Miasm

“ Hence it is probable that when the human species shall have been freed from the miasms which now undermine its vitality, the simple flowers on the fields will be sufficient to control the remaining indispositions. Whereas we, unfortunate heirs of the chronic miasms of all ages, lepra, scrofula, syphilis and a host of other subtle plagues, are compelled to employ the most frightful agents in order to meet the intensity of our diseases. ”

“ Mimms on all sides were mostly young men and women accompanied by energetic, wriggling children of varying ages. It saddened Mrs. Mimms to see the premature lines forming in the youthful mothers' foreheads, and the gray settling too quickly into the men's hair. ”

“ I say a great trial—always assuming human indulgence for that disease of the blind heart which led me where I found myself, which makes me what I am. I did not feel lightly the pang of parting with my birthplace. I did not esteem lightly the sacrifice of business, comfort, and distinction which I was making; and of that greater cause of suffering, supposed or real, of the falling off in my wife's affection, the agony is already in part recorded. ”

“ If you bring me food and drink, disgust takes the place of dinner; if you spread an easy couch for me, sleep on it becomes difficult; if you endeavour to teach me wise conversation, I prefer to be dumb and dull. Whenever I set eyes on you, I recognise as ill-done everything you do; whether I watch you stand, or waggle and walk, ducking, nidnodding, blinking with your eyes, my impulse is to catch the nidnodder by the scruff of the neck, to hurl out of the way for good and all the odious blinker! That is my manner, Mime, of being fond of you. ”

“ One whose sex morals have been of the most conventional kind, a loyal husband, suddenly becomes a profligate, reckless and debauched, perhaps even perverted. The man of firm purposes and indefatigable industry may lose his grip upon the ambitions and strivings of his lifetime and become an inert slacker, to the amazement of his associates. Many a fine character, many a splendid mind, has reached a lofty height and then crumbled before the assaults of this disease upon the brain. ”

“ We shall win you to it, dear child; when you see what it is, your prejudice will wear away." [Pg 376]
"Prejudice!" cried Missy, passionately. "What is not prejudice? Yours and St. John's have cost me dear. Oh, mamma, how could you have had such an alien child? Why must we see everything in such a different light? You and St. John are always of one mind. I am shut out from you by such a wall. I am so lonely, so wretched, and perhaps you can't understand enough to pity me. Oh, mamma, you are all I have in the world! ”

“ It's to save you—I won't say from yourself, because in yourself you're beautiful and good! It's to save you from the worst person of all. I haven't, after all, come over to be afraid to speak of her! That's the person in whose place her ladyship wants such a person as even me; and if she thought herself, as she as good as told me, not fit for Maisie's company, it's not, as you may well suppose, that she may make room for Mrs. Beale! ”

“ The sex desires and instincts struggle with, overcome or harmonize with the social instincts. It would be impossible to portray even the simplest sex life from the mental standpoint. The chastest woman who is unconscious of sex desire is motivated by romance and the sex feelings and customs of others in her ideas of happiness and right behavior. The cynical profligate, indulging every sensual urge, in so far as he can, must guide himself by the resistance of society, by the necessity of camouflage, the fear of public opinion and often the impediment of his own early training. ”

“ For a moment it seemed to him that her tenderness for his equanimity (for should she not know his mind,—she who had made it?) might reasonably have caused her to forego such an exhibition of her social accomplishments as would but remind him afresh of his own deficiencies; but the next moment he asked himself, with a great revulsion of feeling, whether he, a conscious suitor, should fear to know his mistress in her integrity. ”

“ A very profound effect on character and personality, exclusive of intelligence, is that of the sex glands. One need not accept the Freudian extravagances regarding the way in which the sex feelings and impulses enter into our thoughts, emotions, purposes and acts. No unbiased observer of himself or his fellows but knows that the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of the sex feeling, its excitation or its suppression are of great importance in the destinies of character. ”

