The spectacle of this happy community ought to teach us humility and charity in judgment.  Perhaps the philosophy of its attractiveness lies deeper than its ‘dolce far niente’ existence.  We may never have considered the attraction for us of the disagreeable, the positive fascination of the uncommonly ugly.  The repulsive fascination of the loathly serpent or dragon for women can hardly be explained on theological grounds.  Some cranks have maintained that the theory of gravitation alone does not explain the universe, that repulsion is as necessary as attraction in our economy.  This may apply to society.  We are all charmed with the luxuriance of a semi-tropical landscape, so violently charmed that we become in time tired of its overpowering bloom and color.  But what is the charm of the wide, treeless desert, the leagues of sand and burnt-up chaparral, the distant savage, fantastic mountains, the dry desolation as of a world burnt out?  It is not contrast altogether.  For this illimitable waste has its own charm; and again and again, when we come to a world of vegetation, where the vision is shut in by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible longing for these wind-swept plains as wide as the sea, with the ashy and pink horizons.  We shall long to be weary of it all again—­its vast nakedness, its shimmering heat, its cold, star-studded nights.  It seems paradoxical, but it is probably true, that a society composed altogether of agreeable people would become a terrible bore.  We are a “kittle” lot, and hard to please for long.  We know how it is in the matter of climate.  Why is it that the masses of the human race live in the most disagreeable climates to be found on the globe, subject to extremes of heat and cold, sudden and unprovoked changes, frosts, fogs, malarias?  In such regions they congregate, and seem to like the vicissitudes, to like the excitement of the struggle with the weather and the patent medicines to keep alive.  They hate the agreeable monotony of one genial day following another the year through.  They praise this monotony, all literature is full of it; people always say they are in search of the equable climate; but they continue to live, nevertheless, or try to live, in the least equable; and if they can find one spot more disagreeable than another there they build a big city.  If man could make his ideal climate he would probably be dissatisfied with it in a month.  The effect of climate upon disposition and upon manners needs to be considered some day; but we are now only trying to understand the attractiveness of the disagreeable.  There must be some reason for it; and that would explain a social phenomenon, why there are so many unattractive people, and why the attractive readers of these essays could not get on without them.