d article
is 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 surrogateship 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 and 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 labor in excess of what would give them their fullest efficency 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 cawed 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 color, 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 would
bear scrutiny as expressions of beauty, or of serviceability, and the
substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labor, 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