Coldly worshipped on the whole, he can create an
enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up
to peaceful skies and the domestic English world spins
with him. What he does not like will then be
the forbidding law of a most governable people, what
he does like the consenting. If it is declared
that argument will be inefficacious to move him, he
is adored in the form of post. A hint of his
willingness in any direction, causes a perilous rush
of his devotees. Nor is there reason to suppose
we have drawn the fanatical subserviency from the
example of our subject India. We may deem it
native; perhaps of its origin Aryan, but we have made
it our own. Some have been so venturesome as
to trace the lordliness of Bull to the protecting
smiles of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him
to encourage the development of a wanton eccentricity.
Certain weeds of the human bosom are prompt to flourish
where safeness would seem to be guaranteed. Men,
for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone
to the same sort of wilfulness as Bull’s, the
salve abject submission to it which we behold in his
tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done
something. One thinks he has done much, at a
rumour of his inefficiency to do the utmost.
Spy you insecurity?—a possibility of invasion?
Then indeed the colossal creature, inaccessible to
every argument, is open to any suggestion: the
oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there
is no attack on his shores, there is no proof that
they are invulnerable. Neptune is appealed to
and replies by mouth of the latest passenger across
the Channel on a windy night:—Take heart,
son John! They will have poor stomachs for blows
who intrude upon you. The testification to the
Sea-God’s watchfulness restores his darling who
is immediately as horny to argument as before.
Neptune shall have his share of the honours.
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.