Dewitt H. Parker - "The Principles Of Aesthetics"

Isabella L. Bird - "The Hawaiian Archipelago"

Aristophanes - "Peace"

Padraic Colum - "The King of Ireland's Son"

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PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




Mr. Greg specially undertakes the defence of deer-parks. But his ground
is that the deer-forests which were denounced as unproductive have been
proved to be the only mode of raising the condition and securing the
well-being of the ill-fed population. If so, "humanitarians" are ready
to hold up both hands in favour of deer-forests. Nay, we are ready to do
the same if the pleasure yielded by the deer-forests bears any
reasonable proportion to the expense and the agricultural sacrifice,
especially if the sportsman is a worker recruiting his exhausted brain,
not a sybarite killing time.

From parks and pleasure-grounds Mr. Greg goes on to horses; and here it
is the same thing over again. The apologist first sneers at those who
object to the millionaire's stud, then lets in the interest of the
community as a limiting principle, and ends by saying: "We may then
allow frankly and without demur, that if he (the millionaire) maintains
more horses than he needs or can use, his expenditure thereon is
strictly pernicious and indefensible, precisely in the same way as it
would be if he burnt so much hay and threw so many bushels of oats into
the fire. He is destroying human food." Now Mr. Greg has only to
determine whether a man who is keeping a score or more of carriage and
saddle horses, is "using" them or not. If he is, "humanitarians" are
perfectly satisfied.

Finally Mr. Greg comes to the case of large establishments of servants.
And here, having set out with intentions most adverse to my theory, he
"blesses it altogether." "Perhaps," he says, "of all the branches of a
wealthy nobleman's expenditure, that which will be condemned with most
unanimity, and defended with most difficulty, is the number of
ostentatious and unnecessary servants it is customary to maintain. For
this practice I have not a word to say. It is directly and indirectly
bad. It is bad for all parties. Its reflex action on the masters
themselves is noxious; it is mischievous to the flunkies who are
maintained in idleness, and in enervating and demoralizing luxury; it is
pernicious to the community at large, and especially to the middle and
upper middle classes, whose inevitable expenditure in procuring fit
domestic service--already burdensomely great--is thereby oppressively
enhanced, till it has become difficult not only to find good household
servants at moderate wages, but to find servants who will work
diligently and faithfully for any wages at all."

How will Mr. Greg keep up the palaces, parks, and studs, when he has
taken away the retinues of servants? If he does not take care, he will
find himself wielding the bosom of sumptuary reform in the most sweeping
manner before he is aware of it. But let me respectfully ask him, who
can he suppose objects to any expenditure except on the ground that it
is directly and indirectly bad; bad for all parties, noxious to the
voluptuary himself, noxious to all about him, and noxious to the
community? So long as a man does no harm to himself or to anyone else, I
for one see no objection to his supping like a Roman Emperor, on
pheasants' tongues, or making shirt-studs of Koh-i-noors.

"It is charity," says Mr. Greg, hurling at the system of great
establishments his last and bitterest anathema--"It is charity, and
charity of the bastard sort--charity disguised as ostentation. It feeds,
clothes, and houses a number of people in strenuous and pretentious
laziness. If almshouses are noxious and offensive to the economic mind,
then, by parity of reasoning, superfluous domestics are noxious also."
And so it would seem, by parity of reasoning, or rather _a
fortiori_, as being fed, clothed, and housed far more expensively,
and in far more strenuous and pretentious laziness, are the superfluous
masters of flunkeys. The flunkey does some work, at all events enough to
prevent him from becoming a mere fattened animal. If he is required to
grease and powder his head, he does work, as it seems to me, for which
he may fairly claim a high remuneration.

As I have said already, let Mr. Greg take in the moral, political, and
social evils of luxury, as well as the material waste, and I flatter
myself that there will be no real difference between his general view of
the responsibilities of wealth and mine. He seems to be as convinced as
I am that there is no happiness in living in strenuous and pretentious
laziness by the sweat of other men's brows.

