MUSEUMS.

The chief art treasures of Berlin are found in the Royal Museums, Old and New, and in the National Gallery. There are few more characteristic and inspiring sights in Europe than that which greets the eye in a walk on a sunny afternoon in winter from the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm I. through the Operahaus Platz and the Zeughaus Platz, across the Schloss Bruecke and the Lustgarten, to the peerless building of the Old Museum, with the grand équipages, the brilliant uniforms, and the busy but not overcrowded life which throng the vast spaces of these handsome thoroughfares. The Old Museum is not so rich in masterpieces as some other and older art galleries, but there are many fine original works. The Friezes from the Altar of Zeus, excavated within a few years at Pergamus, are extremely interesting, and are exhibited with all the adjuncts which the most thorough German scholarship can supply for their elucidation. The celebrated Raphael tapestry, woven for Henry VIII. from the cartoons now in the South Kensington Museum, and long the foremost ornament of the palace of Whitehall, hangs in the great upper rotunda, which is a setting not unworthy of its fame. Michael Angelo’s “John the Baptist as a Boy,” one of his early works, is quite unlike most of this master’s work, in conception and execution, and is interesting especially on this account. The “Altar-piece of the Mystic Lamb” is remarkable for its merits and because it is reputed to be the first picture ever painted in oils. Murillo’s “Ecstasy of Saint Anthony” is a picture of rare sweetness and power. In one room are five of Raphael’s Madonnas, but only one of them is in his better style. “The collection of pictures in the Old Museum,” wrote George Eliot in 1855, “has three gems which remain in the imagination, ’Titian’s Daughter,’ Correggio’s ’Jupiter and Io,’ and his ‘Head of Christ on a Handkerchief.’ I was pleased, also, to recognize among the pictures the one by Jan Steem which Goethe describes in the ‘Wahlverwandschaften’ as the model of a tableau vivant presented by Lucian and her friends. It is the daughter being reproved by her father, while the mother empties her wine-glass.”

The department of the Museum known as the Antiquarium has its treasures. Here is the original silver table service, supposed to be that of a Roman General, dug up in 1868 near the old German mediaeval town of Hildesheim. A handsome copy of this service is among the beginnings of Chicago’s Art collections. Here are the exquisite terra-cotta statuettes from the ancient Grecian Colony of Tanagra, which no modern work of plastic art can imitate in grace of form and delicacy of color, dating three or four hundred years before the Christian era; and in other rooms, a fabulous collection of jewels, and numberless precious vases, illustrating especially the progress of Ancient Grecian Art.

The New Museum, connected by a colonnade with the Old, is not, like it, remarkable for architectural beauty; but its vast collections, especially in marble, already need and are to have a new building. The masterpieces of ancient sculpture gathered at Munich, Vienna, Paris, Rome, Naples, and elsewhere, are here reproduced in casts, making up a collection said to be, in its way, unrivalled in the world. The collection of originals in Renaissance sculpture is also extensive and valuable.

Referring to sculpture in Berlin, George Eliot wrote: “We went again and again to look at the Parthenon Sculptures, and registered a vow that we would go to feast on the originals [in the British Museum] the first day we could spare in London.” At the date before mentioned, her opinion was that “the first work of art really worth looking at that one sees in Berlin is the ‘Horse-Tamers’ in front of the [Old] palace. It is by a sculptor [Baron Clodt, of St. Petersburg] who made horses his especial study; and certainly, to us, they eclipsed the famous Colossi at Monte Cavallo, casts of which are in [before] the New Museum.”

The Department of Coins has 200,000 specimens, many very old and rare; and that of Northern Antiquities illustrates with great fulness the prehistoric and Roman periods. The Cabinet of Engravings is extremely interesting, and has some specimens of very great value; but it is open to the general public for a few hours on Sunday only, and even then the greater part of its collections is reserved to art students, who have the entire monopoly of its treasures on other days of the week. It well repays persistent effort, however, to make a few quiet visits to this rare cabinet. Some of the finest works are hung on the walls of the pleasant rooms.

