?
Cannot one enjoy a rose without pulling it up by the roots? I have no
patience with those people who are always looking on the seamy side. I
agree with the commercial traveler who says that it will only be in the
millennium that all goods will be alike on both sides. Mr. King made
the acquaintance in Newport of the great but somewhat philosophical
Mr. Snodgrass, who is writing a work on "The Discomforts of the Rich,"
taking a view of life which he says has been wholly overlooked. He
declares that their annoyances, sufferings, mortifications, envies,
jealousies, disappointments, dissatisfactions (and so on through the
dictionary of disagreeable emotions), are a great deal more than those
of the poor, and that they are more worthy of sympathy. Their troubles
are real and unbearable, because they are largely of the mind. All these
are set forth with so much powerful language and variety of illustration
that King said no one could read the book without tears for the rich of
Newport, and he asked Mr. Snodgrass why he did not organize a society
for their relief. But the latter declared that it was not a matter
for levity. The misery is real. An imaginary case would illustrate his
meaning. Suppose two persons quarrel about a purchase of land, and one
builds a stable on his lot so as to shut out his neighbor's view of the
sea. Would not the one suffer because he could not see the ocean, and
the other by reason of the revengeful state of his mind? He went on
to argue that the owner of a splendid villa might have, for reasons he
gave, less content in it than another person in a tiny cottage so small
that it had no spare room for his mother-in-law even, and that in fact
his satisfaction in his own place might be spoiled by the more
showy place of his neighbor. Mr. Snodgrass attempts in his book a
philosophical explanation of this. He says that if every man designed
his own cottage, or had it designed as an expression of his own ideas,
and developed his grounds and landscape according to his own tastes,
working it out himself, with the help of specialists, he would be
satisfied. But when owners have no ideas about architecture or about
gardening, and their places are the creation of some experimenting
architect and a foreign gardener, and the whole effort is not to express
a person's individual taste and character, but to make a show, then
discontent as to his own will arise whenever some new and more showy
villa is built. Mr. Ben