rly with cut crystals
from the early Victorian chandelier there might really be something
suddenly funny in it. But what should we say of hanging diamonds on a
hundred human noses merely to make that precious joke about icicles?

What can be more abject than the union of elaborate and recherche
arrangements with an old and obvious point? The clown with the red-hot
poker and the string of sausages is all very well in his way. 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. And it proves that the wealthy class of to-day
is quite as ignorant about how to enjoy itself as about how to rule
other people. That it cannot make its government govern or its education
educate we may take as a trifling weakness of oligarchy; but pleasure
we do look to see in such a class; and it has surely come to its
decrepitude when it cannot make its pleasures please.

The Garden of the Sea

One sometimes hears from persons of the chillier type of culture the
remark that plain country people do not appreciate the beauty o