“ Pride bound up with a hot intention to conquer misery, pain, death even. Soon he had found himself fully launched on the tide of an ever-swelling general practice. Then one Sunday at Pauli's he had met Mizzi,—full-bosomed, soft-voiced Mizzi, underneath as hard as a rock, as cruel as the grave, crueller than the grave.... ”

“ Patient doing of duty against the grain may be better than not doing duty at all, but it always writes a weary mark across the face. That mark which her mother's face had borne, ever since Missy could remember it, was gone.
Weary no doubt she often was, for her hand and brain were rarely idle now; but it was the healthy weariness that brings the sleep of the just, and wipes out toil with rest. Neither did Missy understand—how could she?—the bliss of those hours spent in the little gallery that overlooked the empty and silent church. ”

“ In men as well as women there is a cycle of desire, with height due to physical tension and abyss following the discharge or disappearance of tension, that profoundly influences life and conduct. Here the sympathetic nervous system and the internal secretion of the genital glands awaken into sexual activity brain, spinal cord and muscles, so that the individual seeks a mate, plunges into marriage and directs his conduct, conscious of taste and desire, but largely unconscious of the physical condition that is impelling him on. ”

“ This disease is cyclic, in that two opposing groups of symptoms tend to appear and displace each other. In the manic, or excited state, there is greatly heightened activity with correspondingly heightened feeling of power. Self-love and admiration reach absurd levels: one is the most beautiful, the richest and wisest of persons, infallible, irresistible, aye, perhaps God or Christ. Sometimes the feeling of grandeur, the euphoria, is less fantastic and the patient imagines himself a great inventor, a statesman of power and wisdom, a writer of renown, etc. ”

“ Spinsters seeking this kind of compensation frequently derive great satisfaction from misogamist meditations. They will display a morbid interest in arguments against marriage, in the statistics of insanity or disease among married women, and in the evidence of excessive parturition (leading to debility) among the wives of the poor. They will exercise their influence to convert young girls to misanthropy, to misogamy, or at least to an indifference to men ”

“ If I am cold and unyielding, I am masculine and neglected—if I am gentle and pliant, my confidence is abused and my person dishonored. What can society, which is thus exacting, accord to me, then, as a mere woman? What shame will it not thrust upon me—a woman—and as I am? ”

“ If among these mistresses of the king there were a single one who had enjoyed her shameful triumphs in peace, who had called herself happy in the midst of her dearly bought luxury and splendor, one might have concluded that, from a merely human point of view, it is possible to find happiness in vice. But, no--there is not even one!" Massillon, the great preacher of truth and morality, said: "The worm of conscience is not dead; it is only benumbed. The alienated reason presently returns, bringing with it bitter troubles, gloomy thoughts, and cruel anxieties"--a true picture of every mistress. ”

“ Mizraim’s cold fingers again threw themselves against his breast, forehead, and lips, and he said:
“As a woman swims in a fountain, so shall I bathe in sweat for thee, who hath given with one hand and hath never taken with the other.” ”

“ The true and profound sensual communion is also a chimera. The senses of my mistress are as obscure as her soul. Never shall I succeed in surprising in her fibres a secret disgust, an appetite unsatisfied, an irritation unappeased. Never shall I succeed in knowing the different sensations which are given to her by a similar caress repeated at different moments. In the course of a single day, an organism as unhealthy as hers passes through a great number of physical states, each in discord with the other, and sometimes in complete opposition. ”

“ And in the opposite direction, men and women wildly passionate in youth develop counter tendencies that swing them into restraint and serene self-control. There are those to whom sex is mere appetite, to be indulged and put out of the way, so as not to interfere with the great purposes of success; there are those to whom it is a religion, carried on with ceremonials and rites; there are those to whom it is an obsession, and their minds are in a sexual stew at all times. ”

“ I ought to be used to hearing things I don't like by this time, don't you think I ought?"
"Most of us have to hear things that are painful, more or less often in our lives—and change is almost always painful to natures like yours, Missy." ”

