The noblest character in the book is Lord Aubrey. As he is not a genius he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion. He begins by pitying the neglected Lady Guilderoy, and ends by loving her, but he makes the great renunciation with considerable effect, and, having induced Lady Guilderoy to receive back her husband, he accepts ‘a distant and arduous Viceroyalty.’ He is Ouida’s ideal of the true politician, for Ouida has apparently taken to the study of English politics. A great deal of her book is devoted to political disquisitions. She believes that the proper rulers of a country like ours are the aristocrats. Oligarchy has great fascinations for her. She thinks meanly of the people and adores the House of Lords and Lord Salisbury. Here are some of her views. We will not call them ideas:
The House of Lords wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people’s needs and resources. It has never withstood the real desire of the country: it has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent follies.
A democracy cannot understand honour; how should it? The Caucus is chiefly made up of men who sand their sugar, put alum in their bread, forge bayonets and girders which bend like willow-wands, send bad calico to India, and insure vessels at Lloyd’s which they know will go to the bottom before they have been ten days at sea.
Lord Salisbury has often been accused of arrogance; people have never seen that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, candid consciousness of a great noble that he is more capable of leading the country than most men composing it would be.
Democracy, after having made everything supremely hideous and uncomfortable for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat tails of some successful general.
The prosperous politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a questionable quality. The moment that a thing is a métier, it is wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the pursuit of it. To the professional politician national affairs are a manufacture into which he puts his audacity and his time, and out of which he expects to make so much percentage for his lifetime.
There is too great a tendency to govern the world by noise.
Ouida’s aphorisms on women, love, and modern society are somewhat more characteristic:
Women speak as though the heart were to be treated at will like a stone, or a bath.
Half the passions of men die early, because they are expected to be eternal.
It is the folly of life that lends charm to it.
What is the cause of half the misery of women? That their love is so much more tenacious than the man’s: it grows stronger as his grows weaker.
To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity of Wordsworth’s mind, and boots and stockings as homely.
It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into the habit of saying what is not true. Wise is the woman who never insists on an explanation.
Love can make its own world in a solitude à deux, but marriage cannot.
Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous; often even polyandrous.
Moralists say that a soul should resist passion. They might as well say that a house should resist an earthquake.
The whole world is just now on its knees before the poorer classes: all the cardinal virtues are taken for granted in them, and it is only property of any kind which is the sinner.
Men are not merciful to women’s tears as a rule; and when it is a woman belonging to them who weeps, they only go out, and slam the door behind them.
Men always consider women unjust to them, when they fail to deify their weaknesses.
No passion, once broken, will ever bear renewal.
Feeling loses its force and its delicacy if we put it under the microscope too often.
Anything which is not flattery seems injustice to a woman.
When society is aware that you think it a flock of geese, it revenges itself by hissing loudly behind your back.
Of descriptions of scenery and art we have, of course, a large number, and it is impossible not to recognise the touch of the real Ouida manner in the following:
It was an old palace: lofty, spacious, magnificent, and dull. Busts of dusky yellow marble, weird bronzes stretching out gaunt arms into the darkness, ivories brown with age, worn brocades with gold threads gleaming in them, and tapestries with strange and pallid figures of dead gods, were all half revealed and half obscured in the twilight. As he moved through them, a figure which looked almost as pale as the Adonis of the tapestry and was erect and motionless like the statue of the wounded Love, came before his sight out of the darkness. It was that of Gladys.
It is a manner full of exaggeration and overemphasis, but with some remarkable rhetorical qualities and a good deal of colour. Ouida is fond of airing a smattering of culture, but she has a certain intrinsic insight into things and, though she is rarely true, she is never dull. Guilderoy, with all its faults, which are great, and its absurdities, which are greater, is a book to be read.
Guilderoy. By Ouida. (Chatto and Windus.)
SOME LITERARY NOTES—VI
(Woman’s World, June 1889.)