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She saw the smile upon his lips, and it was as wine to sick nerves; for even upon warlike Barsoom where all men are brave, woman reacts quickly to quiet indifference to danger to dare-deviltry that is without bombast. "You may return your sword," she said. "I told you that the banths would not harm us. Look!" and as she spoke she stepped quickly toward the nearest animal.
Then to end up, after tramping the streets with other gaping idlers till late at night, he would make his way back, with weary limbs and aching ribs, his head whirling confusedly with bombast and loud talk, through the sleeping city to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Upon any other occasion, the painter would have triumphed greatly upon this detection; but such was the flutter and confusion of his spirits, under the apprehension of being retaken, that, without further communication, he retreated to his own room, in order to resume his own dress, which he hoped would alter his appearance in such a manner as to baffle all search and examination; while the physician remained ashamed and abashed, to find himself convinced of bombast by a person of such contemptible talents.
The fact is that nothing is so commonplace as this conventional refinement and nobility. Nothing original, no imagination, no invention in this style; simply what one has seen everywhere rhetoric, bombast, commonplaces, flowers of college eloquence, poetry after the style of Latin verses.
Now, however, they laugh; and how can we blame them for laughing, when all Europe and all America are laughing too? You see, Sir, that the gentlemen opposite cannot keep their countenances. And no wonder. Was such a State paper ever seen in our language before? And what is the plea set up for all this bombast?
1 This extraordinary effect of anger and fear on animals was observed centuries before America was discovered. Statius, a writer who fully equals Mr Slick both in his affectation and bombast, thus alludes to it: "Qualis ubi audito venantum murmure tigris, Horruit in maculas." "As when the tigress hears the hunter's din, Dark angry spots distain her glossy skin."
Kate took more interest in this melancholy, middle-aged man than she would have done if she had not been on the outlook for her Western type, the man who was to combine all the qualities of chivalry, daring, bombast, and generosity, seasoned with piquant grammar, which she firmly believed to be the real thing.
And then, look at her writings! She mistakes vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality; she struts on one page, rolls her eyes on another, grimaces in a third, and is hysterical in a fourth.
Where the weakest are to be convinced speech must stoop: a full consideration of the velleities and uncertainties, a little bombast to elevate the feelings without committing the judgment, some vague effusion of sentiment, an inapposite blandness, a meaningless rodomontade these are the by-ways to be travelled by the style that is a willing slave to its audience.
A man will not reach eloquence if he is afraid of bombast, just as a man will not jump a hedge if he is afraid of a ditch. As the object of all eloquence is to find the least common denominator of men's souls, to fall just within the natural comprehension, it cannot obviously have any chance with a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside it.
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