Part 4 (2/2)

As libertines are enfeebled by indulgence, it follows that they are proportionally distinguished by fear and cowardice. Nothing, indeed, destroys courage more than s.e.xual abuses.

But, from cowardice, spring cunning, duplicity, lying, and perfidy. These common results of cowardice are uniformly found in eunuchs, slaves, courtiers, and sycophants; while boldness, frankness, and generosity, belong to virtuous, free, and magnanimous men.

Again, cowardice, artifice, falsehood, and perfidy, are the usual elements of cruelty. Men feel more wounded in self-love, as they are conscious of being more contemptible; and they avenge themselves with more malignity upon their enemy, as they find themselves more weak and worthless, and as they consequently dread him more.

These are the causes of that malignant revenge which princes have often shown, as, in ancient times, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Heliogabalus, &c. In later times, Catharine de Medici solicited the ma.s.sacre of the Protestants; Paul, Constantine, and Nicholas, of Russia, were happy only when they wallowed in blood; Charles X., equally effeminate and bigoted, perpetrated the ma.s.sacre of the Parisians; Don Miguel covered Portugal with his a.s.sa.s.sinations; and nearly all the sovereigns and sycophants in Europe upheld or palliated his atrocities.[7]

The strong and brave man, on the contrary, scarcely feels hurt, and scorns revenge.

It is not cruelty only with which we may reproach these effeminate individuals: it is every vice which springs from baseness of character.

Libertinism, moreover, is not hurtful only to the health and welfare of these individuals: it is so also to those of their posterity.

Finally, the results of libertinism have constantly marked, not merely the ruin of families, but the degeneration of races, and the decay of empires.

The delights of Capua caused the ruin of Hannibal; and the Roman, once so proud before kings, finally transformed himself into the wretched slave of monsters degraded far below the rank of humanity.

So little, however, do men look to remote consequences that perhaps the most frightful punishments of libertinism are the diseases which it inflicts. Man may, then, be said to meet only death on the path of life.

The dangers of promiscuous love are, indeed, far beyond what young men will easily believe. I do not exaggerate when I state, that, out of every three women, and those the least common of the promiscuous, two at least are certainly in a state of disease capable of the most destructive infection. A surgeon in the habit of receiving foul patients at a public hospital tells me, I might safely say that nine out of every ten are in this state.[8]

While writing this, Sir Anthony Carlisle observes to me, that, ”the special disease which appears to be a punishment for s.e.xual profligacy, is not only malignant, painful, and hideous, in every stage of it, but the only remedy known for its cure, mercury, is a poison which generally leaves its own evils for the venom which it destroys. This frightful disease has no natural termination but in a disgusting disgraceful death, after disfiguring the countenance, by causing blindness, loss of the nose, the palate and teeth, and by the spoliation of the sinning organs. The miserables, who thus perish in public hospitals, are so offensive to the more respectable patients, that they are confined to appointed rooms, termed foul wards, where they linger and die in the bloom of life, either of the penalty inflicted by their profligacy, of the poison administered to them, or of incurable consequent diseases, such as consumption, palsy, or madness.”

Hence, it has been observed, that, if we have to deal with a young man incapable of guidance by the n.o.bler motives, of feeling contempt for vice, and horror for debauchery, there yet remain means to be employed. Let him be conducted to the hospital, where he will find collected the poor victims of debauchery--the unhappy women whom, even the day before, he may have seen in the streets, with faces dressed in smiles, amid the torments, the corrosion, and the contagion of disease. This may leave an impression sufficiently deep. But let him also know that these unhappy creatures are a thousand times more pitiable than the libertine who destroys them, and who forfeits the only good we cannot refuse to other wretches, compa.s.sion for the misery he endures.[9]

CHAPTER IV.

NATURE OF BEAUTY.

In this chapter, my aim is to show that there is more than one kind of beauty, and that much confusion has arisen among writers, from not clearly distinguis.h.i.+ng the characteristics of these kinds.

An essential condition, then, of all excitement and action in animal bodies, is a greater or less degree of novelty in the objects impressing them--even if this novelty should arise only from a previous cessation of excitement.

Now, objects of greater or less novelty are the causes of excitement, pleasurable or painful, by means of their various relations.

The lowest degree of bodily pleasure (though, owing to its constancy, immense in its total amount) is that which arises, during health, from those relations of bodies and that excitement which cause the mere local exercise of the organs--a source of pleasure which is seldom the object of our voluntary attention, but which seems to me to be the chief cause of attachment to life amid its more definite and conspicuous evils.

All higher mental emotions consist of pleasure or pain superadded to more or less definite ideas. Pleasurable emotions arise from the agreeable relations of things; painful emotions, from the disagreeable ones.

The term by which we express the influence which objects, by means of their relations, possess of exciting emotions of pleasure in the mind, is BEAUTY.

Beauty, when founded on the relations of objects, or of the parts of objects, to each other, forms a first cla.s.s, and may be termed _intrinsic beauty_.

When beauty is farther considered in relation to ourselves, it forms a second cla.s.s, and may be termed _extrinsic_ beauty.

We are next led (hitherto this has apparently been done without a.n.a.lyzing or defining the operation) to a division of the latter into two genera; namely, the _minor beauty_, of which prettiness, delicacy, &c., are modifications, and that which is called _grandeur_ or _sublimity_.

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