Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 59

She had committed the greatest error of all: she had let him be disenchanted by familiarity. Pa.s.sion will pardon rage, will survive absence, will forgive infidelity, will even thrive on outrage, and will often condone a crime; but when it dies of familiarity it is dead for ever and aye.

Society will believe anything rather than ever believe that Itself can be duped.

If you have only a.s.surance enough to rely implicitly on this, there is hardly anything you cannot induce it to accept.

Here was the secret of her success. To her nothing was little.

This temper is always popular with Society. To enjoy yourself in the world, is, to the world, the prettiest of indirect compliments.

The chief offence of the poet, as of the philosopher, is that the world as it is fails to satisfy them.

Society, which is after all only a conglomerate of hosts, has the host's weakness--all its guests must smile.

The poet sighs, the philosopher yawns. Society feels that they depreciate it. Society feels more at ease without them.

To find every one acceptable to you is to make yourself acceptable to every one.

Hived bees get sugar because they will give back honey. All existence is a series of equivalents.

Even the discreetest friends will, like the closest-packed hold of a ship, leak occasionally. Salt water and secrets are alike apt to ooze.

The simplicity of the artist is always the stumbling-block of the artist with the world.

A woman need never dread the fiercest quarrel with her lover; the tempest may bring sweeter weather than any it broke up, and after the thunder the singing of birds will sound lovelier than before. Anger will not extinguish love, nor will scorn trample it dead; jealousy will fan its fires, and offences against it may but fasten closer the fetters that it adores beyond all liberty. But when love dies of a worn-out familiarity it perishes for ever and aye.

Jaded, disenchanted, wearied, indifferent, the tired pa.s.sion expires of sheer listlessness and contemptuous disillusion.

The death is slow and unperceived, but it is sure; and it is a death that has no resurrection.

There is nothing that you may not get people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud enough and often enough, till the welkin rings with it.

What Raffaelle has left us must be to the glories he imagined as the weaver's dye to the sunset's fire.

A woman's violence is a mighty power; before it reason recoils unnerved, justice quails appalled, and peace perishes like a burnt-up scroll; it is a sand-storm, before which courage can do but little: the bravest man can but fall on his face and let it rage on above him.

A very trustful woman believes in her lover's fidelity with her heart; a very vain woman believes in it with her head.

From the moment that another life has any empire on ours, peace is gone.

Art spreads around us a profound and n.o.ble repose, but pa.s.sion enters it, and then art grows restless and troubled as the deep sea at the call of the whirlwind.

_WANDA._

A man cast forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his temptations and perils. That is the n.o.bler side of marriage. When the light of love is faded, and its joys are over, its duties and its mercies remain. Because one of the twain has failed in these the other is not acquitted of obligation.

"Choose some career; make yourself some aim in life; do not fold your talents in a napkin; in a napkin that lies on the supper-table at Bignon's. That idle, aimless life is very attractive, I daresay, in its way, but it must grow wearisome and unsatisfactory as years roll on. The men of my house have never been content with it; they have always been soldiers, statesmen, something or other beside mere n.o.bles."

"But they have had a great position."

"Men make their own position; they cannot make a name (at least, not to my thinking). You have that good fortune; you have a great name; you only need, pardon me, to make your manner of life worthy of it."

"Cannot make a name? Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback in all the ministries and half the n.o.bilities;"

"You mean that Hans, Pierre, or Richard becomes a count, an excellency, or an earl? What does that change? It alters the handle; it does not alter the saucepan. No one can be enn.o.bled. Blood is blood; n.o.bility can only be inherited; it cannot be conferred by all the heralds in the world. The very meaning and essence of n.o.bility are descent, inherited traditions, instincts, habits, and memories--all that is meant by _n.o.blesse oblige_."

"Men are always like Horace," said the princess. "They admire rural life, but they remain for all that with Augustus."

I read the other day of some actresses dining off a truffled pheasant and a sack of bonbons. That is the sort of dinner we make all the year round, morally--metaphorically--how do you say it? It makes us thirsty, and perhaps--I am not sure--perhaps it leaves us half starved, though we nibble the sweetmeats, and don't know it.

"Your dinner must lack two things--bread and water."

"Yes; we never see either. It is all truffles and caramels and _vins frappes_."

"There is your bread."

She glanced at the little children, two pretty, graceful little maids of six and seven years old.

"_Ouf!_" said the Countess Branka. "They are only little bits of puff paste, a couple of _pet.i.ts fours_ baked on the boulevards. If they be _chic_, and marry well, I for one shall ask no more of them. If ever you have children, I suppose you will rear them on science and the Antonines?"