The materials with which she brews her fiery and somewhat heady draughts are almost monotonously alike. Her heroes are beauteous, long-limbed, silky-haired, graceful men: if the scene is laid in England, they are generally officers, always of high family and terribly dissipated. Beneath a quiet, courteous demeanor they hide passionate feeling, indomitable bravery and great capacity for friendship. They are adorned by every vice, and are consequently loved by every woman. As for the women, who except Ouida can describe them? They are faultlessly beautiful, exceedingly headstrong and full of fascinating peccadilloes. Next to the beaux sabreurs come the gifted artists, and alongside of the wicked ladies of rank appear the ladies without rank, but with every other charm of the sinful sort. Brandy and soda, hock and seltzer and cigarettes almost deserve mention among the dramatis personæ: they serve to delight her aristocracy, and for the aristocracy Ouida has a most plebeian esteem. Its faults are virtues in disguise: gambling away a large fortune in a night is heroism; faithlessness in love is its first duty; anything like decorum is the most "caddish" Philistinism. These being Ouida's literary principles, and also the delight of her readers, it is easy to see how absolutely useless would be any solemn attempt to prove that there is anything good in the world except wickedness. Ouida has pages of pseudo-rhythmical soliloquy in which she alleges the truth of her statements about lords and ladies, but, whether true or false, there is a charm to her readers in her flowery account of what their social betters do. Scandal never fails of a listener, and who can serve such huge banquets of scandal as will Ouida at a moment's notice? She offers no mere crumb that has dropped from a rich table, but a mass that concerns every duke and duchess and earl and countess in the peerage. Victor Hugo has taught a docile generation the power of the melodrama, and Ouida, an apt pupil, has written in English the most violent protests against human beings as they are, and has encouraged the use of exaggeration in the representation of life. She employs the much-abused method of contrast. She draws a man who is stained with every vice, and to outweigh his crying faults she makes him tell the truth under difficult circumstances, or keep a promise, or possibly do a generous action, and the reader, who has admired the hero at his worst, thrills with fervent pride in his colossal right-doing at last.
The air of worldly wisdom with which her books are filled is another powerful attraction. Persons who know so much about wickedness must have, it would seem, a rare knowledge of human life and human beings; and the poor reader, whose worst notion of vice is working embroidery on Sunday, has forced down her throat stenographic reports of the talk in demireps' parlors, with occasional interludes in which the author charges her critics with squeamishness for objecting to her parade on the dung-hills of life. But it is useless to make too much mention of her faults. She is like most of the writers who reject all limitations and say they must describe people as they are, and then seek in the mire for people to write about.
Putting aside the question of the impropriety which taints by no means all her work, it is well to find what constitutes her power in other directions. She has a large following, and many who utterly condemn her gross faults are very anxious to read her new books as fast as they appear. In the first place, she has a good deal of real power. It is not accuracy, or refinement, or the accomplishment of much by moderate means, but a great accumulation of effective points, that carries the reader through her books. It is not a man whom she takes for a hero, but a picturesque combination of attractive failings, united with an impossible beauty and grace. It is a vulgar ideal that she worships, and it is vulgarer in fact than as she sees it; but she worships it with positive adoration, and she warms the reader with something of her own fervor. She is in earnest, and she has the gift of expression, often of tawdry, bombastic expression, but often powerful and impressive.
Take Chandos, for instance: it is the melodrama run mad. Chandos belongs to one of the best families in England; he has genius in all directions; he writes books that sell as only very good and very poor books sell; he is as beautiful as the figures that adorn tailors' patterns; his wealth seems boundless; in immorality Don Juan was but a blundering schoolboy by his side. This cold description does him no manner of justice: any one who knows Ouida's novels will readily recall the type, and he stands head and shoulders above the rest. He warms a snake in his bosom in the guise of a friend, who manages his affairs and leads the lordly Chandos to total bankruptcy. The languid voluptuary goes out into the world and knows every kind of suffering: at length, twenty years afterward, he is restored to his rights, and by a magnanimous effort he pardons the treacherous friend, who, he finds, is his illegitimate brother, and all ends well. But the reader's feelings are reached in a way that no one would suspect from this meagre statement. Chandos lives in halls of porphyry, and does everything for the man who betrays him; he is absolutely above suspicion, just as the other man is without a scrap of virtue or kindliness; and the contrast between his high and his low estate is done in black and white, with lights and shadows as distinct as if the book had been written under a calcium flame. That the book has considerable crude force cannot be denied even by those who are ready to sneer most loudly at its glaring faults. By dint of exaggerating virtues and vices the author dulls for a time the inevitable revolt of the reader against such unnatural representations of life. This story—or it may be other readers have been struck by some other of the series—impresses itself upon the memory for a time, just as a play would in which we seem to see a man jump out of a third-story window, but in both cases we should be inclined to question the author's respect for literature. All such work is like scene-painting, but if a man prefers gazing at chromo-lithographs to visiting the Pitti Gallery, he cannot be talked out of his tastes.
