 Section 12 of The Theory of the Leisure Class. Similarly it is felt, and the sentiment is acted upon, that the priestly servitors of the divinity should not engage in industrially productive work. That work of any kind, any employment which is of tangible human use, must not be carried on in the divine presence, or within the precincts of the sanctuary. That whoever comes into the presence should come cleansed of all profane industrial features in his apparel or person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday expensiveness. That on holidays set apart in honour of, or for communion with, the divinity, no work that is of human use should be performed by any one. Even the remota lay dependence should render a vicarious leisure to the extent of one day in seven. In all these deliverances of men's uninstructed sense of what is fit and proper in devout observance, and in the relations of the divinity, the effectual presence of the canons of pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons have had their effect on the devout judgment in this respect immediately, or at the second remove. These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more far-reaching and more specifically determinable effect upon the popular sense of beauty or serviceability in consumable goods. The requirements of pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable extent, influenced the sense of beauty and of utility in articles of use or beauty. Articles are to an extent preferred for use on account of their being conspicuously wasteful. They are felt to be serviceable somewhat in proportion as they are wasteful and ill-adapted to their ostensible use. The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the expensiveness of the articles. A homely illustration will bring out this dependence. A hand-walled silver spoon of a commercial value of some ten to twenty dollars is not ordinarily more serviceable, in the first sense of the word, than a machine-made spoon of the same material. It may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of some base metal, such as aluminium, the value of which may be no more than some ten to twenty cents. The former of the two utensils is, in fact, commonly a less effective contrivance for its ostensible purpose than the latter. The objection is, of course, ready to hand that, in taking this view of the matter, one of the chief uses, if not the chief use, of the costlier spoon is ignored. The hand-walled spoon gratifies our taste, our sense of the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of the base metal has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency. The facts are no doubt as the objection states them, but it will be evident on rejection that the objection is after all more plausible than conclusive. It appears, one, that while the different materials of which the two spoons are made each possess beauty and serviceability for the purpose for which it is used, the material of the hand-walled spoon is some one hundred times more valuable than the base of metal, without very greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or colour, and without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical serviceability. Two, if a close inspection should show that the supposed hand-walled spoon were in reality only a very clever citation of hand-walled goods, but an imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the same impression of line and surface to any but a minute examination by a trained eye, the utility of the article, including the gratification which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty, would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety percent or even more. Three, if the two spoons are, to a fairly close observer, so nearly identical in appearance that the lighter weight of the spurious article alone betrays it, this identity of form and colour will scarcely add to the value of the machine-made spoon nor appreciably enhance the gratification of the user's sense of beauty, in contemplating it, so long as the cheaper spoon is not a novelty, and so long as it can be procured at a nominal cost. The case of the spoons is typical. The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty. Our higher appreciation of the superior article is an appreciation of its superior honorific character, much more frequently than it is an unsophisticated appreciation of its beauty. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present consciously in our canons of taste, but it is nonetheless present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not. It is at this point, where the beautiful and the honorific meet and blend, that a discrimination between serviceability and wastefulness is most difficult in any concrete case. It frequently happens that an article which serves the honorific purpose of conspicuous waste is at the same time a beautiful object, and the same application of labor to which it owes its utility for the form of purpose may, and often does, give beauty of form and color to the article. The question is further complicated by the fact that many objects, as for instance the precious stones and the metals and some other materials used for dormant and decoration, owe their utility as items of conspicuous waste to an antecedent utility as objects of beauty. For instance, has a high degree of sensuous beauty, very many if not most of the highly prized works of art are intrinsically beautiful, though often with material qualification. The like is true for some stuffs used as clothing, of some landscapes and of many other things in less degree. Except for this intrinsic beauty which they possess, these objects would scarcely have been coveted as they are, or have become monopolized objects of pride to their possessors and users. But the utility of these things to the possessor is commonly due less to their intrinsic beauty than to the honor which their possession and consumption offers, or to the obliquy which it wards off. Apart from their serviceability in other respects, these objects are beautiful and have a utility as such. They are valuable on this account if they can be appropriated or monopolized. They are therefore coveted as valuable possessions, and their exclusive enjoyment gratifies the possessor's sense of pecuniary superiority at the same time that their contemplation gratifies his sense of beauty. But their beauty, in the naive sense of the word, is the occasion rather than the ground of their monopolization or of their commercial value. Great as is the sensuous beauty of gems, their rarity and price adds an expression of distinction to them which they would never have if they were cheap. There is indeed in the common run of cases under this head relatively little incentive to the exclusive possession and use of these beautiful things, except on the ground of their honorific character as items of conspicuous waste. Most objects of this general class, with the partial exception of articles of personal adornment, would serve all other purposes than the honorific one equally well, whether owned by the person viewing them or not. And even as regards personal ornaments, it is to be added that their chief purpose is to lend a clout to the person of their wearer, or owner, by comparison with other persons who are compelled to do without. The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not generally nor universally heightened by possession. The generalization for which the discussion so far affords ground is that any valuable object in order to appeal to our sense of beauty must conform to the requirements of beauty and of expansiveness both. But this is not all. Beyond this the canon of expansiveness also affects our tastes in such a way as to inextricably blend the marks of expansiveness in our appreciation with the beautiful features of the object, and to subsume the resultant effect under the head of an appreciation of beauty simply. The marks of expansiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles. They are pleasing as being marks of honorific costiness, and the pleasure which they afford on this score blends with that afforded by the beautiful form and color of the object, so that we often declare that an article of apparel, for instance, is perfectly lovely, when pretty much all that an analysis of the aesthetic value of the article would leave ground for is a declaration that it is peculiarly honorific. This blending and confusion of the elements of expansiveness and of beauty is perhaps best exemplified in articles of dress and of household furniture. The code of reputability in matters of dress decides what shapes, colors, materials, and general effects in human apparel are for the time to be accepted as suitable, and departures from the code are offensive to our taste, supposedly as being departures from aesthetic truth. The approval with which we look upon fashionable attire is by no means to be accounted pure make-believe. We readily, and for the most part with utter sincerity, find those things pleasing that are in vogue. Shaggy dressstuffs and pronounced color effects, for instance, offends us at time when the vogue is goods of a high glossy finish and neutral colors. A fancy bonnet of this year's model unquestionably appeals to our sensibilities today much more forcible than an equally fancy bonnet of the model of last year. Although, when viewed in the perspective of a quarter of a century, it would, I apprehend, be a matter of the utmost difficulty to award the palm for intrinsic beauty to the one rather than to the other of these structures. So, again, it may be remarked that, considered simply in their physical juxtaposition with the human form, the high gloss of a gentleman's hat or of a patent leather shoe has no more of intrinsic beauty than the similarly high gloss on a threadbare sleeve, and yet there is no question but that all well-dread people, in the Occidental civilized communities, instinctively and unaffectedly cleave to the one as a phenomenon of great beauty, and to assure the other as offensive to every sense to which it can appeal, it is extremely doubtful if anyone could be induced to wear such a contrivance as the high hat of civilized society, except for some urgent reason based on other than aesthetic grounds. By further habituation to an appreciative perception of the marks of expensiveness in goods, and by habitually identifying beauty with reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not expensive is accounted not beautiful. In this way it has happened, for instance, that some beautiful flowers pass conventionally for offensive weeds. Others that can be cultivated with relative ease are accepted and admired by the lower middle class, who can afford no more expensive luxuries of this kind. But these varieties are rejected as vulgar by those people who are better able to pay for expensive flowers and who are educated to a higher schedule of pecuniary beauty in the florist's products. While still other flowers of no greater intrinsic beauty than these are cultivated at great cost and call out much admiration from flower lovers whose tastes have been matured under the critical guidance of a polite environment. The same variation in matters of taste from one class of society to another is visible also as regards many other kinds of consumable goods, as for example is the case with furniture, houses, parks and gardens. The diversity of views as to what is beautiful in these various classes of goods is not a diversity of the norm according to which the unsophisticated sense of the beautiful works. It is not a constitutional difference of endowments in the aesthetic respect, but rather a difference in the code of reputability which specifies what objects properly lie within the scope of honorific consumption for the class to which the critic belongs. It is a difference in the traditions of propriety with respect to the kind of things which may, without delegation to the consumer, be consumed under the head of objects of taste and art. With a certain allowance for variations to be accounted for on other grounds, these traditions are determined more or less rigidly by the pecuniary plane of life of the class. Every day life affords many