Contumely

“ We weary of a dress, we weary of a fare, of a scene, of a company; and why should it be for a reproach that we weary also of a passion? It is only an absurd tradition that discriminates between these different pleasures. ”

“ Fulness of the Spirit calms; fulness produced by excitement satiates and exhausts. They who know the world of fashion tell us that the tone adopted there is, either to be, or to affect to be, sated with enjoyment, to be proof against surprise, to have lost all keenness of enjoyment, and to have all keenness of wonder gone. That which ought to be men's shame becomes their boast—unsusceptibility of any fresh emotion. ”

“ All that are bestowed by elegance of dress, the refinements of luxurious habit, the nameless grace that comes from a mind and a manner polished, the one by literary culture, the other by social intercourse, invested the person of the heir with a fascination that rude Nature alone ever fails to give. And about him there was a gaiety, an airiness of spirit, an atmosphere of enjoyment which bespoke one who is in love with life. ”

“ The answer was a kiss that sent a thrill of pleasure through every vein.
"Oh, my dear, this is nothing to what you would enjoy were you to link your fortune to mine and fly with me to France. Then we would live a life of love and pleasure such as you have just tasted. Our whole lives would be nothing but love and pleasure, morn, noon and night it would be love, all love. There should be nothing around us but love - nothing but pleasure!" ”

“ There was the usual, perhaps a little more than the usual, splendor of dress and diamonds; the same glare and crash and glitter and crowd and heat; the same buoyant light-heartedness among the young; the same corroding ennui of the old; taste in dress was criticised, looks were scanned, flirtations detected, quarrels discovered, fans were mislaid, hearts were lost, flounces were torn, and feelings hurt. There was the ordinary measure of what people call enjoyment, mixed up with the ordinary proportion of envy, shyness, pretension, sarcasm, coldness, and malice. ”

“ Nay, I felt the 'clear keen joyance' of the lark that loves, but 'ne'er knew love's sad satiety.' Hitherto, the pleasure that women had given me had always jarred upon my nerves. It was, in fact, 'a thing wherein we feel there is a hidden want.' Lust was now the overflowing of the heart and of the mind—the pleasurable harmony of all the senses. ”

“ I shall be at home at any hour, in the costume you prefer, painted according to your taste, with my hair dressed after your pleasure, ready for your most extravagant caprices. If you desire but tender love, I will cherish you like a child. If you thirst after rare sensations, I will not refuse you the most agonising. ”

“ Her aspect and demeanour at first sight bespoke your affection. There was in her face a look of blithe contentment with her condition; in her dress a neat attention to cleanliness and simplicity, and in her whole manner and behaviour a hearty and honest desire, not only to be happy herself, but to make all around her equally comfortable. ”

“ One must not imagine that life was wholly devoid of pleasures in those days. The young of both sexes always rode horseback, whether to church in the grove, or going the round of parties, candy pullings, or kissing bees. ”

“ Fashion, Bon ton, and Vertù, are the names of certain idols, to which we sacrifice the genuine pleasures of the soul: in this world of semblance, we are contented with personating happiness; to feel it is an art beyond us. ”

“ How delightfully comfortable one feels, and how luxuriantly disposed to quiet,—after having been tossed, and bruised, and tumbled about, sans ceremonie, like a bale of goods, or a printer's devil, for many long weary days and nights upon the slumberless sea—to be once more cosily established in a smiling, elegant little parlour, carpeted, curtained, and furnished with every tasteful convenience that a comfort loving, home-made bachelor could covet. ”

“ In gay luxuriance, charming every sense,
Ne'er, in thy absence, can delight my breast;
Nought, without thee, my weary soul beguiles;
And joy may beam, yet, midst her brightest smiles,
A secret grief is mine, that will not rest. ”

“ I have just thought of a riddle:—'What is that, which, the more you divide it, the greater it grows?' You will guess in a minute that I mean pleasure; for indeed, my dear Emily, at this distance from you all, when each delight is unshared by those I so dearly love, I seem to enjoy myself only by halves. ”