The famous mural paintings by Kaulbach adorning the upper staircase walls of the New Museum are widely admired, but critics differ in the estimate of their place as works of art. The upper saloons reached by this staircase show the cartoons of Cornelius, and foreshadow a grandeur in German art not yet realized.

The third building in the group which holds the chief art treasures of Berlin is the National Gallery, its pictures partaking, as such a collection should, strongly of the German spirit as shown in modern German art. The paintings are of various degrees of merit, many being of value chiefly as reflecting the national life. A fine portrait of Mommsen arrested me, on one visit; a striking picture, “Christ healing a Sick Child in its Mother’s Arms,” by Gabriel Max, was a continual favorite; and many others were among those to which we went frequently and before which we lingered long.

The crowning excellence of all the Royal Art Collections is their singular method and completeness. The Old Museum, especially, in its arrangement and illustration of the history of painting in all schools, is without a peer, and it is particularly rich in the early Italian masters. The National Gallery in London has been compared in arrangement with the Berlin Museum, but our observation showed nowhere else in Europe so great facility for systematic study of art as here.

Quite recently, a writer in the “London Art Journal,” in comparing European art galleries, characterizes the Italian galleries, except the Pitti, as mere storehouses of pictures, so great have been the accessions, in late years, of altar-pieces from suppressed convents; while, on the other hand, the Louvre, and the galleries of Munich, Dresden, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Madrid still retain their original characteristics as collections made by persons of taste and discrimination. “The Berlin Gallery,” says this writer, “is neither a storehouse nor a collection. It stands on a footing of its own. The studious and organizing Prussian mind soon handed over the management of all its collections to a body of specialists, trained to study the objects in their keeping and to arrange them not so much for the delight as for the information of a studious public. The Berlin Gallery has been thus arranged, and its additions have been purchased under the direction of scholars and historians rather than artists and dilettanti. Historical sequence and historical completeness have been aimed at. The collection is intended to exemplify the development of the art of painting in mediaeval and renascence Europe. It is impossible to enter the Museum gallery and not be struck with this fact. The visitor finds himself turned into a student of the history of painting, as he wanders from room to room. The ordering of the pictures, the information contained in the catalogue, everything points in the same direction. So clearly has the Museum come to be understood at Berlin as a kind of art-history branch of a university, that a portion of the funds devoted to it is annually spent upon the publication of a periodical universally recognized as the leading magazine in the world devoted to the history of art. By means of it, students in all countries are informed from year to year of the new acquisitions and discoveries made by the staff of the Museum, or by the leading authors and students of the subject, of all nationalities. The Berlin collection has thus won for itself a place as the historical collection par excellence.”

The Museums are under the care of a Director-General, with nine or more Directors of Departments. Dr. Julius Meyer, Director of the Picture-Gallery, is said to be probably unequalled by any living writer for a wide and philosophic grasp of the whole subject of Art History, to which his life has been devoted; while the names of distinguished scholars and professors at the head of the other departments are guaranties of similar excellence. A series of four illustrated volumes is now in process of publication, which will present, in photographs and engravings, large or small, every picture of importance in the gallery. The text of these volumes, by Drs. Meyer and Bode, will be extremely valuable, and the whole will doubtless stand foremost among publications designed as exponents of European galleries.

The fine and massive building of the Arsenal, opposite the palace of the late Crown Prince, dates from the time of Frederick I., last of the Electors and first of the Prussian Kings. The grand sculptures of the German artist Schlueter, who was afterwards called to the aid of Peter the Great in the creation of St. Petersburg, adorn the exterior of the edifice. Any chance walk along the Linden will arrest the attention to this building, with the remarkable heads of dying warriors carved in the keystones of its window arches. In the renovation of the Arsenal a few years since, no improvement was made on the exterior, except to remove the accumulations of smoke and dust which a hundred and seventy years had deposited there. After the close of the Franco-Prussian War, it was the thought of the aged Emperor to make this Arsenal, already crowded with an immense collection of arms, armor, and trophies, into a kind of Walhalla, a National Hall of Fame. This was fully carried out. In rooms on the ground floor one may read the whole history of ordnance, old and new, including the famous Armstrong and Krupp guns. A portion of this floor is devoted to models of fortresses, plans of battles, and captured flags. There is a war library; and the celebrated pictures of the Giant Grenadiers, painted with his own hand by Frederick William I., father of Frederick the Great, are also to be seen.

