Chapter Six ~~ Pecuniary Canons of Taste

The caution has already been repeated more than once, that while the

regulating norm of consumption is in large part the requirement of

conspicuous waste, it must not be understood that the motive on which

the consumer acts in any given case is this principle in its bald,

unsophisticated form. Ordinarily his motive is a wish to conform to

established usage, to avoid unfavorable notice and comment, to live

up to the accepted canons of decency in the kind, amount, and grade of

goods consumed, as well as in the decorous employment of his time and

effort. In the common run of cases this sense of prescriptive usage is

present in the motives of the consumer and exerts a direct constraining

force, especially as regards consumption carried on under the eyes of

observers. But a considerable element of prescriptive expensiveness is

observable also in consumption that does not in any appreciable degree

become known to outsiders--as, for instance, articles of underclothing,

some articles of food, kitchen utensils, and other household apparatus

designed for service rather than for evidence. In all such useful

articles a close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to

the cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question, but

do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these articles for

the material purposes which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve.

Under the selective surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste there

grows up a code of accredited canons of consumption, the effect of

which is to hold the consumer up to a standard of expensiveness and

wastefulness in his consumption of goods and in his employment of time

and effort. This growth of prescriptive usage has an immediate effect

upon economic life, but it has also an indirect and remoter effect upon

conduct in other respects as well. Habits of thought with respect to

the expression of life in any given direction unavoidably affect the

habitual view of what is good and right in life in other directions

also. In the organic complex of habits of thought which make up the

substance of an individual's conscious life the economic interest does

not lie isolated and distinct from all other interests. Something,

for instance, has already been said of its relation to the canons of

reputability.

The principle of conspicuous waste guides the formation of habits of

thought as to what is honest and reputable in life and in commodities.

In so doing, this principle will traverse other norms of conduct which

do not primarily have to do with the code of pecuniary honor, but

which have, directly or incidentally, an economic significance of some

magnitude. So the canon of honorific waste may, immediately or remotely,

influence the sense of duty, the sense of beauty, the sense of utility,

the sense of devotional or ritualistic fitness, and the scientific sense

of truth.

It is scarcely necessary to go into a discussion here of the particular

points at which, or the particular manner in which, the canon of

honorific expenditure habitually traverses the canons of moral conduct.

The matter is one which has received large attention and illustration at

the hands of those whose office it is to watch and admonish with

respect to any departures from the accepted code of morals. In modern

communities, where the dominant economic and legal feature of the

community's life is the institution of private property, one of the

salient features of the code of morals is the sacredness of property.

There needs no insistence or illustration to gain assent to the

proposition that the habit of holding private property inviolate is

traversed by the other habit of seeking wealth for the sake of the good

repute to be gained through its conspicuous consumption. Most offenses

against property, especially offenses of an appreciable magnitude, come

under this head. It is also a matter of common notoriety and byword

that in offenses which result in a large accession of property to the

offender he does not ordinarily incur the extreme penalty or the extreme

obloquy with which his offenses would be visited on the ground of the

naive moral code alone. The thief or swindler who has gained great

wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of

escaping the rigorous penalty of the law and some good repute accrues

to him from his increased wealth and from his spending the irregularly

acquired possessions in a seemly manner. A well-bred expenditure of his

booty especially appeals with great effect to persons of a cultivated

sense of the proprieties, and goes far to mitigate the sense of moral

turpitude with which his dereliction is viewed by them. It may be noted

also--and it is more immediately to the point--that we are all inclined

to condone an offense against property in the case of a man whose motive

is the worthy one of providing the means of a "decent" manner of

life for his wife and children. If it is added that the wife has been

"nurtured in the lap of luxury," that is accepted as an additional

extenuating circumstance. That is to say, we are prone to condone such

an offense where its aim is the honorific one of enabling the offender's

wife to perform for him such an amount of vicarious consumption of time

and substance as is demanded by the standard of pecuniary decency. In

such a case the habit of approving the accustomed degree of conspicuous

waste traverses the habit of deprecating violations of ownership, to the

extent even of sometimes leaving the award of praise or blame uncertain.

This is peculiarly true where the dereliction involves an appreciable

predatory or piratical element.

This topic need scarcely be pursued further here; but the remark may not

be out of place that all that considerable body of morals that clusters

about the concept of an inviolable ownership is itself a psychological

precipitate of the traditional meritoriousness of wealth. And it should

be added that this wealth which is held sacred is valued primarily

for the sake of the good repute to be got through its conspicuous

consumption. The bearing of pecuniary decency upon the scientific spirit

or the quest of knowledge will be taken up in some detail in a separate

chapter. Also as regards the sense of devout or ritual merit and

adequacy in this connection, little need be said in this place. That

topic will also come up incidentally in a later chapter. Still, this

usage of honorific expenditure has much to say in shaping popular tastes

as to what is right and meritorious in sacred matters, and the bearing

of the principle of conspicuous waste upon some of the commonplace

devout observances and conceits may therefore be pointed out.

Obviously, the canon of conspicuous waste is accountable for a great

portion of what may be called devout consumption; as, e.g., the

consumption of sacred edifices, vestments, and other goods of the same

class. Even in those modern cults to whose divinities is imputed a

predilection for temples not built with hands, the sacred buildings and

the other properties of the cult are constructed and decorated with some

view to a reputable degree of wasteful expenditure. And it needs but

little either of observation or introspection--and either will serve the

turn--to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship

has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the worshipper's

frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same fact if we reflect upon

the sense of abject shamefulness with which any evidence of indigence or

squalor about the sacred place affects all beholders. The accessories

of any devout observance should be pecuniarily above reproach. This

requirement is imperative, whatever latitude may be allowed with regard

to these accessories in point of aesthetic or other serviceability. It

may also be in place to notice that in all communities, especially in

neighborhoods where the standard of pecuniary decency for dwellings

is not high, the local sanctuary is more ornate, more conspicuously

wasteful in its architecture and decoration, than the dwelling houses

of the congregation. This is true of nearly all denominations and cults,

whether Christian or Pagan, but it is true in a peculiar degree of

the older and maturer cults. At the same time the sanctuary commonly

contributes little if anything to the physical comfort of the members.

Indeed, the sacred structure not only serves the physical well-being

of the members to but a slight extent, as compared with their humbler

dwelling-houses; but it is felt by all men that a right and enlightened

sense of the true, the beautiful, and the good demands that in all

expenditure on the sanctuary anything that might serve the comfort of

the worshipper should be conspicuously absent. If any element of comfort

is admitted in the fittings of the sanctuary, it should be at least

scrupulously screened and masked under an ostensible austerity. In the

most reputable latter-day houses of worship, where no expense is spared,

the principle of austerity is carried to the length of making the

fittings of the place a means of mortifying the flesh, especially in

appearance. There are few persons of delicate tastes, in the matter of

devout consumption to whom this austerely wasteful discomfort does not

appeal as intrinsically right and good. Devout consumption is of the

nature of vicarious consumption. This canon of devout austerity is based

on the pecuniary reputability of conspicuously wasteful consumption,

backed by the principle that vicarious consumption should conspicuously

not conduce to the comfort of the vicarious consumer.

