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"But don't you find those mischief-makers, the women, always mix themselves up with adventure?" "Bless them! of course," said the minstrel, with a ringing laugh. "In life, as on the stage, the petticoat interest is always the strongest." "I don't agree with you there," said Kenelm, dryly. "And you seem to me to utter a claptrap beneath the rank of your understanding.
And if the prayers of its rightful owners are answered, it will still stand there in the happy days to come when fair Alsace shall be a part of France again and Kaiser Bill and all his clanking claptrap are gone from it forever.
How you ever came to think of it all so pat beats me to a frazzle!" "I was in such a funk I had to think of something," said Tommy simply. There was a moment's pause, and then Tommy reverted to Mrs. Vandemeyer's death. "There's no doubt it was chloral?" "I believe not. At least they call it heart failure induced by an overdose, or some such claptrap. It's all right.
For a time the Young Turks, like the Magyars farther west, deceived foreign opinion by claptrap phrases from the repertory of modern democracy.
Some claptrap about the Future is worth all these sacred things.... The sort of man who would run a tramway over his mother's grave if he thought that was the cheapest line the tramway could take.... And you think to temporise, to make some scheme of compromise, that will enable you to live in your way while that that machinery lives in its. I tell you it is hopeless hopeless.
Suppose Goethe had begun his literary career with the second part of 'Faust'! He was too wise for that, and wrote himself into popularity with a claptrap novel." "I could not write a claptrap novel, or claptrap verses," sighed Lady Mabel. "If I cannot soar above the clouds, I will never spread my poor little wings again."
The hypocrisy of such a saying in the mouth of a man who was drawing a salary of five thousand pounds a year did not appear to occur to anyone. On the contrary, the hired scribes of the capitalist Press wrote columns of fulsome admiration of the miserable claptrap, and the working men who had elected this man went into raptures over the 'Brilliant Epigram' as if it were good to eat.
He would have been even more amazed than enraged had he known that she regarded his play as mediocre claptrap, false to life, fit only for the unthinking, sloppily sentimental crowd that could not see the truth about even their own lives, their own thoughts and actions. "There you go again!" cried he, a few minutes later. "What are you thinking about? I forgot to ask how you got on with Brent.
"Now a fool fails of happiness because of his insufficient mind, he miscalculates, he stumbles and hobbles, some cant or claptrap whirls him away; he gets passion out of a book and a wife out of the stews, or he quarrels on a petty score; threats frighten him, vanity beguiles him, he fails by blindness. But the knave who is not a fool fails against the light.
Not one of them, he remembered suddenly, had uttered a sentence of the political claptrap of which he had heard so much. They had spoken from the soul; not bitterly, not passionately, but their words had rung with the determination which had made their forefathers and his leave home, toil, and kindred to fight and die at Bunker Hill and Gettysburg for a principle.
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