curious illustrations of the way in which the code of pecuniary beauty in articles of use varies from class to class, as well as of the way in which the conventional sense of beauty departs in its deliverances from the sense untutored by the requirements of pecuniary repute. Such a fact is the lawn or the close cropped yard or park which appeals so unaffectedly to the taste of the Western peoples. It appears especially to appeal to the taste of the well to do classes in those communities in which the dolico blonde element predominates in an appreciable degree. The lawn unquestionably has an element of sensuous beauty simply as an object of our perception, and as such no doubt it appeals pretty directly to the eye of nearly all races and all classes, but it is perhaps more unquestionably beautiful to the eye of the dolico blonde than to most other varieties of men. This higher appreciation of a stretch of greenswatt in this ethnic element than in the other elements of the population goes along with certain other features of the dolico blonde temperament that indicate that this racial element had once been for a long time a pastoral people inhabiting a region with a humid climate. The close cropped lawn is beautiful in the eyes of the people whose inherited bent it is to readily find pleasure in contemplating a well-preserved pasture or grazing land. For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture and in some cases today where the expansiveness of the attendant circumstances bars out any imputation of thrift the idyll of the dolico blonde is rehabilitated in the introduction of a cow into a lawn or private ground. In such cases the cow made use of is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar suggestion of thrift which is nearly inseparable from the cow is a standing objection to the decorative use of this animal so that in all cases except where luxurious surroundings negate this suggestion the use of the cow as an object of taste must be avoided. Worth the predilection for some grazing animal to fill out the suggestion of the pasture is too strong to be suppressed the cow's place is often given up to some more or less inadequate substitute such as deer antelopes or some such exotic beast. These substitutes although less beautiful to the pastoral eye of western man than the cow are in such cases preferred because of their superior expansiveness or futility and their consequent repute. They are not vulgarly lucrative either in fact or in suggestion. Public parks of course fall in the same category with the lawn they too at their best are imitations of the pasture. Such a park is of course best kept by grazing and the cattle on the grass are themselves no mean addition to the beauty of the thing as needs scarcely be insisted on with anyone who has once seen a well-kept pasture. But it is worth noting as an expression of the pecuniary element in popular taste that such a method of keeping public grounds is seldom resorted to. The best that is done by skilled workmen under the supervision of a trained keeper is a more or less close imitation of a pasture but the result invariably falls somewhat short of the artistic effect of grazing. But to the average popular apprehension a herd of cattle so pointily suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence in the public pleasure ground would be intolerably cheap. This method of keeping grounds is comparatively inexpensive therefore it is in decorous. Of the same general bearing is another feature of public grounds. There is a studious exhibition of expansiveness coupled with a make-believe of simplicity and crude serviceability. Private grounds also show the same physiognomy wherever they are in the management or ownership of persons whose tastes have been formed under middle-class habits of life or under the upper-class traditions of no later a date than the childhood of the generation that is now passing. Grounds which conform to the instructed tastes of the latter-day upper class do not show these features in so marked a degree. The reason for this difference in tastes between the past and the incoming generation of the well bred lies in the changing economic situation. A similar difference is perceptible in other respects as well as in the accepted ideals of pleasure grounds. In this country as in most others until the last half century but a very small proportion of the population were possessed of such wealth as would exempt them from thrift. Owing to imperfect means of communication this small fraction was scattered and out of effective touch with one another. There was therefore no basis for a growth of taste in disregard of expansiveness. The revolt of the well-dread taste against vulgar thrift was unchecked. Wherever the unsophisticated sense of beauty might show itself sporadically in an approval of inexpensive or thrifty surroundings it would lack the social confirmation which nothing but a considerable body of like-minded people can give. There was therefore no effective upper-class opinion that would overlook evidences of possible inexpensiveness in the management of grounds, and there was consequently no appreciable divergence between the leisure class and the lower middle-class ideal in the physiognomy of pleasure grounds. Both classes equally constructed their ideals with the fear of pecuniary disrepute before their eyes. End of the second part of chapter 6. Section 13 of the theory of the leisure class. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit Librivox.org. Recording by Morgan Scorpion. The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorsten Reblen. Third part of chapter 6. Pecuniary Canons of Taste. Today a divergence in ideals is beginning to be apparent. The portion of the leisure class that has been consistently exempt from work and from pecuniary cares for a generation or more is now large enough to form and sustain opinion in matters of taste. Increased mobility of the members has also added to the facility with which a social confirmation can be attained within the class. Within this select class the exemption from thrift is a matter so common place as to have lost much of its utility as a basis of pecuniary decency. Therefore the latter-day upper-class canons of taste do not so consistently insist on an unremitting demonstration of expansiveness and a strict exclusion of the appearance of thrift. So a predilection for the rustic and the natural in parks and grounds makes its appearance on these higher social and intellectual levels. This predilection is in large part an outcropping of the instinct of workmanship and it works out its results with varying degrees of consistency. It is seldom altogether unaffected and at times it shades off into something not widely different from that make believe of rusticity which has been referred to above. A weakness for crudely serviceable contrivances that pointedly suggest immediate and wasteless use is present even in the middle-class tastes. But it is there kept well in hand under the unbroken dominance of the canon of reputable futility. Consequently it works out in a variety of ways and means for shamming serviceability. In such contrivances as rustic fences, bridges, bowers, pavilions and the like decorative features. An expression of this affectation of serviceability at what is perhaps its wildest divergence from the first promptings of the sense of economic beauty is afforded by the cast iron rustic fence and trellis or by a circuitous drive laid across level ground. The select leisure class has outgrown the use of these pseudo serviceable variants of pecuniary beauty at least at some points. But the taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths. The popular taste in these matters is to be seen in the prevalent high appreciation of topiary work and of the conventional flowerbeds of public grounds. Perhaps as happy an illustration as may be had of this dominance of pecuniary beauty over aesthetic beauty in middle class tastes is seen in the reconstruction of the grounds lately occupied by the columbian exposition. The evidence goes to show that the requirement of reputable expensiveness is still present in good vigor even when all ostensibly lavish display is avoided. The artistic effects actually wrought in this work of reconstruction diverge somewhat widely from the effects to which the same ground would have lent itself in hands not guided by pecuniary canons of taste. And even the better class of the city's population view the progress of the work with an unreserved approval which suggests that there is in this case little if any discrepancy between the tastes of the upper and the lower or middle classes of the city. The sense of beauty in the population of this representative city of the advanced pecuniary culture is very cherry of any departure from its great cultural principle of conspicuous waste. The love of nature perhaps itself borrowed from a higher class code of taste sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways under the guidance of this canon of pecuniary beauty and leads to results that may seem in congress to an unreflecting beholder. The well accepted practice of planting trees in the treeless areas of this country for instance has been carried over as an item of honorific expenditure into the heavily wooded areas so that it is by no means unusual for a villager or a farmer in the wooded country to clear the land of its native trees and immediately replant saplings of certain introduced varieties about the farmyard or along the streets. In this way a forest growth of oak, elm, beech, butternut, hemlock, basswood and birch is cleared off to give room for saplings of soft maple, cottonwood and brittle willow. It is felt that the inexpensiveness of leaving the forest trees standing would delegate from the dignity that should invest an article which is intended to serve a decorative and honorific end. The like-pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is traceable in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The part played by this canon of taste in assigning her place in the popular aesthetic scale to the cow has already been spoken of. Something to the same effect is true of the other domestic animals so far as they are in an appreciable degree industrially useful to the community, as for instance barnyard fowl, hogs, cattle, sheep, goats, draft horses. They are of the nature of productive goods and serve a useful often allugrative end, therefore beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is different with those domestic animals which ordinarily serve no industrial end, such as pigeons, parrots and other cage birds, cats, dogs and fast horses. These commonly are items of conspicuous consumption and are therefore honorific in their nature and may legitimately be accounted beautiful. This class of animals are conventionally admired by the body of the upper classes, while the pecuniarily lower classes and that select minority of the leisure class among whom the rigorous canon that of George thrift is in a measure obsolescent. Find beauty in one class of animals as in another without drawing a hard and fast line of pecuniary demarcation between the beautiful and the ugly. In the case of those domestic animals which are honorific and are reputed beautiful there is a subsidiary basis of merit that should be spoken of. Apart from the birds which belong in the honorific class of domestic animals and which owe their place in this class to their non-lucrative character alone, the animals which merit particular attention are cats, dogs and fast horses. The cat is less reputable than the other two just named because she is less wasteful. She may even serve a useful end. At the same time the cat's temperament does not fit her for the honorific purpose. She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her owner and his neighbour. The exception to this last rule occurs in the case of such scarce and fanciful products as the Angora cat, which have some slight honorific value on the ground of expensiveness, and have therefore some special claim to beauty on pecuniary grounds. The dog has advantages in the way of uselessness as well as in special gifts of temperament. He is often spoken of in an