The sanctuary and its fittings have something of this austerity in all

the cults in which the saint or divinity to whom the sanctuary pertains

is not conceived to be present and make personal use of the property for

the gratification of luxurious tastes imputed to him. The character of

the sacred paraphernalia is somewhat different in this respect in those

cults where the habits of life imputed to the divinity more nearly

approach those of an earthly patriarchal potentate--where he is

conceived to make use of these consumable goods in person. In the latter

case the sanctuary and its fittings take on more of the fashion given to

goods destined for the conspicuous consumption of a temporal master or

owner. On the other hand, where the sacred apparatus is simply employed

in the divinity's service, that is to say, where it is consumed

vicariously on his account by his servants, there the sacred properties

take the character suited to goods that are destined for vicarious

consumption only.

In the latter case the sanctuary and the sacred apparatus are so

contrived as not to enhance the comfort or fullness of life of the

vicarious consumer, or at any rate not to convey the impression that

the end of their consumption is the consumer's comfort. For the end of

vicarious consumption is to enhance, not the fullness of life of the

consumer, but the pecuniary repute of the master for whose behoof the

consumption takes place. Therefore priestly vestments are notoriously

expensive, ornate, and inconvenient; and in the cults where the priestly

servitor of the divinity is not conceived to serve him in the capacity

of consort, they are of an austere, comfortless fashion. And such it is

felt that they should be.

It is not only in establishing a devout standard of decent expensiveness

that the principle of waste invades the domain of the canons of ritual

serviceability. It touches the ways as well as the means, and draws on

vicarious leisure as well as on vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor

at its best is aloof, leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with

suggestions of sensuous pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees

of course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the

priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious

consumption of time are visible.

The same pervading canon of vicarious leisure is also visibly present in

the exterior details of devout observances and need only be pointed out

in order to become obvious to all beholders. All ritual has a notable

tendency to reduce itself to a rehearsal of formulas. This development

of formula is most noticeable in the maturer cults, which have at the

same time a more austere, ornate, and severe priestly life and garb; but

it is perceptible also in the forms and methods of worship of the newer

and fresher sects, whose tastes in respect of priests, vestments, and

sanctuaries are less exacting. The rehearsal of the service (the term

"service" carries a suggestion significant for the point in question)

grows more perfunctory as the cult gains in age and consistency, and

this perfunctoriness of the rehearsal is very pleasing to the correct

devout taste. And with a good reason, for the fact of its being

perfunctory goes to say pointedly that the master for whom it is

performed is exalted above the vulgar need of actually proficuous

service on the part of his servants. They are unprofitable servants, and

there is an honorific implication for their master in their remaining

unprofitable. It is needless to point out the close analogy at this

point between the priestly office and the office of the footman. It is

pleasing to our sense of what is fitting in these matters, in either

case, to recognize in the obvious perfunctoriness of the service that it

is a pro forma execution only. There should be no show of agility or of

dexterous manipulation in the execution of the priestly office, such as

might suggest a capacity for turning off the work.

In all this there is of course an obvious implication as to the

temperament, tastes, propensities, and habits of life imputed to the

divinity by worshippers who live under the tradition of these pecuniary

canons of reputability. Through its pervading men's habits of thought,

the principle of conspicuous waste has colored the worshippers' notions

of the divinity and of the relation in which the human subject stands

to him. It is of course in the more naive cults that this suffusion

of pecuniary beauty is most patent, but it is visible throughout. All

peoples, at whatever stage of culture or degree of enlightenment, are

fain to eke out a sensibly scant degree of authentic formation regarding

the personality and habitual surroundings of their divinities. In so

calling in the aid of fancy to enrich and fill in their picture of the

divinity's presence and manner of life they habitually impute to him

such traits as go to make up their ideal of a worthy man. And in

seeking communion with the divinity the ways and means of approach are

assimilated as nearly as may be to the divine ideal that is in men's

minds at the time. It is felt that the divine presence is entered with

the best grace, and with the best effect, according to certain accepted

methods and with the accompaniment of certain material circumstances

which in popular apprehension are peculiarly consonant with the divine

nature. This popularly accepted ideal of the bearing and paraphernalia

adequate to such occasions of communion is, of course, to a good extent

shaped by the popular apprehension of what is intrinsically worthy

and beautiful in human carriage and surroundings on all occasions of

dignified intercourse. It would on this account be misleading to

attempt an analysis of devout demeanor by referring all evidences of

the presence of a pecuniary standard of reputability back directly and

baldly to the underlying norm of pecuniary emulation. So it would also

be misleading to ascribe to the divinity, as popularly conceived, a

jealous regard for his pecuniary standing and a habit of avoiding and

condemning squalid situations and surroundings simply because they are

under grade in the pecuniary respect.

And still, after all allowance has been made, it appears that the canons

of pecuniary reputability do, directly or indirectly, materially affect

our notions of the attributes of divinity, as well as our notions

of what are the fit and adequate manner and circumstances of divine

communion. It is felt that the divinity must be of a peculiarly serene

and leisurely habit of life. And whenever his local habitation is

pictured in poetic imagery, for edification or in appeal to the devout

fancy, the devout word-painter, as a matter of course, brings out before

his auditors' imagination a throne with a profusion of the insignia of

opulence and power, and surrounded by a great number of servitors. In

the common run of such presentations of the celestial abodes, the office

of this corps of servants is a vicarious leisure, their time and efforts

being in great measure taken up with an industrially unproductive

rehearsal of the meritorious characteristics and exploits of the

divinity; while the background of the presentation is filled with the

shimmer of the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of

precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout fancy

that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout ideals reaches

such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the devout imagery of the

Negro population of the South. Their word-painters are unable to descend

to anything cheaper than gold; so that in this case the insistence on

pecuniary beauty gives a startling effect in yellow--such as would be

unbearable to a soberer taste. Still, there is probably no cult in which

ideals of pecuniary merit have not been called in to supplement the

ideals of ceremonial adequacy that guide men's conception of what is

right in the matter of sacred apparatus.

Similarly it is felt--and the sentiment is acted upon--that the priestly

servitors of the divinity should not engage in industrially productive

work; that work of any kind--any employment which is of tangible human

use--must not be carried on in the divine presence, or within the

precincts of the sanctuary; that whoever comes into the presence should

come cleansed of all profane industrial features in his apparel

or person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday

expensiveness; that on holidays set apart in honor of or for communion

with the divinity no work that is of human use should be performed by

any one. Even the remoter, lay dependents should render a vicarious

leisure to the extent of one day in seven. In all these deliverances of

men's uninstructed sense of what is fit and proper in devout observance

and in the relations of the divinity, the effectual presence of the

canons of pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons

have had their effect on the devout judgment in this respect immediately

or at the second remove.

These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more far-reaching

and more specifically determinable, effect upon the popular sense

of beauty or serviceability in consumable goods. The requirements of

pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable extent, influenced the

sense of beauty and of utility in articles of use or beauty.

Articles are to an extent preferred for use on account of their being

conspicuously wasteful; they are felt to be serviceable somewhat in

proportion as they are wasteful and ill adapted to their ostensible use.

The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the

expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this

dependence. A hand-wrought silver spoon, of a commercial value of some

ten to twenty dollars, is not ordinarily more serviceable--in the first

sense of the word--than a machine-made spoon of the same material.