Nor do I believe that even the particular phrase which has been deemed
so fraught with treason to plutocracy would, if my critic examined it
closely, seem to him so very objectionable. His own doctrine, it is
true, sounds severely economical. He holds that "the natural man and the
Christian" who should be moved by his natural folly and Christianity to
forego a bottle of champagne in order to relieve a neighbour in want of
actual food, would do a thing "distinctly criminal and pernicious."
Still I presume he would allow, theoretically, as I am very sure he
would practically, a place to natural sympathy. He would not applaud a
banquet given in the midst of a famine, although it might be clearly
proved that the money spent by the banqueters was their own, that those
who were perishing of famine had not been robbed of it, that their
bellies were none the emptier because those of the banqueters were full,
and that the cookery gave a stimulus to gastronomic art. He would not,
even, think it wholly irrational that the gloom of the work-house
should cast a momentary shadow on the enjoyments of the palace. I should
also expect him to understand the impression that a man of "brain," even
one free from any excessive tenderness of "heart," would not like to see
a vast apparatus of luxury, and a great train of flunkeys devoted to his
own material enjoyment--that he would feel it as a slur on his good
sense, as an impeachment of his mental resources, and of his command of
nobler elements of happiness, and even as a degradation of his manhood.
There was surely something respectable in the sentiment which made Mr.
Brassey refuse, however much his riches might increase, to add to his
establishment. There is surely something natural in the tendency, which
we generally find coupled with greatness, to simplicity of life. A
person whom I knew had dined with a millionaire _tete-a-tete_, with
six flunkeys standing round the table. I suspect that a man of Mr.
Greg's intellect and character, in spite of his half-ascetic hatred of
plush, would rather have been one of the six than one of the two.

While, however, I hope that my view of these matters coincides
practically with that of Mr. Greg far more than he supposes, I must
admit that there may be a certain difference of sentiment behind. Mr.
Greg describes the impressions to which I have given currency as a
confused compound of natural sympathy, vague Christianity, and dim
economic science. Of the confusion, vagueness and dimness of our views,
of course we cannot be expected to be conscious; but I own that I defer,
in these matters, not only to natural feeling, but to the ethics of
rational Christianity. I still adhere to the Christian code for want of
a better, the Utilitarian system of morality being, so far as I can see,
no morality at all, in the ordinary sense of the term, as it makes no
appeal to our moral nature, our conscience, or whatever philosophers
choose to call the deepest part of humanity. Of course, therefore, I
accept as the fundamental principle of human relations, and of all
science concerning them, the great Christian doctrine that "we are every
one members one of another" As a consequence of this doctrine I hold
that the wealth of mankind is morally a common store; that we are
morally bound to increase it as much, and to waste it as little, as we
can, that of the two it is happier to be underpaid than to be overpaid;
and that we shall all find it so in the sum of things. There is nothing
in such a view in the least degree subversive of the legal rights of
property, which the founders of Christianity distinctly recognised in
their teaching, and strengthened practically by raising the standard of
integrity; nothing adverse to active industry or good business habits;
nothing opposed to economic science as the study of the laws regulating
the production and distribution of wealth; nothing condemnatory of
pleasure, provided it be pleasure which opens the heart, as I suppose
was the case with the marriage feast at Cana, not the pleasure which
closes the heart, as I fear was the case with the "refined luxury" of
the Marquis of Steyne.

If this is superstition, all that I can say is that I have read Strauss,
Renan, Mr. Greg on the "Creed of Christendom," and all the eminent
writers I could hear of on that side, and that I am not conscious of any
bias to the side of orthodoxy, at least I have not given satisfaction to
the orthodox classes.

Christianity, of course, in common with other systems, craves a
reasonable construction. Plato cannot afford to have his apologues
treated as histories. In "Joshua Davidson," a good man is made to turn
away from Christianity because he finds that his faith will not
literally remove a mountain and cast it into the sea. But he had omitted
an indispensable preliminary. He ought first to have exactly compared
the bulk of his faith with that of a grain of Palestinian mustard seed.
Mr. Greg makes sport of the text "He that hath two coats let him impart
to him that hath none," which he says he heard in his youth, but without
ever considering its present applicability. Yet in the next paragraph
but one he gives it a precise and a very important application by
pronouncing that a man is not at liberty to grow wine for himself on
land which other people need for food. I fail to see how the principle
involved in this passage, and others of a similar tendency which I have
quoted from Mr. Greg's paper, differ from that involved in Gospel texts
which, if I were to quote them would grate strangely upon his ear. The
texts comprise a moral sanction; but Mr. Greg must have some moral
sanction when he forbids a man to do that which he is permitted to do by
law. Christianity, whatever its source and authority, was addressed at
first to childlike minds, and what its antagonists have to prove is not
that its forms of expression or even of thought are adapted to such
minds, but that its principles, when rationally applied to a more
advanced state of society, are unsound. Rightly understood it does not
seem to me to enjoin anything eccentric or spasmodic, to bid you enact
primitive Orientalism in the streets of London, thrust fraternity upon
writers in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, or behave generally as if the
"Kingdom of God" were already come. Your duty as a Christian is done if
you help its coming according to the circumstances of your place in
society and the age in which you live.

