Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/155

 VOL. XXIV.—AUGUST 1877.— No. 2.

    THE PICTURE SEASON IN LONDON.

the advance of the spring and the development of the season, in London, the streets (in the West End) begin to present to the eye of an observant stranger a great many new characteristics. The dusky metropolis takes on, here and there, in spots, a perceptible brightness, and as the days elapse these spots increase and multiply. At last they produce a general impression of brilliancy. Thanks to this combined effect, the murky Babylon by the Thames becomes cheerful and splendid. At the climax of the season, of a fine, fresh day in June, the West End exhibits a radiance which, to my sense, casts into the shade even the charming brightness of Paris. The brightness of Paris is, as I say, charming; it is a very pretty spectacle; it flashes and twinkles, and laughs, and murmurs. Stand on the edge of the Place de la Concorde, at the bottom of the Champs Elysées, on any fine-weathered Sunday in the late spring—on a day when there are races beyond the Bois de Boulogne—and you will feel the full force of all the traditions about Paris being the gayest, easiest, eagerest, most pleasure-taking of capitals. The light has a silvery shimmer, the ladies' dresses in the carriages a charming harmony, the soldiers' red trousers a martial animation, the white caps of the bonnes a gleaming freshness. The carriages sweep in a dense line up the long vista of the Champs Elysées, amid the cool, fresh verdure, and the lines of well-dressed people sitting on neat little yellow chairs; the great mass of the Arc de Triomphe rises with majestic grace, transmuted by distance into a sort of violet shadow; the fountains sparkle and drizzle in the vast sunny place; the Seine sweeps by in an amber flood, through a channel that gleams like marble beneath the league-long frontage of the splendid Louvre, and beyond that, crowning the picturesque purple mass before which the river divides, the towers of Notre Dame stand up and balance in the opposite distance with the softened majesty of the Arch.

All this is irresistibly pretty. You feel that it was made to please. It has a kind of operatic harmony, and the impresario has thoroughly understood his business. But in that fine intermission of the London gloom of which I speak there is something more impressive, more interesting. It was not made to please, and it doesn't think of the spectators. It pleases by accident, by contrast, and by the immensity of its scale. It is an enormous, opulent society expanding to the enjoyment of the privileges and responsibilities of wealth and power, with nothing of that amiable coquetry of attitude toward the public at large which seems somehow to animate the performers in the Parisian spectacle. Except that part of 