eminent sense as the friend of man and his intelligence and fidelity are praised. The meaning of this is that the dog is man's servant and that he has the gift of an unquestioning of subservience and a slave's quickness in guessing his master's mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him well for the relation of status and which must for the present purpose be set down as serviceable traits, the dog has some characteristics which are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up in a servile forming attitude towards his master and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog then commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery, and as he is also an item of expense and commonly serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well assured place in man's regard as a thing of good repute. The dog is at the same time associated now imagination with the chase, a meritorious employment and an expression of the honorable predatory impulse. Standing on this vantage ground, whatever beauty of form and motion and whatever commendable mental traits he may possess are conventionally acknowledged and magnified, and even those varieties of the dog which have been bred into grotesque deformity by the dog fancier are in good faith accounted beautiful by many. These varieties of dogs, and the like is true of other fancy bred animals, are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of a particular fashion which the deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand this differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and instability of structure is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity and consequent expense. The commercial value of canine monstrosities, such as the prevailing styles of pet dogs both for men's and women's use, rests on their high cost of production, and their value to their owners lies chiefly in their utility as items of conspicuous consumption. Indirectly, through reflection upon their horrific expansiveness, a social worth is imputed to them, and so, by an easy substitution of words and ideas, they come to be admired and reputed beautiful. Since any attention bestowed upon these animals is in no sense gainful or useful, it is also reputable, and since the habit of giving them attention is consequently not deprecated, it may grow into an habitual attachment of great tenacity and of a most benevolent character, so that in the affection bestowed on pet animals the canon of expansiveness is present more or less remotely as a norm which guides and shapes the sentiment and the selection of its object. The like is true, as will be noted presently, with respect to affection for persons also, although the manner in which the norm acts in that case is somewhat different. The case of the fast horse is much like that of the dog. He is on the whole expensive or wasteful and useless for the industrial purpose. What productive use he may possess in the way of enhancing the well-being of the community, or making the way of life easier for men, takes the form of exhibitions of force and facility of motion that gratify the popular aesthetic sense. This is of course a substantial service ability. The horse is not endowed with the same spiritual aptitude for servile dependence in the same measure as the dog, but he ministers effectually to his master's impulse to convert the animate forces of the environment to his own use and discretion, and so express his own dominating individuality through them. The fast horse is at least potentially a racehorse of high or low degree, and it is as such that he is peculiarly serviceable to his owner. The utility of the fast horse lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation. It gratifies the owner's sense of aggression and dominance to have his own horse outstrip his neighbors. This use being not lucrative, but on the whole pretty consistently wasteful, and quite conspicuously so, it is honorific, and therefore gives the fast horse a strong presumptive position of reputability. Beyond this, the racehorse proper has also a similarly non-industrial but honorific use as a gambling instrument. The fast horse then is aesthetically fortunate in that the canon of pecuniary good repute legitimates a free appreciation of whatever beauty or serviceability he may possess. His pretensions have the countenance of the principle of conspicuous waste and the backing of the predatory aptitude for dominance and emulation. The horse is, moreover, a beautiful animal, although the racehorse is so in no peculiar degree to the uninstructed taste of those persons who belong neither in the class of racehorse fanciers, nor in the class whose sense of beauty is held in abeyance by the moral constraint of the horse fanciers' award. To this unduited taste the most beautiful horse seems to be a form which has suffered less radical alteration than the racehorse under the breeders' selective development of the animal. Still, when a writer or speaker, especially of those whose eloquence is most consistently commonplace once an illustration of animal grace and serviceability, for rhetorical use he habitually turns to the horse, and he commonly makes it plain before he is done that what he has in mind is the racehorse. It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of varieties of horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among people of even moderately cultivated tastes in these matters, there's also discernible another and more direct line of influence of the leisure class canons of reputability. In this country, for instance, leisure class tastes are to some extent shaped on usages and habits which prevail, or which are apprehended to prevail, among the leisure class of Great Britain. In dogs this is true to a less extent than in horses. In horses, more particularly in saddle horses, which at their best serve the purpose of wasteful display simply, it will hold true in a general way that a horse is more beautiful in proportion as he is more English. The English leisure class being, for purposes of reputable usage, the upper leisure class of this country, and so the exemplar for the lower grades. This mimicry in the methods of the appreciation of beauty and in the forming of judgments of taste need not result in a spurious, or at any rate not a hypocritical or affected, predilection. The predilection is as serious and a substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as when it rests on any other. The difference is that this taste is, and as substantial an award of taste when it rests on this basis as when it rests on any other. The difference is that this taste is a taste for the reputably correct, not for the aesthetically true. The mimicry, it should be said, extends further than to the sense of beauty in horse-flesh simply. It includes trappings and horsemanship as well, so that the correct or reputably beautiful seat or posture is also decided by English usage, as well as the equestrian gate. To show how fortuitous may sometimes be the circumstances which decide what shall be becoming and what not under the pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be noted that this English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gate which has made an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when the English roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually impassable, for a horse travelling at a more comfortable gate. So that a person of decorous taste in horsemanship today rides a punch with docked tail in an uncomfortable posture and at a distressing gate, because the English roads during a great part of the last century were impassable for a horse travelling at a more horse-like gate, or for an animal built for moving with ease over the firm and open country to which the horse is indigenous. It is not only with respect to consumable goods, including domestic animals, that the canons of taste have been coloured by the canons of pecuniary reputability. Something to the like effect is to be said for beauty in persons. In order to avoid whatever may be matter of controversy, no weight will be given in this connection to such popular predilection as there may be for the dignified, leisurely bearing, and polypresence that are by vulgar tradition associated with opulence in mature men. These traits are in some measure accepted as elements of personal beauty. But there are certain elements of feminine beauty, on the other hand, which come in under this head, and which are of so concrete and specific a character as to admit of itemised appreciation. It is more or less a rule that in communities which are at the stage of economic development at which women are valued by the upper class for their service, the ideal of female beauty is a robust, large, limbed woman. The ground of appreciation is the physique, while the conformation of the face is of secondary weight only. A well-known instance of this ideal of the early predatory culture is that of the maidens of the Homeric poems. End of third part of chapter 6. Section 14 of the Theory of the Leisure Class This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Recording by Morgan Scorpion The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorsten Weblen Fourth part of chapter 6. Pecuniary Cannons of Taste This ideal suffers a change in the succeeding development when, in the conventional scheme, the office of the high class wife comes to be a precarious leisure simply. The ideal then includes the characteristics which are supposed to result from or to go with the life of leisure consistently enforced. The ideal accepted under these circumstances may be gathered from descriptions of beautiful women by poets and writers of the chivalric times. In the conventional scheme of those days, ladies of high degree were conceived to be in perpetual tugelage, and to be scrupulously exempt from all useful work. The resulting chivalric or romantic ideal of beauty takes cognizance chiefly of the face, and dwells on its delicacy, and on the delicacy of the hands and feet, the slender figure, and especially the slender waist. In the pictured representations of the women of that time, and in modern romantic imitators of the chivalric thought and feeling, the waist is attenuated to a degree that implies extreme debility. The same ideal is still excellent among a considerable portion of the population of modern industrial communities, but it is to be said that it has retained its hold most tenaciously in those modern communities which are least advanced in point of economic and civil development, and which show the most considerable survivals of status and of predatory institutions. That is to say, the chivalric ideal is best preserved in those existing communities which are substantially least modern. Survival of this lackadaisical or romantic ideal occur freely in the tastes of the well-to-do classes of continental countries. In modern communities which have reached the higher levels of industrial development, the upper leisure class has accumulated so great a mass of wealth as to place its women above all imputation of boggily productive labour. Here the status of women as vicarious consumers is beginning to lose its place in the sections of the body of the people, and as a consequence the ideal of feminine beauty is beginning to change back again from the infirmly delicate, translucent and hazardously slender to a woman of the archaic type that does not disown her hands and feet, nor indeed the other gross material facts of her person. In the course of economic development the ideal of beauty among the peoples of the western culture has shifted from the woman of physical presence to the lady, and it is beginning to shift back again to the woman, and all in obedience to the changing conditions of pecuniary emulation. The exigencies of emulation at one time required lusty slaves, at another time they required a conspicuous performance of vicarious leisure, and consequently an obvious disability. But the situation is now beginning to outgrow this last requirement, since, under the higher efficiency of modern industry, leisure in women is possible so far down the scale of reputability that it will no longer serve as a definitive mark of