Blandishment

“ You always has it out and airs it, and makes yourself sad with thinking of it. ’Tisn’t because you’re poor that you’re sad; ’tis because you think you’re poor, and talk so much about it. You’re not so poor as we, only you have so many grievances.’”
“Ah, you are speaking of the organist?” Lord Blandamer asked. “I fancy it was he who was talking with you in the minster this afternoon, was it not?”
The clerk felt embarrassed once more, for he remembered Mr Sharnall’s violent talk, and how his anathema of all Blandamers had rang out in the church. ”

“ Her complexion, pale as my father’s when she is neither speaking nor moving, has in a far greater degree than his the tendency to flush, not merely in moments of agitation, but even when she is walking, or talking on any subject that interests her. Without this peculiarity her paleness would be a defect. With it, the absence of any colour in her complexion but the fugitive uncertain colour which I have described, would to some eyes debar her from any claims to beauty. And a beauty perhaps she is not—at least, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. ”

“ I must beg you will not put yourself in a passion, but hear me what I have to say." Then I told him, "I believe, sir, you have got something in your water gruel that has done you some injury, and I believe Miss Blandy put it in, by her coming into the washhouse on Monday and saying she had been stirring her papa's water gruel and eating the oatmeal out from the bottom." He said, "I find I have something not right; my head is not right as it used to be, nor has been for some time." I had before told him I had found the powder in the gruel. ”

“ Though it be certain, that beauty and deformity, no more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external; it must be allowed, that there are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings. Now as these qualities may be found in a small degree or may be mixt and confounded with each other, it often happens, that the taste is not affected with such minute qualities, or is not able to distinguish all the particular flavours, amidst the disorder, in which they are presented. ”

“ The banality amused him—sitting here thinking of Copper and talking about coffee. Banality was at once the curse and the saving grace of mankind. It kept men from the emotional peaks and valleys that could destroy them. ”

“ Perhaps, Gentlemen, you will suppose I am guilty of a great deal of Vanity, in imagining myself capable of so grossly imposing on the Understanding of a Lady of such refined sense as Miss Blandy was acknowledged to be. In answer to which I can only say, that when Love has taken possession of the Heart, it leaves but very little Room for Reflection. That this was Miss Blandy's case, I will give you some few instances of the violence of her Passion, and then leave you to judge to what extravagant Lengths that might carry her. ”

“ The paltry, dirty, and evil things that suggested to him contempt and sometimes even disgust at the sight of men had completely disappeared, just as, to people rising in a balloon, the mud and filth of the narrow streets become invisible and ugliness changes into beauty. ”

“ A still bigger blunder, and one equally deplorable and mischievous, now claims our attention—a blunder so amazing, so incomprehensible that it seems almost incredible: the universal belief, among men of science as well as the laity, that the pleasures of the table come to us through the sense of taste. ”

“ The perfect example of the beauty of decay is the consumptive, with soft, silky hair, delicate skin, touched on the cheeks with a brilliant flush, large, dark, sparkling eyes, made to appear still larger by the black rings which surround them, slenderly formed limbs, and tapering fingers with their filbert nails. Yet this is a beauty hardly to be desired: it is but the sign of a disease which before long will stamp it out for ever. ”

“ Try hard to remember all the time that you are not writing to a newspaper, or labouring to produce what, at school, used to be called “a meritorious composition.” Avoid the cliché as you would the devil; nay, even more; for he, in some of his moods, might be interesting; the cliché is always tiresome. Your letter caught me in a moment of depression, one of those mopish moments which come upon me oftener than they [40] should of late, and lie like shadows upon the spirit’s surface, turning to monotone what should be all iridescence. I went down into the breakfast-room and fired off an epigram. ”

“ I conceded, "as already a mere heap of disfigured fragments; but that was the extravagance of my vexation, my despair. It's in point of fact so beautifully fitted that it comes apart piece by piece—which, so far as that goes, you've seen it do in the last quarter of an hour at your own touch, quite handing me the pieces, one by one, yourself and watching me stack them along the ground. They're not even in this state—see!" ”

