Читать книгу The Romance of Madame Tussaud's - John Theodore Tussaud - Страница 4

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This is a fascinating book and its fascination consists in two things attaching to its subject: first that the famous collection of modelled portraits which has become a sort of national institution in England under the name of “Madame Tussaud’s” has its roots in the greatest period of modern history, the French Revolution; second, in that the complete and growing record has passed through so many changes and has yet survived.

Even though the famous collection had dealt with nothing more than the main figures of the Revolution and of the great wars that followed it, it would have been a possession of permanent and lasting historical value. I am not sure that if it had so remained, stopped short at the effigies of those now long dead, it would not now receive a greater respect. It might well in that case have become something recognised as a national possession, protected and preserved by the national government. For the prolongation of the record right on into our own time, while it very greatly increases the real value of the collection as a piece of historical evidence, yet deprives it of that illusion which men cannot avoid where history is concerned: the illusion that things thoroughly passed are in some way greater and of more consequence than contemporary things.

This continuity of the great collection—so long as it is maintained with judgment in selection and without too much yielding to momentary fame is none the less a thing to be very thankful for. Already those of us who, like the present writer, are well on into middle age, can judge how the younger generation is beginning to regard as historical these simulacra, which, when they were first modelled, seemed in our own youth insignificant because they were contemporary. To our children (who are now grown and are young men and women), Disraeli, Gladstone, Bismarck—all the group that were old but living men in the eighties (Disraeli died at the beginning of them, Bismarck long after their close)—are what to us were Louis-Philippe, Garibaldi, Palmerston, and the process properly continued will be invaluable. We have already more than 130 years of record. There is no reason why it should not extend to the two centuries.

It often happens that a thing of great value to history, a piece of evidence which we now find invaluable, has come to us by an accident, the motive of its creation not historical at all nor really connected with record. Indeed of the bulk of historical evidence which we use to-day for the reconstruction of the past only a small proportion—official documents—are of the nature of deliberate records. And that proportion of evidence is on the whole the worst as material, for official documents always have a motive underlying them, and they never give one a vivid picture. The great bulk of the material with which we used to build up the past and make it live again for ourselves is accidental. And so it is with this great collection.

The motive at first was merely that of a waxwork show. The remarkable woman who created the collection did so as a matter of business. The exhibits were intended to satisfy no more than contemporary curiosity. But they have become a piece of historical evidence which increases in value with every year. Whatever you may read (and the accounts are always contradictory) of some man prominent in the past, whatever picture or sculpture you may find of him (and these are often deliberately flattering or in some other way untrue) the physical impression of him will never be so full and so exact as in the case of an effigy made by a contemporary who saw him, watched him, knew him, and whose whole motive was exactitude in reproduction.

Here there does indeed arise the question of the medium. You cannot conceive of a better medium than wax among all the known mediums for production of effigies of human beings. Yet it is not perfect. And it is precisely because the likeness is so great, precisely because the effect is so parallel to that of reality, that we note the minor details in which illusion is not achieved. When a man sees a bust of marble he does not expect to find illusion. The greatest portrait statuary can never be more than a symbol. But the wax effigy aims at exact reproduction. To put it in extreme terms, the ideal of the modeller in wax would be to reproduce a figure such that one knowing the original could be deceived and think he had found again his friend dead or sleeping. When a wax effigy reproduces a known and real person, especially a person whom we ourselves have come across, the discrepancy between reality and its copy is clearer. But there is this strong evidence in support of the success which modelling in wax has reached, that where we are dealing with something unknown, some imaginary person, it is possible to create, in spite of the immobility of the figure, an illusion of life. Everyone who has visited these collections will testify to that. With a person whom one has seen in the flesh the little details in which the wax does not tally with the flesh nor immobility with life, stand out clear. That is especially the case with those whose complexion is difficult to imitate. It is also the case in the attachment of the hair. And I have further noticed that the direction of the eyes makes a difference, the figure being more lifelike as a rule when the eyes are cast down or averted, than when a direct look is imitated. But it remains true that with an imaginary person when you are free to suppose that the person had a complexion of the sort easily imitated in wax, and where you are further free to presume the pose, you can get as near to reality in this medium as it is possible for human art to achieve.

