This is true even with those dreadful useful objects which make us feel hot to distribute; they have become melancholy possible presents because, alas! however necessary, they would otherwise not have been forthcoming. And, apart from such cases, mankind has always decided that gifts should not be of the nature of blankets, or manuals of science, or cooking-pots, but rather flowers, fruit, books of poetry, and the wares of silken Samarkand and cedared Lebanon. It is admitted upon all hands that, to be perfect, presents must be superfluities; but I should like to add that the reverse also holds good, and that superfluities would be the better, nine times out of ten, for being presents.
'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come by our money, and so little how we part with it, as if we were free to waste, provided we do not steal. Now, _my manuals of political economy_ (which were, of course, _not_ presents to me) make it quite plain that whatever we spend in mere self-indulgence is so much taken away from the profitable capital of the community; and sundry other sciences, which require no manuals to teach them, make it plainer still that the habit of indulging, upon legal payment, our whims and our greedinesses, fills our houses with lumber and our souls with worse than lumber where there might be light and breathable air. Extremes meet: and even as to paupers, the barest necessaries of life are superfluities--things dispensed with; so, at the other end of the vicious circle, to the spendthrift luxury ceases to be luxury, and superfluities are turned into things one cannot do without.
The charm of a gift, its little moral flavour which makes us feel the better for it, resides, therefore, not merely in good-will, but in the little prelude of self-restraint on the one hand, of unselfishness on the other. Unless you gave it me, I should not have that pleasant thing; and you, knowing this much, give it to me, instead of to yourself. What a complicated lovers'-knot of good-feeling there is tied, as round flowers or sweetmeats, round every genuine present! This is a rich, varied impression, full of harmonies; compare with it the dry, dull, stifling impression one gets from looking round a rich man's house, or admiring the ornaments of a rich woman's person: all these things having merely been bought!