A magnificent double staircase under a glass roof leads to the second floor (in Germany called the first), where one portion is devoted to an interesting collection of arms, which is, however, inferior to those of one or two other European cities. The chief attraction to the visitor, as well as a permanent magnet to the patriotic Berlinese, who come hither in whole families, is the “Hall of Fame,” consisting of three sections, all splendid in mosaic floors and massive marble pillars, and adorned with sculpture and fine historical frescos. One of the latter represents the Coronation of the first King of Prussia at Koenigsberg, and another has for its subject the Proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles. The Central Hall is adorned with bronze statues of the Great Elector, of the Fredericks and Frederick-Williams of the Prussian royal line, and of the Emperor William I. The “Halls of the Generals,” on either side of this “Hall of the Rulers,” have busts of the military leaders, including a fine one of the Crown Prince. Here are also several historical paintings; prominent among which are “The Battle of Turin,” “The Emperor William and the Crown Prince at Koeniggraetz,” and “The Capitulation at Sedan.”

Perhaps no collection, among many more which might be mentioned, better illustrates the practical working of the German mind than the Royal Post Museum in the Leipziger Straße. Here is shown everything of interest connected with the transmission of intelligence, and poetry as well as prose has entered into the heart of this Government exhibit. On the walls of the first saloon entered by the visitor are copies in stone of Assyrian bas-reliefs showing a warrior with chariot and arrows. This suggests to us a scene in the lives of David and Jonathan; but communication by means of arrows is probably much older than the time of David. Earlier than even the Assyrian stone must have been the model for the Egyptian wicker and wooden post-chariot. In this room, under a glass case, is an exquisite marble statuette, found at Tanagra, of a Grecian girl seated, and writing on a tablet; and not far away is a Roman warrior, carrying his message. Entering the next hall, we pass a beautiful bronze statue of Philip, the Grecian soldier, bearing a laurel spray, stretching his athletic limbs in breathless strides as he goes toward the capital to announce the battle of Marathon, and to fall dead on his entrance to the city, with the single word “Victory!” on his lips. Here on the walls are four emblematic pictures: “The Land-Post,” representing a knight with a sealed missive in his hand, standing beside and curbing his fiery steeds; “The Sea-Post,” showing a mail-carrier on the back of a dolphin in the midst of stormy waves far out at sea; “The Telegraph,” with Jove and his lightnings as its central figure: and “The Rohrpost,” a maiden, blowing into an orifice with “the breath of all the winds.” This last is emblematic of that postal arrangement in Berlin by which letters and postal cards are sent with great speed through pneumatic tubes from which the air is exhausted by means of pumps, and which makes it possible to receive a written message from a distant part of the city within a few minutes after it is written.

Among the ancient representations are models of the boats in which the old Norsemen sailed the seas, and of those by which our Anglo-Saxon ancestors invaded England from Germany. These are strikingly contrasted, in their simplicity and clumsiness, with a fully equipped model, from four to six feet long, of a modern North German Lloyd Atlantic mail steamship, than which no better equipped boat sails the main. One goes on, past a Gobelin tapestry representing a mail-scene at Nueremberg in the Middle Ages, through long halls and corridors where are hundreds of models of post-office buildings of the most convenient and approved plans, in all parts of the world. These are of every variety of architecture, from the great general post-office in London, the handsome Hanover post-office building, those of the central and district post-offices in Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, Heidelberg, and many others in South Germany, to the modern edifices which adorn, and yet seem strangely out of keeping with, the picturesque old North German towns. These models are miniature copies of the exteriors of post-office buildings, varying in length from one and a half to six or eight feet, and of corresponding height. One most interesting model shows the interior of a modern post-office, each floor showing an exact copy of its department of the service, with all appliances and conveniences.