the highest pecuniary grade. Apart from this general control exercised by the norm of conspicuous waste over the ideal of feminine beauty, there are one or two details which merit specific mention as showing how it may exercise an extreme constraint in detail over men's sense of beauty in women. It has already been noticed that at these stages of economic evolution at which conspicuous leisure is much regarded as a means of good repute, the ideal requires delicate and diminutive hands and feet and a slender waist. These features, together with the other related faults of structure that commonly go with them, go to show that the person so affected is incapable of useful effort and must therefore be supported in idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she is consequently valuable as evidence of pecuniary strength. It results that at this cultural stage women take thought to alter their persons, so as to conform more nearly to the requirements of the instructed taste of the time, and under the guidance of the canon of pecuniary decency, the men find the resulting artificially induced pathological features attractive. So, for instance, the constricted waste which has had so wide and persistent a vogue in the communities of the western culture, and so also the deformed thought of the Chinese. Both of these are mutilations of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained sense. It requires habituation to become reconciled to them. Yet there is no room to question their attractiveness to men into whose scheme of life they fit as honorific items sanctioned by the requirements of pecuniary reputability. They are items of pecuniary and cultural beauty which have come to do duty as elements of the ideal of womanliness. The connection here indicated between the aesthetic value and the invidious pecuniary value of things is of course not present in the consciousness of the valuer. So far as a person, informing a judgment of taste, takes thought and reflects that the object of beauty under consideration is wasteful and reputable, and therefore may legitimately be accounted beautiful, so far as the judgment is not a bona fide judgment of taste and does not come up for consideration in this connection. The connection which is here insisted on between the reputability and the apprehended beauty of object lies through the effect which the fact of reputability has upon the valuer's habits of thought. He is in the habit of forming judgments of value of various kinds, economic, moral, aesthetic or reputable concerning the objects with which he has to do, and his attitude of commendation towards a given object on any other ground will affect the degree of his appreciation of the object when he comes to value it for the aesthetic purpose. This is more particularly true as regards valuation on ground so closely related to the aesthetic ground as that of reputability. The valuation for the aesthetic purpose and for the purpose of repute are not held apart as distinctly as might be. Confusion is especially apt to arise between these two kinds of valuation, because the value of objects for repute is not vitually distinguished in speech by the use of a special descriptive term. The result is that the terms in familiar use to designate categories or elements of beauty are applied to cover this unnamed element of the pecuniary merit, and the corresponding confusion of ideas follows by easy consequence. The demands of reputability in this way coalesce in the popular apprehension with the demands of the sense of beauty, and beauty which is not accompanied by the accredited marks of good repute is not accepted. But the requirements of pecuniary reputability and those of beauty in the naive sense do not in any appreciable degree coincide. The elimination from our surroundings of the pecuniary unfit, therefore, results in a more or less slower elimination of that considerable range of elements of beauty which do not happen to conform to the pecuniary requirement. The underlying norms of taste are of very ancient growth, probably far antedating the advent of the pecuniary institutions that are here under discussion. Consequently, by force of the past selective adaptation of men's habits of thought, it happens that the requirements of beauty, simply, are for the most part best satisfied by inexpensive contrivances and structures which in a straightforward manner suggest both the office which they are to perform and the method of serving their end. It may be in place to recall the modern psychological position. Beauty of form seems to be a question of facility of our perception. The proposition could perhaps safely be made broader than this. If abstraction is made from association, suggestion and expression, classed as elements of beauty, then beauty in any perceived object means that the mind readily unfolds its aperceptive activity in the directions which the object in question affords. But the directions in which activity readily unfolds or expresses itself are the directions to which long and close habituation has made the mind prone. So far as concerns the essential elements of beauty, this habituation is an habituation so close and long as to have induced not only a proclivity to the our perceptive form in question, but an adaptation of physiological structure and function as well. So far as the economic interest enters into the constitution of beauty, it enters as a suggestion or expression of adequacy to a purpose, a manifest and readily infrable subservience to the life process. This expression of economic facility or economic serviceability in any object, what may be called the economic beauty of the object, is best sowed by neat and unabiguous suggestion of its office and its efficiency for the material ends of life. On this ground, among objects of use, the simple and unadorned article aesthetically the best. But since the pecuniary canon of reputability rejects the inexpensive in articles appropriated to individual consumption, the satisfaction of our craving for beautiful things must be sought by way of compromise. The canons of beauty must be circumvented by some contrivance which will give evidence of a reputably wasteful expenditure, at the same time that it meets the demands of our critical sense of the useful and the beautiful, or at least meets the demand of some habit which has come to do duty in place of that sense. Such an auxiliary sense of taste is the sense of novelty, and this latter is helped out in its surrogate ship by the curiosity with which men view ingenious and puzzling contrivances. Hence it comes that most objects alleged to be beautiful and doing duty as such show considerable ingenuity of design which are calculated to puzzle the beholder, to bewilder him with irrelevant suggestions and hints of the improbable, at the same time that they give evidence of an expenditure of labour in excess of what would give them their fullest efficiency for their ostensible economic end. This may be shown by an illustration taken from outside the range of our everyday habits and everyday contact, and so outside the range of our bias. Such are the remarkable feather mantles of Hawaii, or the well-known cord handles of the ceremonial adzes of several Polynesian islands. These are undeniably beautiful, both in the sense that they offer a pleasing composition of form, lines and colour, and in the sense that they evince great skill and ingenuity in design and construction. At the same time the articles are manifestly ill-fitted to serve any other economic purpose. But it is not always that the evolution of ingenious and puzzling contrivances under the guidance of the Canon of Wasted Effort works out so happy a result. The result is quite as often a virtually complete suppression of all elements that rebare scrutiny as expressions of beauty or of serviceability, and the substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labour, backed by a conspicuous ineptitude, until many of the objects with which we surround ourselves in everyday life, and even many articles of everyday dress and ornament, are such as would not be tolerated except under the stress of prescriptive tradition. Illustrations of this substitution of ingenuity and expense in place of beauty and serviceability are to be seen, for instance, in domestic architecture, in domestic art or fancy work, in various shades of apparel, especially of feminine and priestly apparel. The Canon of Beauty requires expression of the generic. The novelty, due to the demands of conspicuous waste, traverses this Canon of Beauty, in that it results in making the physiognomy of our objects of taste a conjuries of idiosyncrasies, and the idiosyncrasies are moreover under the selective surveillance of the Canon of Expensiveness. The process of selective adaptation of designs to the end of conspicuous waste and the substitution of pecuniary beauty for aesthetic beauty has been especially effective in the development of architecture. It would be extremely difficult to find a modern civilised residence or public building which can claim anything better than relative inoffensiveness in the eyes of anyone who will dissociate the elements of beauty from those of honorific waste. The endless variety of fonts presented by the better class of tenements and apartment houses in our cities is an endless variety of architectural distress, and of suggestions of expensive discomfort. Considered as objects of beauty, the dead walls of the sides and back of these structures left untouched by the hands of the artist are commonly the best features of the building. What has been said of the influence of the law of conspicuous waste upon the canons of taste will hold true with but a slight change of terms of its influence upon our notions of the serviceability of goods for other ends than the aesthetic ones. Goods are produced and consumed as a means to the fuller unfolding of human life, and their utility consists, in the first instance, in their efficiency as means to this end. The end is, in the first instance, the fullness of life of the individual taken in absolute terms. But the human proclivity to emulation has seized upon the consumption of goods as a means to an invidious comparison, and has thereby invested constable goods with a secondary utility as evidence of relative ability to pay. This indirect or secondary use of consumable goods lends an honorific character to consumption and presently also to the goods which best serve the emulative end of consumption. The consumption of expensive goods is meritorious, and the goods which contain an appreciable element of cost in excess of what goes to give them serviceability for the ostensible mechanical purpose are honorific. The marks of superfluous costliness in the goods are therefore marks of worth, of high efficiency for the indirect invidious end to be served by their consumption, and conversely, goods are humilific, and therefore unattractive, if they show tooth-riffedian adaptation to the mechanical end sort and do not include a margin of expansiveness on which to rest a complacent invidious comparison. This indirect utility gives much of their value to the better grades of goods. In order to appeal to the cultivated sense of utility, an article must contain a modicum of this indirect utility. While men may have set out with disapproving and inexpensive manner of living because it indicated inability to spend much, and so indicated a lack of pecuniary success, they end by falling into the habit of disapproving cheap things as being intrinsically dishonorable or unworthy because they are cheap. As time has gone on, each succeeding generation has received this tradition of meritorious expenditure from the generation before it, and has in its tone further elaborated and fortified the traditional canon of pecuniary reputability in goods consumed, until we have finally reached such a degree of conviction as to the unworthiness of all inexpensive things that we have no longer any misgivings in formulating the maxim, cheap and nasty. So thoroughly has the habit of approving the expensive and disapproving the inexpensive being ingrained into our thinking that we instinctively insist upon at least some measure of wasteful expensiveness in all our