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In the smoking-room or at the supper-table he crushed conversation flat as a steam-roller crushes a road. He was quite irresistible. Trite anecdotes were sandwiched between aphorisms of the copybook; and whether anecdote or aphorism, all was delivered with the air of a man surprised by his own profundity.
The following strikes me as an excellent example. And what less trite except to tritical tastes and intellects than this letter? Sept. 18. 1784. My dear Friend, Following your good example, I lay before me a sheet of my largest paper. It was this moment fair and unblemished but I have begun to blot it, and having begun, am not likely to cease till I have spoiled it.
A man may weary, after a while, of camels and bedouin maidens and all the picturesque paraphernalia of Arab life; or at least they end in becoming so trite that his eyes cease to take note of them; but there are two spectacles, ever new, elemental, that correspond to deeper impulses: this of palms in the waste the miracle of water; and that of fire the sun.
A train is very comfortable; but it certainly brings to these quiet valleys a great many people who would otherwise never come near them." The force of this trite reflection was borne in on her by a loud wrangle between the bridge players. A woman had revoked, and was quite wroth with the man who detected her mistake.
There was a time once when I talked republicanism as loudly as raw youth ever did when I had an excuse for it, too; for when I was a boy, I saw the French Revolution; and it was no wonder if young, enthusiastic brains were excited by all sorts of wild hopes 'perfectibility of the species, 'rights of man, 'universal liberty, equality, and brotherhood. My dear sir, there is nothing new under the sun; all that is stale and trite to a septuagenarian, who has seen where it all ends.
Shall we fight and keep our prisoners?" "What is that white thing in the bow of the first canoe?" said one of the men. "It looks like a flag," said another. "If so, it is a flag of truce," observed Dan. "They have something to say, and do not want to fight." "That may be trite, but we won't let you be at the conference," returned the leader, sternly. "Come, four of you, lead them out of earshot.
The tale was trite in his ears. "But I fancy I've rather good security to offer," went on Warrington coolly. He drew from his wallet a folded slip of paper and spread it out. The purser stared at it, enchanted. Warrington stared down at the purser, equally enchanted. "By Jove!" the former gasped finally. "And so you're the chap who's been holding up the oil syndicate all these months?
For new shudders are as rare as new vices; antiquity has made them all seem trite. The apt commingling of the horrible and the trivial, pathos and ferocity, is yet the one secret of enduring work a secret, parenthetically, which Hugo knew as no one else." His fables depend in most instances upon sexual abberrations, curious coincidences, fantastic happenings. Rapes and incests decorate his pages.
How is it that certain words, and those the homeliest, which the hand writes and the eye reads as trite and commonplace expressions when spoken convey so much, so many meanings complicated and refined? "Ah! if you knew how I have suffered!"
These were doubtless designed by Providence for our comfort and well-being; yet they are often misapplied to trifling purposes, and still more frequently turned into so many agents of misery and death. On this fact indeed is founded the well-known maxim, not more trite than just, that "the best things when corrupted become the worst;" a maxim which is especially just in the instance of Religion.
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