The public saw little of him after that,
for he had not the power of Kean, or Cooke, or Brooke.
They all go the same way when they slip as Devine did. You can meet them
on the roads, in common lodging-houses, in the workhouse. The residuum
is constantly recruited from the "comfortable" classes, and, out of
thousands of cases, I never knew half-a-dozen in which the cause was not
drink. I blame nobody. A drunkard is always selfish--the most selfish of
created beings--and his flashes of generosity are symptoms of disease.
If he lives to be cured of his vice his selfishness disappears, and he
is another man; but so long as he is mastered by the craving, all things
on earth are blotted out for him saving his own miserable personality.
So far does the disease of egotism go, that it is impossible to find a
drunkard who can so much as listen to another person; he is inexorably
impelled to utter forth _his_ views with more or less incoherence.
Devine, the tender husband, the kind father, became a mere slinker, a
haunter of tap-rooms, a weed.
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