e of the article would leave
ground for is the declaration that it is pecuniarily honorific.

This blending and confusion of the elements of expensiveness 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 dress-stuffs and pronounced color effects, for
instance, offend us at times 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 forcibly
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 a similarly high gloss on a threadbare sleeve; and yet
there is no question but that all well-bred people (in the Occidental
civilized communities) instinctively and unaffectedly cleave to the one
as a phenomenon of great beauty, and eschew the other as offensive to
every sense to which it can appeal. It is extremely doubtful if any one
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
luxurie