Waste of better possibilities, of higher qualities, of what we call
_our soul_. To denounce this is dignified, but it is also easy and
most often correspondingly useless. I wish to descend to more prosaic
matters, and, as Ruskin did in his day, to denounce the _mere waste of
money_. For the wasting of money implies nearly always all those other
kinds of wasting. And although there are doubtless pastimes (pastimes
promoted, as is our wont, for fear of yet _other_ pastimes), which are
in themselves unclean or cruel, these are less typically evil, just
because they are more obviously so, than the amusements which imply
the destruction of wealth, the destruction of part of the earth's
resources and of men's labour and thrift, and incidentally thereon of
human leisure and comfort and the world's sweetness.
Do you remember La Bruyère's famous description of the peasants under
Louis XIV.? "One occasionally meets with certain wild animals, both
male and female, scattered over the country; black, livid and parched
by the sun, bound to the soil which they scratch and dig up with
desperate obstinacy. They have something which sounds like speech, and
when they raise themselves up they show a human face. And, as a fact,
they are human beings." The _Ancien Régime_, which had reduced them to
that, and was to continue reducing them worse and worse for another
hundred years by every conceivable tax, tithe, toll, servage, and
privilege, did so mainly to pay for amusements. Amusements of the
_Roi-Soleil_, with his Versailles and Marly and aqueducts and
waterworks, plays and operas; amusements of Louis XV., with his
Parc-aux-Cerfs; amusements of Marie-Antoinette, playing the virtuous
rustic at Trianon; amusements of new buildings, new equipages, new
ribbons and bibbons, new diamonds (including the fatal necklace);
amusements of hunting and gambling and love-making; amusements
sometimes atrocious, sometimes merely futile, but all of them leaving
nothing behind, save the ravaged grass and stench of brimstone of
burnt-out fireworks.
Moreover, wasting money implies _getting more_. And the processes by
which such wasted money is replaced are, by the very nature of those
who do the wasting, rarely, nay, never, otherwise than wasteful in
themselves. To put into their pockets or, like Marshall Villeroi
("a-t-on mis de l'or dans mes poches?"), have it put by their valets,
to replace what was lost overnight, these proud and often honourable
nobles would ante-chamber and cringe for sinecures, pensions,
indemnities, privileges, importune and supplicate the King, the King's
mistress, pandar or lacquey. And the sinecure, pension, indemnity or
privilege was always deducted out of the bread--rye-bread,
straw-bread, grass-bread--which those parched, prone human animals
described by La Bruyère were extracting "with desperate
obstinacy"--out of the ever more sterile and more accursed furrow.
It is convenient to point the moral by reference to those kings and
nobles of other centuries, without incurring pursuit for libel, or
wounding the feelings of one's own kind and estimable contemporaries.
Still, it may be well to add that, odd though it appears, the vicious
circle (in both senses of the words) continues to exist; and that,
even in our democratic civilisation, _you cannot waste money without
wasting something else in getting more money to replace it_.
Waste, and _lay waste_, even as if your pastime had consisted not in
harmless novelty and display, in gentlemanly games or good-humoured
sport, but in destruction and devastation for their own sake.