Joviality

“ I rather wish all amiable couples the longest and most enduring happiness; and, to contribute to it myself in the surest manner, I propose to sever and abolish these most charming little segregations during our social hours. I have, he continued, "already provided for the execution of my project, if it should meet your approbation. Here is a bag in which are the names of the gentlemen: now draw, my fair ones, and be pleased to favour as your servant, for a week, him whom fate shall send you. ”

“ But once we can find that these people were not forever transfixed to frieze, but were as simple, as industrious, as human as we, the kinship is established, and through their veins begins to flow the stream that is common to all humanity. ”

“ We have three main forms of the family, corresponding in general to the three main stages of human development. For savagery group marriage, for barbarism the pairing family, for civilization, monogamy supplemented by adultery and prostitution. ”

“ Let me tell you this: the life that disregards marriage or loosens the bonds of marriage, or transforms the whole institution—you know very well what I mean—the life that is accused of using the "weapons of seduction" in its fashions, its luxury, its entertainments, its art, its theatre—that life is one of the most potent factors in these teeming cities, one of the most fruitful sources of their existence! ”

“ To comfort misfortune, to popularize knowledge, to teach whatever is true and pure in religion and philosophy, to accustom men to respect order and the proprieties of life, to point out the way to genuine happiness, to prepare for that fortunate period, when all the factions of the Human Family, united by the bonds of Toleration and Fraternity, shall be but one household,—these are labors that may well excite zeal and even enthusiasm. ”

“ But from our point of view it must be regarded not as an age of barbarism, but of prosperity,—not as a state of equality, but of the subordination of the members of the family to each chief, and of families relatively to each other; an age of much mental vigour and spiritual intuition, and, so far from being a period of misery, it left reminiscences of happiness such as lingered long in the memory of mankind. ”

“ A higher civility will re–establish in our customs a certain reverence which we have lost. What to do with these brisk young men who break through all fences, and make themselves at home in every house? ”

“ Marriage, then, should be made a study. Every youth, both male and female, should so consider it. It is the grand social institution of humanity. Its laws and relations are of momentous importance to the race. Shall it be entered blindly, in total ignorance of what it is, what its conditions of happiness are? Its relations involve some of the most stern duties and acts of self-denial that men are called upon to perform. Shall youth enter upon its relations without a knowledge of these duties? ”

“ No doubt, however, marriage and the home will undergo modifications, which will tend to make these ancient institutions a little more flexible and to permit a greater degree of variation to meet special circumstances. We can occupy ourselves with no more essential task, whether as regards ourselves or the race, than to make more beautiful the House of Life for the dwelling of Love. ”

“ Both of you young and gay, and in love with life and its frivolities—both the center of your set, and both rattle-brained enough to want to keep that center and throw away your lives in the whirling, rapid stream of society. ”

“ Their principle was respect and justice to the inferior, protection to the weak, and true organization for life. With the rich humor and pure mirthfulness known only to the serious and chaste, they were severe without austerity; simple in private life, that they might be splendid in all that pertained to religious rites and public duties; with pure and dignified relations of friendship, realized on both sides, by husbands and wives, by the unmarried of both sexes, and by the old and the young. ”

“ In fact, it is not; the only social units are individuals—capable individuals. My theory, or rather my philosophy—for it is more than a theory—my philosophy is that the family is the unit of happiness. ”

“ Have not they each their mate—their cherished young, their home, which, though unexpressed to us, is, I doubt not, endeared and enriched, even in their eyes, by the society which kind nature has created for them? ”

“ We are to seek social intercourse, to that extent, which will best promote domestic enjoyment and kindly feelings among neighbors and friends; and we are to pursue exercise and amusement, only so far as will best sustain the vigor of body and mind. For the right apportionment of time, to these and various other duties, we are to give an account to our Creator and final Judge. ”

“ How natural and how easy the transition from one stage of life to another! Not long since, I was a gay, volatile girl, seeking satisfaction in fashionable circles and amusements; but now I am thoroughly domesticated. All my happiness is centred within the limits of my own walls, and I grudge every moment that calls me from the pleasing scenes of domestic life. ”

“ And considering the immense importance of this correspondence in mental taste, tendencies, and inclinations, as a source of permanent domestic happiness, and the amazing diversity of tempers and dispositions which is known to prevail amongst human beings, will a wise man, or will a prudent female, venture to risk their felicity for life by a sudden and precipitate union? What! shall we deem it necessary to institute a severe inquiry respecting the temper, and disposition, and principles of the servants we take into our dwellings, and whom we may dismiss at our pleasure ”

“ The family.—Origin and history of the family.—The family originating in the necessity of the perpetuation of the species, has gradually gained in morality until it has reached the present state, namely, monogamy, or marriage between one man and one woman: a progress so far as the dignity of woman and the equality of the sexes are concerned. ”

“ The society thus constituted was distinguished by great charm and grace of manner, the exclusion of all outer elements not only limiting the numbers, but giving the ease of a family party within the charmed circle. ”

“ I 'married in haste and repented at leisure;' after my union with your father, I found him to be a cold formalist and canting religionist, continually boring me with his lectures on the sins and folly of 'fashionable dissipation,' as he termed the elegant amusements suitable to our wealth and rank and discoursing upon the pleasures of the domestic circle, and such humbugs. ”

