It is an epoch of closed pores, of constriction. The novel
has changed. Pick up the average one and ask yourself whether this
crafty and malodorous sex-problem be not a deliberately commercial
speculation--a frenzied attempt to "sell" by scandalizing our
unscandalizable, because hermaphroditic, middle classes? Ouida was not
one of these professional hacks, but a personality of refined instincts
who wrote, when she cared to write at all, to please her equals; a
rationalistic anti-vulgarian; a woman of wide horizons who fought for
generous issues and despised all shams; the last, almost the last, of
lady-authors. What has such a genial creature in common with our anaemic
and woolly generation? "The Massarenes" may have faults, but how many of
our actual woman-scribes, for all their monkey-tricks of cleverness,
could have written it? The haunting charm of "In Maremma": why ask our
public to taste such stuff? You might as well invite a bilious
nut-fooder to a Lord Mayor's banquet.
The mention of banquets reminds me that she was blamed for preferring
the society of duchesses and diplomats to that of the Florentine
literati, as if there were something reprehensible in Ouida's fondness
for decent food and amusing talk when she could have revelled in Ceylon
tea and dough-nuts and listened to babble concerning Quattro-Cento
glazes in any of the fifty squabbling art-coteries of that City of
Misunderstandings. It was one of her several failings, chiefest among
them being this: that she had no reverence for money.
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