It may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of some

"base" metal, such as aluminum, the value of which may be no more than

some ten to twenty cents. The former of the two utensils is, in fact,

commonly a less effective contrivance for its ostensible purpose than

the latter. The objection is of course ready to hand that, in taking

this view of the matter, one of the chief uses, if not the chief use,

of the costlier spoon is ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our

taste, our sense of the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of

the base metal has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts

are no doubt as the objection states them, but it will be evident

on rejection that the objection is after all more plausible than

conclusive. It appears (1) that while the different materials of which

the two spoons are made each possesses beauty and serviceability for the

purpose for which it is used, the material of the hand-wrought spoon is

some one hundred times more valuable than the baser metal, without very

greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and

without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical

serviceability; (2) if a close inspection should show that the supposed

hand-wrought spoon were in reality only a very clever citation of

hand-wrought goods, but an imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the

same impression of line and surface to any but a minute examination by

a trained eye, the utility of the article, including the gratification

which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty,

would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even

more; (3) if the two spoons are, to a fairly close observer, so nearly

identical in appearance that the lighter weight of the spurious article

alone betrays it, this identity of form and color will scarcely add

to the value of the machine-made spoon, nor appreciably enhance the

gratification of the user's "sense of beauty" in contemplating it, so

long as the cheaper spoon is not a novelty, ad so long as it can be

procured at a nominal cost. The case of the spoons is typical. The

superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly

and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a

gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name

of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article is an

appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more frequently

than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its beauty. The

requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present,

consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as

a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what

is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may

legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not.

It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet and

blend, that a discrimination between serviceability and wastefulness

is most difficult in any concrete case. It frequently happens that an

article which serves the honorific purpose of conspicuous waste is at

the same time a beautiful object; and the same application of labor to

which it owes its utility for the former purpose may, and often does,

give beauty of form and color to the article. The question is further

complicated by the fact that many objects, as, for instance, the

precious stones and the metals and some other materials used for

adornment and decoration, owe their utility as items of conspicuous

waste to an antecedent utility as objects of beauty. Gold, for instance,

has a high degree of sensuous beauty very many if not most of the highly

prized works of art are intrinsically beautiful, though often with

material qualification; the like is true of some stuffs used for

clothing, of some landscapes, and of many other things in less degree.

Except for this intrinsic beauty which they possess, these objects

would scarcely have been coveted as they are, or have become monopolized

objects of pride to their possessors and users. But the utility of these

things to the possessor is commonly due less to their intrinsic beauty

than to the honor which their possession and consumption confers, or to

the obloquy which it wards off.

Apart from their serviceability in other respects, these objects are

beautiful and have a utility as such; they are valuable on this account

if they can be appropriated or monopolized; they are, therefore, coveted

as valuable possessions, and their exclusive enjoyment gratifies the

possessor's sense of pecuniary superiority at the same time that their

contemplation gratifies his sense of beauty. But their beauty, in the

naive sense of the word, is the occasion rather than the ground of their

monopolization or of their commercial value. "Great as is the sensuous

beauty of gems, their rarity and price adds an expression of distinction

to them, which they would never have if they were cheap." There is,

indeed, in the common run of cases under this head, relatively little

incentive to the exclusive possession and use of these beautiful

things, except on the ground of their honorific character as items of

conspicuous waste. Most objects of this general class, with the partial

exception of articles of personal adornment, would serve all other

purposes than the honorific one equally well, whether owned by the

person viewing them or not; and even as regards personal ornaments it is

to be added that their chief purpose is to lend éclat to the person

of their wearer (or owner) by comparison with other persons who are

compelled to do without. The aesthetic serviceability of objects of

beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.

The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground is

that any valuable object in order to appeal to our sense of beauty must

conform to the requirements of beauty and of expensiveness both. But

this is not all. Beyond this the canon of expensiveness also affects

our tastes in such a way as to inextricably blend the marks of

expensiveness, in our appreciation, with the beautiful features of

the object, and to subsume the resultant effect under the head of an

appreciation of beauty simply. The marks of expensiveness come to be

accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles. They are

pleasing as being marks of honorific costliness, and the pleasure which

they afford on this score blends with that afforded by the beautiful

form and color of the object; so that we often declare that an article

of apparel, for instance, is "perfectly lovely," when pretty much all

that an analysis of the aesthetic value of the article would leave

ground for is the declaration that it is pecuniarily honorific.

This blending and confusion of the elements of expensiveness and

of beauty is, perhaps, best exemplified in articles of dress and of

household furniture. The code of reputability in matters of dress

decides what shapes, colors, materials, and general effects in human

apparel are for the time to be accepted as suitable; and departures from

the code are offensive to our taste, supposedly as being departures from

aesthetic truth. The approval with which we look upon fashionable attire

is by no means to be accounted pure make-believe. We readily, and for

the most part with utter sincerity, find those things pleasing that

are in vogue. Shaggy dress-stuffs and pronounced color effects, for

instance, offend us at times when the vogue is goods of a high,

glossy finish and neutral colors. A fancy bonnet of this year's model

unquestionably appeals to our sensibilities today much more forcibly

than an equally fancy bonnet of the model of last year; although

when viewed in the perspective of a quarter of a century, it would, I

apprehend, be a matter of the utmost difficulty to award the palm

for intrinsic beauty to the one rather than to the other of these

structures. So, again, it may be remarked that, considered simply in

their physical juxtaposition with the human form, the high gloss of a

gentleman's hat or of a patent-leather shoe has no more of intrinsic

beauty than a similarly high gloss on a threadbare sleeve; and yet

there is no question but that all well-bred people (in the Occidental

civilized communities) instinctively and unaffectedly cleave to the one

as a phenomenon of great beauty, and eschew the other as offensive to

every sense to which it can appeal. It is extremely doubtful if any one

could be induced to wear such a contrivance as the high hat of civilized

society, except for some urgent reason based on other than aesthetic

grounds.

By further habituation to an appreciative perception of the marks

of expensiveness in goods, and by habitually identifying beauty with

reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not

expensive is accounted not beautiful. In this way it has happened, for

instance, that some beautiful flowers pass conventionally for offensive

weeds; others that can be cultivated with relative ease are accepted

and admired by the lower middle class, who can afford no more expensive

luxuries of this kind; but these varieties are rejected as vulgar by

those people who are better able to pay for expensive flowers and who

are educated to a higher schedule of pecuniary beauty in the florist's

products; while still other flowers, of no greater intrinsic beauty than

these, are cultivated at great cost and call out much admiration from

flower-lovers whose tastes have been matured under the critical guidance

of a polite environment.

The same variation in matters of taste, from one class of society to

another, is visible also as regards many other kinds of consumable

goods, as, for example, is the case with furniture, houses, parks,

and gardens. This diversity of views as to what is beautiful in these

various classes of goods is not a diversity of the norm according to

which the unsophisticated sense of the beautiful works. It is not a

constitutional difference of endowments in the aesthetic respect, but

rather a difference in the code of reputability which specifies what

objects properly lie within the scope of honorific consumption for the

class to which the critic belongs. It is a difference in the traditions

of propriety with respect to the kinds of things which may, without

derogation to the consumer, be consumed under the head of objects of

taste and art. With a certain allowance for variations to be accounted

for on other grounds, these traditions are determined, more or less

rigidly, by the pecuniary plane of life of the class.

Everyday life affords many curious illustrations of the way in which the

code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from class to class,

as well as of the way in which the conventional sense of beauty departs

in its deliverances from the sense untutored by the requirements of

pecuniary repute. Such a fact is the lawn, or the close-cropped yard or

park, which appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples.

