If scientific research
demonstrated the feasibility of speaking in an ordinary voice at
receptions, dinner-parties, and in "calls," then the Drawer is of opinion
that intelligible and enjoyable conversation would be possible on these
occasions, if it becomes fashionable not to scream.
DOES REFINEMENT KILL INDIVIDUALITY?
Is it true that cultivation, what we call refinement, kills
individuality? Or, worse than that even, that one loses his taste by
over-cultivation? Those persons are uninteresting, certainly, who have
gone so far in culture that they accept conventional standards supposed
to be correct, to which they refer everything, and by which they measure
everybody. Taste usually implies a sort of selection; the cultivated
taste of which we speak is merely a comparison, no longer an individual
preference or appreciation, but only a reference to the conventional and
accepted standard. When a man or woman has reached this stage of
propriety we are never curious any more concerning their opinions on any
subject. We know that the opinions expressed will not be theirs, evolved
out of their own feeling, but that they will be the cut-and-dried results
of conventionality.
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