In another room are miniature mail-coaches of different kinds. In the centre of this apartment stands a life-size figure of a mail-carrier in Germany of four hundred years ago. He is a wild-looking official, reminding one by his bronzed features and general appearance of some trusty Indian scout, as he holds his gun in an attitude of suspicion and menace, while a bear-cub opens a capacious mouth at his feet.

Model mail and post-office cars occupy the side of another large room; but this exhibit is so vast and varied that the memory refuses to retain its classification, and holds side by side Alaskan sledges drawn by dogs, Russian post-chaises with reindeer teams, mail-boats on Norwegian fiords, carrier-pigeons and balloons, camels and elephants, and the model mail-coach of the lightning express of the New York Central Railroad. The working appliance used in America for catching off a mail-bag without stopping the train attracts much attention. There is a complete set of the weights and measures used in British post-offices, and two glass cases show the forms of horseshoes best adapted to the speed of horses carrying mails. Tablets, pens, and pencils have cases to themselves, as well as parchments, ancient rolls and ink-horns, reeds and papyrus. Here are the primitive postal arrangements of some of the East Indies; there is the yellow satin missive with a scarlet seal which carries the royal mandates of Siam. Pictures and models of mail-carrying elephants come next, their gay saddle-cloths filled with pockets and parchment rolls. A model of a Japanese post-office is finished in all its interior with the perfection of detail and delicacy of execution which characterize the best Japanese work. A framed engraving of the International Postal Congress at Berne in 1874 hangs near one of the Congress at Paris in 1878. There is a room devoted to the exhibition of postal stamps, cards, and envelopes of every kind, and there are several rooms where models of the most approved kinds of telegraphic apparatus are shown. In a corridor are all varieties of submarine cables, with the ore and the Bessemer steel of which they are spun. In one of the rooms a small crowd is collected about an operator who speaks through a telephone, records the sound of his own voice on strips of foil, which he tears into fragments and distributes to those who eagerly reach for them. In the centre of this room there is a tiny circular railway, with a coach, but no locomotive, standing on the track. By turning the wheel of an electro-magnet the official produces an electric light at the extremity of a model burner; then, applying the same power to the little railway, propels the coach at a rapid rate by means of the invisible agent. One goes forth into the street, past wax figures of armed and mounted mail-messengers in the Middle Ages, past the model street mail-boxes and carriages which help to make so wonderful the Berlin postal arrangements, in a maze at what may here be seen in a single half-hour of the history of mail-carrying in all lands and ages. The originator of this “Post Museum” is Dr. Stephan, the inventor of the postal card and the chief promoter of the International Postal Union. His is the “power behind the throne” which has made the German postal system a marvel of efficiency, unsurpassed, if not unrivalled, in the world.

Less known to travellers than many others far inferior in interest, is the Hohenzollern Museum, occupying the Monbijou Palace in the heart of Berlin. This palace, of so much interest to the readers of Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great,” has been transformed into a repository for the personal belongings and memorials of the kings and queens of Prussia. One or more rooms devoted to each sovereign in historical succession make up a fascinating picture of the royal customs of the kingdom for two hundred years. Our attention was called to this museum by an English resident, but its interest far exceeded our expectations. Here are the laces, jewels, and often the entire wardrobes of the Hohenzollern queens, with their writing desks and tablets, jewel-cases, embroidery, work-baskets, mirrors, beds, and other furniture; and the kings have each their own apartment likewise, tenanted by their “counterfeit presentments” in wax, sitting or standing in the very clothes they wore, and surrounded by visible mementos of the life they used to live. The glittering eyes and mundane expression of Frederick William I., father of Frederick the Great, give one a strange feeling, and the chairs and table of his “Tobacco College” must have a vivid interest for every reader of Carlyle’s “Frederick.” But when we entered the rooms containing the many mementos of the Great Frederick himself, from his effigy in the cradle and his baby shoes, and threaded all the vicissitudes of that strangely fascinating life by the help of its visible surroundings, and finally stood before the glass case containing a mask of his dead face and hand surrounded by its laurel wreath, the spell of the past was at its height. It was a bright sunny afternoon, and the golden light came in long slanting lines through windows opening on Monbijou gardens, beautiful even in winter, and lay upon the tessellated floors of the corridors in patterns of shining glory. The chat and laughter of young companions floated from adjoining rooms, and the foot of the guard fell softly in the marble halls. But a kind of awe born of that wonderful past had taken possession of me. I was alone with the spirit of the Great Monarch, and it was more than could be borne. We hurried away from the spot, as when children we fled from fancied ghosts. To one in search of a genuine sensation, we recommend the reading (with judicious skipping) of Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great,” and a visit, alone or with a single companion, to the Hohenzollern Museum.

