Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 25

Grat.i.tude is such an unpleasant quality, you know; there is always a grudge behind it!

The richest soil always bears the rankest mushrooms: France is always bearing mushrooms.

Position, she thought, was the only thing that, like old wine or oak furniture, improved with years.

Position is a pillory: sometimes they pelt one with rose-leaves, and sometimes with rotten eggs, but one is for ever in the pillory!

We are too afraid of death: that fear is the shame of Christianity.

He never could prevail on his vanity to break with her, lest men should think she had broken with him.

She would go grandly to the guillotine, but she will never understand her own times. She has dignity; we have not a sc.r.a.p; we have forgotten what it was like; we go into a pa.s.sion at the amount of our bills; we play and never pay; we smoke and we wrangle; we laugh loud, much too loud; we inspire nothing unless, now and then, a bad war or a disastrous speculation; we live showily, noisily, meanly, gaudily.

Big brains do not easily hold trifles ... little packets of starch that this world thinks are the staff of life.

Pehl, like a young girl, is prettiest in the morning. Pehl is calm and sedate, and simple and decorous. Pehl is like some tender, fair, wholesome yet patrician beauty, like the pretty aristocratic Charlotte in Kaulbach's picture, who cuts the bread-and-b.u.t.ter, yet looks a patrician. Pehl has nothing of the _belle pet.i.te_, like her sister of Baden; nothing of the t.i.tled _cocadetta_, like her cousin of Monaco; Pehl does not gamble or riot or conduct herself madly in any way; she is a little old-fashioned still in a courtly way; she has a little rusticity still in her elegant manners; she is like the n.o.ble dames of the past ages, who were so high of rank and so proud of habit, yet were not above the distilling-room and the spinning-wheel; who were quiet, serious, sweet, and smelt of the rose-leaves with which they filled their big jars.

The pity of modern Society is that all its habits make as effectual a disguise morally as our domino in carnival does physically. Everybody looks just like everybody else. Perhaps, as under the domino, so under the appearance, there may be great n.o.bility or great deformity; but all look alike. Were Socrates amongst us, he would only look like a club bore; and were there Messalina, she would only look--well--look much like our d.u.c.h.esse Jeunne!

She did not know that from these swamps of flattery, intrigue, envy, rivalry, and emulation there rises a miasma which scarcely the healthiest lungs can withstand. She did not know that though many may be indifferent to the tempting of men, few indeed are impenetrable to the smile and the sneer of women; that to live your own life in the midst of the world is a harder thing than it was of old to withdraw to the Thebaid; that to risk "looking strange" requires a courage perhaps cooler and higher than the soldier's or the saint's; and that to stand away from the contact and custom of your "set" is a harder and sterner work than it was of old to go into the sanctuary of La Trappe or Port Royal.

The world has grown apathetic and purblind. Critics rage and quarrel before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public mind in a confused phantasmagoria, where the colours run into one another, and the lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer alone still keeps the old magic power, "The beauty that was Athens, once the glory that was Rome's," still holds the divine Cadmus, still sways the vast thronged auditorium, till the myriads hold their breath like little children in delight and awe. The great singer alone has the magic sway of fame; and if he close his lips, "The gaiety of nations is eclipsed,"

and the world seems empty and silent, like a wood in which the birds are all dead.

_IN A WINTER CITY._

The Duc found no topic that suited her. It was the Corso di Gala that afternoon, would she not go?

No: her horses hated masks, and she hated noise.

The Veglione on Sunday--would she not go to that?

No: those things were well enough in the days of Philippe d'Orleans, who invented them, but they were only now as stupid as they were vulgar; anybody was let in for five francs.

Did she like the new weekly journal that was electrifying Paris?

No: she could see nothing in it: there was no wit now-a-days--only personalities, which grew more gross every year.

The Duc urged that personalities were as old as Cratinus and Archilochus, and that five hundred years before Christ the satires of Hipponax drove Bupalus to hang himself.

She answered that a bad thing was not the better for being old.

People were talking of a clever English novel translated everywhere, called "In a Hothouse," the hothouse being society--had she seen it?

No: what was the use of reading novels of society by people who never had been in it? The last English "society" novel she had read had described a cabinet minister in London as going to a Drawing-room in the crowd, with everybody else, instead of by the _pet.i.te entree_; they were always full of such blunders.

Had she read the new French story "Le Bal de Mademoiselle Bibi?"

No: she had heard too much of it; it made you almost wish for a Censorship of the Press.

The Duc agreed that literature was terribly but truly described as "un tas d'ordures soigneus.e.m.e.nt enveloppe."

She said that the "tas d'ordures" without the envelope was sufficient for popularity, but that the literature of any age was not to be blamed--it was only a natural growth, like a mushroom; if the soil were noxious, the fungus was bad.

The Duc wondered what a censorship would let pa.s.s if there were one.

She said that when there was one it had let pa.s.s Crebillon, the Chevalier Le Clos, and the "Bijoux Indiscrets;" it had proscribed Marmontel, Helvetius, and Lanjuinais. She did not know how one man could be expected to be wiser than all his generation.

The Duc admired some majolica she had purchased.

She said she began to think that majolica was a false taste; the metallic l.u.s.tre was fine, but how clumsy the forms! one might be led astray by too great love of old work.

The Duc praised a magnificent Sevres panel, just painted by Riocreux and Goupil, and given to her by Princess Olga on the New Year.

She said it was well done, but what charm was there in it? All their modern iron and zinc colours, and hydrate of aluminum, and oxide of chromium, and purple of Ca.s.sius, and all the rest of it, never gave one-tenth the charm of those old painters who had only green greys and dull blues and tawny yellows, and never could get any kind of red whatever; Olga had meant to please her, but she, for her part, would much sooner have had a little panel of Abruzzi, with all the holes and defects in the pottery, and a brown contadina for a Madonna; there was some interest in that,--there was no interest in that gorgeous landscape and those brilliant hunting figures.

The Duc bore all the contradictions with imperturbable serenity and urbanity, smiled to himself, and bowed himself out in perfect good-humour.

"Tout va bien," he thought to himself; "Miladi must be very much in love to be so cross."

The Duc's personal experience amongst ladies had made him of opinion that love did not improve the temper.