She was unable to
hoard--an unpardonable sin. Envied in prosperity, she was smugly pitied
in her distress. Such is the fate of those who stand apart from the
crowd, among a nation of canting shopkeepers. To die penniless, after
being the friend of duchesses, is distinctly bad form--a slur on
society. True, she might have bettered her state by accepting a
lucrative proposal to write her autobiography, but she considered such
literature a "degrading form of vanity" and refused the offer. She
preferred to remain ladylike to the last, in this and other little
trifles--in her lack of humour, her redundancies, her love of expensive
clothes and genuinely humble people, of hot baths and latinisms and
flowers and pet dogs and sealing-wax. All through life she made no
attempt to hide her woman's nature, her preference for male over female
company; she was even guilty of saying that disease serves the world
better than war, because it kills more women than men. Out of date, with
a vengeance!
There recurs to me a sentence in a printed letter written by a
celebrated novelist of the artificial school, a sentence I wish I could
forget, describing Ouida as "a little terrible and finally pathetic
grotesque." Does not a phrase like this reveal, even better than his own
romances, the essentially non-human fibre of the writer's mind? Whether
this derivative intellectualist spiderishly spinning his own plots and
phrases and calling Ouida a "grotesque"--whether this echo ever tried to
grasp the bearing of her essays on Shelley or Blind Guides or Alma
Veniesia or The Quality of Mercy--tried to sense her burning words of
pity for those that suffer, her hatred of hypocrisy and oppression and
betrayal of friendship, her so righteous pleadings, coined out of the
heart's red blood, for all that makes life worthy to be lived? He may
have tried.
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