It appears especially to appeal to the tastes of the well-to-do classes

in those communities in which the dolicho-blond element predominates

in an appreciable degree. The lawn unquestionably has an element of

sensuous beauty, simply as an object of apperception, and as such no

doubt it appeals pretty directly to the eye of nearly all races and all

classes; but it is, perhaps, more unquestionably beautiful to the eye

of the dolicho-blond than to most other varieties of men. This higher

appreciation of a stretch of greensward in this ethnic element than

in the other elements of the population, goes along with certain other

features of the dolicho-blond temperament that indicate that this racial

element had once been for a long time a pastoral people inhabiting a

region with a humid climate. The close-cropped lawn is beautiful in the

eyes of a people whose inherited bent it is to readily find pleasure in

contemplating a well-preserved pasture or grazing land.

For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some cases

today--where the expensiveness of the attendant circumstances bars out

any imputation of thrift--the idyl of the dolicho-blond is rehabilitated

in the introduction of a cow into a lawn or private ground. In such

cases the cow made use of is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar

suggestion of thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a

standing objection to the decorative use of this animal. So that in all

cases, except where luxurious surroundings negate this suggestion,

the use of the cow as an object of taste must be avoided. Where the

predilection for some grazing animal to fill out the suggestion of the

pasture is too strong to be suppressed, the cow's place is often given

to some more or less inadequate substitute, such as deer, antelopes, or

some such exotic beast. These substitutes, although less beautiful

to the pastoral eye of Western man than the cow, are in such cases

preferred because of their superior expensiveness or futility, and their

consequent repute. They are not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in

suggestion.

Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn; they

too, at their best, are imitations of the pasture. Such a park is of

course best kept by grazing, and the cattle on the grass are themselves

no mean addition to the beauty of the thing, as need scarcely be

insisted on with anyone who has once seen a well-kept pasture. But it

is worth noting, as an expression of the pecuniary element in popular

taste, that such a method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted

to. The best that is done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a

trained keeper is a more or less close imitation of a pasture, but

the result invariably falls somewhat short of the artistic effect of

grazing. But to the average popular apprehension a herd of cattle so

pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence in the

public pleasure ground would be intolerably cheap. This method

of keeping grounds is comparatively inexpensive, therefore it is

indecorous.

Of the same general bearing is another feature of public grounds. There

is a studious exhibition of expensiveness coupled with a make-believe of

simplicity and crude serviceability. Private grounds also show the same

physiognomy wherever they are in the management or ownership of persons

whose tastes have been formed under middle-class habits of life or under

the upper-class traditions of no later a date than the childhood of the

generation that is now passing. Grounds which conform to the instructed

tastes of the latter-day upper class do not show these features in so

marked a degree. The reason for this difference in tastes between the

past and the incoming generation of the well-bred lies in the changing

economic situation. A similar difference is perceptible in other

respects, as well as in the accepted ideals of pleasure grounds. In this

country as in most others, until the last half century but a very small

proportion of the population were possessed of such wealth as would

exempt them from thrift. Owing to imperfect means of communication,

this small fraction were scattered and out of effective touch with one

another. There was therefore no basis for a growth of taste in disregard

of expensiveness. The revolt of the well-bred taste against vulgar

thrift was unchecked. Wherever the unsophisticated sense of beauty

might show itself sporadically in an approval of inexpensive or thrifty

surroundings, it would lack the "social confirmation" which nothing

but a considerable body of like-minded people can give. There was,

therefore, no effective upper-class opinion that would overlook

evidences of possible inexpensiveness in the management of grounds;

and there was consequently no appreciable divergence between the

leisure-class and the lower middle-class ideal in the physiognomy of

pleasure grounds. Both classes equally constructed their ideals with the

fear of pecuniary disrepute before their eyes.

Today a divergence in ideals is beginning to be apparent. The portion of

the leisure class that has been consistently exempt from work and from

pecuniary cares for a generation or more is now large enough to form and

sustain opinion in matters of taste. Increased mobility of the members

has also added to the facility with which a "social confirmation" can be

attained within the class. Within this select class the exemption from

thrift is a matter so commonplace as to have lost much of its utility

as a basis of pecuniary decency. Therefore the latter-day upper-class

canons of taste do not so consistently insist on an unremitting

demonstration of expensiveness and a strict exclusion of the appearance

of thrift. So, a predilection for the rustic and the "natural" in parks

and grounds makes its appearance on these higher social and intellectual

levels. This predilection is in large part an outcropping of the

instinct of workmanship; and it works out its results with varying

degrees of consistency. It is seldom altogether unaffected, and at times

it shades off into something not widely different from that make-believe

of rusticity which has been referred to above.

A weakness for crudely serviceable contrivances that pointedly suggest

immediate and wasteless use is present even in the middle-class tastes;

but it is there kept well in hand under the unbroken dominance of the

canon of reputable futility. Consequently it works out in a variety

of ways and means for shamming serviceability--in such contrivances

as rustic fences, bridges, bowers, pavilions, and the like decorative

features. An expression of this affectation of serviceability, at what

is perhaps its widest divergence from the first promptings of the

sense of economic beauty, is afforded by the cast-iron rustic fence and

trellis or by a circuitous drive laid across level ground.

The select leisure class has outgrown the use of these

pseudo-serviceable variants of pecuniary beauty, at least at some

points. But the taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class

proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary

beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which

are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural

growths.

The popular taste in these matters is to be seen in the prevalent high

appreciation of topiary work and of the conventional flower-beds of

public grounds. Perhaps as happy an illustration as may be had of this

dominance of pecuniary beauty over aesthetic beauty in middle-class

tastes is seen in the reconstruction of the grounds lately occupied by

the Columbian Exposition. The evidence goes to show that the requirement

of reputable expensiveness is still present in good vigor even where

all ostensibly lavish display is avoided. The artistic effects actually

wrought in this work of reconstruction diverge somewhat widely from

the effect to which the same ground would have lent itself in hands not

guided by pecuniary canons of taste. And even the better class of the

city's population view the progress of the work with an unreserved

approval which suggests that there is in this case little if any

discrepancy between the tastes of the upper and the lower or middle

classes of the city. The sense of beauty in the population of this

representative city of the advanced pecuniary culture is very chary of

any departure from its great cultural principle of conspicuous waste.

The love of nature, perhaps itself borrowed from a higher-class code of

taste, sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance

of this canon of pecuniary beauty, and leads to results that may seem

incongruous to an unreflecting beholder. The well-accepted practice of

planting trees in the treeless areas of this country, for instance, has

been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily

wooded areas; so that it is by no means unusual for a village or a

farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of its native trees and

immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the

farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm,

beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood, and birch is cleared off to give

room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood, and brittle willow. It is

felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing

would derogate from the dignity that should invest an article which is

intended to serve a decorative and honorific end.