“ Here began the usual tender preliminaries, as delicious perhaps as the crowning act of enjoyment itself; which they often beget an impatience of, that makes pleasure destructive of itself, by hurrying on the final period, and closing that scene of bliss, in which the actors are generally too well pleas'd with their parts, not to wish them an eternity of duration. ”

“ Grown men on either side of me—smilingly delightful, tempting me with sweets and cakes and wine, and a new strange interest rising in me like a little flood of exultation—the joy of the world, and the first faint breath of the mystery of sex. ”

“ Temperance includes moderation at table, and in the enjoyment of what the world calls pleasure. A young beauty, were she fair as Hebe, and elegant as the Goddess of Love herself, would soon lose these charms by a course of inordinate eating, drinking, and late hours. ”

“ Some fair ones sought, by dint of eloquent glances, to subdue hearts which had thus far resisted their charms, but which would naturally be more submissive after a sumptuous supper, and in an assemblage where pleasure was the only law that anyone chose to recognize. ”

“ How it is possible for those who have once tasted this, the sweetest of all human delights, how it is possible for any rational mind afterwards to submit to be whirled round in the vortex of dissipation, to tolerate, to endure, the empty, vain, comfortless, nothingness of fashionable amusements, now appears to me to be almost inexplicable. The real felicity imparted and received in a happy domestic circle, in one evening, far, very far surpasses all the pleasures derived from the gaze and throng of crowded routs and fashionable parties in a whole year. ”

“ For the rest, to be dressed with a kind of brutal gaudiness, to be very thirsty and violently flushed, to laugh perpetually at everything and at nothing, thoroughly to enjoy, in short, a momentous occasion—all this is not, in simple persons of the more susceptible sex, an unpardonable crime. ”

“ If, in all those attentions and eagernesses with which we see you occupied, to manage either the interests of your worldly affairs, or the preservation of a vain beauty, there is not either as much forwardness as may amount to the crime of illegal ambition, or complaisance for yourself, and desire of pleasing, as may sully your heart with the guilt of sensuality? ”

“ Habitual neatness is laudable; but, if you wish to be reckoned a well, an elegantly dressed girl, and feel that praise on account of it gives you pleasure, you are vain; and a laudable ambition cannot dwell with vanity. ”

“ Some delight solely in faces and figures; others find insatiable pleasure in singing and dancing; some in dalliance and raillery; others in the incessant indulgence of their lusts; and these regret that all the beautiful maidens under the heavens cannot minister to their short-lived pleasure. These several kinds of persons are foul objects steeped skin and all in lewdness. ”

“ But when that same beloved object, looking less romantic in correct evening dress, is accepted smilingly by the powers that be, and is sate down to a large and varied, many coursed dinner, then Romance shrugs her disgusted shoulders and turns petulantly away. ”

“ When wine, lascivious discourse, night, and the mingling of the sexes had extinguished every sentiment of modesty, then debaucheries of every kind were practiced, as every person found at hand that sort of enjoyment to which he was disposed by the passion most prevalent in his nature. ”

“ She had learned to disdain the follies of the world, always chusing plainness and neatness in dress, rather than gaiety and extravagance, and preferring an hour’s solitude, spent in communing with her own heart, or in searching the word of God, before all those trifling amusements, which so much engross the attention, and waste the time of the generality of persons of all ages. ”

“ On the one hand, there is the persistent desire to be attractive, which manifests itself in the subtlest ways. How many of the yearnings and activities of human life have their roots in this ancient and honorable desire! The love of pretty clothes,—however it may seem to be motivated and however it may be complicated by other motives,-draws its energy, fundamentally, from the same need that provides the gay plumage and limpid song of the bird or the painted wings of the butterfly. ”

“ The serenity of her habitual attitude, which veils a stubborn fierceness of soul, her indolent enjoyment of cushioned ease and warmth, have endeared her naturally to men of thought rather than to men of action. ”

“ This was the still life of the scene, but above and beyond was congregrated that active, cheerful bustle which springs out of a great multitude bent on enjoyment—cheerful, luxurious, refined, or otherwise, as humanity is always found. ”

