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For Idalia's above-named juniors, while not bad books to read for mere amusement, have a very particular interest for the student of the history of the novel. Taken in connection with their author's earlier work, they illustrate, for the first time, a curious phenomenon which has repeated itself often, notably in the case of Bulwer, and of a living novelist who need not be named. This is that the novel, more almost than any other kind of literature, seems to lend itself to what may be called the timeserving or "opportunism" of craftsmanship to call out the adaptiveness and versatility of the artist. Betsy and Jenny are so different from Idalia and her group that a critic of the idle Separatist persuasion would, were it not for troublesome certainties of fact, have no difficulty whatever in proving that they must be by different authors. We know that they were not: and we know also the reason of their dissimilarity the fact that Pamela and her brother and their groups ont passé par l
We have learned to distrust the responses of their timeserving oracles, and to laugh at the ignorant pretensions of their literary artisans. These "outsiders" have shown, to our entire satisfaction, that they are thoroughly incompetent to judge our character as a community, and that they have no true estimate of its spirit and its resources.
They gloried not in their big salaries, fine parsonages, and refined congregations, but in the souls that had been won for Jesus. Oh, how changed! A hireling ministry will be a feeble, a timid, a truckling, a timeserving ministry, without faith, endurance, and holy power. Methodism formerly dealt in the great central truth. Now the pulpits deal largely in the generalities and in popular lectures.
At any rate, whatever as coming from the god was imparted to those present seemed to be generally of a complimentary nature: a fact which illustrates the sagacity of Kolory, or else the timeserving disposition of this hardly used deity.
Whether this charge was true or not, at any rate he wrote a letter to a friend, a Madrid editor visiting Havana, in which he characterized McKinley as a vacillating and timeserving politician. Alert American newspaper men, who practically constituted a secret service of some efficiency, managed to obtain the letter.
"Nobody deigns to tell me," he wrote to me, "how things go on, and who helps, and whether I can help. In short, I know nothing, and begin to fancy that you, like some others, think me a lukewarm and timeserving aristocrat, after I have ventured more than many, because I had more to venture."
Arminius had sought her hand in marriage; but Segestes, who probably discerned the young chief's disaffection to Rome, forbade his suit, and strove to preclude all communication between him and his daughter. Thusnelda, however, sympathized far more with the heroic spirit of her lover than with the timeserving policy of her father.
Some modern gentleman of note I forget who, and do not care to recollect says that Raleigh's 'prudence never bore any proportion to his genius. The next biographer we open accuses him of being too calculating, cunning, timeserving; and so forth. Perhaps both are true. The man's was a character very likely to fall alternately into either sin doubtless did so a hundred times.
"I ain't agoing to Church to-morrer," said another, with assumed languor. "Me and Sam's goin' on 'Midnight Pass' ter-night, ain't we, Sam?" inquired a young "timeserving" fellow. "Who's on at the Hipper-drome?" "Oh! Mah-rie Lloyd." "Get urt, you'm too young to see our Mah-rie." Roars of laughter, that almost shut out the wind with their heartiness!
Pretended conversions which invariably jump with party interests are more sudden; and even hypocrisy now appears to be scarcely thought discreditable. The same moral cowardice extends downwards as well as upwards. The action and reaction are equal. Hypocrisy and timeserving above are accompanied by hypocrisy and timeserving below.
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