time to look at the beautiful things that leaned and
beckoned from the walls. There was no chance of
quiet, reasonable talk; one pumped up a few inanities
to person after person. I suppose that most of
the guests would not have come if they did not at all
events think it amused them; but what was the charm?
I suppose that to most of the guests it was the stir,
the light, the moving figures—for there
were many beautiful and stately women and distinguished
men present—the sense of company, warmth,
success, about it all. To me it was merely distracting—a
score of sources of pleasure, and all of them preventing
the enjoyment of each. I think I am probably more
and not less sensitive to all these fine and rare
things than perhaps most people; and I suppose it
is this very sensitiveness that makes me averse to
them all in mass. It is to me like the
jangling of all the strings of some musical instrument.
I felt that I could have lingered alone in these fine
rooms, wandering from picture to picture with a lively
pleasure. There were many people present with
whom I should have deeply enjoyed a tete-a-tete.
But the whole effect was like over-eating oneself,
like having to taste a hundred exquisite dishes in
a single meal. I do not protest against such gatherings
on principle; if they give the guests a sense of pleasure
and well-being, I have not a word to say against it
all. But I believe in my heart that there are
many people who do not really enjoy it, or enjoy it
only in a purely conventional way; and what I should
like to do is to assist the people whose enjoyment
of it is conventional, to find out simpler and more
real sources of happiness; because to make these great
houses possible there is a vast amount of patient
and unpraised human labour wasted. I do not think
labour is wasted in producing beautiful things, so
long as they can have an effect; but a superabundance
of beauty has no effect—no effect, at least,
that could not be produced by things less costly of
effort and skill. The very refreshments, which
hardly any one touched, stand for an amount of wasted
labour which might have given pleasure to the poor
toilers who produced them. Think of the ransacking
of different climates, of the ships speeding over the
sea, the toil of gatherers, porters, cooks, servers,
that went to fit out that sparkling buffet. I
suppose that it is easy for me, who do not value the
result, to be mildly socialistic about these things;
the pathos is not in the work, but in the waste of
the work, not in the delicate things collected for
our use and however fitfully enjoyed, but in the things
made and collected by unknown toilers, and then either
not used at all or not consciously enjoyed.