is,” he says, “a man with no heart and who has done nothing all his life.” Old ruins look beautiful by reason of the rain and the wind, the heat of August and the frost of January, and I am sure I have often seen in men—aye, and in women too—far more beauty where the tempests have passed over the face and brow, than where the life has been more sheltered and less interesting.
But I must notice before I conclude this part of my subject one of the principal causes of a fatal indulgence in luxury, and that is a despairing sense of the futility of attempting to do anything worth doing, and of inability to strive against what is going on wrong. This is the meaning of that rather vulgar phrase, “Anything for a quiet life”; and this is the reason why with many people everything and everybody is always a “bore.” Here, too, is the secret of that suave, polished, soft-voiced manner so much affected nowadays by highly-educated young men, and that somewhat chilly reserve in which they wrap themselves up. “Pray don’t ask us to give an opinion, or show an interest, or discuss any serious view of things.”
“For not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more
Than to walk all day, like the Sultan of old, in a garden of spice.”
“Let us surround ourselves with every luxury; let us cease to strive or fret; let us be elegant, refined, gentle, harmless, and, above all, undisturbed in mind and body.” “We have had enough of motion and of action we.” “Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil.” “Let us get through life the best way we can, and though there is not much that can delight us, let us achieve as much amelioration of our lot as is possible for us.”
These, then, are some of the forms which luxury takes in the present century, and these are some of the outcomes of an advanced, and still rapidly advancing, civilization. These, too, seem to be the invariable accompaniments of such an advance. A very similar picture of Rome in the days of Cicero and Cæsar is drawn by Mr. Froude in his Cæsar. He says: “With such vividness, with such transparent clearness, the age stands before us of Cato and Pompey, of Cicero and Julius Cæsar; the more distinctly because it was an age in so many ways the counterpart of our own, the blossoming period of the old civilization. It was an age of material progress and material civilization; an age of civil liberty and intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of dinner parties, of sensational majorities and electoral corruption. The rich were extravagant, for life had ceased to have practical interest, except for its material pleasures; the occupation of the higher classes was to obtain money without labour, and to spend it in idle enjoyment. Patriotism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant the ascendancy of the party which would maintain the existing order of things, or would overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good things, which alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the laws and rule of personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The educated, in their hearts, disbelieved it. Temples were still built with increasing splendour; the established forms were scrupulously observed. Public men spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw on their opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life had any serious meaning, there was none remaining beyond
the circle of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude. The whole spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant—cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal speech. The truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke frankly out their real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream, and that man and the world he lived in were material phenomena, generated by natural forces out of cosmic atoms, and into atoms to be again resolved.”
Next I am going, as I promised, to consider those indulgences which become luxuries by excessive use, and in this I shall be led also to consider the effects of luxury. It has become a very trite saying that riches do not bring happiness; and certainly luxury, which riches can command, does not bring content, which is the greatest of all pleasures. On the contrary, the moment the body or mind is over-indulged in any way, it immediately demands more of the same indulgence, and even in stronger doses. Who does not know that too much wine makes one desire more? Who, after reading a novel, does not feel a longing for another?
The rich and poor dog, as we all know, meet and discourse of these things in Burns’s poem—
“Frae morn to e’en it’s naught but toiling
At baking, roasting, frying, boiling,
An’, tho’ the gentry first are stechin,
Yet e’en the hall folk fill their pechan
With sauce, ragouts, and sic like trashtrie,
That’s little short of downright wastrie.
An’ what poor cot-folk pit their painch in
I own it’s past my comprehension.”
To which Luath replies—