ayer of coarse and repulsive labour by other folk; and the thought of
the pork suet will spoil the smell of the violets. For the more dishes
we have for dinner, the greater number of cooking-pots will have to be
cleaned; the more carriages and horses we use, the more washing and
grooming will result; the more crowded our rooms with furniture and
nicknacks, the more dust will have to be removed; the more numerous
and delicate our clothes, the more brushing and folding there will
be; and the more purely ornamental our own existence, the less
ornamental will be that of others.

There is a _pensee_ of Pascal's to the effect that a fop carries on
his person the evidence of the existence of so many people devoted to
his service. This thought may be delightful to a fop; but it is not
pleasant to a mind sensitive to beauty and hating the bare thought of
ugliness: for while vanity takes pleasure in lack of harmony between
oneself and one's neighbour, aesthetic feeling takes pleasure only in
harmonious relations. The thought of the servile lives devoted to make
our life more beautiful counterbalances the pleasure of the beauty;
'tis the eternal question of the violet essence and the pork suet. Now
the habit of beauty, the aesthetic sense, becomes, as I said, more and
more sensitive and vivacious; you cannot hide from it the knowledge of
every sort of detail, you cannot prevent its noticing the ugly side,
the ugly lining of certain pretty things. 'Tis a but weak and sleepy
kind of aestheticism which "blinks and shuts its apprehension up" at
your bidding, which looks another way discreetly, and discreetly
refrains from all comparisons. The real aesthetic activity _is_ an
activity; it is one of the strongest and most imperious powers of
human nature; it does not take orders, it only gives them. It is, when
full grown, a kind of conscience of beautiful and ugly, analogous to
the other conscience of right and wrong, and it is equally difficult
to silence. If you can silence your aesthetic faculty and bid it be
satisfied with the lesser beauty, the lesser harmony, instead of the
greater, be sure that it is a very rudimentary kind of instinct; and
that you are no more thoroughly aesthetic than if you could make your
sense of right and wrong be blind and dumb at your convenience, you
could be thoroughly moral.

Hence, the more aesthetic we become, the less we shall tolerate such
modes of living as involve dull and dirty work for others,