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"I can hear you very well, but I, unfortunately, am a mute." He could not repress the low ejaculation of astonishment that came to his lips, and as his companion lifted her cup he saw in her face again the look that had stirred him so strangely when he stood in the window of the Hotel Windsor. Howland was not a man educated in the trivialities of chance flirtations.
Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of these trivialities, but passed on, as a practical man ought to pass on. But, at the back of the booth he saw a number of children congregated in a number of stealthy attitudes, striving to peep in at the hidden glories of the place.
Such a procedure, which glides over essentials, and handles truisms or trivialities with a fervour of conviction, has its functions in practice. It will win for a politician the coveted and deserved repute of a "safe" man safe, even though the cause perish.
And in knowing this Venetian much may be learned of the decadence of Venice, which had come to produce, not the great and reverent and serious men who laid her stones and covered her walls with sweet and splendid works expressive of the endurance and piety of great souls, but such men as Casanova the gambler, Goldoni the play-writer, Longhi and Canaletto the painters; and then, as the best among them all, the honest Venetian whom we now meet, sometimes called the Shakespeare of Venice, but in fact only a play-writer, a Venetian nobleman, who depicted in a dispassionate temper the trivialities of his age, and lacked both the milieu and the material to produce a great work.
When one sees for what trivialities people are fighting to-day one begins to understand how callously and shamelessly they gave up a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has really happened.
Of particular interest is his belief that the stage had contributed to the improvement of the language, especially in dissuading the clergy from a fantastic, conceited rhetoric. The fury of Collier's attack seemed to dull the wits of the defenders of the stage. Too often they allowed themselves to be drawn into quibbling over trivialities.
They told me, in their queer, old, toothless fashion, about their visitors, a man who used to fish all day, every day for three weeks, fish every hour of the day, though many a day he caught nothing nothing at all still he fished from the boat; and so on, such trivialities. Then they told me of a third sister who had died, a third little old lady. One could feel the gap in the house.
Curiously enough, The General, whilst anxious at all times to remind every one of death and judgment, and to prevent their being so intoxicated by pleasure and passing trivialities as to prevent their thinking of their souls and of eternity, abolished, so far as his followers were concerned, the horrible formalities which, in all countries have come to be thought necessary whenever death and the grave come into view.
The most costly buildings of the town were the courthouse and jail, and these occupied the most conspicuous places. Here great crowds of Negroes would gather on Saturdays to spend their earnings of the week for a fine breakfast or dinner on the following Sunday, or for useless trivialities.
But what struck me more cogently upon reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true, immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they were inventions of the human fancy.
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