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In countries where the levels of fortune are such that few men have incomes greatly in excess of their real or factitious wants, this method will probably be necessary; but many of the wants I have described can be better met by the old English method of intelligent private generosity, and in a country in which the number of the very rich is so great and so increasing, this generosity should not be wanting.
Some of the most frail and feeble creatures are endowed with extraordinary vigor of soul; it would seem as if, in these weak, infirm organizations, the spirit reigned absolutely over the body, and knew how to inspire it with a factitious energy. Thus, for the last twenty-four hours, Mother Bunch had neither slept nor eaten; she had suffered from the cold, through the whole of a frosty night.
There is something extremely amusing to me in the number of factitious wants, the loads of imaginary conveniences, but real incumbrances, with which the luxurious are apt to burthen themselves. I like to watch the whimsical stir and display about one of these petty progresses.
And this nature, as they present it, is really not nature at all, but a factitious admiration for certain isolated aspects of the universe conventionally regarded as "natural."
But it changed abruptly on the doctor's arrival. "Ah! it's you, is it?" she said brusquely, as if waking from a dream. "Did you ring? I did not hear." And in the ennui, the weariness that suddenly overspread that lovely face, only the eyes retained their expression and brilliancy, eyes in which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins Pearls was heightened by a natural fierceness.
Obliged, meanwhile, to see these young creatures, placed, by the mere factitious circumstance of wealth, in possession of happiness which they had not had time either to earn or to appreciate. He thought it shallow, because of their mirth and gaiety, as if they were only seeking food for laughter, finding it in mistakes, for which he was ready to despise them.
But Hardy is so much a special pleader for Tess, that the argument suffers and a grave fault is apparent when the story's climax is studied. There is an intrusion of what seems like factitious melodrama instead of that tissue of events which one expects from a stern necessitarian.
I had some difficulty in making myself understood; this perpetual see-saw of nature and art which enshrouds æsthetic dialectics as in a Scotch mist seems curiously factitious to the truly imaginative mind. But I shall always remember his reply, when he finally made me out, as one of the finest severings conceivable of a Gordian knot of this kind.
An earthly potentate, unable to execute with his own hand all the affairs of which he has control, is obliged to delegate the larger portion of them to his servants; selecting the lightest part for himself, he gratifies his pride by calling it also the noblest, though the distinction is factitious, there being no real difference, in point of honor or dignity, between them.
"The factitious exhilaration produced by uttering these beautiful sentiments did not last very long, as you may imagine.