“ It is ugly enough outside, but that is nothing to what it is inside. Dreariness, flimsiness, bad taste reduced to mathematical completeness is what the inside offers to the eye, if it remains yet what it always has been. ”

“ A poor, ostracised rustic hunchback—the incarnation of ugliness and simplicity. ‘You know how the horrible often fascinates one,’ she said to me later, ‘for instance, a nasty tooth, or some other equally horrible defect in a person’s face, which one keeps on looking at however much one tries not to—well, it was a fascination of this kind that possessed me now. ”

“ Let us, then, allow them their defects—the necessary shade in so brilliant a picture—defects which, in reducing their felicity to its due level, are easily fathomed, and their consequences guarded against, by sojourners amongst them, in whose eyes their peculiar graces, and the charm of their manner of life, find none the less favour from their being subject to the universal law of humanity. They cannot be better painted in a few words, than by the sketch, drawn by the witty and graceful Lantier, from the inhabitants of Miletus. ”

“ One sees a person capable of choosing the worst style of wall-paper become suddenly afflicted by its ugliness under an attack of illness. And if an evil state of blood and lymph usually goes along with an evil state of mind, who shall say that the ugliness of our streets, the falsity of our ornamentation, the vulgarity of our upholstery, have not something to do with those bad tempers which breed false conclusions? ”

“ I could not have distinguished the features of any human face, I had seen that one only in my imagination; but how distinct, how ghastly, how horrible it was. It was myself twenty years older, with features wasted by debauchery or disease, wild eyes, a brutalized mouth, and, despite the total wiping out of my vitality, there was enough energy remaining in that phantom to insult and defy the creature that I am now. ”

“ Blandish is now resolved to exorcise. He is, in fact, engaged in trying to get that brandy away, trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying—if one must put the thing in all the concrete crudity of his fundamental intention—to sell the stuff....
“Now in real life you would just go and sell it. But people in the novels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand, rather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous brains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence. ”

“ Alas! how often does that which we fondly imagine will save us become our destruction? So it was in the present instance. For providentially, though the letters were destroyed, the paper with the poison in it was not burnt. One of the maids having immediately flung some fresh coals upon the fire, Miss Blandy went well satisfied out of the room. Upon her going out, Susan Gunnell said to her fellow-servants, "I saw Miss Blandy throw some papers in the fire, let us see whether we can discover what they were." ”

“ When we remember that this same fictitious indifference characterized the typical grand seigneur of old France, and when we also remember that indifference may be rapidly transformed into insolence, and insolence into cruelty, we may well look grave at the symptoms which we can watch around us. The dreary ennui of the heart, ennui that revolts at truth, that is nauseated by earnestness, expresses itself in what we call slang, and slang is the sign of mental disease. ”

“ Even in subjects which had no such elements of horror he finds the materials for the delectation of his ferocious pencil; he makes up for the defect by rendering with a brutal realism deformity and ugliness. ”

“ Some there were, however, even among the young men, whose hollow cheeks and bloodless lips, accompanied with a short cough, told of evil resulting from bad air and frequent chills; while, on the other hand, a few old men were to be seen with bright eyes and ruddy cheeks which indicated constitutions of iron. Not a few were mere lads, whose broad shoulders and deep chests and resolute wills enabled them to claim the title, and do the work, of men. ”

“ There were smartly-dressed men here and there with grimy chins and features frankly dirty. It seemed strange to see individuals with good coats and spotless linen grimed and lined with the dust of yesterday. ”

“ The men, women, and children struggled to disentomb themselves, and in doing so mixed up the oil of the lamps, the soup of their kettles, the black soot of the walls and roof, the dogs that had sneaked in, the junks of cooked, half-cooked, and raw blubber, and their own hairy-coated persons, into a conglomerate so atrocious to behold, or even think upon, that we are constrained to draw a curtain over the scene and spare the reader’s feelings. ”

