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As to other matters, I will return no more to your father’s; I want not to have my ears dinned by him and his dotards with the violation of the rites of hospitality; as if it were less an honour for you to espouse the sovereign of the world than a girl dressed up like a boy!”
He had imagined that M. Gillenormand had never loved him, and that that crusty, harsh, and smiling old fellow who cursed, shouted, and stormed and brandished his cane, cherished for him, at the most, only that affection, which is at once slight and severe, of the dotards of comedy. Marius was in error.
They went and sat a good deal in the softening evenings among the infants and dotards of Latin extraction in Washington Square, safe from all who ever knew them, and enjoyed the advancing season, which thickened the foliage of the trees and flattered out of sight the church warden's Gothic of the University Building.
Worse'n you've been forgived at fust hand by the Lard when He travelled on flesh-an'-blood feet 'mong men; an' folks have short memories for dates, an' them as sniggers now will be dust or dotards 'fore Tim's grawed. When you've been a lawful wife ten year an' more, who's gwaine to mind this? Not little Tim's fellow bwoys an' gals, anyway.
Dreiser does break with it morally, spiritually, aesthetically. Let the dotards, he says, bury their dead. Mr. Mencken wishes to drive us out of Colonialism. He says that Longfellow has had his day, and that it is time to stop imitating Addison, time to be ashamed of aping Stevenson, Kipling, or John Masefield. He is right.
In early springtime one best realizes the antiquity; the first opening leaves call to mind pale lichen growing upon damp castle walls: in summer the air is languorous, bringing a desire for rest and contemplation. Storms are impious there: the ancient oaks and birches and chestnuts must wail and protest, like dotards wakened from senility to cruel hours of actual life.
If any of the sober counsellors give him good advice, and move him in anything that is to his good and honour, the other part, which are his counsellers of pleasure, take him when he is with my Lady Castlemaine, and in a humour of delight, and then persuade him that he ought not to hear nor listen to the advice of those old dotards or counsellors that were heretofore his enemies: when, God knows! it is they that now-a-days do most study his honour.
There is, of course, a marvellous virtue in the word ‘legalised.’ The most unholy and horrible marriages between fair young girls and rich or titled dotards, drunkards, or cretins are considered perfectly proper and respectable because ‘legalised.’ Yet the people who countenance these abominations would probably be unutterably shocked by the very whisper of polyandry an infinitely more decent relation, because regulated by honest sex attraction, and free presumably from mercenary considerations.
If any of the sober counsellors give him good advice, and move him in anything that is to his good and honour, the other part, which are his counsellers of pleasure, take him when he is with my Lady Castlemaine, and in a humour of delight, and then persuade him that he ought not to hear nor listen to the advice of those old dotards or counsellors that were heretofore his enemies: when, God knows! it is they that now-a-days do most study his honour.
And the prospect of awakening again among houses and trees, among children and dotards, among wars and rumours of wars, still fettered to one personality and one accidental past, still uncertain of the future, is not this prospect wearisome and deeply repulsive? Having passed through these things once and bequeathed them to posterity, is it not time for each soul to rest?
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