“ The more imaginative observer would perceive in the group something unhealthy, something faisandé, an air of too deliberate enjoyment that seemed to imply a perfect knowledge of the limitations of human pleasure. These men and girls aimed no arrow of fleeting gayety to pierce in a straight, sharp course the heart of the present. ”

“ Years had developed the charms which girlhood then but shadowed forth, and in the full and liquid softness of her dark and long-lashed eyes, and the playful delicacy of her mouth, I saw how a consciousness of fascination had served to lend new powers of pleasing. ”

“ Impromptu charades and proverbs are delightful, and are the occasion for much merriment; the mistakes, the absurd contrasts between character and costume, the scenery—a deep, hanging wood, the court of Louis Quatorze or the deck of a man of war, being improvised at a moment's notice, only add to the merry enjoyment.
One rule you must observe if you join in these amusements: never to carry your gayety into romping. Merry and laughing you may be, yet never forget you are a lady. ”

“ Secure to please while youth confirms her reign,
Slights every borrow’d charm that dress supplies,
Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes—
But when those charms are pass’d, for charms are frail,
When time advances, and when lovers fail—
She then shines forth, solicitous to bless,
In all the glaring impotence of dress. ”

“ I hope you’re comfortable.’ To which the gentleman replies, ‘Oh yes, he’s quite comfortable quite.’ ‘There are not many married men, I hope,’ returns the lady, ‘who seek comfort in such selfish gratifications as you do.’ ‘Nor many wives who seek comfort in such selfish gratifications as you do, I hope,’ retorts the gentleman. ”

“ Hence, perhaps, the sense of spontaneity in all the work—the sense, when you have looked through his plates, that you have been living in the intimacy of charming people who in their daily ways turn this way and that, stoop, stretch themselves, smile, get suddenly grave, dress themselves, lift their eyes inquiringly, or toss the great long hair upon their shoulders. ”

“ But the spectacle of the middle-aged male followers of the life of pleasure in any restaurant or theatre ought to terrify these bold ladies from maintaining such a demand. The supreme philosophers of pleasure, from Epicurus to Stevenson, have all had to turn to hard work and virtue as the only forms of amusement which did not spoil the bloom of one's cheek. Even the supreme philosopher of clothes would have kept us far too busy ever to think about them. ”

“ Then you confess that true pleasures proceed from the mind as from a fountain. Sp. It is plain they do. He. So great is the force of the mind that it often takes away the sense of outward pain, and sometimes makes what of itself is bitter to be sweet. Sp. We see that daily in those who are in love, who take a pleasure in watching and waiting all a cold winter's night at their mistress's door. ”

“ For example, the spectacle of the lackey donning the externals of a fine gentleman—a favourite subject of mirthful treatment by Molière and others—may amuse us as a transparent pretence, as a fine display of insolent vanity, or, again, as an amusing caricature of the extravagant absurdities of fine manners. Extravagance in dress and the like is frequently found in the company of a deliciously erroneous idea of one’s own importance. ”

“ To amuse herself in her hours of relaxation, she would dress her hair with flowers, and, like the shepherdesses of former times, forgetting in a rural life all that had most gratified her in the height of opulence, every day brought to her some new innocent pleasure. ”

“ The harshly dreamless industries and shallow loiterings of the day were replaced by an effort at romance, soiled but persistent, and a sensual pride preening itself with gallantries, and a confusion of cruel or softly dozing confidences. ”

“ Sensuality had always been for her the one unpardonable sin, and sensuality of this kind, turning the power of sex into a mere motive for squalid pleasure-seeking, filled her with a shuddering disgust. ”

“ The glamour of the day, the resistless force of their masterful love that seemed to them so unlike all other loves of which they had ever heard or dreamed, held them in a transport of delight that could only manifest itself in strange, bitter-sweet caresses, in incoherent murmurings. ”

“ And food delicious satisfies the sense;
The air is balmy as the breath of spring,
And every atom is a beauteous thing.
One thing alone this mighty place appalls:
No woman dwells within these sculptured walls.
Here man with man in lustful caprice plays,
And Heaven's righteous mandate disobeys;
Sinks, through his lust, below the groveling beast,
Who to the female makes his amorous suit. ”