Satiety

“ I shall find myself watching the sunny side of Bond Street for a revival—because while one does not ask for passion, or even object to the tart flavours of satiety, I feel that there is a standard somewhere, and a line to be drawn. Taste draws it. I trouble myself very little with the morals of the matter, yet must think manners very nearly half of the conduct of life. And the manners which are expressed in clothes are those which are instilled in art. ”

“ With shame be it confessed, that the law of satiety holds good in every creature of God save man. The clouds rain down their surplus moisture, and lea and furrow drink their fill and pass along the residue to the parched plain. ”

“ But to avoid wearying you and reserving this controversy for another time, let us direct the discourse to another subject; for a table with only one sort of food produces satiety, while variety provokes the appetite. ”

“ The satiety which every pleasure begets in us, after some continuance, makes us thirst perpetually after the grand and novel; and, as it were, grasp at infinity in number and extent; there being a kind of tacit expectation, that the pleasure will be in in proportion to the magnitude and variety of the causes, in the same manner as we observe, in other cases, the effects to be in some degree proportional to their causes. ”

“ Think also of the poor purveyors of food, who note their masters' tastes with delicate skill, who know what special flavours will sharpen their appetite, what will please their eyes, what new combinations will rouse their cloyed stomachs, what food will excite their loathing through sheer satiety, and what will stir them to hunger on that particular day. ”

“ Exquisite pleasure produceth satiety: moderate pleasure becomes stronger by custom. Business is our province, and pleasure our relaxation only. Hence, satiety is necessary to check exquisite pleasures, which otherwise would ingross the mind, and unqualify us for business. On the other hand, habitual increase of moderate pleasure, and even conversion of pain into pleasure, are admirably contrived for disappointing the malice of Fortune, and for reconciling us to whatever course of life may be our lot:
How use doth breed a habit in a man! ”

“ Then they caused satiety to the verge of loathing.' Only necessary things, such as bread and water, he says, possess real value; but he desires neither, because he has even less taste for them than for the dainties which spoil a man's morrow. ”

“ It needs but to name appetite and satiety to suggest multitudinous facts showing that pleasures are relative not only to the organic structures but also to their states. The food which yields keen gratification when there is great hunger ceases to be grateful when hunger is satisfied, and if then forced on the eater is rejected with aversion. So, too, a particular kind of food, seeming when first tasted so delicious that daily repetition would be a source of endless enjoyment, becomes, in a few days, not only unenjoyable but repugnant. ”

“ They both understood that beauty and grandeur were not far-off, hardly attained ideals, and that the great pleasures were set in the world rather as incentives and [318] rewards, than highly seasoned daily food which must inevitably produce satiety. Some time, when they had earned this glorious vacation, they would take it hungering with the healthy appetite of a well-trained soul. ”

“ This practice is opposed to the dictates of physiology. The satiety produced by an often-repeated dish, and the gratification caused by one long a stranger to the palate, are not meaningless, as people carelessly assume; but they are the incentives to a wholesome diversity of diet. ”

“ We find that the intensity of the stimulation is in proportion to the degree of the pleasurable excitement, being highest at the commencement, and sinking gradually in the approach to satiety. There is no fact that can be produced more exactly typifying the primary action of the will. A tasted pleasure, everywhere, at all times, from the beginning to the close of life, is an immediate inducement to activity. ”

“ But now-a-days, inversely, he translates himself to satiety from the ancients, and forms and spices with them his taste for the moderns. In our authorial world we see the sad result; that teachers begin at the end and undertake, by means of writers who properly only give the tenderest, best taste the last finish, to carve that of the gymnasiast out of the rough, and so follow neither nature nor me. ”

“ However much we may with our sense of taste enjoy a dinner to-day, it will be no joy whatever even a week hence. The natural everyday facts should (and are intended to) prove to us the futility of giving so much time and thought to the pleasures of the flesh: these pleasures lead nowhere, they end abruptly, they are very limited, being confined to five senses, and consequently, owing to a necessity of continual repetition, satiety supervenes, and there remains nothing else to turn to. ”

“ The men of this generation, therefore, without distinction of class, and with only individual exceptions, suffer241 from the discontent of an appetite excited by a taste of luxury, but held far below satiety. ”

“ A broad taste adds to one’s own pleasure and that of others. How disappointing the guest who refuses dish after dish planned with an eye to his pleasure!
Do not be ashamed of the enjoyments of life which are derived from judicious eating and drinking. There are no more accurate standards of a family than its table-manners, table-service, table-talk. Culture is reflected in them as in a mirror. Care not if the bigots and Pharisees call you a wine-bibber and a glutton. You will not be the first to whom they have applied those epithets, and you need not Pg 137 be ashamed of your company. ”

“ Kinds of savour are, like shades of colour, simple when in broad contrast—as the sweet and bitter with their sequences, of the former the oily and of the latter the brackish; and intermediate to these are the pungent, rough, astringent, and sour, which seem to include almost all the varieties of savour.
In fine, the sapid sense, when in potentiality, is such as is the sapid object; and the sapid object, when in reality, is productive, in the sense, of its own savour. ”

“ A Taste worth cultivating is to be improved and preserved by reading only the best writers. But whoever, after perusing a satire of Horace, even in the dullest English translation, can relish the stupid abuse of a blackguard rhymster, may as well indulge the natural depravity of his Taste, and riot for life upon distiller's grains. ”

“ Why not take all our desserts in life when they taste best, instead of at the proper time, when we don't care for them? Desserts are, I suppose, meant to be enjoyed. Why not have them when most enjoyable? I wonder if there is not a certain perverted conscientiousness that leads us to this enforcement of our pleasures. I am myself conscious that I can scarcely ever approach a pleasure with a mind singly bent on enjoyment. ”

