Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of
heresy, opposition to his image. It is an exercise of imagination to
accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner
of the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that
flowering stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily
casts out what it cannot consume. He is a positive shape, a practical
corporation, and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by
his bards of the Press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt
by laughing ocean-waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome
roundness, like that other Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces
robed in vestments not so wonderful as printed sheets. Rounder at each
inspection, he preaches to mankind from the text of a finger curved upon
the pattern spectacles. Your Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering
on tentative politics; your Germans ploughing in philosophy, thumbing
classics, composing music of a novel order: both are marching,
evolutionising, learning how to kill. Ridiculous Germans! capricious
Frenchmen! We want nothing new in musical composition and abstract
speculation of an indecent mythology, or political contrivances and
schemes of Government, and we do not want war. Peace is the Goddess we
court for the hand of her daughter Plenty, and we have won that jolly
girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-feast; but avaunt new-fangled
theories and howlings: old tunes, tried systems, for us, my worthy
friends.
Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic
invitation to the leaner kine. It can exhibit to the world that Peace
is a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping
the pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth. Bull's
perusal of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat
meads; he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for
a sign of his diligent wisdom in seizing the day. He can read the page
fronting him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will
vociferously confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe
there is no such thing as a present hour for man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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