For two things do my thoughts turn now and then to London. I should like
to hear the long note of a master's violin, or the faultless cadence of
an exquisite voice, and I should like to see pictures. Music and
painting have always meant much to me; here I can enjoy them only in
memory.
Of course there is the discomfort of concert-hall and exhibition-rooms.
My pleasure in the finest music would be greatly spoilt by having to sit
amid a crowd, with some idiot audible on right hand or left, and the show
of pictures would give me a headache in the first quarter of an hour.
_Non sum qualis eram_ when I waited several hours at the gallery door to
hear Patti, and knew not a moment's fatigue to the end of the concert; or
when, at the Academy, I was astonished to find that it was four o'clock,
and I had forgotten food since breakfast. The truth is, I do not much
enjoy anything nowadays which I cannot enjoy _alone_. It sounds morose;
I imagine the comment of good people if they overheard such a confession.
Ought I, in truth, to be ashamed of it?
I always read the newspaper articles on exhibitions of pictures, and with
most pleasure when the pictures are landscapes. The mere names of
paintings often gladden me for a whole day--those names which bring
before the mind a bit of seashore, a riverside, a glimpse of moorland or
of woods. However feeble his criticism, the journalist generally writes
with appreciation of these subjects; his descriptions carry me away to
all sorts of places which I shall never see again with the bodily eye,
and I thank him for his unconscious magic. Much better this, after all,
than really going to London and seeing the pictures themselves. They
would not disappoint me; I love and honour even the least of English
landscape painters; but I should try to see too many at once, and fall
back into my old mood of tired grumbling at the conditions of modern
life. For a year or two I have grumbled little--all the better for me.