But think of a string of pate de foie gras sausages at a guinea
a piece! Think of a red-hot poker cut out of a single ruby!
Imagine such fantasticalities of expense with such a tameness
and staleness of design.
We may even admit the practical joke if it is domestic and simple.
We may concede that apple-pie beds and butter-slides are sometimes
useful things for the education of pompous persons living
the Higher Life. But imagine a man making a butter-slide and
telling everybody it was made with the most expensive butter.
Picture an apple-pie bed of purple and cloth of gold. It is
not hard to see that such schemes would lead simultaneously
to a double boredom; weariness of the costly and complex method
and of the meagre and trivial thought. This is the true analysis,
I think of that chill of tedium that strikes to the soul of any
intelligent man when he hears of such elephantine pranks.
That is why we feel that Freak Dinners would not even be freakish.
That is why we feel that expensive Arctic feasts would probably
be a frost.
If it be said that such things do no harm, I hasten, in one sense,
at least, to agree. Far from it; they do good. They do good
in the most vital matter of modern times; for they prove and print
in huge letters the truth which our society must learn or perish.
They prove that wealth in society as now constituted does
not tend to get into the hands of the thrifty or the capable,
but actually tends to get into the hands of wastrels and imbeciles.
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