Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/157

 our metaphor), they may be observed to have affected a change of linen. In the London streets their number is always great, but after Easter it becomes greater than ever. This season ushers in a quickened activity in those two forms of entertainment on whose behalf they chiefly appeal—the concerts and the picture shows.

Judged by the testimony of the wooden-shirted fraternity, the English are both the most musical and the most pictorial of races. There are half a dozen concerts every day; there is a special "exhibition" in every print shop. Every song, every singer, every picture, is the subject of a special placard, and you thus walk about in a wilderness of æsthetic mementoes. If you are a perfect stranger, you will at first be led to suppose that you are in a city whose native inspiration is a kind of résumé of the arts of modern Germany, mediæval Florence, and ancient Athens. If you are an older inhabitant, you will not be led into this illusion, but I think I may say that your reflections will be, on this ground, only a few degrees less interesting. You are not among the greatest artistic producers of the world, but you are among the greatest consumers. The supply is for the most part foreign, but the demand is extremely domestic. The evidences of the demand are, in England, to a certain extent always before one's eyes; but in London, among the various vernal phenomena, they are not the least striking. They are a part of that redundancy of luxury of which the "season" is an expression. The English are as largely addicted to intellectual luxury as to material; and these things may, I suppose, come under the former head, or in other words under that of "culture."

I am conscious at this point of the temptation to wander off into a long parenthesis and note down a few of my impressions of this same intellectual luxury—enumerate a few of those more particularly social tributes to culture which strike an observant foreigner. But remembering that it is only with the sidelight projected from picture shows that I am concerned, I content myself with the briefest allusion. An American could not be long in England before he discovers that its inhabitants are a much more "accomplished" people than ourselves—that in those graceful arts which mitigate the severity of almost obligatory leisure they are infinitely more proficient. I should say that, in the educated classes, eight English persons out of ten have some small specialty of the artistic, scientific, or literary sort. Of course I include both sexes, but I do not include the purely muscular and athletic, or, more correctly, the purely sporting members of society; these should not properly be numbered in the educated classes. The others either sketch, or "play," or sing, or botanize, or geologize, or write novels; they are amateur antiquaries, entomologists, astronomers, geographers, photographers, engravers, or wood-carvers. If they are nothing else, they are addicted to private theatricals. But these, perhaps, should be accounted a form of athletics. The ladies in particular cultivate their little private plot of æsthetic or scientific learning; thereunto impelled in a large measure, I imagine, by that peculiarly English institution of country life which is so beautiful, so stately, so respectable, and so dull. "Que faire en un gîte à moins que l'on n'a songé?"

What can you do in a country house unless you sketch, or make music, or scribble? The answer to this question sometimes takes the shape of an offhand affirmation that country houses are always filled with visitors; but the stranger is free to suspect that this is true only as regards the minority of rural residences and the scantier portion of the year. Even if his glimpses of these enchanting spots have been infinitely briefer than his desire, he will probably have gathered our impression that, for many months together, the hours are as spacious as the great smooth-rolled lawns, and the days as long as the neatly gravelled avenues.