Views and Opinions

by Ouida

But every word, whether written or spoken, which urges the woman to antagonism against the man, every word which is written or spoken to try and make of her a hybrid[hybrid], self-contained opponent of men, makes a rift in the lute to which the world looks for its sweetest music.

The New Woman reminds me of an agriculturist who, discarding a fine farm of his own, and leaving it to nettles, stones, thistles and wire-worms, should spend his whole time in demanding neighbouring fields which are not his. The New Woman will not even look at the extent of ground indisputably her own, which she leaves unweeded and untilled.

Not to speak of the entire guidance of childhood, which is certainly already chiefly in the hands of woman (and of which her use does not do her much honour), so long as she goes to see one of her own sex dancing in a lion’s den, the lions being meanwhile terrorised by a male brute; so long as she wears dead birds as millinery and dead seals as coats, so long as she goes to races, steeplechases, coursing and pigeon matches; so long as she ‘walks with the guns’; so long as she goes to see an American lashing horses to death in idiotic contest with velocipedes, so long as she curtsies before princes and emperors who reward the winners of distance-rides; so long as she receives physiologists in her drawing-rooms, and trusts to them in her maladies; so long as she invades literature without culture, and art without talent; so long as she orders her court-dress in a hurry, regardless of the strain thus placed on the poor seamstresses; so long as she makes no attempt to interest herself in her servants, in her animals, in the poor slaves of her tradespeople; so long as she shows herself, as she does at present, without scruple at every brutal and debasing spectacle which is considered fashionable; so long as she understands nothing of the beauty of meditation, of solitude, of Nature; so long as she is utterly incapable of keeping her sons out of the shambles of modern sport, and lifting her daughters above the pestilent miasma of modern society; so long as she is what she is in the worlds subject to her, she has no possible title or capacity to demand the place or the privilege of man, for she shows herself incapable of turning to profit her own place and her own privilege.

DEATH AND PITY

Le livre de la Pitié et de la Mort is the latest and, in my estimation, in some respects, the most touching and the most precious of the works of Loti, and I wish that this little volume, so small in bulk, so pregnant with thought and value, could be translated into every language spoken upon earth, and sped like an electric wave over the dull, deaf, cruel multitudes of men. It is not that Loti himself needs a larger public than he possesses. All who have any affinity with him know every line he writes.

Despite the singular absence of all scholarship in his works—for, indeed, he might be living before the birth of Cadmus for any allusion which he ever makes to the art of letters—a perfect instinct of style, like the child Mozart’s instinct for harmony, has led him to the most exquisite grace and precision of expression, the most accurate, as well as the most ideal realisations in words alike of scenery and of sentiment.

His earlier works were not unjustly reproached with being trop décousu, too impressionist; but in his later books this imperfection is no longer traceable, they are delicately and beautifully harmonious. A sympathetic critic has said, perhaps rightly, that the long night-watches on the sea, the long isolation of ocean voyages, and the removal from the common-place conventional pressure of society in cities and provinces have kept his mind singularly free, original and poetic. But no other sailor has ever produced anything beautiful, either in prose or in verse; and the influence of the Armorican coast and the Breton temperament have probably had more to do with making him what he is than voyages which leave sterile those who with sterile minds and souls go down to the deep in ships, and come back with their minds and their hands empty. He would have been just what he is had he never been rocked on any other waves than the long grey breakers of the iron coast of Morbihan, and, to those whom from the first have known and loved his poetic and pregnant thoughts, even the palm leaves of the first intellectual Academy of the world can add nothing to his merit, nay, they seem scarcely to accord with his soul, free as the seagull’s motion, and his sympathy wide as that ocean which has cradled and nursed him.

But it is not of himself that I wish to speak here. It is of this last little book of his which, so small in compass, is yet vast as the universe in what it touches and suggests. All the cultured world has, doubtless, read it; but how little and narrow is that world compared to the immeasurable multitudes to which the volume will for ever remain unknown, and also to that, alas! equally great world to which it would be, even when read, a dead letter: for to those who have no ear for harmony the music of Beethoven is but as the crackling of thorns under a pot. He knows this, and in his preface counsels such as these to leave it alone, for it can only weary them.

Indeed, the book is in absolute and uncompromising opposition to the modern tone of his own times, and to the bare, dry, hard temperament of his generation. It is in direct antagonism with what is called the scientific spirit and its narrow classifications. It is full of altruism of the widest, purest and highest kind, stretching out its comprehension and affection to those innumerable races which the human race has disinherited, driven into bondage, and sacrificed to its own appetites and desires. To its author the ox in the shambles, the cat in the gutter is as truly a fellow creature as the mariner on his deck, or the mother by his hearth; the nest of the bird is as sacred as the rush hut of the peasant, and the cry of the wounded animal reaches his heart as quickly as the wail of the fisherman’s widow. No one can reproach him, as they reproach me (a reproach I am quite willing to accept), with thinking more of animals than of men and women. His charities to his own kind are unceasing and boundless; he is ever foremost in the relief of sorrow and want. It cannot be said either that he is what is scornfully called a ‘mere sentimentalist.’ He is well known as a daring and brilliant officer in his service, and he has shown that he possesses moral as well as physical courage, and that he is careless of censure and indifferent to his own interests and prospects when he is moved to indignation against the tyrannies of the strong over the weak. Here is no woman who has dreamed by her fireside or in her rose garden until her sentiment has overshadowed her reason, but a brave des braves, a man whose life is spent by choice in the most perilous contest with the forces of nature, a man who has been often under fire, who has seen war in all its sickly horror, who has felt the lightnings of death playing round him in a thousand shapes. His noble and rashly-expressed indignation at the barbarities shown in the taking of Tonquin led to his temporary banishment from the French navy. He does prove, and has ever proved, in his conduct as in his writings, that to him nothing human can be alien. But he is not hemmed in behind the narrow pale of humanitarianism: he has the vision to see, and the courage to show, that the uncounted, sentient, suffering children of creation for whom humanity has no mercy, but merely servitude and slaughter, are as dear to him as his own kind.

In a century which in its decrepitude has fallen prone and helpless under the fiat of the physiologist and bacteriologist, this attitude needs no common courage. Browning had this courage, Renan had it not. In an age when the idolatry of man is carried to a height which would be ludicrous in its inflated conceit were it not in its results so tragic, it requires no common force and boldness to speak as Loti speaks of the many other races of the earth as equally deserving with their tyrants of tenderness and comprehension; to admit, as he admits, that in the suppliant eyes of his little four-footed companions he can see, as in a woman’s or a child’s, the soul within speaking and calling to his own.