consumption, even in the case of goods which are consumed in strict privacy and without the slightest thought of display. We all feel, sincerely and without misgiving, that we are the more lifted up in spirit for having, even in the privacy of our own household, eaten our daily meal by the help of hand-wraught e-silver utensils, from hand-painted china, often of dubious artistic value, laid on high-priced table linen. Any retrogression from the standard of living which we are accustomed to regard as worthy in this respect is felt to be a grievous violation of our human dignity. So also for the last dozen years candles have been a more pleasing source of light at dinner than any other. Candle light is now softer, less distressing to well-dread eyes than oil, gas or electric light. The same could not have been said thirty years ago, when candles were, or recently had been, the cheapest available light for domestic use. Nor are candles even now found to give an acceptable or effective light for any other than a ceremonial illumination. A political sage still living has summed up the conclusion of this whole matter in the dictum. A cheap coat makes a cheap man, and there is probably no one who does not feel the convincing force of this maxim. The habit of looking for the marks of superfluous expansiveness in goods, and of requiring that all goods should afford some utility of the indirect or invidious sort, leads to a change in the standards by which the utility of goods is gauged. The honorific element and the element of brute efficiency are not held apart in the consumer's appreciation of commodities, and the two together go to make up the unalised aggregate serviceability of the goods. Under the resulting standard of serviceability, no article will pass master on the strength of material sufficiency alone. In order to completeness and full acceptability to the consumer, it must also show the honorific element. It results that the producers of articles of consumption direct their efforts to the production of goods that shall meet this demand for the honorific element. They will do this with all the more alacrity and effect, since they are themselves under the dominance of the same standard of worth in goods, and would be sincerely grieved at the sight of goods which lack the proper honorific finish. Hence it has come about that there are today no goods supplied in any trade which do not contain the honorific element in greater or less degree. Any consumer who might diogenes like insist on the elimination of all honorific or wasteful elements from his consumption would be unable to supply his most trivial once in the modern market. Indeed, even if he resorted to supplying his once directly by his own efforts, he would find it difficult if not impossible to divest himself of the current habits of thought on this head, so that he could scarcely compass a supply of the necessaries of life for a day's consumption without instinctively and by oversight incorporating in his homemade product something of this honorific quasi-decorative element of wasted labour. End of fourth part of chapter 6. Section 15 of The Theory of the Leisure Class This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Morgan Scorpion The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorsten Weblen Fifth part of chapter 6, Pecuniary Cannons of Taste It is notorious that in their selection of serviceable goods in the retail market purchasers are guided more by the finish and workmanship of the goods than by any marks of substantial serviceability. Goods, in order to sell, must have some appreciable amount of labour spent in giving them the marks of decent expensiveness. In addition to what goes to give them efficiency for the material use which they are to serve. This habit of making obvious costliness a canon of serviceability of course acts to enhance the aggregate cost of articles of consumption. It puts us on our guard against cheapness by identifying merit in some degree with cost. There is ordinarily a consistent effort on the part of the consumer to obtain goods of the required serviceability at as advantageous a bargain as may be. But the conventional requirement of obvious costliness, as a voucher and a constituent of the serviceability of the goods, leads him to reject as undergrade such goods as do not contain a large element of conspicuous waste. It is to be added that a large share of those features of consumable goods which figure in popular apprehension as marks of serviceability, and to which references here had as elements of conspicuous waste, commend themselves to the consumer also on other grounds than that of expensiveness alone. They usually give evidence of skill and effective workmanship, even if they do not contribute to the substantial serviceability of the goods, and it is no doubt largely on some such ground that any particular mark of honorific serviceability first comes into vogue and afterwards maintains its footing as a normal constituent element of the worth of an article. A display of efficient workmanship is pleasing simply as such, even where its promoter, for the time unconsidered, outcome is futile. There is a gratification of the artistic sense in the contemplation of skillful work. But it is also to be added that no such evidence of skillful workmanship, or of ingenious and effective adaptation of means to an end, will, in the long run, enjoy the apprehension of the modern civilized consumer unless it has the sanction of the canon of conspicuous waste. The position here taken is enforced in a felicitous manner by the place assigned in the economy of consumption to machine products. The point of material difference between machine made goods and the hand wrought goods which serve the same purpose is, ordinarily, that the former serve their primary purpose more adequately. They are a more perfect product, show a more perfect adaptation of means to end. This does not save them from disesteem and deprecation, for they fall short under the test of honorific waste. Hand labour is a more wasteful method of production, hence the goods turned out by this method are more serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary repritability. Hence the marks of hand labour come to be honorific, and the goods which exhibit these marks take rank as of higher grade than the corresponding machine product. Commonly, if not invariably, the honorific marks of hand labour are certain imperfections and irregularities in the lines of the hand wrought article, showing where the workman has fallen short in the execution of the design. The ground of the superiority of hand wrought goods, therefore, is a certain margin of crudeness. This margin must never be so widest to show bungling workmanship, since that would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal decision attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost. The appreciation of those evidences of honorific crudeness to which hand wrought goods owe their superior worth and charm in the eyes of well-read people is a matter of nice discrimination. It requires training and the formation of the right habits of thoughts with respect to what may be called the physiognomy of goods. Machine-made goods of daily use are often admired and preferred precisely on account of their excessive perfection by the vulgar and the underbread who have not given due thought to the punctilios of an elegant consumption. The ceremonial inferiority of machine products goes to show that the perfection of skill and workmanship embodied in any costly innovations in the finish of goods is not sufficient of itself to secure them acceptance and permanent favor. The innovation must have the support of the canon of conspicuous waste. Any feature in the physiognomy of goods, however pleasing in itself, and however well it may approve itself to the taste for effective work, will not be tolerated if it proves obnoxious to this norm of pecuniary reputability. The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due to commonness, or in other words to their slight cost of production, has been taken very seriously by many persons. The objection to machine products is often formulated as an objection to the commonness of such goods. What is common is within the pecuniary reach of many people. Its consumption is therefore not honorific, since it does not serve the purpose of a favorable invidious comparison with other consumers. Hence the consumption, or even the sight of such goods, is inseparable from an odious suggestion of the lower levels of human life, and one comes away from their contemplation with a pervading sense of meanness that is extremely distasteful and depressing to a person of sensibility. In persons whose tastes assert themselves imperiously, and who have not the gift, habit or incentive to discriminate between the grounds of their various judgments of taste, the deliverances of the sense of the honorific coalesce with those of the sense of beauty and of the sense of serviceability in the manner already spoken of. The resulting composite valuation serves as a judgment of the object's beauty or its service ability, according as the valuer's bias or interest inclines him to apprehend the object in the one or the other of these aspects. It follows not infrequently that the marks of cheapness or commonness are accepted as definitive marks of artistic unfitness, and a code or schedule of aesthetic proprieties on the one hand, and of aesthetic abominations on the other, is constructed on this basis for guidance in the questions of taste. As has already been pointed out, the cheap and therefore indecorous articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are commonly machine products, and the generic features of the visionary of machine-made goods as compared with the handwrought article is their greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detailed execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of the handwrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty or serviceability or both. Hence has arisen that exultation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time, and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterisation here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper. It is of course only as to the economic value of this school of aesthetic teaching that anything is intended to be said or can be said here. What is said is not to be taken in the sense of depreciation, but chiefly as a characterisation of the tendency of this teaching in its effect on consumption and on the production of consumable goods. The manner in which the bias of this growth of taste has worked itself out in production is perhaps most cogently exemplified in the book manufacture with which Morris busied himself during the later years of his life. But what holds true of the work of the Calmscott press in an eminent degree, holds true but with slightly abated force when applied to latter day artistic bookmaking generally as to type, paper, illustration, binding materials and binder's work. The claims to excellence put forward by the later products of the bookmakers industry rest in some measure on the degree of its approximation to the crudities of the time when the work of bookmaking was a doubtful struggle with refractory materials carried on by means of insufficient appliances. These products, since they require hand labour, are more expensive. They are also less convenient for use than the books turned out with a view to service ability alone. They therefore argue ability on the part of the purchaser to consume freely, as well as ability to waste time and effort. It is on this basis that the printers of today are returning to old style, and other more or less obsolete styles of type which are less legible and given a cruder appearance to the page than the modern. Even a scientific periodical, with ostensibly no purpose but the most effective presentation of matter with which its science is concerned, will concede so much to the demands of this pecuniary beauty as to publish its scientific discussions in old style type, on laid paper and with uncut edges. But books which are not ostensibly concerned with the effective presentation of their contents alone, of