The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is traceable

in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The part played by this

canon of taste in assigning her place in the popular aesthetic scale to

the cow has already been spokes of. Something to the same effect is

true of the other domestic animals, so far as they are in an appreciable

degree industrially useful to the community--as, for instance, barnyard

fowl, hogs, cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses. They are of the

nature of productive goods, and serve a useful, often a lucrative end;

therefore beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is different

with those domestic animals which ordinarily serve no industrial end;

such as pigeons, parrots and other cage-birds, cats, dogs, and fast

horses. These commonly are items of conspicuous consumption, and are

therefore honorific in their nature and may legitimately be accounted

beautiful. This class of animals are conventionally admired by the body

of the upper classes, while the pecuniarily lower classes--and that

select minority of the leisure class among whom the rigorous canon that

abjures thrift is in a measure obsolescent--find beauty in one class of

animals as in another, without drawing a hard and fast line of pecuniary

demarcation between the beautiful and the ugly. In the case of those

domestic animals which are honorific and are reputed beautiful, there

is a subsidiary basis of merit that should be spokes of. Apart from the

birds which belong in the honorific class of domestic animals, and which

owe their place in this class to their non-lucrative character alone,

the animals which merit particular attention are cats, dogs, and fast

horses. The cat is less reputable than the other two just named, because

she is less wasteful; she may even serve a useful end. At the same time

the cat's temperament does not fit her for the honorific purpose. She

lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of

status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor,

and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious

comparison between her owner and his neighbors. The exception to this

last rule occurs in the case of such scarce and fanciful products as

the Angora cat, which have some slight honorific value on the ground

of expensiveness, and have, therefore, some special claim to beauty on

pecuniary grounds.

The dog has advantages in the way of uselessness as well as in special

gifts of temperament. He is often spoken of, in an eminent sense, as

the friend of man, and his intelligence and fidelity are praised. The

meaning of this is that the dog is man's servant and that he has

the gift of an unquestioning subservience and a slave's quickness in

guessing his master's mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him

well for the relation of status--and which must for the present purpose

be set down as serviceable traits--the dog has some characteristics

which are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He is the filthiest of

the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For

this he makes up is a servile, fawning attitude towards his master, and

a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then,

commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for

mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no

industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as

a thing of good repute. The dog is at the same time associated in our

imagination with the chase--a meritorious employment and an expression

of the honorable predatory impulse. Standing on this vantage ground,

whatever beauty of form and motion and whatever commendable mental

traits he may possess are conventionally acknowledged and magnified.

And even those varieties of the dog which have been bred into grotesque

deformity by the dog-fancier are in good faith accounted beautiful by

many. These varieties of dogs--and the like is true of other fancy-bred

animals--are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion

to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion

which the deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand,

this differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and instability

of structure is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity and consequent

expense. The commercial value of canine monstrosities, such as the

prevailing styles of pet dogs both for men's and women's use, rests

on their high cost of production, and their value to their owners

lies chiefly in their utility as items of conspicuous consumption.

Indirectly, through reflection upon their honorific expensiveness,

a social worth is imputed to them; and so, by an easy substitution of

words and ideas, they come to be admired and reputed beautiful. Since

any attention bestowed upon these animals is in no sense gainful

or useful, it is also reputable; and since the habit of giving them

attention is consequently not deprecated, it may grow into an habitual

attachment of great tenacity and of a most benevolent character. So that

in the affection bestowed on pet animals the canon of expensiveness

is present more or less remotely as a norm which guides and shapes the

sentiment and the selection of its object. The like is true, as will be

noticed presently, with respect to affection for persons also; although

the manner in which the norm acts in that case is somewhat different.

The case of the fast horse is much like that of the dog. He is on the

whole expensive, or wasteful and useless--for the industrial purpose.

What productive use he may possess, in the way of enhancing the

well-being of the community or making the way of life easier for men,

takes the form of exhibitions of force and facility of motion that

gratify the popular aesthetic sense. This is of course a substantial

serviceability. The horse is not endowed with the spiritual aptitude

for servile dependence in the same measure as the dog; but he ministers

effectually to his master's impulse to convert the "animate" forces of

the environment to his own use and discretion and so express his own

dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least

potentially a race-horse, of high or low degree; and it is as such that

he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility of the fast horse

lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation; it gratifies the

owner's sense of aggression and dominance to have his own horse outstrip

his neighbor's. This use being not lucrative, but on the whole pretty

consistently wasteful, and quite conspicuously so, it is honorific,

and therefore gives the fast horse a strong presumptive position of

reputability. Beyond this, the race-horse proper has also a similarly

non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling instrument.

The fast horse, then, is aesthetically fortunate, in that the canon of

pecuniary good repute legitimates a free appreciation of whatever beauty

or serviceability he may possess. His pretensions have the countenance

of the principle of conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory

aptitude for dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a

beautiful animal, although the race-horse is so in no peculiar degree to

the uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the class

of race-horse fanciers nor in the class whose sense of beauty is held in

abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse fancier's award. To this

untutored taste the most beautiful horse seems to be a form which has

suffered less radical alteration than the race-horse under the

breeder's selective development of the animal. Still, when a writer

or speaker--especially of those whose eloquence is most consistently

commonplace wants an illustration of animal grace and serviceability,

for rhetorical use, he habitually turns to the horse; and he commonly

makes it plain before he is done that what he has in mind is the

race-horse.

It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of varieties

of horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among people of even

moderately cultivated tastes in these matters, there is also discernible

another and more direct line of influence of the leisure-class canons of

reputability. In this country, for instance, leisure-class tastes are

to some extent shaped on usages and habits which prevail, or which are

apprehended to prevail, among the leisure class of Great Britain. In

dogs this is true to a less extent than in horses. In horses, more

particularly in saddle horses--which at their best serve the purpose of

wasteful display simply--it will hold true in a general way that a

horse is more beautiful in proportion as he is more English; the English

leisure class being, for purposes of reputable usage, the upper leisure

class of this country, and so the exemplar for the lower grades. This

mimicry in the methods of the apperception of beauty and in the forming

of judgments of taste need not result in a spurious, or at any rate not

a hypocritical or affected, predilection. The predilection is as serious

and as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as

when it rests on any other, the difference is that this taste is and

as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as when it

rests on any other; the difference is that this taste is a taste for the

reputably correct, not for the aesthetically true.

The mimicry, it should be said, extends further than to the sense of

beauty in horseflesh simply. It includes trappings and horsemanship as

well, so that the correct or reputably beautiful seat or posture is also

decided by English usage, as well as the equestrian gait. To show how

fortuitous may sometimes be the circumstances which decide what shall

be becoming and what not under the pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be

noted that this English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gait which

has made an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when

the English roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually

impassable for a horse travelling at a more comfortable gait; so that

a person of decorous tastes in horsemanship today rides a punch with

docked tail, in an uncomfortable posture and at a distressing gait,

because the English roads during a great part of the last century were

impassable for a horse travelling at a more horse-like gait, or for

an animal built for moving with ease over the firm and open country to

which the horse is indigenous. It is not only with respect to consumable

goods--including domestic animals--that the canons of taste have been

colored by the canons of pecuniary reputability. Something to the like

effect is to be said for beauty in persons. In order to avoid whatever

may be matter of controversy, no weight will be given in this connection

to such popular predilection as there may be for the dignified

(leisurely) bearing and poly presence that are by vulgar tradition

associated with opulence in mature men. These traits are in some measure

accepted as elements of personal beauty. But there are certain elements

of feminine beauty, on the other hand, which come in under this head,

and which are of so concrete and specific a character as to admit of

itemized appreciation. It is more or less a rule that in communities

which are at the stage of economic development at which women are valued

by the upper class for their service, the ideal of female beauty is a

robust, large-limbed woman. The ground of appreciation is the physique,

while the conformation of the face is of secondary weight only. A

well-known instance of this ideal of the early predatory culture is that

of the maidens of the Homeric poems.