“ This time relation between odiousness and instability in fashions affords ground for the inference that the more rapidly the styles succeed and displace one another, the more offensive they are to sound taste. ”

“ In spite of its apparent vigour and uncompromising modernity, one suspected a sub-stratum of weakness and a perversity slightly vicious.
Colour blindness might account for some of the canvases, strabismus for some of the draughtmanship; but not for all. There was an ugly deliberation in the glorification of the raw, the uncouth; there was a callous hardness in the deadly elaboration of ugliness for its own sake. And transcendentalism looked on in approval. ”

“ The depraved tendencies, which had previously overgrown and obscured the better to so large an extent, now withered like cellar fungi in the open air, and the nobler qualities showed a sudden luxuriance which turned cynics into panegyrists and for the first time in human history tempted mankind to fall in love with itself. ”

“ I wonder, by the way, whence has arisen the notion so common to people of very small taste or no taste at all, that so long as they stick to greys and drabs and slate colour, they are perfectly unimpregnable, however terribly they may mingle the shades, or, which is almost as bad, distress more sensitive organizations by unbroken monotony of dingy gloom. ”

“ Excess of a particular power, which in itself is a perfection, becomes a defect; the organs of touch may be so refined as to show a diseased sensibility; the ear may become so exquisitely sensitive as to be more susceptible to the uneasiness produced by discords than to the pleasures of harmony. In the nations which have been long civilised the defects are generally those dependent on excess of sensibility—defects which are cured in the next generation by the strength and power belonging to a ruder tribe. ”

“ Even the plainest exterior is often only sham. Painted cheeks, colored eyebrows, false hair, false teeth; and even if these forms were not false, but true--if you penetrate these forms, if, under the constraint of graceful repose, we see modesty, purity, and even humility--there is then still greater danger of deception. A wearied, enervated nature, nerves blunted by the enjoyment of all kinds of pleasures, are frequently all that remains of womanly nature. ”

“ So that they that use filthy, standing, ill-coloured, thick, muddy water, must needs have muddy, ill-coloured, impure, and infirm bodies. And because the body works upon the mind, they shall have grosser understandings, dull, foggy, melancholy spirits, and be really subject to all manner of infirmities.
To these noxious simples, we may reduce an infinite number of compound, artificial, made dishes, of which our cooks afford us a great variety, as tailors do fashions in our apparel. ”

“ So, too, their faces present the harsh pallor, the deceitful coloring, those dull, tarnished eyes, and garrulous, sensual mouths, in which the observer recognizes the symptoms of the degeneracy of the thought and its rotation in the circle of a special idea which destroys the creative faculties of the brain and the gift of seeing in large, of generalizing and deducing. ”

“ We then smile half in contempt and half in pity at his customs, which we call "barbarous;" but when we see around us customs equally injurious, equally outrageous against nature, we do not consider that they in any way derogate from our lofty position as the intellectual salt of the earth. ”

“ They are gross, like the joy of Worcester sauce on the palate. Now, if there is one point common to all classics, it is the absence of exaggeration. The balanced sanity of a great mind makes impossible exaggeration, and, therefore, distortion. ”

“ Our defects, or what others call our defects, are usually the root of our excellencies; the qualities that are censured as our vices are the foundation of our virtues. It is not a universal æsthetic, applicable to{69} all peoples alike, a pure æsthetic—for I doubt whether such an æsthetic exists or even can exist—that has condemned our conceptism and gongorism, for example, and that has decreed that our genuine and natural instinct for emphasis is in bad taste. ”

“ They swathe their heads in old lace which declines to drape gracefully about their cheeks. Their wan and elongated faces, their haggard eyes and faded brows, are not without a certain melancholy grace, in spite of the false fronts with flattened curls to which they cling,—and yet these ruins are all subordinate to an unspeakable dignity of look and manner. ”