The reaction against realism shows itself now-a-days in many curious ways. Alongside of an intense devotion to science there flourishes the vulgarest superstition regarding the occupations and intellectual capacity of departed spirits, and the imagination of the present day finds its frequent expression in coarse melodrama. But even for the melodrama Ouida, clever as she is, lacks one important element—namely, a sense of humor. There is a monotonous seriousness in her stories, and frequently an unrelieved pathos, which is in direct violation of the law that commands grotesqueness and misery to be put in close antithesis by the writer who is anxious to win fame. The airy badinage of some of her characters is singularly void of lightness and frolicsomeness. Their unfailing cynicism alone makes good this noticeable deficiency. This fault distinguishes Ouida very clearly from Dumas and Victor Hugo, for Dumas's high spirits seldom failed him, while Victor Hugo combines contrasting qualities in his novel as carefully as if he were making a salad. But Ouida can relieve the strain she makes upon her readers' feelings only by a profuse display of worldly wisdom. Every-day experience shows that vulgar, unrelieved cynicism is an easily-learned accomplishment: any credulous person, inclined to gossip and ashamed of being thought decorous, can be hand and glove with Ouida in a very short time, although it is by no means every one who out of such tawdry material can weave a story that shall be generally interesting. The double nature of this writer is an instance of a rather rare combination. She can be as vulgar as a gossiping dressmaker with a keen love of scandal, and yet she has a vein of poetical sensitiveness, of strong feeling, which stands in strange contrast with her heavy-handed cynicism. In fact, she gilds in her own fashion the crudest display of coarseness and selfishness. Possibly it is too much to say that she gilds: she hangs round with tinsel all sorts of subjects, over which she rejoices as a raw schoolboy rejoices over his first cigar; and this with an infantile delight in her own savoir vivre and an ecstatic vain-glory in her faults which throw real merits into the shade.
A melodramatic imagination—by which is meant a proneness to look at things as Ouida looks at them, an inclination to see crude picturesqueness of effect—apparently fills its owner or victim with the most puffed-up pride. Anything like moderation or exactness is despised, good workmanship is regarded as the plodding of stupidity, and all chance of cultivating what talents the writer may have is thrown over to find place for strong effect. All of Ouida's desultory reading seems to have taught her nothing except that by heaping up agonizing incidents a point will be reached at last when even the most hardened reader will have to succumb and give his sympathy to much-persecuted innocence or to fascinating guilt; and her power of inventing harrowing scenes is practically unlimited. So many writers are cold and unlifelike that Ouida's exaggeration seems to many a most pardonable fault, so far indeed as it seems to be a fault. Her perpetual references to the classics probably appear to the ignorant reader like the profoundest lore: her chatter about French literature, especially about books seldom discussed in mixed company, furthers this delusion. Indeed, it is pitiable to go through one of her novels and pick out the rubbish she collects and sets in order for the delight of an eager public. Here are some gems from In a Winter City. The present condition of Florence, disguised as Floralia, is thus compared with its past glories: "It is Belisarius turned croupier to a gaming-table; it is Cæsar selling cigars and newspapers; it is Apelles drawing for the Albums pour Rire; it is Pindar rhyming the couplets for Fleur de Thé; it is Praxiteles designing costumes for a calico ball; it is Phidias forming the poses of a ballet." That gem is on the first page of the book, which is more like a tenth-rate French novel than any English story that has appeared for some time.
Here are a few lines from Chandos, describing the revels of the aristocracy in a "summer villa at Richmond belonging to him [the hero, of course], where most of these Bohemian dinners and suppers à la Régence were given—a charming place, half covered in flowering trees and pyramids of May blossoms,... with the daintiest and cosiest banqueting-room in the world, hung with scarlet silk, drawn back here and there to show some beautiful picture by Titian, Greuze, Regnault or La Tour; large enough to hold twenty people, but small enough to fill à huis clos like a cabinet; with the air scented by dreamy incenses and dishes and wines under the mellowed light that would have entranced even Lucullus had he been throned there on his ivory chair....
"'The art of life is—to enjoy!' cried Chandos that night, lifting up to crown the sentiment a deep glass of glowing red Roussillon.
"'Toast worthy of Lucullus and Ovid! and you are a master of the science,' said John Trevenna, who was perhaps the only one who saw quite clearly through that intoxicating atmosphere of pastilles, and perfumes, and wines, and crushed flowers, and bruised fruits, and glancing tresses, and languid eyes, and lips fit for the hymns of a Catullus.
"'He is the darling of the gods!' cried Flora de l'Orme, that magnificent Arlésienne, with her melting, Greek-like glance, and her cheek like a peach in the sun, while she leaned over him and twisted, Catullus-like, in the bright masses of his long, golden hair a wreath of crimson roses washed in purple Burgundy."