except the Savage, musical instruments:  if you were to propose to have a piano, and to sing at it, I suppose the universal astonishment would be too great for words.  At the Arts, I believe, some of the members sometimes hang up pictures of their own for exhibition and criticism, but at no other club is there any recognition of Art.  There are good libraries at two or three clubs, but many have none.  In fact, the clubs which belong to gentlemen are organized as if there was no other occupation possible for civilized people in polite society, except dining, smoking, reading papers, or playing whist and billiards.  The working men who have recently established clubs of their own in imitation of the West-End clubs are said to be finding them so dull that, where they cannot turn them into political organizations, they have tolerated the introduction of gambling.  When clubs were first established gambling was everywhere the favourite recreation, so that the working men are only beginning where their predecessors began sixty years ago.

Of all the Arts the average man, be he gentleman or mechanic, knows none.  He has never learned to play any instrument at all; he cannot use his voice in taking a part, he cannot paint, draw, carve in wood or ivory, use a lathe, or make anything that the wide world wants to use.  He cannot write poetry, or drama, or fiction; he is no orator; he plays no games of cards except whist, and no other games at all of any kind.  What can he do?  He can practise the trade he has learned, by which he makes his money.  He knows how to convey property, how to buy and sell stock and shares, how to carry on business in the City.  This, if you please, is all he knows.  And when you propose that the working man shall, have an opportunity of learning and practising Art in any of its multitudinous varieties, he laughs derisively, because, which is a very natural and sensible thing to do, he puts himself in that man’s place, and he knows that he would not be tempted to undergo the drudgery and the drill of learning one of the Arts, even did that Art appear to him in the form of a nymph more lovely than Helen of Troy.

The second objection belongs to the old order of prejudice.  It used to be assumed that there were two distinct orders of human beings; it was the privilege of the higher order to be maintained by the labour of the lower; for the higher order was reserved all the graces, refinements, and joys of this fleeting life.  The lower order were privileged to work for their betters, and to have, in the brief intervals between work and sleep, their own coarse enjoyments, which were not the same as those of the upper class; they were ordained by Providence to be different, not only in degree, but also in kind.  The privileges of the former class have received of late years many grievous knocks.  They have had to admit into their body, as capable of the higher social pleasures and of polite culture, an enormous accession of people who actually work