But London has, in no sense, the importance for England which Paris has for France. It is a centre of attraction for business; but the more refined classes of society live in the country. As soon as one is off in the Dover express country houses fly past on either side of the train. They are all over England--upon the shores of the lakes, upon the strand of the sea, upon the tops of the hills. And how pleasant they are, how well appointed, how delightful to look at, with their gabled roofs and their gleaming brickwork overgrown with ivy! Around them stretches a fresh lawn which is rolled every morning, as soft as velvet. Fat oxen, and sheep as white as if they had been just washed, lie upon the grass. Thus all rustic England is like a great summer resort, where there is heard no sound of the ringing and throbbing strokes of life. Nor is painting allowed to disturb this idyllic harmony. No one wishes that anything should remind him of the prose of life when his work is done and the town has vanished. Schiller's assertion, "Life is earnest, blithe is art," is here the first law of æesthetics.
[Illustration: _Mag. of Art._ LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.]
English painting is exclusively an art based on luxury, optimism, and aristocracy; in its neatness, cleanliness, and good-breeding it is exclusively designed to ingratiate itself with English ideas of comfort. Yet the pictures have to satisfy very different tastes--the taste of a wealthy middle class which wishes to have substantial nourishment, and the æesthetic taste of an _élite_ class, which will only tolerate the quintessence of art, the most subtle art that can be given. But all these works are not created for galleries, but for the drawing-room of a private house, and in subject and treatment they have all to reckon with the ascendant view that a picture ought, in the first place, to be an attractive article of furniture for the sitting-room. The traveller, the lover of antiquity, is pleased by imitation of the ancient style; the sportsman, the lover of country life, has a delight in little rustic scenes; and the women are enchanted with feminine types. And everything must be kept within the bounds of what is charming, temperate, and prosperous, without in any degree suggesting the struggle for existence. The pictures have themselves the grace of that mundane refinement from the midst of which they are beheld.