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 he 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 he 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 ‚ clat 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 similiarly 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 eves 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. In directly,
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 bands
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 mid 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 bas 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 sewed
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
constable 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.