

The Inquiry into the Symbolism of Greek Art and Mythology.

On the thorough study of the fine Collection which had been gathered from so many sources—here indicated by but a scanty sample—and on that of other choice Collections both at home and abroad, Mr. Knight based the most elaborate—perhaps the most valuable—work of his life, next to his Museum itself. The Inquiry into the Symbolism of Greek Art and Mythology bears, indeed, too many traces of the narrowness of the author’s range of thought, whenever he leaves the purely artistic criticism of which he was, despite his limitations, a master, in order to dissertate on the interdependence or on the ‘priestcraft’ of the religions of the world. But his genuine lore cannot be concealed by his flimsy philosophy. The student will gain from the Inquiry real knowledge about ancient art. He will find, indeed, not a few statements which the author himself would be the first to modify in the light of the new information of the last fifty years. But he will also find much which, in its time, proved to be suggestive and fruitful to other minds, and which prepared the way for wider and deeper studies. It may do so yet. The book is one which the student of archæology cannot afford to overlook. Whilst he may well afford a passing smile at the philosophic insight which prompted our author’s eulogies (1) upon the ‘liberal and humane spirit which still prevails among those nations whose religion is founded upon the principle of emanations;’ (2) upon the wisdom of the ‘Siamese, who 410shun disputes, and believe that almost all religions are good;’ |Inquiry, &c., p. 19.| (3) on the supreme fitness of the idolatries of India ‘to call forth the ideal perfections of art, by expanding and exalting the imagination of the artist;’ or (4) upon the exceptional and pre-eminent capacity of the Hindoos to become ‘the most virtuous and happy of the human race,’ but for that one solitary misfortune which cursed them with a priesthood.^[65]

The Dissertation on Ancient Sculpture.

The Inquiry into Symbolism was, at first, printed only for private circulation, in 1818. It was afterwards reprinted in the Classical Journal, with some corrections by the author. It was again reprinted, after his death, as an appendix to the second volume of the Specimens of Ancient Sculpture.

To the first volume of that work Mr. Payne Knight had already prefixed his Preliminary Dissertation on the Progress of Ancient Sculpture. After showing that of Phœnician art we have no real knowledge other than that 411which is to be derived from the study of coins, and that thence it may be learnt that the Phœnicians had artisans, but not artists, he goes on to survey Greek art in its successive phases. That art, at its best, finds, he thinks, a typical expression, or summary, in the saying ascribed to Lysippus: ‘It is for the sculptor to represent men as they seem to be, not as they really are.’ He dates the culmination of Greek sculpture as ranging between the years B.C. 450 and 400, and as due to the national pride and energy which were excited by the defeat of Xerxes and the events which followed. He thinks that what was gained, by the artists of the next half-century, in ideal grace, and in the fluent refinements of workmanship, was obtained only by a loss of energy, of characteristic expression, and of originality—the εθος of art. In the works of Lysippus and his school (B.C. 350–300), he sees a brief resuscitation of the vigour of the former period, combined with much more than the grace of the latter, to be followed only too swiftly by those desolating wars ‘in which the temples were destroyed, their treasures of art pillaged, and artists, for the first time, saw their works perish before themselves.’

In the ‘Dissertation,’ as in the ‘Inquiry,’ there are many statements and many reasonings to which subsequent discoveries have brought a tacit correction. |Mr. Payne Knight and the Elgin Marbles.| The passage in the former about the Elgin Marbles had to be corrected by the evidence of the author’s own eyesight. His examination before the Commons’ Committee of 1816 was an amusing scene. The key-note was struck by the witness’s first words. To the question ‘Have you seen the marbles brought to England by Lord Elgin?’ he replied, ‘Yes. I have looked them over.’ But on this point, enough has been said already in a previous page.

412Both to the Edinburgh Review and to the Classical Journal Mr. Knight was a frequent and valuable contributor. It was in the latter periodical that his Prolegomena to Homer were first given to the world, although he had printed a small edition (limited to fifty copies) for private circulation, as early as in the year 1808.^[66] His latest poetical work, the Romance of Alfred, I have never had the opportunity of reading.

Richard Payne Knight died on the twenty-fourth of April, 1824, in the 75th year of his age. He bequeathed his whole Collections to the British Museum, of which he had long been a zealous and faithful Trustee. He made no conditions, other than that his gift should be commemorated by the addition to the Trust of a perpetual Knight ‘Family Trustee.’

For this purpose a Bill was introduced into Parliament by Lord Colchester on the eighth of June. It received the royal assent on the seventeenth.

The addition of Mr. Knight’s Greek Coins made the British Museum superior, in that department, to the Royal Museum of Paris; the addition of his bronzes raised it above the famous Museum of Naples. By the most competent judges it has been estimated that, if the Collection had been sold by public auction, Mr. Knight’s representatives would probably have obtained for it the sum of sixty thousand pounds.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.

Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.