What monster have we here? Who is he that sprawls thus, ventrirotund,
against the huge oozing wine-skin? Wide his nose, narrowly-slit his
eyes, and with little teeth he smiles at us through a beard of bright
russet--a beard soft as the russet coat of a squirrel, and sprouting in
several tiers according to the several chins that ascend behind it from
his chest. Nude he is but for a few dark twists of drapery. One dimpled
foot is tucked under him, the other cocked before him. With a
bifurcated fist (such is his hand) he pillows the bald dome of his
head. He seems to be very happy, sprawling here in the twilight. The
wine oozes from the wine-skin; but he, replete, takes no heed of it. On
the ground before him are a few almond-blossoms, blown there by the
wind. He is snuffing their fragrance, I think.
Who is he? 'Ho-Tei,' you tell me; 'god of increase, god of the
corn-fields and rice-fields, patron of all little children in Japan--a
blend of Dionysus and Santa Claus.' So? Then his look belies him. He is
far too fat to care for humanity, too gross to be divine. I suspect he
is but some self-centred sage, whom Hokusai beheld with his own eyes in
a devious corner of Yedo. A hermit he is, surely; one not more affable
than Diogenes, yet wiser than he, being at peace with himself and
finding (as it were) the honest man without emerging from his own tub;
a complacent Diogenes; a Diogenes who has put on flesh. Looking at him,
one is reminded of that over-swollen monster gourd which to young Nevil
Beauchamp and his Marquise, as they saw it from their river-boat,
'hanging heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow cheek, in
prolonged contemplation of its image in the mirror below,' so
sinisterly recalled Monsieur le Marquis. But to us this 'self-adored,
gross bald Cupid' has no such symbolism, and we revel as
whole-heartedly as he in his monstrous contours. 'I am very beautiful,'
he seems to murmur. And we endorse the boast. At the same time, we
transfer to Hokusai the credit which this glutton takes all to himself.
It is Hokusai who made him, delineating his paunch in that one soft
summary curve, and echoing it in the curve of the wine-skin that swells
around him. Himself, as a living man, were too loathsome for words; but
here, thanks to Hokusai, he is not less admirable than Pheidias'
Hermes, or the Discobolus himself. Yes! Swathed in his abominable
surplusage of bulk, he is as fair as any statue of astricted god or
athlete that would suffer not by incarnation...
Presently, we forget again that he is unreal. He seems alive to us, and
somehow he is still beautiful. 'It is a beauty,' like that of Mona
Lisa, 'wrought out from within upon the flesh, the' adipose 'deposit,
little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and
exquisite passions.' It is the beauty of real fatness--that fatness
which comes from within, and reacts on the soul that made it, until
soul and body are one deep harmony of fat; that fatness which gave us
the geniality of Silenus, of the late Major O'Gorman; which soothes all
nerves in its owner, and creates the earthy, truistic wisdom of Sancho
Pauza, of Francisque Sarcey; which makes a man selfish, because there
is so much of him, and venerable because he seems to be a knoll of the
very globe we live on, and lazy inasmuch as the form of government
under which he lives is an absolute gastrocracy--the belly tyrannising
over the members whom it used to serve, and wielding its power as
unscrupulously as none but a promoted slave could.
Such is the true fatness. It is not to be confounded with mere
stoutness. Contrast with this Japanese sage that orgulous hidalgo who,
in black velvet, defies modern Prussia from one of Velasquez's canvases
in Berlin. Huge is that other, and gross; and, so puffed his cheeks are
that the light, cast up from below, strives vainly to creep over them
to his eyes, like a tourist vainly striving to creep over a boulder on
a mountainside. Yet is he not of the hierarchy of true fatness. He
bears his bulk proudly, and would sit well any charger that were strong
enough to bear him, and, if such a steed were not in stables, would
walk the distance swingingly. He is a man of action, a fighter, an
insolent dominator of men and women. In fact, he is merely a stout
man--uniform with Porthos, and Arthur Orton, and Sir John Falstaff;
spiced, like them, with charlatanism and braggadocio, and not the less
a fine fellow for that. Indeed, such bulk as his and theirs is in the
same kind as that bulk which, lesser in degree, is indispensable to
greatness in practical affairs. No man, as Prince Bismarck declared, is
to be trusted in state-craft until he can show a stomach. A lack of
stomach betokens lack of mental solidity, of humanity, of capacity for
going through with things; and these three qualities are essential to
statesmanship. Poets and philosophers can afford to be thin--cannot,
indeed, afford to be otherwise; inasmuch as poetry and philosophy
thrive but in the clouds aloft, and a stomach ballasts you to earth.
Such ballast the statesman must have. Thin statesmen may destroy, but
construct they cannot; have achieved chaos, but cosmos never.
But why prate history, why evoke phantoms of the past, when we can gaze
on this exquisitely concrete thing--this glad and simple creature of
Hokusai? Let us emulate his calm, enjoy his enjoyment as he sprawls
before us--pinguis, iners, placidus--in the pale twilight. Let us not
seek to identify him as god or mortal, nor guess his character from his
form. Rather, let us take him as he is; for all time the perfect type
of fatness.
Lovely and excessive monster! Monster immensurable! What belt could
inclip you? What blade were long enough to prick the heart of you?
'THE VISIT'