Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 20

By the way, what exquisite irony lies in some of your kitchen nomenclature!

Once at a great house in the west I saw a gathering on the young lord's coming of age. There were half the highest people in England there; and a little while before the tenantry went to their banquet in the marquees, the boy-peer and his guests were all out on the terraces and the lawns. With him was a very n.o.ble deer-hound, whom he had owned for four years.

Suddenly the hound, Red Comyn, left his t.i.tled master, and plunged head-foremost through the patrician crowd, and threw himself in wild raptures on to a poor, miserable, tattered, travelling cobbler, who had dared to creep in through the open gates and the happy crowds, hoping for a broken crust. Red Comyn pounced on him, and caressed him, and laid ma.s.sive paws upon his shoulders, and gave him maddest welcome--this poor hungry man, in the midst of that aristocratic festival.

The cobbler could scarcely speak awhile; but when he got his breath, his arms were round the hound, and his eyes were wet with tears.

"Please pardon him, my lord," he said, all in a quiver and a tremble.

"He was mine once from the time he was pupped for a whole two year; and he loved me, poor soul, and he ha'n't forgot. He don't know no better, my lord--he's only a dog."

No; he didn't know any better than to remember, and be faithful, and to recognise a friend, no matter in what woe or want. Ah, indeed, dogs are far behind you!

For the credit of "the order," it may be added that Red Comyn and the cobbler have parted no more, but dwell together still upon that young lord's lands.

Appearances are so and so, hence facts must be so and so likewise, is Society's formula. This sounds mathematical and accurate; but as facts, nine times out of ten, belie appearances, the logic is very false. There is something, indeed, comically stupid in your satisfied belief in the surface of any parliamentary or public facts that may be presented to you, varnished out of all likeness to the truth by the suave periods of writer or speaker. But there is something tragically stupid about your dogged acceptation of any social construction of a private life, d.a.m.ned out of all possibility of redemption by the flippant deductions of chatter-box or of slanderer.

Now and then you poor humanities, who are always so dimly conscious that you are all lies to one another, get a glimpse of various truths from some cynical dead man's diary, or some statesman's secret papers. But you never are warned: you placidly continue greedily to gobble up, unexamined, the falsehoods of public men; and impudently to adjudicate on the unrevealed secrets of private lives.

You are given, very continually, to denouncing or lamenting the gradual encroachment of mob-rule. But, alas! whose fault, pray, is it that bill-discounters dwell as lords in ancient castles; that money-lenders reign over old, time-honoured lands; that low-born hirelings dare to address their master with a grin and sneer, strong in the knowledge of his shameful secrets; and that the vile daughters of the populace are throned in public places, made gorgeous with the jewels which, from the heirlooms of a great patriciate, have fallen to be the gew-gaws of a fashionable infamy?

Ah, believe me, an aristocracy is a feudal fortress which, though it has merciless beleaguers in the Jacquerie of plebeian Envy, has yet no foe so deadly as its own internal traitor of Lost Dignity!

"But ye dunna get good wage?" said the miner, with practical wisdom.

"We doan't," confessed the East Anglian, "we doan't. And that theer botherin' machinery as do the threshin', and the reapin', and the sawin', and the mowin', hev a ruined us. See!--in old time, when ground was frost-bit or water-soaked, the min threshed in-doors, in barns, and kep in work so. But now the machine, he dew all theer is to dew, and dew it up so quick. Theer's a many more min than theer be things to dew. In winter-time measter he doan't want half o' us; and we're just out o'

labour; and we fall sick, cos o' naethin' to eat; and goes tew parish--able-bodied min strong as steers."

"Machine's o' use i' mill-work," suggested one of the northerners.

"O' use! ay, o' coorse 'tis o' use--tew tha measters," growled the East Anglian. "But if ye warn't needed at yer mill cos the iron beast was a weavin' and a reelin' and a dewin' of it all, how'd yer feel? Wi' six children, mebbe, biggest ony seven or eight, a crazin' ye for bread. And ye mayn't send 'em out, cos o' labour-laws, to pick up a halfpenny for theerselves; and tha pa.s.son be all agin yer, cos ye warn't thrifty and didn't gev a penny for the forrin blacks out o' the six shillin' a week?

Would yer think iron beast wor o' use thin? or would yer d.a.m.n him hard?"

The poetic faculty--as you call the insight and the sympathy which feels a divinity in all created things and a joy unutterable in the natural beauty of the earth--is lacking in the generality of women, notwithstanding their claims to the monopoly of emotion. If it be not, how comes it that women have given you no great poet since the days of Sappho?

It is women's deficiency in intellect, you will observe. Not a whit: it is women's deficiency in sympathy.

