Othmar

by Ouida

'Are there any true lovers?'

'I think you should be the last woman who could doubt it.'

'You want a compliment, but I shall not give it you. Or if you mean the others—well, perhaps they have been, or they are, true enough; but then that is only because a passion for me has always been thought d'un chic incroyable. I should believe in the love of a man if I were a milkmaid, but when to be in love with one is a mere fashion like the height of your wheels or the shape of your mail, one may question its single-mindedness. I have never, either, observed that the most devoted of them eat their dinner less regularly, or smoke less often when they were unhappy. Even you, yourself, when you were wasting with despair, did not refuse to dine or smoke.'

'Do not speak of that time,' said Othmar, with a look of distress. 'As for your complaint against us, we are mere machines in a great deal; the machine goes on mechanically in its daily exercise for its daily necessities; that movement of mechanism has nothing to do with the suffering of the soul. Nothing can be more unjust than to confuse the one with the other. You say a man cannot be a poet or a lover because he eats a truffled beefsteak. I say it is the mechanical part of him which eats the beefsteak, and eating it impairs neither his sensitive nerves nor his passions. As for smoking, it is a consolation because it is a sedative.'

'Admirably reasoned,' said Nadine, 'but you do not convince me. I am certain that the conventionalities and habits of modern life do diminish the forces of passion. When Tityæus was forsaken by Musidora, and had only the primæval woods, the fons sylvæ, the mountain solitudes, and the silent sheep, his grief could reign over him undivided; but nowadays, when he dines out every evening, is made to laugh whether he will or no, finds a hundred engagements waiting for every hour, and has the babble of the world eternally in his ear, his remembrance is of a very attenuated sort. I do not say that he suffers nothing, but I do say that he often forgets that he suffers.'

'I am not at all sure of that,' said Othmar, 'and what is more, I am almost disposed to think that the effort to affect indifference which Society compels, is much more suffering than the delightful permission which Nature gave your shepherd to be as miserable as he pleased, unchecked and unremarked. The world may cause the most excruciating torture to a man who is compelled to be in it and of it, while some great preoccupation makes every thought except one alien and hateful.'

'If the man have a great nature, perhaps. But how many have?'

'As many, or as few, as in the days of the shepherds. The ordinary Tityæus, I imagine, did not weep long for the ordinary Musidora, but soon tuned his pipe afresh and put new ribbons on his crook.'

'I do not quite think that; I think all feelings were stronger, warmer, deeper, more concentrated in the earlier ages of the world. Nowadays we contrive to make everything absurd—our heroes, our poets, our sorrows, our loves, all are dwarfed by our treatment of them. Even death itself we have managed to make ridiculous, and strip of all its majesty. Ulysses' self would have looked grotesque if buried with the civil rites which attended Gambetta to his tomb, or the religious rites which mocked the prince of mockers, Disraeli. Whenever I die, I hope you will let me be carried by young children clad in white to some green grave in your own woods, where only a stag will come or a pretty hare. Will you be unconventional enough for that? Or will you be afraid of the French municipalities and the Russian popes? I should have courage to execute your last wishes so, but whether you will have the courage to execute mine——Men are so much more timid than women!'

'Do not talk of death!' said Othmar, with a passing shudder.