Therein, then, lies the great value of this thing. It is a witness to history, and as I have said, one increasingly valuable as time proceeds.

Still it is with what is chiefly historical in this gallery of figures and especially with the tradition of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, that we are most concerned. And the Tussaud collection has this added interest that it sprung as it were from the revolutionary time. Its origins lay in that. Its first fame was due to an emigration from France into England, and it still remains much the best effort at physical reconstruction which we have to-day.

The reason is that the lady who founded this institution was not only herself a contemporary of but an actor in the principal events of that time. She came by a series of accidents into direct touch with one personality after another. She left a record of each. She was a personal and convincing witness and her work remains. She is just as much a person of the Revolution and of the Napoleonic period as any one of those whom she modelled for our benefit. And that is (let us remember) of special value in that one is in the spirit of one’s time.

The artist deliberately reconstructing a bust through plastic art is always in danger of failing through a lack of the necessary sympathy between the time in which he lives and the time in which his subject lived. The truth of this is expressed very sharply in modern attempts at reconstructing mediæval sculpture. It has been done. It is singularly successful, for instance, in the central porch of Notre Dame in Paris. But as a rule it fails. The modern man either works from a modern model, or at any rate with modern expressions and modern features at the back of his mind. One conspicuous instance occurs to me, the modern figures upon Lichfield. They are as grievously out of their supposed time as are the figures of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the Kings.” The Knights of the Round Tables of Tennyson’s version are the gentlemen of pegtopped trousers who were contemporary with the poet. They have been to public schools and to universities. They would be horrified at the dropping of aitches, and they have often attended at services which were fully choral. They would have called the inhabitants of the country which they visited “natives.” That is what Tennyson made of Geraint and Launcelot and his odious Arthur.

I am afraid one cannot say much more for the sculptures that I have in my mind. They are dressed in mediæval armour, but the faces that look out from the helmets are the faces to be seen in the London clubs to-day. They are faces devoid of simplicity and strength. They are not the faces of the Middle Ages.

You have the same thing in historical painting, and that is why historical painting usually looks so ridiculous in the generation after it was made. We all know those historical paintings which our grandfathers bought and which still disfigure the large rooms of private houses, where you have Richard I of England charging the Saracens (he, an Angevin!), his face glowing with the emotions of the football field.

Now this prime difficulty and error in pictorial and plastic record in the past you can only avoid by the advantage of contemporary work, and this is where the great value of this collection comes in. All its work is contemporary, and we can to-day, after an interval of more than a hundred years, weigh the importance of that point. The revolutionary figures sometimes look odd to us precisely because their real aspect has been so vividly preserved. The hand that modelled Marat was a hand of Marat’s age. It touched the flesh of the dead man. The eyes that received the conception reproduced by the hands, gazed upon Marat himself as he lay back dead.

And here it is convenient to introduce that essential character in the great collection—the genius of its originator.

The whole thing, its character, long tradition and establishment—is the creation of one remarkable woman, and of her we ought to have some full biography. I know of none. She has at least the rare advantage of having propagated her name justly and the thing she created is identified with her. It is not often that history acts with so little irony and with so much generosity. Her energy was much more remarkable than that of those very few women who have created and organised permanent businesses, for it was not only her judgment and initiative which created the commercial side of the collection: it was also her own talent and industry, the work of her own hands, that laid the foundation of it all. Most of the early portraits were the direct product of her skill and it is from her that the continuous tradition of the place descends. Her sons learnt their art from their mother and carried it on to the third generation which still continues it. It was she who took all the critical decisions, she who steered the fortunes of the family through the crisis of the Revolution, who determined to take the collection over to England, who conceived the idea of making it a permanent record by adding contemporaries year after year.

It is not often that one has this intimate admixture of personality with an institution, and when one gets it it has an astonishing effect in vivifying the whole. When an institution is thus the product of a character at once highly energetic and highly individual, it is as though a living thing continued on long beyond the term of a human life. It is, in the strict and original sense of the word, “inspired.” You get that quality, of course, in all literature, and in some of the corporations which remarkable men and women have founded, but very rarely in a piece of business in an institution of affairs. Here you get it, and the more you read of the woman’s life and character the more you understand the success of her effort and its vitality.