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She despised her audience for their acceptance of the playwright's claptrap; she felt that she could do better than any of the actresses entrusted with the more important characters; her imagination was for ever turning to powerful scenes in plays she had studied privately, and despair possessed her at the thought that she would perhaps never have a chance of putting forth her strength.
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.
The chauffeur saw that the hotel-keeper sided with the police sergeant: there was no support to be got in that quarter. "Explain yourself, policeman!" burst out the chauffeur. "What's all this humbugging claptrap you are giving me?" "In the name of the law!" declared the offended police officer, in solemn tones: "I think it advisable to arrest you!... You may consider yourself my prisoner!"...
To me this book, which I examined with extreme care, seemed, in the practical bearing, a piece of monumental claptrap, though it was claptrap of the highest order, and was for that reason all the more pernicious. Mr.
But to set oneself to know thoroughly and to think clearly about any human question is to unfit oneself for the forensic claptrap which is contemporary politics, is to put oneself out of the effective current of the nation's life.
All the claptrap about Western Superiority to the Orient, and the growth of freedom in the West, in contrast with Eastern political immobility, simply means that the Orient is less fond of squirreling than we are; taking its aces by and large, there has been a little more Tao with them than with us: more consuming the detritus as they went; more balanced living, and thus more keeping the channels open.
Biology for the young readily degenerates into a mawkish "nature-study," or all-for-the-best claptrap about adaptation, but a sure remedy is the strong tonic of agnosticism, teaching one of the best lessons science has to offer, the resolute rejection of authority.
Hays, with his insufferable claptrap about absolute unity as a blanket under which to gather votes while the very existence of the nation is threatened more ominously than anybody west of the Alleghanies or in Washington, for that matter, seems to realize, the sooner he goes home and takes his damned old party with him, the better it will be for all creation." Surely no uncertain language!
"What was that they were shouting at us?" inquired the Bishop, looking back. Gissing shook his head. He was too overcome to speak. The little chapel at Dalmatian Heights sat upon a hill, among a grove of pines, the most romantic of all trees. Life, a powerful but clumsy dramatist, does not reject the most claptrap "situations," which a sophisticated playwright would discard as too obvious.
The sort of claptrap that makes a man feel so jolly comfortable inside, so damned satisfied with everything like after a good deed. And that sentimental primrose business. Dizzy as flower-expert! What cared he for primroses? Votes and moneybags was what he was after. But he knew the British Public. And that accounts for the pious domestic button-hole.
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