Upwards of twenty years ago, German trade was falling behind in the best markets of the world, because the products of German industry were largely poor in quality and deficient in artistic value. With the Duke of Ratisbon, President of the Herrenhaus, as chairman of a committee appointed to consider the subject, a few leading minds combined in a movement which issued in the establishment of the Industrial Art Museum. The Crown Prince and the Crown Princess were much interested in the subject, and gave the plan their hearty support. Less than ten years since, the fine new building in Zimmer Straße near Koeniggraetzer was opened on the birthday of the Crown Princess, to receive the vast treasures accumulated, by gift, loan, and purchase, for the permanent exhibition. A cursory visit, though most interesting, is sometimes bewildering from the extent and variety of the collection. The centre of the edifice consists of a large court, roofed with glass and surrounded by two galleries. This is the place reserved for loan exhibitions, and several of importance have already been held here. One of the earlier was of some of the treasures of the South Kensington Museum, loaned by Queen Victoria. Opening upon these arcades are numerous halls on the lower floor, devoted to the permanent exhibition. The classification of the objects exhibited, if not loose, is very general, seeming to us inferior to the method which makes the South Kensington a delight, whether one has hours or months in which to visit it. On the ground floor of this Berlin Museum are “objects in the making of which fire is not used.” This includes domestic and ecclesiastical furniture of different countries and historical periods, musical instruments, tapestries, carvings in ivory and wood, and many other objects widely separated in thought. A fine exhibit is made of articles in amber wrought by workmen of rich old Dantzic, for which Baltic Germany furnishes the raw material. The ancient Italian carved bridal-chests brought vividly to mind our childhood’s favorite story of Ginevra, by chance imprisoned in such a chest on the day which was to have witnessed her marriage.

The upper floor, with an arrangement similar to that of the lower, shows “objects in the manufacture of which fire is necessary.” The very extensive collection of pottery and porcelain was surpassed, in our observation, only by that at Sevres; and there are many rare and valuable specimens of work in glass and metals. The ancient municipal silver service of the city of Lueneberg, bought at a cost of $165,000, deserves the attention it attracts; and the work of German mediaeval goldsmiths particularly of the famous Augsburg artisans is a revelation of the possibilities of human handiwork. Stained glass, of much historic and artistic value, fills the windows of the entire building. The specimens of textile fabrics, in completeness and extent, are matchless, and are so arranged as to afford the utmost facility to students of the history of this important subject, as well as great pleasure to the favored visitor who has the opportunity to inspect them.

This “Kuenstgewerbe Museum” is open to the public without charge on three days of the week, and for a small fee on the remaining days; while its valuable industrial library may be freely consulted on four week-day evenings. Its influence is already strongly felt along the lines of trade and industry throughout the Empire.

The great Ethnographical Museum adjoining, on the corner of Koeniggraetzer Straße, has the kind and variety of objects usually found in such exhibitions, including those connected with several races of American Indians. The other departments were, to us, eclipsed in interest by the Schliemann exhibition of Trojan remains on the ground floor. Here we found, on the walls, framed pencil or India ink sketches of the localities where the earlier excavations were made, plans of the work, sections of the unearthed portions, and the precious old Trojan antiquities themselves, deposited here for inspection and safe keeping.

The Maerkische Museum, in the Fisch Markt, a centre of Old Berlin, illustrates the history and the prehistoric times of the Mark of Brandenburg, including an interesting department of curiosities from the lake-dwellings and tumuli. There are also ancient coins and other objects picked up at different times within the province. One of the later treasures of this unique museum is the box from which the monk Tetzel sold the indulgences which fanned into a flame the rising fires of the Reformation.