Of course, in subscribing to the Christian code of ethics, one lays
oneself open to "retorts corteous" without limit. But so one does in
subscribing to any code, or accepting any standard, whether moral or of
any other kind.

I do not see on what principle Mr. Greg would justify, if he does
justify, any sort of charitable benefactions. Did not Mr. Peabody give
his glass of champagne to a man in need? He might have spent all his
money on himself if he had been driven to building Chatsworths, and
hanging their walls with Raffaelles. How will he escape the reproach of
having done what was criminal and pernicious? And what are we to say of
the conduct of London plutocrats who abetted his proceedings by their
applause though they abstained from following his example? Is there any
apology for them at all but one essentially Christian? Not that
Christianity makes any great fuss over munificence, or gives political
economy reasonable ground for apprehension on that score. Plutocracy
deifies Mr. Peabody; Christianity measures him and pronounces his
millions worth less than the widow's mite.

In my lecture I have applied my principles, or tried to apply them,
fairly to the mechanic as well as to the millionaire. I have deprecated,
as immoral, a resort to strikes solely in the interest of the strikers,
without regard to the general interests of industry and of the community
at large. What has my critic to say, from the moral point of view, to
the gas stokers who leave London in the dark, or the colliers who, in
struggling to raise their own wages, condemn the ironworkers to "clamm"
for want of coal?

I would venture to suggest that Mr. Greg somewhat overrates in his paper
the beneficence of luxury as an agent in the advancement of
civilization. "Artificial wants," he says, "what may be termed
extravagant wants, the wish to possess something beyond the bare
necessaries of existence; the taste for superfluities and luxuries
first, the desire for refinements and embellishments next; the craving
for the higher enjoyments of intellect and art as the final stage--these
are the sources and stimulants of advancing civilization. It is these
desires, these needs, which raise mankind above mere animal existence,
which, in time and gradually, transform the savage into the cultured
citizen of intelligence and leisure. Ample food once obtained, he begins
to long for better, more varied, more succulent food; the richer
nutriment leads on to the well-stored larder and the well-filled cellar,
and culminates in the French cook." The love of truth, the love of
beauty, the effort to realize a high type of individual character, and a
high social ideal, surely these are elements of progress distinct from
gastronomy, and from that special chain of gradual improvement which
culminates in the French cook. It may be doubted whether French cookery
does always denote the acme of civilization. Perhaps in the case of the
typical London Alderman, it denotes something like the acme of
barbarism, for the barbarism of the elaborate and expensive glutton
surely exceeds that of the child of nature who gorges himself on the
flesh which he has taken in hunting: not to mention that the child of
nature costs humanity nothing, whereas the gourmand devours the labour
of the French cook and probably that of a good many assistants and
purveyors.

The greatest service is obviously rendered by any one who can improve
human food. "The man is what he eats," is a truth though somewhat too
broadly stated. But then the improvement must be one ultimately if not
immediately accessible to mankind in general. That which requires a
French cook is accessible only to a few.

Again, in setting forth the civilizing effects of expenditure, Mr. Greg,
I think, rather leaves out of sight those of frugality. The Florentines,
certainly the leaders of civilization in their day, were frugal in their
personal habits, and by that frugality accumulated the public wealth
which produced Florentine art, and sustained a national policy eminently
generous and beneficent for its time.

