re was no chance of quiet, reasonable talk;
one pumped up a few inanities to person after person. I suppose that
most of the guests would not have come if they did not at all events
think it amused them; but what was the charm? I suppose that to most of
the guests it was the stir, the light, the moving figures--for there
were many beautiful and stately women and distinguished men
present--the sense of company, warmth, success, about it all. To me it
was merely distracting--a score of sources of pleasure, and all of them
preventing the enjoyment of each. I think I am probably more and not
less sensitive to all these fine and rare things than perhaps most
people; and I suppose it is this very sensitiveness that makes me
averse to them all _in mass_. It is to me like the jangling of all the
strings of some musical instrument. I felt that I could have lingered
alone in these fine rooms, wandering from picture to picture with a
lively pleasure. There were many people present with whom I should have
deeply enjoyed a _tete-a-tete_. But the whole effect was like
over-eating oneself, like having to taste a hundred exquisite dishes in
a single meal. I do not protest against such gatherings on principle;
if they give the guests a sense of pleasure and well-being, I have not
a word to say against it all. But I believe in my heart that there are
many people who do not really enjoy it, or enjoy it only in a purely
conventional way; and what I should like to do is to assist the people
whose enjoyment of it is conventional, to find out simpler and more
real sources of happiness; because to make these great houses possible
there is a vast amount of patient and unpraised human labour wasted. I
do not think labour is wasted in producing beautiful things, so long as
they can have an effect; but a superabundance of beauty has no
effect--no effect, at least, that could not be produced by things less
costly of effort and skill. The very refreshments, which hardly any one
touched, stand for an amount of wasted labour which might have given
pleasure to the poor toilers who produced them. Think of the ransacking
of different climates, of the ships speeding over the sea, the toil of
gatherers, porters, cooks, servers, that went to fit out that sparkling
buffet. I suppose that it is easy for me, who do not value the result,
to be mildly socialistic about these things; the pathos is not in the
work, but in the waste of the work, not in the delicate t