course go farther in this direction. Here we have a somewhat cruder type, printed on hand-laid, decal-edged paper with excessive margins and uncut leaves, with bindings of a painstaking crudeness and elaborate ineptitude. The Kelmscott Press reduced the matter to an absurdity, as seen from the point of view of brute service ability alone, by issuing books for modern use, edited with the obsolete spelling, printed in black letter, and bound in limp vellum fitted with thongs. As a further characteristic feature which fixes the economic place of artistic book-making, there is the fact that these more elegant books are, at their best, printed in limited editions. A limited edition is in effect a guarantee, somewhat crude it is true, that this book is scarce and that it therefore is costly and then's pecuniary distinction to its consumer. The special attractiveness of these book-products to the book-bio of cultivated taste lies, not in a conscious, naive recognition of their costinous and superior clumsiness. Here, as in the parallel case of the superiority of hand-walked articles over machine products, the conscious ground of preference is an intrinsic excellence imputed to the costier and more awkward article. The superior excellence imputed to the book which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect. But it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech. So far as regards to the superior aesthetic value of the decadent book, the chances are that the book-lover's contention has some ground. The book is designed with an eye single to its beauty and the result is commonly some measure of success on the part of the designer. What is insisted on here, however, is that the canon of taste under which the designer works is a canon formed under the surveillance of the law of conspicuous waste and that this law acts selectively to eliminate any canon of taste that does not conform to its demands. That is to say, while the decadent book may be beautiful, the limits within which the designer may work are fixed by requirements of a non-aesthetic kind. The product, if it is beautiful, must also at the same time be costly and ill-adapted to its ostensible use. This mandatory canon of taste in the case of the book designer, however, is not shaped entirely by the law of waste in its first form. The canon is to some extent shaped in conformity to that secondary expression of the predatory temperament, veneration for the archaic or obsolete, which in one of its special developments is called classicism. In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism or regard with the archaic and the canon of beauty. For the aesthetic purpose such a distinction needs scarcely be drawn, and indeed it need not exist. For with theory of taste the expression of an accepted ideal of archaism on whatever basis it may have been accepted is perhaps best rated as an element of beauty. There need be no question of its legitimation. But for the present purpose, for the purpose of determining what economic grounds are present in the accepted canons of taste and what is their significance for the distribution and consumption of goods, the distinction is not similarly beside the point. The position of machine products in the civilized scheme of consumption serves to point out the nature of the relation which subsists between the canon of conspicuous waste and the code of propriities in consumption. Neither in matters of art and taste proper, nor as regards the current sense of the serviceability of goods, does this canon act as a principle of innovation or initiative. It does not go into the future as a creative principle which makes innovations and adds new items of consumption and new elements of cost. The principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle. It very rarely initiates or originates any usage or custom directly. Its action is selective only. Conspicuous wastefulness does not directly afford ground for variation and growth, but conformity to its requirements is a condition to the survival of such innovations as may be made on other grounds. In whatever way usages and customs and methods of expenditure arise, they are all subject to the selective action of this norm of reputability, and the degree in which they conform to its requirements is a test of their fitness to survive in the competition with other similar usages and customs. Other things being equal, the more obviously wasteful usage or method stands the better chance of survival under this law. The law of conspicuous waste does not account for the origin of variations, but only for the persistence of such forms as are fit to survive under its dominance. It acts to conserve the fit, not to originate the acceptable. Its office is to prove all things and to hold fast that which is good for its purpose. Chapter 7 Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture It will place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail how the economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday facts in some one direction of the life process. For this purpose, no line of consumption affords a more apt illustration than expenditure on dress. It is especially the rule of conspicuous waste of goods that finds expression in dress, although other related principles of pecuniary repute are also exemplified in the same contrivances. Other methods of putting one's pecuniary standing in evidence serve their end effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and everywhere, but expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other methods that our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance. It is also true that admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present and is perhaps more universally practiced in the manner of dress than in any other line of consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the commonplace that the greater part of the expenditure incurred by all classes for apparel is incurred for the sake of a respectable appearance rather than for protection of the person, and probably at no other point is the sense of shabbiness so keenly felt as it is if we fall short of the standard set by social usage in this matter of dress. It is true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other items of consumption that people will undergo a very considerable degree of privation in comforts or the necessities of life in order to afford what is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption so that it is by no means an uncommon occurrence in an inclement climate for people to go ill-clad in order to appear well-dressed. And the commercial value of the goods used for clothing in any modern community is made up to a much larger extent of the fashionableness, the reputability of the goods, then of the mechanical service which they render in clothing the person of the wearer. The need of dress is eminently a higher or spiritual need. The spiritual need of dress is not holy or even chiefly a naive propensity for display of expenditure. The law of conspicuous waste guides consumption in apparel as in other things chiefly at the second remove by shaping the cannons of taste and decency. In the common run of cases the conscious motive of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously wasteful apparel is the need of conforming to established usage and of living up to the accredited standards of taste and reputability. It is not only that one must be guided by the code of proprieties in dress in order to avoid the mortification that comes of unfavorable notice and comment, though that motive in itself counts for a great deal, but besides that the requirement of expensiveness is so ingrained into our habits of thought in matters of dress that any other than expensive apparel is instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis we feel that what is inexpensive is unworthy. A cheap coat makes a cheap man. Cheap and nasty is recognized to hold true in dress with even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On the ground of both taste and of serviceability an inexpensive article of apparel is held to be inferior under the maxim cheap and nasty. We find things beautiful as well as serviceable somewhat in proportion as they are costly. With few and inconsequential exceptions we all find a costly hand-wrought article of apparel much preferable in point of beauty and of serviceability to a less expensive imitation of it. However cleverly the spurious article may imitate the costly original and what offends our sensibilities in the spurious article is not that it falls short in form or color or indeed in visual effect in any way. The offense of object may be so close an imitation as to defy any but the closest scrutiny and yet so soon as the counterfeit is detected its aesthetic value and its commercial value as well declines precipitately. Not only that but it may be asserted with but small risk of contradiction that the aesthetic value of a detective counterfeit in dress declines somewhat in the same proportion as the counterfeit is cheaper than its original. It loses case aesthetically because it falls to a lower pecuniary grade but the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of what is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and gratifying as far as it goes. It is good prima facie evidence of pecuniary success and consequently prima facie evidence of social worth but dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities than this crude first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption only. If in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to a consume freely and uneconomically it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity of earning a livelihood the evidence of social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress therefore in order to serve its purpose effectually should not only be expensive but it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the evolutionary process by which our system of dress has been elaborated into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose this subsidiary line of evidence has received due attention. A detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel can be considered elegant or even decent if it shows the effect of manual labor on the part of the wearer in the way of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is chiefly if not altogether due to their caring the suggestion of leisure exemption from personal contact with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the patent leather shoe the stainless linen the lustrous cylindrical hat and the walking stick which so greatly enhance the native dignity of a gentleman comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive but also because it is the insignia of leisure. It not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively large value but it argues at the same time that he consumes without producing. The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish because this high heel obviously makes any even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery which characterizes women's dress. The substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this. It is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair excessively long. But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor, it also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of contrivance of which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is true the corset impairs the personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that score is offset by the gain in reputability, which comes of her visibly increased expansiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself in point of substantial fact into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments peculiar to women. This difference between masculine and feminine apparel is here simply pointed out as a characteristic feature. The ground of its occurrence will be discussed presently. So far then we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress, the broad principle of conspicuous waist. Subsidiary to this principle and as a corollary under it, we get as a second norm the principle of conspicuous