It was there, some years ago, as I stood before the half-done marvel
of the Night and Morning, that I first conceived the idea of a museum
of incomplete masterpieces. And now I mean to organise the thing on my
own account. The Baptistery itself, so full of unfulfilment, and with
such a wealth, at present, of spare space, will be the ideal setting
for my treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep
itself in the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and
perhaps in excellent preservation, Penelope's web and the original
designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a
reformed House of Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime
German Emperor for a proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of
Paris. There too shall be the MS. of that fragmentary `Iphige'nie'
which Racine laid aside so meekly at the behest of Mlle. de Tre`ves--
`quoique cela fu^t de mon mieux'; and there an early score of that one
unfinished Symphony of Beethoven's--I forget the number of it, but
anyhow it is my favourite. Among the pictures, Rossetti's oil-painting
of `Found' must be ruled out, because we know by more than one drawing
just what it would have been, and how much less good than those
drawings. But Leonardo's St. Sebastian (even if it isn't Leonardo's)
shall be there, and Whistler's Miss Connie Gilchrist, and numerous
other pictures that I would mention if my mind were not so full of one
picture to which, if I can find it and acquire it, a special place of
honour shall be given: a certain huge picture in which a life-sized
gentleman, draped in a white mantle, sits on a fallen obelisk and
surveys the ruined temples of the Campagna Romana.
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