n 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,