Chapter 6: Pecuniary Canons of Taste
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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.
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