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To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
But if he avoided the weakness of Burns' verses to animals, the occasional morbidity, bombast and moralisation on himself, the credit is surely due to a cleaner and more transparent life. The general attitude of St Francis, like that of his Master, embodied a kind of terrible common-sense. The famous remark of the Caterpillar in 'Alice in Wonderland' 'Why not? impresses us as his general motto.
He told them in prose and verse prose which was measled with 'Oh's, and 'Alas's, and full of great windblown phrases of bombast, like inflated bladders, each with one little parched pea of meaning to rattle inside it The verse was mainly such as might have been written by a moderately illiterate absurd old man who had found life a vanity, and had deserved his discovery.
General Forey, the commander of the besieging force, increased as far as possible the difficulties of the conflict, in order to send, with the customary French bombast, brilliant bulletins to Paris, and thus bind a victor's wreath about his own brow, and enable him to obtain a much-coveted marshalship. In this he was successful, as he was promoted to that dignity upon his return to France.
The delirium of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary historians, and the choicest examples in all literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of common sense and judgment, are to be found in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of them men of eminence, call histories of the Revolution, or lives of this or that actor in it.
The general characteristics of the imitation, size and bombast, are well epitomised in the principal statue of Montpellier's fine Champ de Mars, which represents the high-heeled and luxurious Louis XIV in the unfitting armour of a Roman Imperator, mounted on a huge and restive charger.
Magnificent, noble, and sublime words are to be estimated by their congruity with the subject; for what is magnificent in one place, swells into bombast in another; and what is low in a grand matter, may be proper in a humble situation.
But now at five-and-thirty, find out the yellow manuscript, and read it carefully over; and I will venture to say, that, if you were a really clever and eloquent young man, writing in an ambitious and rhetorical style, and prompted to do so by the spontaneous fervor of your heart and readiness of your imagination, you will feel now little sympathy even with the literary style of that early composition, you will see extravagance and bombast, where once you saw only eloquence and graphic power.
"Or else I shall die without ever having lived a vegetable, not a human being." "Bombast! a 'flower' your lovers will call you." "And men of sense a 'weed. But don't let us discuss me. What I wish to know is the nature of your annoyance, dear."
That the passage is open to the charge of being bombastic proves nothing; or rather, proves our case. For what is bombast but a force of expression too great for the magnitude of the ideas embodied? All that may rightly be inferred is, that only in very rare cases, and then only to produce a climax, should all the conditions of effective expression be fulfilled. v.