Letters from England/In the Natural History Museum
In the Natural History Museum
“HAVE you been to the British Museum?”
“Have you seen the Wallace Collection?”
“Have you been to the Tate Gallery yet?”
“Have you seen Madame Tussaud’s?”
“Have you had a look at South Kensington Museum?”
“Have you been to the National Gallery?”
Yes, yes, yes, I have been everywhere; but now permit me to sit down and talk about something else. What was I going to say? Yes, nature is strange and mighty: and I, an unwearied pilgrim to pictures and statues, must confess that I derived the greatest delight from the sea-shells and crystals in the Natural History Museum. Of course, the mammoths and iguanoda are also very fine; likewise the fish, the butterflies, the antelopes and the other beasts of the field; but the sea-shells and conches are the prettiest, for they look as if they had been created for its amusement by a divinely playful spirit, fascinated by countless possibilities. They are pink, tempting like a girl’s mouth, purple, amber-coloured, mother-of-pearl and black, white, streaked, heavy as an anvil and as filigree as Queen Mab’s powder-puff, twisted, fluted, spiky, oval, bearing a likeness to kidneys, eyes, lips, arrows, helmets and nothing on earth; translucent, opalescent, dainty, terrifying and indescribable. What was I going to say? Yes, when I was passing through the hordes and treasures of art, the collections of furniture, weapons, garments, carpets, carvings, porcelain, things chased, engraved, woven, kneaded, hammered, inlaid, and painted, enamelled and embroidered and woven, I again saw: nature is strange and mighty. All these are other sea-shells, produced by the urge of another divine and vehement playfulness; all this was put forth by a soft and naked snail, trembling with creative frenzy. O magnificent tiny thing, Natsuke of Japan or eastern fabric, if I could have you with me at home, how I should prize you!
As a human secret, the manifestation of a mortal, a speech strange and graceful. But in this terrible and un bounded accumulation there are no individual objects, nor personal hands nor history; here is only frenzied nature, animal creativeness, a fantastic abundance of strange and beautiful sea-shells collected from a timeless ocean. Be ye also like nature; create, create, things strange, beautiful, fluted or twisted, pied and translucent; the more lavishly, strangely and purely you create, the nearer will you be to nature or perhaps to God. Mighty is nature.
But I must not forget the crystals, their shapes, laws and colours. There are crystals as big as cathedral pillars, delicate as mildew and sharp as needles; plain, blue, green like nothing in the world, of fiery colours or black; mathematical, perfect, like the contrivances of queer and bewildered sages; or recalling livers, hearts, gigantic human organs and animal fluids. There are crystalline caves or spectral bubbles or mineral dough; there is mineral fermenting, grilling, growth, architecture and engineering; I vow that a Gothic church is not the most complicated of crystals. Even within us there persists a crystalline power; even Egypt crystallized in pyramids and obelisks, Greece in pillars, Gothic in pinaches and London in cubes of black mud; countless laws of structure and composition pass through matter like secret mathematical lightning flashes. We must be exact, mathematical and geometrical, in order to be equal to nature. Number and fantasy, law and abundance are the feverish forces of nature; not sitting down beneath a green tree, but creating crystals and ideas denotes becoming as nature; creating laws and forms: penetrating matter with glowing flashes of divine computation.
Ah, how scantily eccentric, how scantily daring and precise is poetry!