The Penn's Grove record., 1882-09-30
The Culture Market.

II rs BSncIdliy tcAtl SiOWGftIf even
by the veriest Philistine, hat culture
is somehow a more intangible and
subtle kind of thing than any Ordi-
nary article OF merchandise. You can
buy your picture off hand, and have
done with it forever; it exists thence
forth as a permanent monument Of
your taste. You can hang il up in
your dining-room and say to your
admiring friends "Thi3 is art; this
is by Blank, r. A. 1 bought it at So
and-So's sale very cheap; little more
than two thousand guineas." Nobody
can deny that there you really have
got high art-something to be acquir.
ed, not, like a picture, by paying
down its money price at a single trans
action, but like Green or Partisan &C.
cent, by taking lessons to which you
yourself contribute q certain amount
in personal exertion. Ac sordingly,
large Numbers of excellent people,
most of them in the middle ranks Of
life, have set to work during the last
ten years at a mature age to acquire
culture 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,
C~hippendsle chairs, San Murano glass.
work you can buy grand pianos,
Chopin, Schubert, the music of the
future apd are not these things the
component elements of culture?
Therefore you can buy culture itself.
Or If it ONE to learning, you a
read books or the Renaissance-the
Renaissance is so very fashionable;
and you can get little primers on lace,
and pottery, and textile fabrics, and
ivory carving; all stamped with the
official appreciation of the Department
If you shake your head dubiously, if
you hint in passing that Bedford Park
furniture and Oriental blue and sub
dued colors, 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 b~ewildered Philis-
tine hears you with unfeigned dis
tress; scarce knowing what thing he
has left undone hat he ought to have
done. He wants, without any previ-
Gus care or preparation, to take the
kingdom of culture by storm. He
wishes, like Simon Magus, to purchase
an inner grace by a simple and unaf-
fected offer of money.
What the individual middle-class
Philistine is now doing in his OWL
home and his own person, the
collective middle class Philistinism
of the great manufacturing towns
has long been doing in its cor
capacity. And now that
they have done all, they turn and say :
I" What else would you have us do2
get pictures by R0ssetti and Hol-
Hunt. We put up stained glass
by Burne Jones in u church win
We ask Professor Huxley to
discourse evolution to us everyautumn.
read Pater, and Symonds, and
Arnold, and 'Iseult of
Lyonesse.' We cover our chairs with
velvet from William Morris, and paper
our walls after designs by DIR. Dresser.
We lay The Portfolio, The COntempo-
rary, and The Nineteenth Century in
conspicuous places on our drawing
room tables. We go to hear the Wag-
ner cycle. We even know all about
the Hittites and Matteo's poems, and
Filipino Lippi, and the marks on
Rouen faienee. And if all this isn't
culture, tell us what more we ought to
do" To which the objector ear only
answer "All these things are very
well in their way, but they are only
the externals of culture they are not
culture itself. If you send your child
rem TO the colleges you have built; if
you bring them up in the houses you
have hal decorated for you by cOmpe-
lent upholsterers and filed with pic
lures and sculpture by true artists if
you teach them betimes to read and
digest the books that lie so obtrusively
upon your drawing-room tsbles-you
may in the end make some few among
them, who have natures originally
adapted for it, into people of real Gull
ture. You are doing the best you can;
but you yourselves a never get more
than the veneer, whereas what is
needed il culture in the grain. Profit
and enjoyment no doubt you may
find in what you do; but 1t Is no more
culture han a cap and gown Is erudi-
ton or than going TO chapel twice on
2ntdau IL ralinipn