He kept up a kind of acquaintance
with me, not by writing to me, but by the very cheap mode of sending
me a newspaper now and then with a marked paragraph in it announcing
the exploits of his school at a cricket-match, or occasionally with a
report of a lecture which he had delivered. He was a decent orator,
and from motives of business if from no other, he not unfrequently
spoke in public. One or two of these lectures wounded me a good
deal. There was one in particular on As You Like It, in which he
held up to admiration the fidelity which is so remarkable in
Shakespeare, and lamented that in these days it was so rare to find
anything of the kind, he thought that we were becoming more
indifferent to one another. He maintained, however, that man should
be everything to man, and he then enlarged on the duty of really
cultivating affection, of its superiority to books, and on the
pleasure and profit of self-denial. I do not mean to accuse Clem of
downright hypocrisy. I have known many persons come up from the
country and go into raptures over a playhouse sun and moon who have
never bestowed a glance or a thought on the real sun and moon to be
seen from their own doors; and we are all aware it by no means
follows because we are moved to our very depths by the spectacle of
unrecognised, uncomplaining endurance in a novel, that therefore we
can step over the road to waste an hour or a sixpence upon the
unrecognised, uncomplaining endurance of the poor lone woman left a
widow in the little villa there.
Pages:
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71