Facsimile PDF - Online Library of Liberty

AMWSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE.
1I
must involve the hazardona expenditure of great 50m~ of
money.
A second di5cnlty is, that music is naturally more pure
and removed from the concreto and sensuous ideas of ordinary
life than a drama can usually bo. No doubt music is prostituted
in many a lascivious song, but the question might well
arise whether the impurit,y is not wholly in tho words, not in
the music. In any case the difficulty of purifying an alrondy
impure theatre must bo far greater than of promoting orchestral
perforlnancos where, with the simplest police regulations, thero
would arise no question of purity at all.
For these, and various secondary roasons which might bo
urged, I hold that musical cultivation is the safest and surest
Method of popular culture; and it is greatly to the low state
of musical education among the masses of English population
that I attribute their helpless state when seeking recreation.
In tho majority of tho Continental towns it is quite the rule to
fiud a fair orchestra giving daily open-air concerts in the public
square or park. The merchant and the shopkeeper, and tho
mechanic, as a matter of course, stroll down on a fine evening,
and spend a tranquil hour or two with their families nnd neighbours.
Tho husband perhaps takes his glass of thin beer, and
tho wife and family share a bottle or two of lemonade. A
more harmless, wholesome, and recreative mode of spending
tho evening cannot bo invented; but where is it possible to do
tho like in England, escept crt a few select watering-places ?
Not to go further afield for the present, where, I want to
know, can a young man or a family in London enjoy D few
hours of inexpensive out-of-door popular music in the summer
evenings ? The parks are open, and it is possible to walk, and
sometimes to sit down and repose in them; but where is the
music? I suppose a military band still plays every morning
at the change of guard at St. James’s Palace, as I remember
it used to do many years ago. A police band once started
afternoon performances at the end of the Mall in St. James’s
Park, and there was the hotly-contested Sunday afternoon
bud in Regent’a Park. Once or twice I heard one of the
Qnardd banda play near the Knightsbridge Barracks. With