The husband of a young woman adored by a lover, whom she treats unkindly and scarcely allows to kiss her hand, has, at the very most, only the grossest physical pleasure, where the lover would find the charms and transports of the keenest happiness that exists on earth.
LVIII
The laws of the imagination are still so little understood, that I include the following estimate, though perhaps it is all quite wrong.
I seem to distinguish two sorts of imagination:—
1. Imagination like Fabio's, ardent, impetuous, inconsiderate, leading straight to action, consuming itself, and already languishing at a delay of twenty-four hours. Impatience is its prime characteristic; it becomes enraged against that which it cannot obtain. It sees all exterior objects, but they only serve to inflame it. It assimilates them to its own substance, and converts them straight away to the profit of passion.
2. Imagination which takes fire slowly and little by little, but which loses in time the perception of exterior objects, and comes to find occupation and nourishment in nothing but its own passion. This last sort of imagination goes quite easily with slowness, or even scarcity, of ideas. It is favourable to constancy. It is the imagination of the greater part of those poor German girls, who are dying of love and consumption. That sad spectacle, so frequent beyond the Rhine, is never met with in Italy.
LIX
Imaginative habits. A Frenchman is really shocked by eight changes of scenery in one act of a tragedy. Such a man is incapable of pleasure in seeing Macbeth. He consoles himself by damning Shakespeare.
LX
In France the provinces are forty years behind Paris in all that regards women. A. C., a married woman, tells me that she only liked to read certain parts of Lanzi's Memoirs. Such stupidity is too much for me; I can no longer find a word to say to her. As if that were a book one could put down!