Views and Opinions

by Ouida

The instant that any man or woman accomplishes anything which is in any way remarkable, the curiosity of the public is roused and fastens on his or her private life to the neglect and detriment of his or her creations. The composer of the ‘Cavalleria Rusticana,’ an opera which, whatever may or may not be its artistic merit, has had charm and melody enough to run like a flame of fire across Italy, awakening the applause of the whole nation, had dwelt in obscurity and poverty up to the moment when his work aroused a fury of delight in his country people. Lo! the press immediately seizes on every detail of his hard and laborious life, and makes a jest of his long hair. What has his life or his hair to do with the score of the ‘Cavalleria Rusticana?’ What has the fact that he has written music which, if not original, or spiritual, has the secret of rousing the enthusiasm of the populace, to do with the private circumstances, habits, or preferences of his daily existence? It is an intolerable impudence which can presume to pry into the latter because the former has revealed in him that magic gift of inspiration which makes him momentarily master of the souls of others.

The human mind is too quickly coloured, too easily disturbed, for it to be possible to shake off all alien bias and reflected hues; and it is more just to the dead than to the living, because it is not by the dead moved either to that envy or detraction, that favour or adulation, which it unconsciously imbibes from all it hears and knows of the living.

Whoever else may deem that the phonograph, the telephone, and the photographic apparatus are beneficial to the world, every man and woman who has a name of celebrity in that world must curse them with deadliest hatred. Life is either a miserable and weak submission to their demands, or a perpetual and exhausting struggle against and conflict with their pretensions, in the course of which warfare enemies are made inevitably and continually by the tens of thousands. He who bends beneath the decrees of the sovereign spy is popular at the price of dignity and peace. Those who refuse to so stoop are marked out for abuse and calumny from all those who live by or are diverted by the results of the espionage. There is no middle way between the two; you must be the obedient slave or the irreconcilable opponent of all the numerous and varied forms of public inquiry and personal interference. The walls of Varzin have never been high enough to keep out the interviewer, and the trees of Faringford have never been so thickly planted that they availed to screen the study of the poet. The little, through these means and methods, have found out that they can annoy, harass, torment, and turn to profit, the great. Who that knows humanity could hope that the former would abstain from the exercise of such power?

The worst result of the literary clamour for these arrays of facts, or presumed facts, is that the ordinary multitude, who have not the talent of the original seekers, imitate the latter, and deem it of more importance to know what any famous person eats, drinks, and wears, in what way he sins, and in what manner he sorrows, than it does to rightly measure and value his picture, his position, his romance, or his poem. Journalistic inquisitiveness has begotten an unwholesome appetite, an impudent curiosity, in the world, which leaves those conspicuous in it neither peace nor privacy.

The press throughout the whole world feeds this appetite, and the victims, either from timidity or vanity, do not do what they might do to condemn and resist it. The interviewer too often finds his impertinent intrusion unresented for him, or the public which employs him, to reach any consciousness of his intolerable effrontery. He has behind him those many-handed powders of anathema, misrepresentation, and depreciation which are called the fourth estate, and almost all celebrity is afraid of provoking the reprisals in print which would follow on a proper and peremptory ejection of the unsought visitor.

Because a man or woman more gifted than the common multitude bestows upon the world some poem or romance, some picture, statue, or musical composition, of excellence and beauty, by what possible right can the world pry into his or her privacy and discuss his or her fortunes and character? The work belongs to the public, the creator of the work does not. The invasion of private life and character never was so great or so general as it is in the last years of this century. It is born of two despicable parents, curiosity and malignity. Beneath all the flattery, which too frequently covers with flowers the snake of inquisitiveness, the snake’s hiss of envy may be plainly heard by those who have ears to hear. It is the hope to find, sometime, some flaw, some moral or physical disease, some lesion of brain or decay of fortune, in the private life of those whom they profess to admire or adore, which brings the interviewer crawling to the threshold and peering through the keyhole. What rapture for those who cannot write anything more worthy than a newspaper paragraph to discover that the author of ‘Salammbo’ was an epileptic! What consolation for those who cannot string rhymes together at a child’s party to stand beside the bedside of Heine and watch ‘the pale Jew writhe and sweat!’

In Dalou’s monument to Eugene Delacroix he represents the great painter with his chin sunk in the cache-nez, which his chilly and fragile organisation led to his wearing generally, no matter whether the weather were fine or foul. Dalou has outraged art, but he has delighted his contemporaries and crystallised their taste; the cache-nez about the throat of the man of genius enchants the common herd, which catches cold perpetually, but could not paint an inch of canvas or a foot of fresco, and feels jealously, restlessly, malignantly, grudgingly, that the creator of the ‘Entreé des Croises’ and the ‘Barque de Dante,’ who was so far above them in all else is brought nearer to them by that folded foulard. The monument in the gardens of the Luxembourg is an epitome of the sentiment of the age; time, glory and art bend before Delacroix and offer him the palms of immortality; Apollo throws his lyre away in sympathy and ecstasy; but what the mortal crowds see and applaud is the disfiguring neckerchief!

It is the habit of scholars to lament that so little is known of the private life of Shakespeare. It is, rather, most fortunate that we know so little, and that little but vaguely. What can we want to know more than the plays tell us? Why should we desire to have records which, drawing earthwards the man, might draw us also downwards from that high empyrean of thought where we can dwell through the magic of the poet’s incantations?

It may be a natural instinct which leads the crowd to crave and seek personal details of the lives of those who are greater than their fellows, but it is an instinct to be discouraged and repressed by all who care for the dignity of art. The cry of the realists for documents humains is a phase of it, and results from the poverty of imagination in those who require such documents as the scaffolding of their creations. The supreme gift of the true artist is a rapidity of perception and comprehension which is totally unlike the slow piecemeal observations of others. As the musician reads the page of a score at a glance, as the author comprehends the essence of a book by a flash of intelligence, as the painter sees at a glance the points and lines and hues of a landscape, whilst the ordinary man plods through the musical composition note by note, the book page by page, the landscape detail by detail, so the true artist, whether poet, painter, or dramatist, sees human nature, penetrating its disguises and embracing all its force and weakness by that insight which is within him. The catalogues, the classifications, the microscopic examinations, which are required to make up these ‘documents,’ are required by those who have not that instantaneous comprehension which is the supreme gift of all supreme talent. The man who takes his notebook and enumerates in it the vegetables, the fish, the game, of the markets, missing no bruise on a peach, no feather in a bird, no stain on the slab where the perch and trout lie dying, will make a painstaking inventory, but he will not see the whole scene as Teniers or Callot saw it.

When the true poet or artist takes up in his hand a single garden pear or russet apple, he will behold, through its suggestions, as in a sorcerer’s mirror, a whole smiling land of orchard and of meadow; he will smell the sweet scent of ripe fruit and wet leaves; he will tread a thousand grassy ways and wade in a thousand rippling streams; he will hear the matin’s bell and the even song, the lowing kine and the bleating flocks; he will think in a second of time of the trees which were in blossom when Drake and Raleigh sailed, and the fields which were green when the Tudor and Valois met, and the sunsets of long, long ago, when Picardy was in the flames of war, and all over the Norman lands the bowmen tramped and the fair knights rode.