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Updated: May 7, 2025
Such teachers will not copy the form; they will not imitate the awkward clap-trap; but, yielding to the inspiration of the dominant idea, they will, in a way more in accordance with nature, manage to thrill with life the teaching of facts, and will aid the mind in giving birth to its ideas. This is the old method of Socrates, the eternal method of reason, the only method which really educates.
In Holland, a popular monarch taps some forty puncheons of schnapps, and makes the people drunk. In Belgium, he gets up a high mass, and a procession of virgins. In the States, a rabid diatribe against England, and a spice of Lynch Law, are clap-trap. But every land has its own peculiar leaning to be gratified by some one concession or compliment in preference to every other.
I think the audience is as much concerned in the play as the actor or the author, and if either of these fails in the ideal, or does a bit of clap-trap when they have wrought the audience up in expectation of something noble, then they insult the audience or all the better part of it." "The better part of the audience never fills the house," said the actor. "Very well.
Upholster the road first, and let us ride on bare boards until a cushion can be afforded; not till after the bridges are of granite and iron, and the rails of steel, do we want this more than aristocratic splendor and luxury of palace and drawingroom cars. To me there is no more marked sign of essential vulgarity of the national manners than these princely cars and beggarly, clap-trap roads.
"Social triumphs!" she repeated scornfully. "What clap-trap! I tell you that a season in London or Paris, much more Vienna, is enough to drive a real American woman crazy. Success, indeed! What does it amount to?" She paused for a moment to take breath.
I may be burned, but I cannot be melted; so if secesh succeeds, I throw in a cesspool my document of naturalization, and shall return to Europe, even if working my passage. It is maddening to read all this ignoble clap-trap, written by European wiseacres concerning this country.
In France also a Republic where they likewise paraded conspicuously the clap-trap "Egalité, Fraternité," they managed these things far better. The French lower classes knew their place. They did not ape the dress, nor frequent the resorts of those above them in the social scale.
No description can do justice to the intensity of its insolence; it made even Mr. Fullarton's torpid blood boil resentfully. "How dare you address such words to me?" he cried out, trembling with rage. "If it were not for my profession " "Stop!" the other broke in, rudely; "you need not trouble yourself to repeat that stale clap-trap.
Martin turned upon him. "A cheap judgment," he remarked quietly. "I heard it first in the City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known better. I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap of it nauseates me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear that great and noble man's name upon your lips is like finding a dew-drop in a cesspool. You are disgusting."
"What is your view of the subject, Count?" asked Madame Fosco, calmly proceeding with her cigarettes, and not taking the least notice of me. The Count stroked one of his white mice reflectively with his chubby little finger before he answered. "It is truly wonderful," he said, "how easily Society can console itself for the worst of its shortcomings with a little bit of clap-trap.
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