THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND SOHO

The Bloomsbury History of the World Great statuary Julius Caesar and Demeter The Elgin Marbles Terra-cotta and bronze MSS. London's foreign quarter Soho Square and Golden Square Soho Cheap restaurants The old artists' quarter Wardour Street and Berners Street The great Hoax Madame Tussaud's--Clothes without Illusion The Chamber of Horrors Thoughts on the Killing of Men The Vivifying of "Little Arthur" Waxworks at Night An Experience in the Edgware Road.

THE British Museum is the history of the world: in its Bloomsbury galleries the history of civilisation, in its Cromwell Road galleries the history of nature. The lesson of the Museum is the transitoriness of man and the littleness of his greatest deeds. That is the burden of its every Bloomsbury room. The ghosts of dead peoples, once dominant, inhabit it; the dust of empires fills its air. One may turn in from Oxford Street and in half an hour pass all the nations of the earth, commanding and servile, cultured and uncouth, under review. The finest achievements of Greek Sculpture are here, and here are the painted canoes of the South Sea islander ; the Egyptian Book of the Dead is here, and here, in the Reading Room, is a copy of the work you are now judiciously skipping; the obelisk of Shalmaneser is here, and here are cinematoscope records of London street scenes, here are phonographic records of great Englishmen's voices.

JEAN ARNOLFINI AND JEANNE, HIS WIFE,

AFTER THE PICTURE BY JAN VAN EYCK IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY

It is too much for one mind to grasp. Nor do I try. The Roman Emperors, the Gr co-Roman sculptures, the bronzes, the terra-cottas, the Etruscan vases, the gems, the ceramics and glass, the prints, the manuscripts, the Egyptian rooms these, with the Reading Room, are my British Museum. Among the other things I am too conscious of the typical museum depression: it is all so bleak and instructive.

In vain for me have the archipelagos of the Pacific been ransacked for weapons and canoes ; in vain for me have spades been busy in Assyria and Babylonia. Primitive man does not interest me, and Nineveh was not human enough. Not till the Egyptians baked pottery divinely blue and invented most of civilisation's endearing ways did the world begin for me; but I could spare everything that Egypt has yielded us rather than the Demeter of Cnidos, the serenest thing in England, or the head of Julius Caesar. For although at the Museum the interesting predominates over the beautiful, the beautiful is here too ; more than the beautiful, the sublime. For here are the Elgin Marbles : the Three Fates from the Parthenon, and its bas-reliefs, which are among the greatest works of art that man has achieved. We may not have the Winged Victory of Samothrace, or the Venus of Milo, the Laocoon or the Dying Gladiator; but we have these, and we have the Demeter and the Julius Caesar and the bronze head of Hypnos, although lately a torso has been attached to this not at all to its advantage. Indeed, I doubt if any of the restorations to broken statuary have been good. The nose given to Demeter fortunately was removed again, in deference to public opinion; but Julia Paula, just inside the Roman Gallery, who used to be so mischievous and charming with her broken retrousse is now nothing at all with that organ made long and hooked.

One reaches the sculpture galleries by way of the Roman Gallery, where the Emperors are, culminating in the Julius Caesar, surely the most fascinating male head ever chiselled from marble. I pause always before the pugilistic features of Trajanus, and the Caracalla, so rustic and determined. In the Second Gr co-Roman room is a superb Diskobolos, and here also is a little beautiful torso of Aphrodite loosening her sandal that action in which the great masters so often placed her, that the exquisite contour of the curved back might be theirs. My favourites in the Third Gr co-Roman room are the head of Aphrodite from the Towneley Collection No. 1596; the boy extracting a thorn from his foot, No. 1755; the head of Apollo Musagetes, No. 1548, the beauty of which triumphs over the lack of a nose in the amazing way that the perfect beauty of a statue will so much so indeed that one very soon comes not to miss the broken portions at all. It is almost as if one acquires a second vision that subconsciously supplies the missing parts and enables one to see it whole; or rather prevents one from noticing that it is incomplete. I love also the head in Asiatic attire No. 1769 on the same side, and the terminal figure opposite No. 1742 on which the winds and the rains have laid their softening hand.

But all these give way to the Ceres, or Demeter, in the Greek ante-room. This is to me the most beautiful piece of sculpture in the British Museum. It came from the sanctuary of Demeter at Cnidos a temple to worship in indeed! I know of no Madonna in the painting of any old master more maternal and serene and wise and holy than this marble goddess from the fourth century B.c., a photograph of which will be found opposite page 186.

In a case on the right of the Ephesus Room, as you enter from this ante-room, are two gems another little Aphrodite, No. 1417, with a back of liquid softness ; and a draped figure of the same goddess, from her temple at Cyrene the lower half only the folds of the dress being exquisite beyond words.

And so we enter the room which brings more people to Bloomsbury than any other treasure here the room of the Elgin Marbles, which certain sentimentalists would restore to Greece but which I for one think better here. The group of Fates is the most wonderful; and it is difficult to imagine how much more impressive they would be if they were unmutilated. As it is, they have more dignity and more beauty than the ordinary observer can witness unmoved. Broken fragments as they are, they are the last word in plastic art ; and one wonders how the Athenians dared look at their temple in its perfection. On a lower plane, but great and satisfying and beautiful beyond description, are some of the reliefs from the frieze the perfection of the treatment of the horse in decorative art. Such horses, such horsemen: life and loveliness in every line.