The Portland daily press., 1882-09-12
THE Advent managers have ordered anoth
er end of the world for October 4.
The Culture Market.


now in fashion, says the st. James Gazette.
The real revolution of taste of the last few
years, and the affected estheticism which has
stood to it as the doctrines of the anarchic
Anabaptists on the Continent stood to the Ref
ormation, have brought home to the minds of
the exoteric public two distinct facts: first,
that there exists certain valuable commodity
known as culture; and secondly, that this COM
modify is greatly priced by superior persons
supposed to be in proper position to judge of
its use and Importance. These things being SO,
nothing can be more natural than that the ex-
oteric public should wish to procure a little
of this fashionable culture for itself at the low
est practicable market quotations.
1t is generally felt, however, even by the
veriest Philistine, that culture is somehow a
more intangible and subtler kind of thing than
any ordinary article of merchandise. You can
buy your picture off-hand, and have done with
it forever; it exists thenceforth as permanent
monument of your taste. You can hang it up
in your dining room and say to your admiring
friends; "This is art; this is by Blank, r. A.
bought it at So and-So's sale very cheap; little
more than two guineas" Nobody can deny
that there you have really got higl art. But
to get culture is Il 1t to be more difficult and
strictly personal thing. It is something rather
more intimate than mere art-somethiDg to be
acquired, not, like picture, by paying down
its money price at a single transaction, but
like Greek or Partisan accent, by taking
lessons to which you contribute certain
amount in personal exertion.
Accordingly, large numbers OF excellent peo-
pie, most of them in the middle ranks of life,
have set to work during the last ten years at a
mature age to acquire cultnre-not because
they feel the need of it, but because it is now
being talked about SO much in the papers,
They have no doubt at all as to the ultimate
practicability of their chosen method. You
can buy books; you can buy Japanese fans, old
china, Chppendale chairs, San Murano glass
work: you can buy grand pianos, Chopin, Schu-
bert, the music of the future; and are not
these the component elements of culture?
Therefore you can buy culture itself. Or, if it
comes to learning. you can read books on the
Renaissance-the Renaissance is so very fashion
able; and you can get little primers on lace,
and pottery and textile fabrics, and ivory cary
ing; all stamped with the official appreciation
of the Department of Science and Art, South
Kensington. If you shake your head dubious
w. if YOU hint in passing that Bedford Park
furniture and oriental blue and subdued col
ors, and all the rest of it, are at best but the
outward and visible signs of an inward and
spiritual grace, without which all these good
works avail nothing, the bewildered Philistine
hears you with unfeigned distress; scarcely
knowing what thing he has left undone that
he ought to have done. He wants, without
any previous care or preparation, to take the
kingdom of culture by storm. He wishes, like
Simon Magus, to purchase an inner grace by
simple and unaffected offer of money.
What the individual middle-class Philistine
is now doing in his own home and in his own
person, the collective middle-class Philistinism
of the great manufacturing towns has long been
~ in ito gar a q the in
dividual millionaire, the Sir Georgius Midas of
real life, bought pictures by the square yard
for his own brand new gallery, SO the collec-
tive millioDaires Joined together to buy culture
for the town to which they belonged as a whole.
They endowed colleges-a good work; they
were all good works, indeed, only the mistake
lay in supposing that such good works were in
themselves sort of vicarious culture, making
their donors in the scholastic phrase deserve
grace of congruity." They built museums aud
enamel, and Assyrian has-reliefs, and models
of Stonehenge and diagrams illustrative of the
action of the heart and vital organs.
They got up AtheD9ums and Philosophical
Societies, and Workingmens Institutes, and
new-fangled Universities. They invited Selen-
tific lecturers down from London in the winter
season to discourse about the very latest adj
yances in sciences to people who knew not the
rudinceI is thereof. They built Few town halls
in Venetian Gothic, as recommended by MIR.
modern lamps of architecture. They bought
everything that money could buy to make
their own town just as learned and just as Gull
tivated as any of its rivals, from professors of
Sanskrit and skeletons of the megatherium
down to antiquities from Mycen9 and Anglo
Saxon spindles And now that they have done
all, they turn and say, "What else would you
have us do? We get pictures by Rossetti and
Holman Hunt. We put up stained glass by
ones in our church windows. We ask
Professor Huxley to discourse evolution to us
every autumn. We read Pater, and Symonds,
and Matthew. Arnold, and Iseult, of Lyonesse.
We cover our chairs with velvet from William
Morris, and papers our walls after designs by
Dr. Dresser. We lay the Portfolio, the Con-
temporary and the Nineteenth Century in con-
spicuous places on our drawing-room tables.
We go to hear the Wagner cycle. We even
know all about the Hitites, and Mateo'S poems,
and Filipino Lippi, and the marks on Rouen
faience. And if all this isn't culture, tell us
what more we ought to do. To which the OBJ
jector can only answer, "All these things are
ye.y well in their way, but they are only the
externals of culture; they are not culture
itself. If you send your children to the colleges
YOU have built; if you bring them up in the
houses YOU have had decorated for you by COM
petent upholstered and filled with pictures and
sculpture by true artists; II you teach them be-
times to read and digest the books that lie so
obtrusively upon your drawing-room tables
you may in the end make some few among
them, who have natures originally adapted for
it, into people of real culture You are doing
the best youican; but you yourselves can never
get more than a veneer, whereas what is Iced
cd is culture in the grain. Profit and enjoy
ment no doubt you may find in VIVA you 40;
but it is no more culture than a cap and gown
is erudition, or going to chapel twice on Sum
day is religion.