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We know not how it is, but love at first sight is a subject of constant ridicule; but, somehow, we suspect that it has more to do with the affairs of this world than the world is willing to own. Eyes meet which have never met before, and glances thrill with expression which is strange. We contrast these pleasant sights and new emotions with hackneyed objects and worn sensations.
Formerly, too, this spirit was confined to the old, hackneyed in the ways of the world, and who, having worn out the trifling affections which they ever had, would subject those of their children to the maxims of worldly prudence. This we learn from fiction and the drama, where the worldly wisdom of age is always represented as opposed to the generous but imprudent passions of youth.
Yet one who has nothing to say can say it better in a foreign language. If you must speak nothing but phrases, Ollendorff's are as good as any one's. Where there are a dozen people all speaking French equally badly, each one imagines there is a certain elegance in the hackneyed forms.
The loud, boisterous talking, the daily repetition of the same hackneyed remarks, the anarchistic swashbuckling of the painter whom his comrades had dubbed Kropotkin—all of these were familiar stories to him.
"Speak the worst, Bertram Lyngern!" cried the old lady. "Thy Lord " It seemed to Bertram as if the only words that would come to his lips in reply were two lines of an inscription set up in many a church, and as familiar to all present as any hackneyed proverb to us. "`Pur ta pite, Jesu, regarde, Et met cest alme en sauve garde." There was an instant's dead silence.
So obviously dramatic is this incident that it has become sadly hackneyed. Again, we have bankruptcy following upon a course of gambling, generally in stocks. Here there is evident opportunity, which has been frequently utilized, for a series of crises of somewhat violent and commonplace emotion.
There was never a more striking illustration of the necessity of constant renewal of inspiration, of the constant danger of lapse into the perfunctory and the hackneyed, which threatens an artist of precisely Chapu's qualities.
At a crisis when I would have given a month's income to have said something neat, epigrammatic, suggestive, yet withal courteous and respectful, I could only find a hackneyed, unenthusiastic phrase which I should have used in accepting an invitation from a bore to lunch with him at his club. "Of course you understand my friends must be my father's friends." "Yes," I said gloomily, "I suppose so."
He smiled, answering the adoring look of her eyes with his own amorous glance, and in another few seconds they were part of the brilliant whirl of dancers now crowding the ball-room and swinging round in a blaze of colour and beauty to the somewhat hackneyed strains of the "Fruhlings Reigen."
Item, she had a quite incredible amount of yellow hair, that was not in the least like gold or copper or bronze I scorn the hackneyed similes of metallurgical poets but a straightforward yellow, darkening at the roots; and she wore it low down on her neck in great coils that were held in place by a multitude of little golden hair-pins and divers corpulent tortoise-shell ones.
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