This ideal suffers a change in the succeeding development, when, in the

conventional scheme, the office of the high-class wife comes to be a

vicarious leisure simply. The ideal then includes the characteristics

which are supposed to result from or to go with a life of leisure

consistently enforced. The ideal accepted under these circumstances may

be gathered from descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of

the chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days ladies

of high degree were conceived to be in perpetual tutelage, and to be

scrupulously exempt from all useful work. The resulting chivalric or

romantic ideal of beauty takes cognizance chiefly of the face, and

dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the hands and feet,

the slender figure, and especially the slender waist. In the pictured

representations of the women of that time, and in modern romantic

imitators of the chivalric thought and feeling, the waist is attenuated

to a degree that implies extreme debility. The same ideal is still

extant among a considerable portion of the population of modern

industrial communities; but it is to be said that it has retained

its hold most tenaciously in those modern communities which are least

advanced in point of economic and civil development, and which show the

most considerable survivals of status and of predatory institutions.

That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in those existing

communities which are substantially least modern. Survivals of this

lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in the tastes of the

well-to-do classes of Continental countries. In modern communities which

have reached the higher levels of industrial development, the upper

leisure class has accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its

women above all imputation of vulgarly productive labor. Here the status

of women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in the

sections of the body of the people; and as a consequence the ideal of

feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from the infirmly

delicate, translucent, and hazardously slender, to a woman of the

archaic type that does not disown her hands and feet, nor, indeed, the

other gross material facts of her person. In the course of economic

development the ideal of beauty among the peoples of the Western culture

has shifted from the woman of physical presence to the lady, and it is

beginning to shift back again to the woman; and all in obedience to the

changing conditions of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation

at one time required lusty slaves; at another time they required a

conspicuous performance of vicarious leisure and consequently an obvious

disability; but the situation is now beginning to outgrow this last

requirement, since, under the higher efficiency of modern industry,

leisure in women is possible so far down the scale of reputability that

it will no longer serve as a definitive mark of the highest pecuniary

grade.

Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of conspicuous

waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are one or two details

which merit specific mention as showing how it may exercise an extreme

constraint in detail over men's sense of beauty in women. It has

already been noticed that at the stages of economic evolution at which

conspicuous leisure is much regarded as a means of good repute, the

ideal requires delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender

waist. These features, together with the other, related faults of

structure that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so

affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported

in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is

consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. It results that

at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons, so as

to conform more nearly to the requirements of the instructed taste of

the time; and under the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency,

the men find the resulting artificially induced pathological features

attractive. So, for instance, the constricted waist which has had so

wide and persistent a vogue in the communities of the Western culture,

and so also the deformed foot of the Chinese. Both of these are

mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense. It

requires habituation to become reconciled to them. Yet there is no room

to question their attractiveness to men into whose scheme of life they

fit as honorific items sanctioned by the requirements of pecuniary

reputability. They are items of pecuniary and cultural beauty which have

come to do duty as elements of the ideal of womanliness.

The connection here indicated between the aesthetic value and the

invidious pecuniary value of things is of course not present in the

consciousness of the valuer. So far as a person, in forming a judgment

of taste, takes thought and reflects that the object of beauty under

consideration is wasteful and reputable, and therefore may legitimately

be accounted beautiful; so far the judgment is not a bona fide judgment

of taste and does not come up for consideration in this connection. The

connection which is here insisted on between the reputability and the

apprehended beauty of objects lies through the effect which the fact of

reputability has upon the valuer's habits of thought. He is in the

habit of forming judgments of value of various kinds-economic, moral,

aesthetic, or reputable concerning the objects with which he has to do,

and his attitude of commendation towards a given object on any other

ground will affect the degree of his appreciation of the object when he

comes to value it for the aesthetic purpose. This is more particularly

true as regards valuation on grounds so closely related to the aesthetic

ground as that of reputability. The valuation for the aesthetic purpose

and for the purpose of repute are not held apart as distinctly as might

be. Confusion is especially apt to arise between these two kinds of

valuation, because the value of objects for repute is not habitually

distinguished in speech by the use of a special descriptive term. The

result is that the terms in familiar use to designate categories

or elements of beauty are applied to cover this unnamed element of

pecuniary merit, and the corresponding confusion of ideas follows by

easy consequence. The demands of reputability in this way coalesce in

the popular apprehension with the demands of the sense of beauty, and

beauty which is not accompanied by the accredited marks of good repute

is not accepted. But the requirements of pecuniary reputability and

those of beauty in the naive sense do not in any appreciable degree

coincide. The elimination from our surroundings of the pecuniarily

unfit, therefore, results in a more or less thorough elimination of that

considerable range of elements of beauty which do not happen to conform

to the pecuniary requirement. The underlying norms of taste are of very

ancient growth, probably far antedating the advent of the pecuniary

institutions that are here under discussion. Consequently, by force of

the past selective adaptation of men's habits of thought, it happens

that the requirements of beauty, simply, are for the most part best

satisfied by inexpensive contrivances and structures which in a

straightforward manner suggest both the office which they are to perform

and the method of serving their end. It may be in place to recall the

modern psychological position. Beauty of form seems to be a question of

facility of apperception. The proposition could perhaps safely be made

broader than this. If abstraction is made from association, suggestion,

and "expression," classed as elements of beauty, then beauty in any

perceived object means that the mind readily unfolds its apperceptive

activity in the directions which the object in question affords. But the

directions in which activity readily unfolds or expresses itself are the

directions to which long and close habituation has made the mind prone.

So far as concerns the essential elements of beauty, this habituation

is an habituation so close and long as to have induced not only a

proclivity to the apperceptive form in question, but an adaptation of

physiological structure and function as well. So far as the economic

interest enters into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a

suggestion or expression of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and

readily inferable subservience to the life process. This expression of

economic facility or economic serviceability in any object--what may

be called the economic beauty of the object-is best served by neat and

unambiguous suggestion of its office and its efficiency for the material

ends of life.

On this ground, among objects of use the simple and unadorned article

is aesthetically the best. But since the pecuniary canon of reputability

rejects the inexpensive in articles appropriated to individual

consumption, the satisfaction of our craving for beautiful things

must be sought by way of compromise. The canons of beauty must be

circumvented by some contrivance which will give evidence of a reputably

wasteful expenditure, at the same time that it meets the demands of our

critical sense of the useful and the beautiful, or at least meets the

demand of some habit which has come to do duty in place of that sense.

Such an auxiliary sense of taste is the sense of novelty; and this

latter is helped out in its surrogateship by the curiosity with which

men view ingenious and puzzling contrivances. Hence it comes that

most objects alleged to be beautiful, and doing duty as such, show

considerable ingenuity of design and are calculated to puzzle the

beholder--to bewilder him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the

improbable--at the same time that they give evidence of an expenditure

of labor in excess of what would give them their fullest efficency for

their ostensible economic end.

This may be shown by an illustration taken from outside the range of our

everyday habits and everyday contact, and so outside the range of

our bias. Such are the remarkable feather mantles of Hawaii, or the

well-known cawed handles of the ceremonial adzes of several Polynesian

islands. These are undeniably beautiful, both in the sense that they

offer a pleasing composition of form, lines, and color, and in the sense

that they evince great skill and ingenuity in design and construction.

