So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace and amiable sight.
For of the soul the body form doth take;
For soul is form and doth the body make.
He does not try to make us believe that physical pleasures have a divine justification. Neither has he any wish to “make us grovel, hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.” He is merely engaged in remembering “des heures et des entretiens” which were extremely pleasant—hours which strike for every one, conversations and meetings which are taking place in all parts of the world and at every moment.
This attitude towards volupté is sufficiently old in France to have made possible the evolution of a very precise and definite vocabulary in which to describe its phenomena. This language is as exact as the technical jargon of a trade, and as elegant as the Latin of Petronius. It is a language of which we have no equivalent in our English literature. It is impossible in English to describe volupté elegantly; it is hardly possible to write of it without being gross. To begin with, we do not even possess a word equivalent to volupté. “Voluptuousness” is feeble and almost meaningless; “pleasure” is hopelessly inadequate. From the first the English writer is at a loss; he cannot even name precisely the thing he proposes to describe and analyze. But for the most part he has not much use for such a language. His approach to the subject is not dispassionate and scientific, and he has no need for technicalities. The English amorist is inclined to approach the subject rapturously, passionately, philosophically—almost in any way that is not the wittily matter-of-fact French way.
In our rich Australian Songs of Love and Life we see the rapturous-philosophic approach reduced to something that is very nearly the absurd. Overcome with the intensities of connubial bliss, the authoress feels it necessary to find a sort of justification for them by relating them in some way with the cosmos. God, we are told,
looking through His hills on you and me,
Feeds Heaven upon the flame of our desire.