FATE OF PLEASURE
171
Yet the social and cultural data which Sombart accumulates are in
themselves very interesting, and they are much to our point.
Sombart advances the view that the European preoccupation
with luxury took its rise in the princely courts and in the influence of
women which court life made possible; he represents luxury as being
essentially an expression of eroticism, as the effort to refine and
complicate the sexual life, to enhance, as it were, the quality of erotic
pleasure. The courtly luxury that Sombart studies is scarcely a
unique instance of the association of pleasure with power, of pleasure
being thought of as one of the signs of power and therefore to be
made not merely manifest but conspicuous in the objects that con–
stitute the
decor
of the lives of powerful men-surely Egypt, Cnossos,
and Byzantium surpassed Renaissance Europe in elaborateness of
luxury. But what would seem to be remarkable about the particular
phenomenon that Sombart describes is the extent of its proliferation
at a certain period-the sheer amount of luxury that got produced,
its increasing availability to classes less than royal or noble, the
overtness of desire for it, and the fierceness of this desire. Sombart's
data
on these points are too numerous to be adduced here, but any
tourist, having in mind what he has even casually seen of the
secondary arts of Europe from the centuries in question, the orna–
ments, furniture, and garniture of certain stations of life,
will
know
that Sombart does not exaggerate about the amount of luxury pro–
duced. And any reader of Balzac will recognize the intensity of the
passions which, at a somewhat later time, attended the acquisition of
elaborate and costly objects which were desired as the means or
signs
of pleasure.
What chiefly engages our interest is the influence that luxury
may be discovered to have upon social and moral ideas. Such an
influence is to be observed in the growing tendency of power to
express itself mediately, by signs or indices, rather than directly, by
the exercise of force. The richness and elaboration of the objects in
a princely establishment were the indices of a power which was
actual enough, but they indicated an actual power which had no
need to avow itself in action. What a prince conceived of as his
dignity
might, more than ever before, be expressed by affluence,
by
the means of pleasure made overt and conspicuous.
And as the objects of luxury became more widely available, so