At the same time the articles are manifestly ill fitted to serve any

other economic purpose. But it is not always that the evolution of

ingenious and puzzling contrivances under the guidance of the canon of

wasted effort works out so happy a result. The result is quite as

often a virtually complete suppression of all elements that would

bear scrutiny as expressions of beauty, or of serviceability, and the

substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labor, backed by a

conspicuous ineptitude; until many of the objects with which we surround

ourselves in everyday life, and even many articles of everyday dress and

ornament, are such as would not be tolerated except under the stress of

prescriptive tradition. Illustrations of this substitution of ingenuity

and expense in place of beauty and serviceability are to be seen, for

instance, in domestic architecture, in domestic art or fancy work,

in various articles of apparel, especially of feminine and priestly

apparel.

The canon of beauty requires expression of the generic. The "novelty"

due to the demands of conspicuous waste traverses this canon of beauty,

in that it results in making the physiognomy of our objects of taste a

congeries of idiosyncrasies; and the idiosyncrasies are, moreover, under

the selective surveillance of the canon of expensiveness.

This process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of

conspicuous waste, and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for

aesthetic beauty, has been especially effective in the development of

architecture. It would be extremely difficult to find a modern civilized

residence or public building which can claim anything better than

relative inoffensiveness in the eyes of anyone who will dissociate the

elements of beauty from those of honorific waste. The endless variety of

fronts presented by the better class of tenements and apartment houses

in our cities is an endless variety of architectural distress and of

suggestions of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty,

the dead walls of the sides and back of these structures, left untouched

by the hands of the artist, are commonly the best feature of the

building.

What has been said of the influence of the law of conspicuous waste upon

the canons of taste will hold true, with but a slight change of terms,

of its influence upon our notions of the serviceability of goods for

other ends than the aesthetic one. Goods are produced and consumed as a

means to the fuller unfolding of human life; and their utility consists,

in the first instance, in their efficiency as means to this end. The end

is, in the first instance, the fullness of life of the individual, taken

in absolute terms. But the human proclivity to emulation has seized upon

the consumption of goods as a means to an invidious comparison, and has

thereby invested consumable goods with a secondary utility as evidence

of relative ability to pay. This indirect or secondary use of consumable

goods lends an honorific character to consumption and presently also

to the goods which best serve the emulative end of consumption. The

consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods which

contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what goes to

give them serviceability for their ostensible mechanical purpose

are honorific. The marks of superfluous costliness in the goods are

therefore marks of worth--of high efficency for the indirect, invidious

end to be served by their consumption; and conversely, goods are

humilific, and therefore unattractive, if they show too thrifty an

adaptation to the mechanical end sought and do not include a margin of

expensiveness on which to rest a complacent invidious comparison. This

indirect utility gives much of their value to the "better" grades of

goods. In order to appeal to the cultivated sense of utility, an article

must contain a modicum of this indirect utility.

While men may have set out with disapproving an inexpensive manner of

living because it indicated inability to spend much, and so indicated

a lack of pecuniary success, they end by falling into the habit of

disapproving cheap things as being intrinsically dishonorable or

unworthy because they are cheap. As time has gone on, each succeeding

generation has received this tradition of meritorious expenditure from

the generation before it, and has in its turn further elaborated and

fortified the traditional canon of pecuniary reputability in goods

consumed; until we have finally reached such a degree of conviction as

to the unworthiness of all inexpensive things, that we have no

longer any misgivings in formulating the maxim, "Cheap and nasty." So

thoroughly has the habit of approving the expensive and disapproving

the inexpensive been ingrained into our thinking that we instinctively

insist upon at least some measure of wasteful expensiveness in all our

consumption, even in the case of goods which are consumed in strict

privacy and without the slightest thought of display. We all feel,

sincerely and without misgiving, that we are the more lifted up in

spirit for having, even in the privacy of our own household, eaten

our daily meal by the help of hand-wrought silver utensils, from

hand-painted china (often of dubious artistic value) laid on high-priced

table linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living which we are

accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be a grievous

violation of our human dignity. So, also, for the last dozen years

candles have been a more pleasing source of light at dinner than any

other. Candlelight is now softer, less distressing to well-bred eyes,

than oil, gas, or electric light. The same could not have been said

thirty years ago, when candles were, or recently had been, the cheapest

available light for domestic use. Nor are candles even now found to

give an acceptable or effective light for any other than a ceremonial

illumination.

A political sage still living has summed up the conclusion of this whole

matter in the dictum: "A cheap coat makes a cheap man," and there is

probably no one who does not feel the convincing force of the maxim.

The habit of looking for the marks of superfluous expensiveness in

goods, and of requiring that all goods should afford some utility of the

indirect or invidious sort, leads to a change in the standards by which

the utility of goods is gauged. The honorific element and the element

of brute efficiency are not held apart in the consumer's appreciation of

commodities, and the two together go to make up the unanalyzed

aggregate serviceability of the goods. Under the resulting standard of

serviceability, no article will pass muster on the strength of material

sufficiency alone. In order to completeness and full acceptability to

the consumer it must also show the honorific element. It results that

the producers of articles of consumption direct their efforts to the

production of goods that shall meet this demand for the honorific

element. They will do this with all the more alacrity and effect, since

they are themselves under the dominance of the same standard of worth in

goods, and would be sincerely grieved at the sight of goods which lack

the proper honorific finish. Hence it has come about that there are

today no goods supplied in any trade which do not contain the

honorific element in greater or less degree. Any consumer who might,

Diogenes-like, insist on the elimination of all honorific or wasteful

elements from his consumption, would be unable to supply his most

trivial wants in the modern market. Indeed, even if he resorted to

supplying his wants directly by his own efforts, he would find it

difficult if not impossible to divest himself of the current habits of

thought on this head; so that he could scarcely compass a supply of the

necessaries of life for a day's consumption without instinctively and

by oversight incorporating in his home-made product something of this

honorific, quasi-decorative element of wasted labor.

It is notorious that in their selection of serviceable goods in the

retail market purchasers are guided more by the finish and workmanship

of the goods than by any marks of substantial serviceability. Goods,

in order to sell, must have some appreciable amount of labor spent in

giving them the marks of decent expensiveness, in addition to what goes

to give them efficiency for the material use which they are to serve.

This habit of making obvious costliness a canon of serviceability of

course acts to enhance the aggregate cost of articles of consumption.

It puts us on our guard against cheapness by identifying merit in some

degree with cost. There is ordinarily a consistent effort on the part

of the consumer to obtain goods of the required serviceability at as

advantageous a bargain as may be; but the conventional requirement of

obvious costliness, as a voucher and a constituent of the serviceability

of the goods, leads him to reject as under grade such goods as do not

contain a large element of conspicuous waste.