Moreover, in estimating the general influence of great fortunes, Mr.
Greg seems to take a rather sanguine view of the probable character and
conduct of their possessors. He admits that a broad-acred peer or
opulent commoner "may spend his L30,000 a year in such a manner as to be
a curse, a reproach, and an object of contempt to the community,
demoralizing and disgusting all around him, doing no good to others, and
bringing no real enjoyment to himself." But he appears to think that the
normal case, and the one which should govern our general views and
policy upon the subject, is that of a man "of refined taste and
intellect expanded to the requirements of his position, managing his
property with care and judgment, so as to set a feasible example to less
wealthy neighbours; prompt to discern and to aid useful undertakings, to
succour striving merit, unearned suffering, and overmatched energy."
"Such a man," he says, in a concluding burst of eloquence, "if his
establishment in horses and servants is not immoderate, although he
surrounds himself with all that art can offer to render life beautiful
and elegant though he gathers round him the best productions of the
intellect of all countries and ages, though his gardens and his park are
models of curiosity and beauty, though he lets his ancestral trees rot
in their picturesque mutility instead of converting them into profitable
timber, and disregards the fact that his park would be more productive
if cut up into potato plots though, in fine he lives in the very height
of elegant, refined and tasteful luxury--I should hesitate to denounce
as consuming on himself the incomes of countless labouring families, and
I should imagine that he might lead his life of temperate and thoughtful
joy quietly conscious that his liberal expenditure enabled scores of
these families as well as artists and others to exist in comfort and
without either brain or heart giving way under the burdensome
reflection."

It must be by a slip of the pen such as naturally occurs amidst the glow
of an enthusiastic description that the writer speaks of people as
enabling others to subsist by their expenditure. It is clear that people
can furnish subsistence to themselves or others only by production. A
rich idler may appear to give bread to an artist or opera girl but the
bread really comes not from the idler but from the workers who pay his
rents; the idler is at most the channel of distribution. The munificence
of monarchs who generously lavish the money of the taxpayer is a
familiar case of the same fallacy. This is the illusion of the Irish
peasant whose respect for the spendthrift "gentleman" and contempt for
the frugal "sneak" Mr. Greg honours with a place among the serious
elements of an economical and social problem.

But not to dwell on what is so obvious how many let me ask, of the
possessors of inherited wealth in England or in any other country,
fulfil or approach Mr. Greg's ideal? I confess that, as regards the mass
of the English squires the passage seems to me almost satire. Refined
taste and expanded intellect, promptness to discern and aid striving
merit and unearned suffering, life surrounded with all that art can do
to render it beautiful and elegant, the best productions of intellect
gathered from all intellects and ages--I do not deny that Mr. Greg has
seen all this, but I can hardly believe that he has seen it often, and I
suspect that there are probably people not unfamiliar with the abodes of
great landowners who have never seen it at all. Not to speak of artists
and art, what does landed wealth do for popular education? It appears
from the Popular Education Report of 1861 (p. 77) that in a district
taken as a fair specimen, the sum of L4,518, contributed by voluntary
subscription towards the support of 168 schools, was derived from the
following sources:

169 clergymen contributed L1,782 or L10 10 0 each
399 landowners " 2,127 " 5 6 0 "
2l7 occupiers " 200 " 18 6 "
102 householders " 181 " 1 15 6 "
141 other persons " 228 " 1 12 4 "

The rental of the 399 landowners was estimated at, L650,000 a year.
Judging from the result of my own observations, I should not have been
at all surprised if a further analysis of the return had shown that not
only the contributions of the clergy but those of retired professional
men and others with limited incomes were, in proportion, far greater
than those of the leviathans of wealth.

To play the part of Mr. Greg's ideal millionaire, a man must have not
only a large heart but a cultivated mind; and how often are educators
successful in getting work out of boys or youths who know that they have
not to make their own bread?

In my lecture I have drawn a strong distinction, though Mr. Greg has not
observed it, between hereditary wealth and that which, however great,
and even, compared with the wages of subordinate producers, excessive,
is earned by industry. Wealth earned by industry is, for obvious
reasons, generally much more wisely and beneficially spent than
hereditary wealth. The self-made millionaire must at all events, have an
active mind. The late Mr. Brassey was probably one man in a hundred even
among self-made millionaires; among hereditary millionaires he would
have been one in a thousand. Surely we always bestow especial praise on
one who resists the evil influences of hereditary wealth, and surely our
praise is deserved.