leisure. In dress construction this norm works out in the shape of diverse contrivances going to show that the wear does not and as far as it may conveniently be shown cannot engage in productive labor. Beyond these two principles there is a third of scarcely less constraining force which will occur to anyone who reflects it all on the subject. Dress must not only be conspicuously expensive and inconvenient, it must at the same time be up to date. No explanation at all satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the phenomenon of changing fashions. The imperative requirement of dressing in the latest accredited manner as well as the fact that this accredited fashion constantly changes from season to season is sufficiently familiar to everyone but the theory of this flux and change has not been worked out. We may of course say with perfect consistency and truthfulness that this principle of novelty is another corollary under the law of conspicuous waist. Obviously if each garment is permitted to serve but for a brief term and if none of last season's apparel is carried over and made further use of during the present season the wasteful expenditure on dress is greatly increased. This is good as far as it goes but it is negative only. Pretty much all that this consideration warrants us in saying is that the norm of conspicuous waist exercises a controlling surveillance in all matters of dress so that any change in the fashions must conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance in all matters of dress so that any change in the fashions must conform to the requirement of wastefulness. It leaves unanswered the question as to the motive for making and accepting a change in the prevailing styles and it also fails to explain why conformity to a given style at a given time is so imperatively necessary as we know it to be. For a creative principle capable of serving as motive to invention and innovation in fashions we shall have to go back to the primitive non-economic motive with which apparel originated the motive of adornment. Without going into an extended discussion of how and why this motive asserts itself under the guidance of the law of expensiveness it may be stated broadly that each success of innovation in the fashions is an effort to reach some form of display which shall be more acceptable to our sense of form and color or of effectiveness than that which it displaces. The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful or perhaps often or less offensive than that which it displaces but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness. It would seem at first sight that the result of such an unremitting struggle to attain the beautiful in dress should be a gradual approach to artistic perfection. We might naturally expect that the fashions should show a well-marked trend in the direction of some one or more types of apparel eminently becoming to the human form and we might even feel that we have substantial ground for the hope that today after all the ingenuity and effort which have been spent on dress these many years the fashion should have achieved a relative perfection and a relative stability closely approximating to a permanently tenable artistic ideal but such is not the case it would be very hazardous indeed to assert that the styles of today are intrinsically more becoming than those of 10 years ago or than those of 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. On the other hand the assertion freely goes uncontradicted that the styles in vogue 2000 years ago are more becoming than the most elaborate and painstaking constructions of today the explanation of the fashions just offered then does not fully explain and we shall have to look farther it is well known that certain relatively stable styles and types of costume have been worked out in various parts of the world as for instance among the Japanese Chinese and other oriental nations likewise among the Greeks Romans and other eastern peoples of antiquity so also in later times among the peasants of nearly every country of Europe these national or popular costumes are in most cases a judged by competent critics to be more becoming more artistic than the fluctuating styles of modern civilized apparel at the same time they are also at least usually less obviously wasteful that is to say other elements than that of display of expense are more readily detected in their structure these relatively stable costumes are commonly pretty strictly and narrowly localized and they vary by slight and systematic gradations from place to place they have in every case been worked out by peoples or classes which are poorer than we and especially they belong in countries and localities and times where the population or at least the class to which the costume in question belongs is relatively homogeneous stable and immobile that is to say stable costumes which will bear the test of time and perspective are worked out under circumstances where the norm of conspicuous waste asserts itself less imperatively than it does in the large modern civilized cities whose relatively mobile wealthy population today sets the pace in matters of fashion the countries and classes which have in this way worked out stable and artistic costumes have been so placed that the pecuniary emulation among them has taken the direction of a competition in conspicuous leisure rather than in conspicuous consumption of goods so that it will hold true in a general way that fashions are least stable and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively as among ourselves all this points to an antagonism between expensiveness and artistic apparel in point of practical fact the norm of conspicuous waste is incompatible with the requirement that dress should be beautiful or becoming and this antagonism offers an explanation of that restless change in fashion which neither the canon of expensiveness nor that of beauty alone can account for the standard of reputability requires that dress should show wasteful expenditure but all wastefulness is offensive to native taste the psychological law has already been pointed out that all men and women perhaps even in a higher degree of whore futility whether of effort or of expenditure much as nature was once said to abhor a vacuum but the principle of conspicuous waste requires an obviously futile expenditure and the resulting conspicuous expensiveness of dress is therefore intrinsically ugly hence we find that in all innovations in dress each added or altered detail strives to avoid condemnation by showing some ostensible purpose at the same time that the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense even in its freest flights fashion rarely if ever gets away from a simulation of some ostensible use the ostensible usefulness of the fashionable details of dress however is always so transparent a make believe and their substantial futility presently forces itself so badly upon our attention as to become unbearable and then we take refuge in a new style but the new style must conform to the requirement of reputable wastefulness and futility its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its predecessor and the only remedy which the law of waste allows us is to seek relief in some new construction equally futile and equally untenable hence the essential ugliness and the unceasing change of fashionable attire and a first part of chapter seven section seventeen of the theory of the leisure class this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Tracy Datlin the theory of the leisure class by Thorsten Veblen second part of chapter seven dress as an expression of the pecuniary culture having so explained the phenomenon of shifting fashions the next thing is to make the explanation tally with everyday facts among these everyday facts is the well-known liking which all men have for the styles that are in vogue at any given time a new style comes into vogue and remains in favor for a season and at least so long as it is a novelty people very generally find the new style attractive the prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful this is due partly to the relief it affords in being different from what went before it partly to its being reputable as indicated in the last chapter the canon of reputability to some extent shapes our tastes so that under its guidance anything will be accepted as becoming until its novelty wears off or until the warrant of reputability is transferred to a new and novel structure serving the same general purpose that the alleged beauty or loveliness of the styles in vogue at any given time is transient and spurious only is attested by the fact that none of the many shifting fashions will bear the test of time when seen in the perspective of half a dozen years or more the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque if not unsightly our transient attachment to whatever happens to be the latest rests on other than aesthetic grounds and lasts only until our abiding aesthetic sense has had time to assert itself and reject this latest indigestible contrivance the process of developing an aesthetic nausea takes more or less time the length of time required in any given case being inversely as the degree of intrinsic odiousness of the styling question this time relation between odiousness and instability in fashions affords ground for the inference that the more rapidly the styles succeed and displace one another the more offensive they are to sound taste the presumption therefore is that the farther the community especially the wealthy classes of the community develop in wealth and mobility and in the range of their human contact the more imperatively will the law of conspicuous waste assert itself in matters of dress the more will the sense of beauty tend to fall into abeyance or be overborn by the canon of pecuniary reputability the more rapidly will fashions shift and change and the more grotesque and intolerable will be the varying styles that successively come into vogue there remains at least one point in this theory of dress yet to be discussed most of what has been said applies to men's attire as well as to that of women although in modern times it applies at nearly all points with greater force to that of women but at one point the dress of women differs substantially from that of men in women's dress there is obviously greater insistence on such features as testify to the wearer's exemption from or in capacity for all vocally productive employment this characteristic of women's apparel is of interest not only as completing the theory of dress but also as confirming what has already been said of the economic status of women both in the past and in the present has has been seen in the discussion of women's status under the heads of vicarious leisure and vicarious consumption it has in the course of economic development become the office of the woman to consume vicariously for the head of the household and her apparel is contrived with this object in view it has come about that obviously productive labor is in a peculiar degree derogatory to respectable women and therefore special pain should be taken in the construction of women's dress to impress upon the beholder the fact often indeed a fiction that the wearer does not and cannot habitually engage in useful work propriety requires respectable women to abstain more consistently from useful effort and to make more a show of leisure than the men of the same social classes it grates painfully on our nerves to contemplate the necessity of any well-bred woman's earning a livelihood by useful work it is not woman's fear her sphere is within the household which she should beautify and of which she should be the chief ornament the male head of household is not currently spoken of as its ornament this feature taken in conjunction with the other fact that propriety requires more unrementing attention to expensive display in the dress and other paraphernalia of women goes to enforce the view already implied in what has gone before by virtue of its descent from a patriarchal past our social system makes it the woman's function in and a special degree to put in evidence her household's ability to pay according to the