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 things
collected for our use and however fitfully enjoyed, but in the things
made and collected by unknown toilers, and then either not used at all
or not consciously enjoyed.
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