--What are you going to do about it?--I will tell you
another line I wrote long ago:--
Don't be "consistent,"--but be simply true.
The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that the
truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with many
facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about them;
secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to grind us
down to a single flat surface. It is hard work to resist this
grinding-down action.--Now give me a chance. Better eternal and
universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made wives
and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they should
have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches! Yet better
even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon all our tables,
let us praise it for its color and fragrance and social tendency, so far
as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the closet and pretend not to
know the use of a wine-glass at a public dinner! I think you will find
that people who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves
much more rarely than those who try to be "consistent.
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