" His
altogether outside vehemence and hypocrisy did in fact react upon
him, and so far from affecting harmfully what lay deeper, produced a
more complete sincerity and transparency extending even to the finest
verbal distinctions. Over and over again have I heard him preach to
his wife, almost with pathos, the duty of perfect exactitude in
speech in describing the commonest occurrences. "Now, my dear, IS
that so?" was a perpetual remonstrance with him; and he always
insisted upon it that there is no training more necessary for
children than that of teaching them not merely to speak the truth in
the ordinary, vulgar sense of the term, but to speak it in a much
higher sense, by rigidly compelling, point by point, a correspondence
of the words with the fact external or internal. He never would
tolerate in his own children a mere hackneyed, borrowed expression,
but demanded exact portraiture; and nothing vexed him more than to
hear one of them spoil and make worthless what he or she had seen, by
reporting it in some stale phrase which had been used by everybody.
This refusal to take the trouble to watch the presentment to the mind
of anything which had been placed before it, and to reproduce it in
its own lines and colours was, as he said, nothing but falsehood, and
he maintained that the principal reason why people are so
uninteresting is not that they have nothing to say.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25