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Before consigning the German Chancellor's Pecksniffian oration to well-deserved oblivion, there is one other fact to state, because it is of immediate interest to Great Britain. In the person of Bethmann-Hollweg the German Government stood before the world on August 4th, 1914, and endeavoured to prove that Germany was attacked, and that her conscience was clear.
Tom made himself as spruce as he could before leaving home, and when John Westlock, through the half-opened parlour door, had glimpses of that brave little sister brushing the collar of his coat in the passage, taking up loose stitches in his gloves and hovering lightly about and about him, touching him up here and there in the height of her quaint, little, old-fashioned tidiness, he called to mind the fancy-portraits of her on the wall of the Pecksniffian workroom, and decided with uncommon indignation that they were gross libels, and not half pretty enough; though, as hath been mentioned in its place, the artists always made those sketches beautiful, and he had drawn at least a score of them with his own hands.
The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo.
About the catastrophe of the Année Terrible, his craze for "righteousness" makes him a very little Pecksniffian one thinks of the Tower of Siloam. But it is pleasant to hear that, early in 1871, they are arranging for him "a perfect district, Westminster and a small rural part near Harrow." So one hopes that the days of posting from shire to shire and subsisting on buns were over.
The conclusion was couched in that vein of Pecksniffian benevolence of which we hear so much in life.
This applies also to the manner in which former centuries have spoken about drinking. We sometimes begin to move uneasily, as if something Pecksniffian had come into our presence, when we behold the twentieth century sitting in judgment on the manners and morals of the sixteenth century.
There had been one or two awkward meetings between the two in the open street; and at the Parlour, among his special intimates, Daddy had elaborated a Purcell myth of a Pecksniffian character which his invention perpetually enriched. On the whole, however, it was in his liking for young Grieve, originally a casual customer at the restaurant, that Dora saw the chief effects of the feud.
But there is something quite pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea that it is not hard enough. If any man will really try talking to the ten beggars who come to his door he will soon find out whether it is really so much easier than the labor of writing a check for a hospital.
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