“ And in one of those dégagé touch-and-go sketches in which he so often sums up the history of humankind, he has presented the Normal Social Life as a "common atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy, and domestic intimacy," an immemorial state of being which implies on the part of men and women a perpetual acquiescence—a satisfied or hopeless consent—to the end of time. ”

“ In regard to the social principle. They are social beings. There are among them those great impulses of our nature, general love for society, and attachment to the sexes, out of which arise the affection of husband and wife, the love of parents to children, and children to parents, and all the various modifications of affection, resulting from collateral and more distant relationships. ”

“ Not less his eminent humanity delighted in the sense and virtue and wit of the common people. In his own household and neighbors he found characters and pets of humble class, with whom he established the best relation,—small farmers and tradesmen, shepherds, fishermen, gypsies, peasant-girls, crones,—and came with these into real ties of mutual help and good will. ”

“ Again, wherever the Family existed, there hovered, ever contending, the angels of Joy and Sorrow; and in a world where joy and sorrow are known, Equality cannot live. One man and woman, in the night, stand weeping beside a little cot. ”

“ They had risked life to help loved ones to escape its far-reaching tentacles. They had reached a laud of freedom and had begun to taste the joy of being human. Their little homes were clustering about—they had their churches, lodges, social gatherings, and newspaper. ”

“ Will no one have the humanity to break a leg, or his neighbour's bones, so as to afford them some employment, and us a little peace and quiet? Must we be ever afflicted with their admiration and homage? ”

“ In considering deductively the connections between the forms of domestic life and the forms of social life, and in showing how these are in each type of society related to one another because jointly related to the same type of individual character, it will be convenient to deal simultaneously with the marital arrangement, the family structure, the status of women, and the status of children. ”

“ There totters the family—for marriage is its base, and the more English society receives in its ranks those who have flouted it, the more it will be shaken by the new spirit which bids human creatures live together, but also with the rest of the world. ”

“ Worldliness wars upon the sentiment of family, and I know of no strife more impassioned. By great means and small, by all sorts of new customs, requirements and pretensions, the spirit of the world breaks into the domestic sanctuary. ”

“ The first expansions of the human heart were the effects of a novel situation, which united husbands and wives, fathers and children, under one roof. The habit of living together soon gave rise to the finest feelings known to humanity, conjugal love and paternal affection. ”

“ You behold a galaxy of folk evidently born, like yourself, anew. Some, like yourself, are solitary. Others are with wives, with children—but with new wives, new children. The associations of home have been forgotten, even though home's actual appendages be here. ”

“ But in morals and in spiritual life this is only the beginning of another process—namely, the subjective individual entrance into the meaning of it all and the practical appropriation of it. I know the whole of duty on the human side: I am to love my neighbour as myself. ”

“ Among these alien motives which affect the devout scheme in its later growth, may be mentioned the motives of charity and of social good-fellowship, or conviviality, or, in more general terms, the various expressions of the sense of human solidarity and sympathy. ”

“ But nature was too strong for habit; her upright, fearless mind acknowledged kinship with these hard-working men and women, to whom pleasure is not save in toil, whose whole life is one long unconscious sacrifice to their country. ”

“ If they could sit down at night as they come in from their daily labor, take up a religious periodical and read their half-clad families some interesting accounts of the triumphs of grace over depravity instead of meditating and teaching the principles of revenge, how would the family circle be cheered and the lowering cloud of our Western solitude be dissipated ! ”

“ Day after day, as now, patient, and hopeful, the husbandman enters upon the work that lies before him, and, hand in hand with God's blessed sunshine, dews, and rain, a loving and earnest co-laborer, brings forth from earth's treasure-house of blessings good gifts for his fellow-men. Is all this commonplace? How great and good is the commonplace! ”

“ They accustomed themselves to assemble before their huts round a large tree; singing and dancing, the true offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather the occupation, of men and women thus assembled together with nothing else to do. ”

“ But the deliberate and relentlessly-planned assemblage of such distinctly diverse types of men and women as prodded by unusual conditions of weather, domicile, and propinquity, will best act and re-act upon each other in terms inevitably dramatic, though most naively unrehearsed! ”

“ My host then proceeded to question me as to the habits and modes of life among the races on the upper earth, more especially among those considered to be the most advanced in that civilisation which he was pleased to define "the art of diffusing throughout a community the tranquil happiness which belongs to a virtuous and well-ordered household." ”

“ These self-reliant men, not infrequently too with wives and children who match them in their vigor and resource, passing beyond the ever-moving line and tide of emigration, have been well described as hanging like the froth of the billows on its very edge. These, too, are a miscellaneous gathering from our common humanity. ”

“ It is a tremendous experiment, we all admit, to separate a person from his race, from his country, from his climate, and the habits of his part of the country, by marriage; it is only an experiment differing in degree to introduce him by marriage into a new circle of kinsfolk. ”

“ The members of every family, every group of blood relations, are held together by the unseen spirit of their generations. It matters little whether they can trace their descent or not; the peculiar spirit of that race which is theirs fashions them for particular purposes and work. ”

“ Ils reprennent leur place à leur foyer d’autrefois, ils vaquent à leurs anciens travaux, ils s’intéressent au logis, aux champs, à la barque; ils se comportent, en un mot, comme ce peuple des hommes et des femmes-fées qui formait jadis une espèce d’humanité plus fine et plus délicate au milieu de la véritable humanité. ”