“ Whatever connection there may be originally between these two species of delicacy, I am persuaded that nothing is so proper to cure us of this delicacy of passion, as the cultivating of that higher and more refined taste, which enables us to judge of the characters of men, of the compositions of genius, and of the productions of the nobler arts. A greater or less relish for those obvious beauties which strike the senses, depends entirely upon the greater or less sensibility of the temper ”

“ When rich food is brought down by ingredients of a plainer taste, the composition{99} is susceptible of a specific habit. Thus the sweet taste of sugar, rendered less poignant in a mixture, may, in course of time, produce a specific habit for such mixture. As moderate pleasures, by becoming more intense, tend to generic habits; so intense pleasures, by becoming more moderate, tend to specific habits.
The beauty of the human figure, by a special recommendation of nature, appears to us supreme, amid the great variety of beauteous forms bestowed upon animals. ”

“ But in this age, a sect of writers are, That, only, for particular likings care, And will taste nothing that is popular. With such we mingle neither brains nor breasts; Our wishes, like to those make public feasts, Are not to please the cook's taste, but the guests'. ”

“ His wife does the cooking, and he sits in a long sweet ecstacy, drinking in the fragrance of food, enjoying food by anticipation, with all his soul sunk in thoughts of food. As he dreams of his coming supper, "every prospect pleases, and only man is vile." ”

“ THE FIRE-TENDER. So if you could take all the first-class qualities that we admire in men and women, and put them together into one being, you wouldn't be sure of the result?
HERBERT. Certainly not. You would probably have a monster. It takes a cook of long experience, with the best materials, to make a dish “taste good;” and the “taste good” is the indefinable essence, the resulting balance or harmony which makes man or woman agreeable or beautiful or effective in the world. ”

“ Taste is not only a part and an index of morality—it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their 'taste' is, and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. ”

“ O men of taste in future centuries, let me recommend you the men of taste of to-day! You will laugh at their cramps, their superb disdain, their preference for veal and milk, and the faces they make when underdone meat and too ardent poetry is served to them. ”

“ This great man, as is well known to all lovers of polite eating, begins at first by setting plain things before his hungry guests, rising afterwards by degrees as their stomachs may be supposed to decrease, to the very quintessence of sauce and spices. In like manner, we shall represent human nature at first to the keen appetite of our reader, in that more plain and simple manner in which it is found in the country, and shall hereafter hash and ragoo it with all the high French and Italian seasoning of affectation and vice which courts and cities afford. ”

“ And that it has the sense of taste also, will, I think, be clear to you, when you remember bow much you enjoy the reading of a good book, wherein is food for the mind. Healthy food is sometimes presented in so unpalatable a shape, that the taste rejects it; and so it is with truth, which is the mind's food. ”

“ The word 'sauce,' as commonly used, designates a condiment, generally but not always of liquid form, eaten as an addition to and together with a dish of food, to give it flavor and make it more palatable, and is not applied to anything which is eaten alone, or with a bit of bread, either for its own sake, only, or to stimulate the appetite for other food to be eaten afterwards. ”

“ Considered as a principle of action, such a taste provides an effectual security against the grossness connected with many vices, and cherishes a temper of mind friendly to all that is amiable, or generous, or elevated in our nature. While, therefore, we regard taste as an important [Pg 59] ally to the sense of duty, we are not to rely chiefly upon it. ”

“ When all is said and done, life is serious business. The humour, the amusement, the recreation are only the sauce on the table to give an added zest and relish—they are not the roast beef and potatoes. ”

“ So in all grades are there various matters of taste which become extravagance if rushed into by persons unbreeched for the occasion. Luckily for the present day, the tastes of the gourmand and epicure are merged in more manly sports; the great class of Corinthian aristocrats cull sweets from the blackened eyes of policemen—raptures from wrenched-off knockers—merriment in contusions—and frantic delight in fractured limbs! ”

“ This sphere, the last in my scale of the perceptions of taste, and which borders upon every thing that is contrary to its laws, is properly the sphere of Fancy, who seems an undisciplined offspring of Taste; sometimes sporting within the bounds of parental authority, and sometimes beyond them. Fancy seems to bear the same affinity to Taste as Pleasure does to Happiness. ”

“ Those who try to clip or melt themselves down to the standard of current feeling, to sauce and spice their natural fruits of mind with such condiments as may take the palate of common opinion, deserve to disgust themselves and others alike. ”

“ There are some readers who have never read an essay on taste; and if they take my advice they never will; for they can no more improve their taste by so doing than they could improve their appetite or digestion by studying a cookery-book.—Southey. ”

“ Taste is a matter of education. Let us educate ourselves to like the things that are good for us.
“Perseverance in a self-denying course of eating and drinking will soon make plain, wholesome food palatable, and it will be eaten with greater satisfaction than the epicure enjoys over his rich dainties.” ”

“ From the early cup of exquisite tea brought to her bedside, through all the day of dilettante lounging over a clever book—a day relieved from monotony by pleasant episodes—dainty dishes especially prepared, visits from acquaintances, with whom she had a reputation for languid cynicism and quite awesome literary and artistic cleverness—to this hour of hair-brushing, few of her moments were not consciously appreciative of the most finely flavored mental and physical enjoyment. ”

“ What remains positive in the impression is a sense of extreme fineness and delicacy, qualities which reflect themselves in the physical counterparts of that restraint and sure taste which are in the essence of all that she signed. ”

“ On the whole, it appears to me, that what is called taste, in its most general acceptation, is not a simple idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, concerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners, and actions. ”