In one age we admire Byron and
drink sweet champagne: twenty years later it is more fashionable to
prefer Shelley, and we like our champagne dry. At school we are told
that Shakespeare is a great poet, and that the Venus di Medici is a fine
piece of sculpture; and so for the rest of our lives we go about saying
what a great poet we think Shakespeare, and that there is no piece of
sculpture, in our opinion, so fine as the Venus di Medici. If we are
Frenchmen we adore our mother; if Englishmen we love dogs and virtue. We
grieve for the death of a near relative twelve months; but for a second
cousin we sorrow only three. The good man has his regulation
excellencies to strive after, his regulation sins to repent of. I knew a
good man who was quite troubled because he was not proud, and could not,
therefore, with any reasonableness, pray for humility. In society one
must needs be cynical and mildly wicked: in Bohemia, orthodoxly
unorthodox. I remember my mother expostulating with a friend, an
actress, who had left a devoted husband and eloped with a disagreeable,
ugly, little low comedian (I am speaking of long, long ago).
"'You must be mad,' said my mother; 'what on earth induced you to take
such a step?'
"'My dear Emma,' replied the lady; 'what else was there for me? You know
I can't act.
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