In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate. Often do we
have him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without
one bit of tracery on its black breast other than that which his
apprehensions project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes,
thinner than the phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done
for the growth of his globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful
posture the upper, and justly the directing globe, through whose
directions we do, by feeding on the past to sow the future, create a
sensible present composed of both--the present of the good using of
our powers. What can he show in the Arts? What in Arms? His
bards--O faithless! but they are men--his bards accuse him of sheer
cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility of brain, drowsihood,
mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness. They question him to deafen him
of our defences, our intellectual eminence, our material achievements,
our poetry, our science; they sneer at his trust in Neptune, doubt the
scaly invulnerability of the God. They point over to the foreigner, the
clean-stepping, braced, self-confident foreigner, good at arms, good
at the arts, and eclipsing us in industriousness manual and mental, and
some dare to say, in splendour of verse=-our supreme accomplishment.
Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his
pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he
is down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,
lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports
from camps of foreign armies. He drops his head like a smitten ox to all
great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining
apostrophe. He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what
poetry means. If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness
in times of reverse. Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are
the generators of the conquering energies. He is now for brains at
all costs, he has gained a conception of them. He is ready to knock
knighthood on the heads of men of brains--even literary brains.
They shall be knights, an ornamental body. To make them peers, and a
legislative, has not struck him, for he has not yet imagined them a
stable body. They require petting, to persuade them to flourish and
bring him esteem.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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