Critical Studies

by Ouida

His morality is of the most primitive kind; or rather, he has none whatever, no more than has a South-Sea islander lying in the sun under a cocoa-nut tree whilst the surf bathes his naked limbs. It would be absurd to accuse him of immorality because the indulgence of the senses is as natural and as legitimate in his estimation, as Favetta's song amongst the golden furze, or the reapers' welcome of the purple wine. Yet by a not rare anomaly, this demand for perfect freedom of the passions is accompanied by a tendency to desire tyranny in political matters. He is disposed to deify force. In one or two expressions there is an echo of Carlyle which sounds oddly and jarringly amongst the amorous liberties and artistic debaucheries of the rest; and is not worthy of a writer who has so much courage in opposing scientific pharisaism and the thraldom of the schools. He is disposed to admire what is strong simply because it is strong, forgetful that such strength is sustained and nourished by the suffering of the weak. It is true that he has lived in an atmosphere in which the verities embodied in the aspirations, abortive but always noble, of the higher efforts of revolution have been received with fear and misunderstanding. The tendencies and training of the Codini are visible through the eloquence of the poet and the conclusions of the philosopher. The entire lack in him of all altruism comes from this. Mazzini must be as unintelligible to him as Tolstoi. The mass of humanity is always to him the filthy, surging, bestial multitudes of the crowd at Casalbordino. But even this absence of benevolence is better than the pitiful sycophancy of writers who are as fulsome in their flattery to Demos as to kings; is manlier than the nauseating self-worship of a Humanity at once its own pimp and pander, its own adorer and assassin.

In his scorn of the human flocks of sheep, he forgets, I admit, too entirely the justice to which the humblest unit amongst these flocks has right, but that scorn, even when misdirected, is fresh and bracing as the dash of his own Adriatic waves, when the east wind drives them hurrying on to the shingle beach. He has no fear; and he never stoops to that base flattery of his own species which is the most nauseous feature of modern politics and of modern science.

'This alone is your office,' he cries to his contemporaries, if they would resist the debasing influences of their time, 'defend the dream which is in you. Since in this day mortals no longer bring tribute of love and honour to the choristers of the Muses, defend yourselves, O poets, with all your weapons, steep the point of your rapiers in the most biting poisons. Let your satires bear such corrosive acid in them that they shall pierce to the very pith of the spine and destroy it. Brand to the very bone the stupid forehead of those fools who would mark every soul with the same label, and make every brain like another, as the heads of nails are beaten into a common likeness by the blows of the nailmaker. Let your mordant laughter reach to heaven when you hear the stablemen of the Great Beast shouting in the parliaments of the earth.... Defend the thought which they menace, defend the beauty which they outrage, defend the antique freedom of your masters and the future freedom of your disciples, against the insane assaults of drunken slaves. Despair not, though you be few in number. You have the supreme force of the world: the written word.'

The written word is indeed in his hand a scourge, a sword, a sheaf of arrows from the quiver of the divine Python Slayer.

And in no country more than in the Italy of his generation is such a scourge, such a sword, such flame-tipped arrows, needed to slay the courtiers, the usurers, the sycophants, the knaves, the brutes, the sellers of justice who fasten like leeches on her body.

This son of Italy is a great writer; a great poet. Read his works in the original text all ye who can, men and women for whom life has no secrets and truth has no terror.

He is young; the time will come, as it comes to all, when the joys of the senses will fade for him as the roses of the summer are scattered by autumn winds.

Let us hope that there will be later a second period of his creative art, in which there will be developed an original genius free of exotic influences, and untrammelled by the search for idioms and pruriencies. Genius, like the river at its source, takes the colour of the earth it springs from. It is only when it has reached its full volume, its deepest currents, that it becomes clear and reflects the sky alone.

Let us hope that such a future awaits him, and that more and more fully will he realise what he has already said in noble words:—

'Art! Here is the one faithful passion ever youthful, nay, immortal; here is the fountain of pure joy unknown to the multitude; here is the divine food which makes men like to gods. How could he have stooped to drink at other cups when he had once tasted of this?[3] How could he have bent to taste of other joys, once having known this ecstasy? How could his senses have let themselves be weakened and debased to lowest lusts when they had once been stirred to that highest sensibility which beholds the invisible, which touches the impalpable, which divines the most hidden secrets in the heart of nature?'