It is to be added that a large share of those features of consumable

goods which figure in popular apprehension as marks of serviceability,

and to which reference is here had as elements of conspicuous waste,

commend themselves to the consumer also on other grounds than that of

expensiveness alone. They usually give evidence of skill and effective

workmanship, even if they do not contribute to the substantial

serviceability of the goods; and it is no doubt largely on some such

ground that any particular mark of honorific serviceability first comes

into vogue and afterward maintains its footing as a normal constituent

element of the worth of an article. A display of efficient workmanship

is pleasing simply as such, even where its remoter, for the time

unconsidered, outcome is futile. There is a gratification of the

artistic sense in the contemplation of skillful work. But it is also to

be added that no such evidence of skillful workmanship, or of ingenious

and effective adaptation of means to an end, will, in the long run,

enjoy the approbation of the modern civilized consumer unless it has the

sanction of the Canon of conspicuous waste.

The position here taken is enforced in a felicitous manner by the place

assigned in the economy of consumption to machine products. The point

of material difference between machine-made goods and the hand-wrought

goods which serve the same purposes is, ordinarily, that the former

serve their primary purpose more adequately. They are a more perfect

product--show a more perfect adaptation of means to end. This does not

save them from disesteem and deprecation, for they fall short under

the test of honorific waste. Hand labor is a more wasteful method

of production; hence the goods turned out by this method are more

serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability; hence the marks

of hand labor come to be honorific, and the goods which exhibit these

marks take rank as of higher grade than the corresponding machine

product. Commonly, if not invariably, the honorific marks of hand

labor are certain imperfections and irregularities in the lines of the

hand-wrought article, showing where the workman has fallen short in the

execution of the design. The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought

goods, therefore, is a certain margin of crudeness. This margin must

never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that would be

evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal precision

attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost.

The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to which

hand-wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in the eyes

of well-bred people is a matter of nice discrimination. It requires

training and the formation of right habits of thought with respect to

what may be called the physiognomy of goods. Machine-made goods of

daily use are often admired and preferred precisely on account of their

excessive perfection by the vulgar and the underbred who have not given

due thought to the punctilios of elegant consumption. The ceremonial

inferiority of machine products goes to show that the perfection of

skill and workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish

of goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and

permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the canon of

conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of goods, however

pleasing in itself, and however well it may approve itself to the taste

for effective work, will not be tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this

norm of pecuniary reputability.

The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due to

"commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of production,

has been taken very seriously by many persons. The objection to machine

products is often formulated as an objection to the commonness of such

goods. What is common is within the (pecuniary) reach of many people.

Its consumption is therefore not honorific, since it does not serve the

purpose of a favorable invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence

the consumption, or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an

odious suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away

from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that is

extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of sensibility. In

persons whose tastes assert themselves imperiously, and who have not the

gift, habit, or incentive to discriminate between the grounds of

their various judgments of taste, the deliverances of the sense of the

honorific coalesce with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of

serviceability--in the manner already spoken of; the resulting

composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty or its

serviceability, according as the valuer's bias or interest inclines him

to apprehend the object in the one or the other of these aspects. It

follows not infrequently that the marks of cheapness or commonness

are accepted as definitive marks of artistic unfitness, and a code or

schedule of aesthetic proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic

abominations on the other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in

questions of taste.

As has already been pointed out, the cheap, and therefore indecorous,

articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are

commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy

of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their

greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail

execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible

imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted

marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.

Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin

and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this

ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up

and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for

a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work

and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the

characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when

the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper.

It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of

aesthetic teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be said

here. What is said is not to be taken in the sense of depreciation, but

chiefly as a characterization of the tendency of this teaching in its

effect on consumption and on the production of consumable goods.

The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked itself

out in production is perhaps most cogently exemplified in the book

manufacture with which Morris busied himself during the later years of

his life; but what holds true of the work of the Kelmscott Press in an

eminent degree, holds true with but slightly abated force when applied

to latter-day artistic book-making generally--as to type, paper,

illustration, binding materials, and binder's work. The claims to

excellence put forward by the later products of the bookmaker's industry

rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation to the crudities

of the time when the work of book-making was a doubtful struggle with

refractory materials carried on by means of insufficient appliances.

These products, since they require hand labor, are more expensive; they

are also less convenient for use than the books turned out with a view

to serviceability alone; they therefore argue ability on the part of

the purchaser to consume freely, as well as ability to waste time and

effort. It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to

"old-style," and other more or less obsolete styles of type which are

less legible and give a cruder appearance to the page than the "modern."

Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no purpose but the most

effective presentation of matter with which its science is concerned,

will concede so much to the demands of this pecuniary beauty as to

publish its scientific discussions in oldstyle type, on laid paper, and

with uncut edges. But books which are not ostensibly concerned with the

effective presentation of their contents alone, of course go farther

in this direction. Here we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on

hand-laid, deckel-edged paper, with excessive margins and uncut leaves,

with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and elaborate ineptitude. The

Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an absurdity--as seen from the

point of view of brute serviceability alone--by issuing books for modern

use, edited with the obsolete spelling, printed in black-letter, and

bound in limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic

feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making, there

is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their best, printed in

limited editions. A limited edition is in effect a guarantee--somewhat

crude, it is true--that this book is scarce and that it therefore is

costly and lends pecuniary distinction to its consumer.

The special attractiveness of these book-products to the book-buyer of

cultivated taste lies, of course, not in a conscious, naive recognition

of their costliness and superior clumsiness. Here, as in the parallel

case of the superiority of hand-wrought articles over machine products,

the conscious ground of preference is an intrinsic excellence imputed to

the costlier and more awkward article. The superior excellence imputed

to the book which imitates the products of antique and obsolete

processes is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic

respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting

that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of

printed speech. So far as regards the superior aesthetic value of the

decadent book, the chances are that the book-lover's contention has some

ground. The book is designed with an eye single to its beauty, and the

result is commonly some measure of success on the part of the designer.

What is insisted on here, however, is that the canon of taste under

which the designer works is a canon formed under the surveillance of

the law of conspicuous waste, and that this law acts selectively to

eliminate any canon of taste that does not conform to its demands. That

is to say, while the decadent book may be beautiful, the limits within

which the designer may work are fixed by requirements of a non-aesthetic

kind. The product, if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be

costly and ill adapted to its ostensible use. This mandatory canon of

taste in the case of the book-designer, however, is not shaped entirely

by the law of waste in its first form; the canon is to some extent

shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory

temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its

special developments is called classicism. In aesthetic theory it might

be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line

between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the

canon of beauty. For the aesthetic purpose such a distinction need

scarcely be drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For a theory of taste

the expression of an accepted ideal of archaism, on whatever basis it

may have been accepted, is perhaps best rated as an element of beauty;

there need be no question of its legitimation. But for the present

purpose--for the purpose of determining what economic grounds are

present in the accepted canons of taste and what is their significance

for the distribution and consumption of goods--the distinction is not

similarly beside the point. The position of machine products in the

civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the nature of the

relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the

code of proprieties in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste

proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods,

does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative. It does

not go into the future as a creative principle which makes innovations

and adds new items of consumption and new elements of cost. The

principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a

positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It

very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its

action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly

afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its

requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may

be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods

of expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of

this norm of reputability; and the degree in which they conform to its

requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition

with other similar usages and customs. Other thing being equal, the more

obviously wasteful usage or method stands the better chance of survival

under this law. The law of conspicuous waste does not account for the

origin of variations, but only for the persistence of such forms as are

fit to survive under its dominance. It acts to conserve the fit, not to

originate the acceptable. Its office is to prove all things and to hold

fast that which is good for its purpose.