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To go back to the carved oak question, our great-great-grandfathers must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful. Why, all our art treasures of today are only the usual items of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real beauty in the old soup plates, beer mugs, and candle snuffers98 that we prize now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes99. The pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to admire, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel ornaments100 that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of today always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow pattern dinner plates101 be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the twenty-first century? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown) be carefully mended and dusted only by the lady of the house?
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished apartments. It is a white dog. Its eyes are blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect; its expression is nearly imbecile. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends laugh at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.