The greatness of a poet lies in the universality of his sympathies. And women are not sympathetic, because they are intensely self-centred.

All living things seemed to draw closer together in the perils and privations of the winter, as you men do in the frost of your frights or your sorrows. In summer--as in prosperity--every one is for himself, and is heedless of others because he needs nothing of them.

It was covered, from the lowest of its stones to the top of its peaked roof, with a gigantic rose-thorn.

"Sure the n.o.blest shrub as ever G.o.d have made," would Ben say, looking at its ma.s.sive, cactus-like branches, with their red, waxen, tender-coloured berries. The cottage was very old, and the rose-thorn was the growth of centuries. Men's hands had never touched it. It had stretched where it would, ungoverned, unhampered, unarrested. It had a beautiful dusky glow about it always, from its peculiar thickness and its blended hues; and in the chilly weather the little robin red-b.r.e.a.s.t.s would come and flutter into it, and screen themselves in its shelter from the cold, and make it rosier yet with the brightness of their little ruddy throats.

"Tha Christ-birds do allus seem safest like i' tha Christ-bush," Ben would say softly, breaking off the larger half of his portion of oaten cake, to crumble for the robins with the dawn. I never knew what he meant, though I saw he had some soft, grave, old-world story in his thoughts, that made the rose-thorn and the red-b.r.e.a.s.t.s both sacred to him.

"Ah, my dear, you little dream the ecstatic delight that exists in Waste, for the vulgarity of a mind that has never enjoyed Possession, till it comes to riot at one blow in Spoliation!"

"I do wish you would answer me plainly," I said, sulkily, "without--without----"

"Epigrams!" she added, sharply; "I daresay you do, my dear. Epigrams are the salts of life; but they wither up the gra.s.ses of foolishness, and naturally the gra.s.ses hate to be sprinkled therewith."

We are ill appreciated, we cynics; on my honour if cynicism be not the highest homage to Virtue there is, I should like to know what Virtue wants. We sigh over her absence, and we glorify her perfections. But Virtue is always a trifle stuck-up, you know, and she is very difficult to please.

She is always looking uneasily out of the "tail of her eye" at her opposition-leader Sin, and wondering why Sin dresses so well, and drinks such very good wine. We "cynics" tell her that under Sin's fine clothes there is a breast cancer-eaten, and at the bottom of the wine there is a bitter dreg called satiety; but Virtue does not much heed that; like the woman she is, she only notes that Sin drives a pair of ponies in the sunshine, while she herself is often left to plod wearily through the everlasting falling rain. So she dubs us "cynics" and leaves us--who can wonder if we won't follow her through the rain? Sin smiles so merrily if she makes us pay toll at the end; whereas Virtue--ah me, Virtue _will_ find such virtue in frowning!

Women always put me in mind of that bird of yours, the cuckoo.

Your poetry and your plat.i.tudes have all combined to attach a most sentimental value to cuckoos and women. All sorts of pretty phantasies surround them both; the springtide of the year, the breath of early flowers, the verse of old dead poets, the scent of sweet summer rains, the light of bright dewy dawns--all these things you have mingled with the thought of the cuckoo, till its first call through the woods in April brings all these memories with it. Just so in like manner have you entangled your poetic ideals, your dreams of peace and purity, all divinities of patience and of pity, all sweet saintly sacrifice and sorrow, with your ideas of women.

Well--cuckoos and women, believe me, are very much like each other, and not at all like your phantasy:--to get a well-feathered nest without the trouble of making it, and to keep easily in it themselves, no matter who may turn out in the cold, is both cuckoo and woman all over; and, while you quote Herrick and Wordsworth about them as you walk in the dewy greenwood, they are busy slaying the poor lonely fledglings, that their own young may lie snug and warm.

"Then everybody is a hypocrite?"

"Not a bit, child. We always like what we haven't got; and people are quite honest very often in their professions, though they give the lie direct to them in their practice. People can talk themselves into believing that they believe anything. When the preacher discourses on the excellence of holiness, he may have been a thoroughgoing scamp all his life; but it don't follow he's dishonest, because he's so accustomed to talk goody-goody talk that it runs off his lips as the thread off a reel----"

"But he must know he's a scamp?"

"Good gracious me, why should he? I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

Bless you, my dear, a man no more sees himself, as others see him, in a moral looking-gla.s.s, than he does in a mirror out of his dressing-box. I know a man who has forged bills, run off with his neighbour's wife, and left sixty thousand pounds odd in debts behind him; but he only thinks himself 'a victim of circ.u.mstances'--honestly thinks it too. A man never is so honest as when he speaks well of himself. Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them."

I yawned a little; nothing is so pleasant, as I have known later, as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only--What a crib from Rochefoucauld!