away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are
wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but
conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better
and simpler people.

A strange temptation attends upon man: to keep his eye on pleasures,
even when he will not share in them; to aim all his morals against
them. This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade
against dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age.
I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any excess or perversion
of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing
denunciations; but for all displays of the truly diabolic--envy, malice,
the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the backbiter, the
petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life--their standard is
quite different. These are wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not so
wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret element of
gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things not wrong in themselves that
they reserve the choicest of their indignation. A man may naturally
disclaim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr. Zola or the hobgoblin
old lady of the dolls; for these are gross and naked instances. And
yet in each of us some similar element resides. The sight of a pleasure
in which we cannot or else will not share moves us to a particular
impatience. It may be because we are envious, or because we are
sad, or because we dislike noise and romping--being so refined, or
because--being so philosophic--we have an overweighing sense of life's
gravity: at least, as we go on in years, we are all tempted to frown
upon our neighbour's pleasures. People are nowadays so fond of
resisting temptations; here is one to be resisted. They are fond of
self-denial; here is a propensity that cannot be too peremptorily
denied. There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should