“ Wix went on, an echo rang within her that matched the echo she had herself just produced. "How much you must want to see her to say such things as that and to be ready to do so much for the poor little likes of Maisie and me! She has a hold on you, and you know it, and you want to feel it again and—God knows, or at least I do, what's your motive and desire—enjoy it once more and give yourself up to it! It doesn't matter if it's one day or three: enough is as good as a feast and the lovely time you'll have with her is something you're willing to pay for! ”

“ It must also be admitted that he took them far, further perhaps than was always warranted by the old-fashioned conscience, the dingy decencies, of Maisie's simple instructress. There were hours when Mrs. Wix sighingly testified to the scruples she surmounted, seemed to ask what other line one could take with a young person whose experience had been, as it were, so peculiar. "It isn't as if you didn't already know everything, is it, love?" ”

“ It began to dawn on Missy that he was going to be one of those men who are to preach from their hearts as well as from their brains; who are to bring out from their own soul's labor, food for the hungry souls about them. ”

“ An angry rebellion slowly awoke within her. It is safer to blame yourself than to blame fate. Poor Missy took the unsafest way, and went into the house, hardening her heart, and resisting the destiny that lay before her. ”

“ She had almost had time to weary of the human scene; her own humanity at any rate, in the shape of a smutch on her scanty skirt, had held her so long that as soon as she raised her eyes they rested on a high fair drapery by which smutches were put to shame and which had glided toward her over the grass without her noting its rustle. ”

“ Maisie's flush deepened both with the immense plausibility of this and with a fresh wave of the consciousness that was always there to remind her of his cleverness—the consciousness of how immeasurably more after all he knew about mamma than she. She had lived with her so many times without discovering the material of her curl-papers or assisting at any other of her dealings with banknotes. The tight little ball had at any rate rolled away from her for ever—quite like one of the other balls that Ida's cue used to send flying. ”

“ The male feeling is called sadism, after an infamous nobleman who wrote on the subject. It is a delight in power, especially in cruelty, and shows itself in a desire for the subjection of the female. In its pathological forms it substitutes cruelty for the sexual relation, and we have thus the horrible Jack the Rippers, etc. The Freudians go to the extreme of seeing in all love of power a sadism, but the truth is that the sadistic impulse is the love of power, cruelly or roughly expressed in sex. ”

“ How many in the fashionable world conduct as though an excessive refinement of feeling were the chief praise of their sex. They cannot witness any spectacle of suffering and pain; it shocks their nerves to be present with the sick. O how fallen is she from the high station, for which God created her, who thus shrinks from scenes where the beauty and glory of her nature may be so nobly displayed! Can it be that an affected sensibility shall shut one of this sex from the chamber of sickness? ”

“ It is scarcely possible to love life and see good days with the same zest after this sorrowful journey. It abates one's relish for enjoyment, it tempers one's thirst for present pleasures; it loosens one's hold upon things mundane. That is the certain good it does, and the uncertain, how infinite!
Poor Missy felt like a penitent child, after that illness of hers. ”

“ She was of inferior intellect and had but little chance for development of that side of her nature, but the sex brain, or nerve center, had done much for her and built in her body lines of remarkable grace, had painted her cheeks with marvelous color and given unusual brilliancy to her eyes. A foul miscreant, in the form of a man of older years, saw this beautiful human creature and decoyed her into improper relations with him. His body was full of the leprosy of lewdness and he imparted it to this ignorant young creature. ”

“ Perhaps, there are other hearts equally froward and wayward with my own. I know not if my story will amend—perhaps it may not even instruct or inform them—I feel that no story, however truthful, could have disarmed the humor of that particular mood of mind which shows itself in the blindness of the heart under which it was my lot to labor. I did not want knowledge of my own perversity. I knew—I felt it—as clearly as if I had seen it written in characters of light, on the walls of my chamber. ”