The finer class of people in the
East-end of London seem to enjoy the very noblest and even the most
abstruse of sacred music at the Sunday concerts; but it will be long
before the music-hall audiences are educated up even to the standard
of those crowds who come off the Whitechapel pavements to hear Handel.
We cannot hurry them: why try? Their lives are very hard, and, when
the brief gleam comes on the evening of evenings in the week, we
should be content with ensuring them decency, safety, order, and let
them enjoy their own entertainment in their own way. A thoroughly
prosaic and logical preacher might say to those poor souls with
perfect truth, "Why do you waste time in coming here to see things
which are done much better in the streets? You roar and cheer and
stamp when you see a real cab-horse come across from the wings, and
yet in an hour you might watch a hundred cabs pass you in the street
and you would not cheer the least bit. You hear a costermonger on the
stage say, 'Give me my 'umble fireside, and let my good old missus
'and me my cup o' tea and my 'ard-earned bit o' bread, and all the
dooks and lords in Hengland ain't nothin' to me!'--you hear that, and
you know quite well that no costermonger on this goodly earth ever
talked in that way, and still you cheer.
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