The good which private wealth has done in the way of patronizing
literature and art is, I am convinced, greatly overrated. The beneficent
patronage of Lorenzo di Medici is, like that of Louis XIV., a
chronological and moral fallacy. What Lorenzo did was, in effect, to
make literature and art servile and in some cases to taint them with the
propensities of a magnificent debauchee. It was not Lorenzo, nor any
number of Lorenzos, that made Florence, with her intellect and beauty,
but the public spirit, the love of the community, the intensity of civic
life, in which the interest of Florentine history lies. The decree of
the Commune for the building of the Cathedral directs the architect to
make a design "of such noble and extreme magnificence that the industry
and skill of men shall be able to invent nothing grander or more
beautiful," since it had been decided in Council that no plan should be
accepted "unless the conception was such as to render the work worthy of
an ambition which had become very great, inasmuch as it resulted from
the continued desires of a great number of citizens united in one sole
will."

I believe, too, that the munificence of a community is generally wiser
and better directed than that of private benefactors. Nothing can be
more admirable than the munificence of rich men in the United States.
But the drawback in the way of personal fancies and crochets is so great
that I sometimes doubt whether future generations will have reason to
thank the present, especially as the reverence of the Americans for
property is so intense that they would let a dead founder breed any
pestilence rather than touch the letter of his will.

Politically, no one can have lived in the New World without knowing that
a society in which wealth is distributed rests on an incomparably safer
foundation than one in which it is concentrated in the hands of a few.
British plutocracy has its cannoneer; but if the cannoneer happens to
take fancies into his head the "whiff of grapeshot" goes the wrong way.

Socially, I do not know whether Mr. Greg has been led to consider the
extent to which artificial desires, expensive fashions, and conventional
necessities created by wealth, interfere with freedom of intercourse and
general happiness. The _Saturday Review_ says:

"All classes of Her Majesty's respectable subjects are always doing
their best to keep up appearances, and a very hard struggle many of us
make of it. Thus a mansion in Belgrave Square ought to mean a corpulent
hall-porter, a couple of gigantic footmen, a butler and an under-butler
at the very least, if the owner professes to live op to his social
dignities. If our house is in Baker or Wimpole street, we must certainly
have a manservant in sombre raiment to open our door, with a hobbledehoy
or a buttons to run his superior's messages. In the smart, although
somewhat dismal, small squares in South Kensington and the Western
suburbs, the parlourmaid must wear the freshest of ribbons and trimmest
of bows, and be resplendent in starch and clean coloured muslins. So it
goes on, as we run down the gamut of the social scale; our ostentatious
expenditure must be in harmony throughout with the stuccoed facade
behind which we live, or the staff of domestics we parade. We are aware,
of course, as our incomes for the most part are limited, and as we are
all of us upon our mettle in the battle of life that we must pinch
somewhere if appearances are to be kept up. We do what we can in secret
towards balancing the budget. We retrench on our charities, save on our
coals, screw on our cabs, drink the sourest of Bordeaux instead of more
generous vintages, dispense with the cream which makes tea palatable,
and systematically sacrifice substantial comforts that we may swagger
successfully in the face of a critical and carping society. But with
the most of us if our position is an anxious one; it is of our own
making and if we dared to be eccentrically rational it might be very
tolerable."

Nor is this the worst. The worst is the exclusion from society of the
people who do not choose to torture and degrade themselves in order to
keep up appearances and who are probably the best people of all. The
interference of wealth and its exigencies with social enjoyment is I
suspect a heavy set off against squirearchical patronage of intellect
and art.

Those who believe that the distribution of wealth is more favourable to
happiness and more civilizing than its concentration will of course vote
against laws which tend to artificial concentration of wealth such as
those of primogeniture and entail. This they may do without advocating
public plunder though it suits plutocratic writers to confound the two.
For my own part I do not feel bound to pay to British plutocracy a
respect which British plutocracy does not pay to humanity. Some of its
organs are beginning to preach doctrines revolting to a Christian and to
any man who has not banished from his heart the love of his kind and we
have seen it when its class passions were excited show a temper as cruel
as that of any Maratist or Petroleuse. But so far from attacking the
institution of property [Footnote: The _Saturday Review_ some time
ago charged me with proposing to confiscate the increase in the value of
land. I never said anything of the kind nor anything I believe that
could easily be mistaken for it.] I have as great a respect for it as
any millionaire can have and as sincerely accept and uphold it as the
condition of our civilization. There is nothing inconsistent with this
in the belief that among the better part of the race property is being
gradually modified by duty or in the surmise that before humanity
reaches its distant goal property and duty will alike be merged in
affection.