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.

It is doubtless a great comfort to a person to know exactly how to feel and what to say in every new contingency, but whether the zest of life is not dulled by this ability is a grave question, for it leaves no room for surprise and little for emotion.  O ye belles of Newport and of Bar Harbor, in your correct and conventional agreement of what is proper and agreeable, are you wasting your sweet lives by rule?  Is your compact, graceful, orderly society liable to be monotonous in its gay repetition of the same thing week after week?  Is there nothing outside of that envied circle which you make so brilliant?  Is the Atlantic shore the only coast where beauty may lounge and spread its net of enchantment?  The Atlantic shore and Europe?  Perhaps on the Pacific you might come back to your original selves, and find again that freedom and that charm of individuality that are so attractive.  Some sparkling summer morning, if you chanced to drive four-in-hand along the broad beach at Santa Barbara, inhaling, the spicy breeze from the Sandwich Islands, along the curved shore where the blue of the sea and the purple of the mountains remind you of the Sorrentine promontory, and then dashed away into the canon of Montecito, among the vineyards and orange orchards and live-oaks and palms, in vales and hills all ablaze with roses and flowers of the garden and the hothouse, which bloom the year round in the gracious sea-air, would you not, we wonder, come to yourselves in the sense of a new life where it is good form to be enthusiastic and not disgraceful to be surprised?  It is a far cry from Newport to Santa Barbara, and a whole world of new sensations lies on the way, experiences for which you will have no formula of experience.  To take the journey is perhaps too heroic treatment for the disease of conformity—­the sort of malaria of our exclusive civilization.