It is a great pity. Lions ought to know better. The man who stares you
in the eye and squeezes hard in a handshake may come to the bad end
which you wish him, but it is unlikely that he will ever be eaten by
lions. Something else must be devised for him. Even outside the circus
he is likely to go far. Anybody who can shake a little personality can
be ringmaster in this world. And we, all of us who have none, do nothing
about it except to obey him. Camels we can swallow easily enough, but we
strain at the natty dresser.
Still we did manage to find a few bits of information in _The Ways of
the Circus_ which were brand new to us. If, for instance, a rhinoceros
escaped from his cage just what would you do to get him back again? That
is, if he were the sort of rhinoceros you wanted back. At first glance
it seems rather a problem, but any reader of Mr. Conklin's book could
arrange it for you without difficulty. Nothing is needed but carrots and
a stout heart. The carrots you scatter profusely about the floor of the
cage, and when the rhinoceros returns to get them you slam down the
door, and there he is.
H. G. Wells of England
H. G. Wells in his _Outline of History_ seldom seems just an Englishman.
He fights his battles and makes most of his judgments alone and
generally in defiance of the traditions of his countrymen, but he is not
bold enough to face Napoleon Bonaparte all by himself. The sight of the
terrible little Corsican peeping over the edge of the thirty-eighth
chapter sends Wells scurrying from his solitude into the center of a
British square. It must be that when Wells was little and bad his nurse
told him that if he did not eat his mush or go to bed, or perform some
other necessary function in the daily life of a child, Old Bony would
get him. And Wells is still scared. He takes it out, of course, by
pretending that Napoleon has been vastly overrated and remarks that it
was pretty lucky for him that he lost Trafalgar and never got to
England, where troops would have made short work of him.
Nelson, Wells holds, was just as great a figure in his own specialty as
Napoleon in his, but if so it seems a pity that he did not rise to
Wellsian heights of strategy and lose Trafalgar so that Napoleon might
land and be defeated by British pluck and skill. Then, indeed, might
Waterloo have been won upon the cricket fields of Eton.
Not only does Wells insist on regarding Napoleon through national lenses
but through moral ones also. Speaking of his accession as First Consul,
Wells writes: "Now surely here was opportunity such as never came to man
before. Here was a position in which a man might well bow himself in
fear of himself, and search his heart and serve God and man to the
utmost."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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