modern civilized scheme of life the good name of the household to which she belongs should be the special care of the woman and the system of honorific expenditure and conspicuous leisure by which this good name is chiefly sustained is therefore the woman's fear in the ideal scheme as it tends to realize itself in the life of the higher pecuniary classes this attention to conspicuous waste of substance and effort should normally be the sole economic function of the woman at the stage of economic development at which the women were still in the full sense the property of the men the performance of conspicuous leisure and consumption came to be part of the services required of them the women being not their own masters obvious expenditure and leisure on their part would redound to the credit of their master rather than to their own credit and therefore the more expensive and the more obviously unproductive the women of the household are the more creditable and more effective for the purpose of reputability of the household or its head will their life be so much so that the women have been required not only to afford evidence of a life of leisure but even to disable themselves for useful activity it is at this point that the dress of men fall short of that of women and for sufficient reason conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure are reputable because they are evidence of pecuniary strength pecuniary strength is reputable or honorific because in the last analysis it argues success and superior force therefore the evidence of waste and leisure put forth by any individual in his own behalf cannot consistently take such a form or be carried to such a pitch as to argue in capacity or marked discomfort on his part as the exhibition would in that case show not superior force but inferiority and so defeat its own purpose so then wherever wasteful expenditure and the show of abstention from effort is normally or on an average carried to the extent of showing obvious discomfort or voluntarily induced physical disability there the immediate inference is that the individual in question does not perform this wasteful expenditure and undergo this disability for her own personal gain in pecuniary repute but in behalf of someone else to whom she stands in relation of economic dependence a relation which in the last analysis must in economic theory reduce itself to a relation of servitude to apply this generalization to women's dress and put the matter in concrete terms the high heel the skirt the impracticable bonnet the corset and the general disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized women's apparel are so many items of evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme of life the woman is still in theory the economic dependent of the man that perhaps in a highly idealized sense she is still the man's chattel the only reason for all this conspicuous leisure and attire on the part of women lies in the fact that they are servants to whom in the differentiation of economic functions has been delegated the office of putting in evidence their masters ability to pay there is a marked similarity in these respects between the apparel of women and that of domestic servants especially livered servants in both there is a very elaborate show of unnecessary expansiveness and in both cases there is also a notable disregard of the physical comfort of the wearer but the attire of the lady goes farther in its elaborate insistence on the idleness if not on the physical infirmity of the wearer then does that of the domestic and this is as it should be for in theory according to the ideal scheme of the pecuniary culture the lady of the house is the chief menial of the household besides servants currently recognized as such there is at least one other class of persons whose garb assimilates them to the class of servants and shows many of the features that go to make up the womanliness of woman's dress this is the priestly class priestly vestments show in accentuated form all the features that have been shown to be evidence of a servile status and a vicarious life even more strikingly than the everyday habit of the priest the vestments properly so-called are ornate grotesque inconvenient and at least ostensibly comfortless to the point of distress the priest is at the same time expected to refrain from useful effort and when before the public eye to present an impassively disconsolate countenance very much after the manner of a well-trained domestic servant the shaven face of the priest is a further item to the same effect this assimilation of the priestly class to the class of body servants in demeanor and apparel is due to the similarity of the two classes as regards economic function in economic theory the priest is a body servant constructively in attendance upon the person of the divinity whose livery he wears his livery is of a very expensive character as it should be in order to set forth in a be seeming manner the dignity of his exalted master but it is contrived to show that the wearing of it contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the wearer for it is an item of vicarious consumption and the repute which accrues from its consumption is to be imputed to the absent master not to the servant the line of demarcation between the dress of women priests and servants on the one hand and of men on the other hand is not always consistently observed in practice but it will scarcely be disputed that it is always present in a more or less definite way in the popular habits of thought there are of course also free men and not a few of them who in their blind zeal for faultless reputable attire transgress the theoretical line between man's and woman's dress to the extent of arraying themselves in apparel that is obviously designed to vex the mortal frame but everyone recognizes without hesitation that such apparel for men is a departure from the normal we are in habit of saying that such dress is effeminate and one sometimes hears the remark that such or such an exquisitely attired gentleman is as well dressed as a footman certain apparent discrepancies under this theory of dress merit a more detailed examination especially as they mark a more or less evident trend in the later and mature development of dress the vogue of the course that offers an apparent exception from the rule of which it is here been cited as an illustration a closer examination however will show that this apparent exception is really a verification of the rule that the vogue of any given element or feature in dress rests on its utility as an evidence of pecuniary standing it is well known that in the industrially more advanced communities the course that is employed only within certain fairly well-defined social strata the women of the poorer classes especially of the rural population do not habitually use it except as a holiday luxury among these classes the women have to work hard and it avails them little in the way of a pretense of leisure to so crucify the flesh in everyday life the holiday use of the contrivance is due to imitation of a higher class canon of decency upwards from this low level of indigence and manual labor the course it was until within a generation or two nearly indispensable to a socially blameless standing for all women including the wealthiest and most reputable this rule held so long as there still was no large class of people wealthy enough to be above the imputation of any necessity for manual labor and at the same time large enough to form a self-sufficient isolated social body whose mask could afford a foundation for special rules of conduct within the class enforced by the current opinion of the class alone but now there has grown up a large enough leisure class possessed of such wealth that any aspersion on the score of enforced manual employment would be idle and harmless calumny and the course that it has therefore enlarged measure fallen into disuse within this class the exceptions under this rule of exemption from the corset are more apparent than real they are the wealthy classes of countries with a lower industrial structure near the archaic quasi industrial type together with the later accessions of the wealthy classes in the more advanced industrial communities the latter have not yet had time to divest themselves of the plebeian cannons of taste and of reputability carried over from their former lower pecuniary grade such survival of the corset is not infrequent among the higher social classes of those american cities for instance which have recently and rapidly risen into opulence if the word be used as a technical term without any odious implication it may be said that the corset persists in great measure through the period of snobbery the interval of uncertainty and of transition from a lower to the upper levels of pecuniary culture that is to say in all countries which have inherited the corset it continues in use wherever and so long as it serves its purpose as an evidence of honorific leisure by arguing physical disability in the wearer the same rule of course applies to other mutilations and contrivances for decreasing the visible efficiency of the individual something similar should hold true with respect to diverse items of conspicuous consumption and indeed something of the kind does seem to hold to a slight degree of sundry features of dress especially if such features involved a marked discomfort or appearance of discomfort to the wearer during the past 100 years there is a tendency perceptible in the development of men's dress especially to discontinue methods of expenditure and the use of symbols of leisure which must have been irksome which may have served a good purpose in their time but the continuation of which among the upper classes today would be a work of super-arrogation as for instance the use of powdered wigs and of gold lace and the practice of constantly shaving the face there has of late years been some slight recudescence of the shaven face in polite society but this is probably transient and unadvised mimicry of the fashion imposed upon body servants and it may fairly be expected to go the way of the powdered wig of our grandfathers these indices and others which resemble them in point of the boldness with which they point out to all observers the habitual uselessness of those persons who employ them have been replaced by other more delicate methods of expressing the same fact methods which are no less evident to the trained eyes of that smaller select circle whose good opinion is chiefly sought the earlier and cruder method of advertisement held its ground so long as the public to which the exhibitor had to appeal comprised large portions of the community who are not trained to detect delicate variations in the evidences of wealth and leisure the method of advertisement undergoes a refinement when a sufficiently large wealthy class has developed who have the leisure for acquiring skill in interpreting the subtler signs of expenditure loud dress becomes offensive to people of taste as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar to the individual of high breeding it is only the more honorific esteem accorded by the cultivated sense of the members of his own high class that is of material consequence since the wealthy leisure class has grown so large or the contact of the leisure class individual with members of his own class has grown so wide as to constitute a human environment sufficient for the honorific purpose there arises a tendency to exclude the baser elements of the population from the scheme even as spectators whose applause or mortification should be sought the result of all this is a refinement of methods a resort to subtler contrivances and a spiritualization of the scheme of symbolism in dress and as this upper leisure class sets the pace in all matters of decency the result for the rest of society also is a gradual amelioration of the scheme of dress as the community advances in wealth and culture the ability to pay is put in evidence by means which require a progressively nicer discrimination in the beholder this nicer discrimination between advertising media is in fact a very large element of the higher pecuniary culture end of chapter seven