Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/159

 perceived that what I started to say was that the taste for art in England is at bottom a fashion, a need of luxury, a tribute even, as my friend says, to propriety; not an outgush of productive power. So the reflective stranger concludes, after having gone the rounds of everything in the way of an exhibition that the season offers him; and so, if he had time to make the reader perform the same interesting tour, he would expect the latter to conclude with him. But if art is a fashion in England, at least it is a great fashion. How these people have always needed, in a certain sort of way, to be entertained; what handsome things they have collected about them; in the absence of production, on what a scale the consumption has always gone on! A great multiplicity of exhibitions is, I take it, a growth of our own day—a result of that democratization of all tastes and fashions which marks our glorious period. But the English have always bought pictures in quantities, and they certainly have often had the artistic intelligence to buy good ones. In England it has not been the sovereigns who have purchased, or the generals who have "lifted," and London accordingly boasts of no national collection equal to the gallery at Dresden or the Louvre. But English gentlemen have bought—with English bank notes—profusely, unremittingly, splendidly. They have stored their treasures in their more or less dusky drawing-rooms, so that the people at large have not, on the whole, been much the wiser; but the treasures are at any rate in the country, and are constantly becoming more accessible. Of their number and value the exhibitions held for several years past, during the winter, in the rooms of the Royal Academy, and formed by the loan of choice specimens of the old masters, have been a liberal intimation. These exhibitions give a great impression of the standing art-wealth of Great Britain, and of the fact that, whether or no the English people have painted, the rest of the world has painted for them. They have needed pictures; it is ungracious to look too narrowly at the grounds of the need. Formerly it was supplied almost exclusively by the lordly operation of purchase; now it is gratified by the simpler process of paying a shilling to an extremely civil person in a front shop and passing into certain maroon-draped penetralia, where the London daylight is most artfully economized, and where a still more civil person supplies you with a neat literary explanation of the pictures, majestically printed on cardboard, and almost as clever as an article in a magazine.

They do all this wonderfully well in London, I always appreciate it; but then, perhaps, I am too appreciative. I have just come out of a place in Bond street, which struck me as a particularly characteristic example of its class. The exhibitions in Bond street, indeed, are legion, and are surpassed (if surpassed) in number only by those in Pall Mall. In this case I saw by the outside announcements that a great religious work by Sir Noel Paton, R. S. A., LL. D., was on view within, and I furthermore perused a statement, glued to the middle of the plate-glass window, that the picture had, on Thursday, May 10, been conveyed to Marlborough for inspection by H. R. H. the Prince of Wales. Here was a combination of attractions not to be resisted. A religious picture, painted by a baronet, a Royal Scottish Academician (I believe that is the meaning of the first batch of initials), and a Doctor of Laws, and further consecrated by exposure to the awful gaze of royalty—a glimpse of such a work was certainly cheap at a shilling. "C'est pour rien," said that friend whom I just now quoted, who happened to be with me, and who interlards his conversation most unconsciously with disjointed scraps of French. We paid our respects—that is, our shilling—to the blond young lady posted ad hoc in the front shop, and then we were inducted by two blond gentlemen—