Ouida

“ Many public men would breathe more freely were Venice but a memory of the past entombed in seaweed and in sand. For there is nothing so curiously malignant or so restlessly jealous as the enmity of a feeble Present of a great Past. It is such malignity, it is such jealousy, which, even more than greed of gain, and vitiated taste, caused, and causes, and will cause, the destruction of the great cities of Italy by Italian deputies, syndics, and municipalities, and by those foreign companies and alien speculations to which they unhappily open their gates. ”

“ It is through their imagination still more than by their vanity that Italians are led by unscrupulous political flattery and cajoled into disastrous political enterprises. They will believe anything if it be sufficiently captivating to their self-admiration and their fancy, and will dance blindfold on the brink of a bottomless pit. It is only an imaginative people who love so wildly, and kill themselves so madly for affection's sake, as the Italian people do. ”

“ Amongst even the most cultured classes few have really any sensibility to beauty. Not one in a thousand pauses in the hurried excitements of social life to note beauty in nature; to art there is accorded a passing attention because it is considered chic to do so; but all true sense of art must be lacking in a generation whose women wear the spoils of tropical birds, slain for them, on their heads and skirts, and whose men find their principal joy for nearly half the year in the slaughter of tame creatures, and bespatter with blood the white hellebore of their winter woods. ”

“ Go into an old street of any old city you will, and you will almost certainly find a delight for the eye in archway and ogive, in lintel and casement, in winding stair and leaning eave; in the wallflowers rooted in the steps, in the capsicum which has seeded itself between the stones, in the swallows' nests under the gargoyle, in the pots of basil and mignonette on the window-sills. But the modern street with its dreary monotony, its long and high blank spaces, its even surfaces where not a seed can cling or a bird can build, what will it say to your eyes or your heart? ”

“ The man of easy temper and pleasure-loving disposition consoles himself with amusement; the serious man seeks refuge in study or in science; one and all accept inaction as their lot. A political camorra guides the chariot of the State, and the people draw aside, and stand silent, only hoping to escape being crushed under its wheels. Professor Sergi must be well aware of this sad truth; then why speak to Italy as if she were a free country, why speak to her of expansion and vitality when he sees her without power to purge herself of the fiscal and constitutional disease which is in her blood? ”

“ The modern world is at this moment ruled by two enemies of all beauty: these are commerce and militarism. What the one does not destroy, the other tramples under foot. In earlier times war, terrible always, was beautiful, like its goddess Bellona, in its savage splendour. Its camps, its troops, its standards, its panoply, were all full of colour and of pomp. Even so late as the Napoleonic wars its awfulness was blended with beauty. ”

“ To wear out the temper and patience of the populace with harassing edicts; to drive to desperation those who are cheerful and contented in an honestly supported poverty; to starve them by artificially raised food-prices, and by gate-taxes, which ruin the small trader, the modest householder, and the rural vendor alike; to render it, by a monstrous taxation, impossible for small industries to exist; to levy income-tax (focatico) on the poorest labourer—this is the terrible error, the inexcusable cruelty, of which the actual, and every preceding, Italian Cabinet is, and has been, guilty. ”

“ Tragedy is not necessarily cruelty, nor accuracy necessarily brutality. Shakespeare makes us indignant for Lear and sharers in his sorrows; but D'Annunzio would concentrate our thoughts only on his ridiculous thin hair blown by the winter winds, the tremor of his toothless jaws, and palsy of his bent, unsteady limbs. [Pg 13] In the highest art there is always pity because there is always comprehension. D'Annunzio has as yet no more pity than the demonstrator in a physiological amphitheatre. But it is not impossible that such pity may come to him later on, for pity is rarely a passion of youth ”

“ What does it matter to them that, through their demands, the bird of paradise has become so rare that, unless stringent measures be taken at once, it will be soon totally extinct, and the golden glory of its plumes will gleam no more in tropical sunlight? What does it matter to them that the herons in all their various kinds, the osprey, the egret, the crane, the ibis, are scarcely seen now in the southern and middle States of America, and, when seen, are no longer together in confident colonies, as of yore, but nesting singly and in fear? ”

“ Without speaking of the torture of the spur, the stinging of the lash, the dreadful weight upon the spine from which the riding-horse suffers, and the dreadful strain upon the lungs and withers to which the draught and driving-horse is incessantly condemned, only realise the continued imprisonment and galling servitude in which the equine race are forced to dwell, and ask yourself if, in common pity or justice, that life should not be as much alleviated and lightened as it is possible to make it. ”

“ The French of Cherbuliez is the French of an elegant writer, of a man of the world, and is, beside that of 'les jeunes,' as a pure and limpid river beside a crooked and choked-up stream. Without their professorial jargon of psychology or their strained analysis, which so greatly fatigues the reader and resembles nothing so much as the efforts of a cyclist to run smoothly on a stony road, Le Secret du Précepteur is full of delicate and interesting studies of the human mind and character. ”

“ Who crowded into a few years of life such accomplishment, such eloquence such romance of existence? Who resembled Byron before Byron lived?
Poets who are not great, and do not aspire to be so, may touch the chords of memory, may unseal the fountains of tears, may make dead loves arise and smile, and the springs of dead years return, and do this with a line, a verse, a suggestion. This is what Owen Meredith did in his song; so does his friend and comrade in his. There is a strongly virile quality in his verse: it is not epicene, nor ever effeminate ”

“ The helot of Greece, the gladiator of Rome, the swash-buckler of Mediæval Europe, nay, the mere pimp and pander of Elizabethan England, of the France of the Valois, of the Spain of Velasquez, were dignity, purity, courage in person beside the Cad of this breaking dawn of the twentieth century; the Cad rushing on with his shrill scream of laughter as he knocks down the feeble woman or the yearling child, and making life and death and all eternity seem ridiculous by the mere existence of his own intolerable fatuity and bestiality. ”

“ Is not the most eloquent voice doomed to cry without echo in the wilderness? And what wilderness is there so barren as the desert of human indifference and of human egotism?
Pity is only awakened in those who are already pitiful. We cannot sow mustard seed on granite. The whole tendency of the age is towards cynicism, indifference, self-engrossment. The small children sneer much more often than they smile. ”

“ As 'the winds of March take the world with beauty,' every pasture and coppice is full of blossom, passed unnoticed by thousands in every daily country walk; so in the same manner do the multitudes trample down, and pass by, the ineffable charm and fragrance of disregarded affections, and unappreciated qualities, in the other races of earth.
Hang a poor woodland bird in a cage, if you can bear to look on such a captive, above a blossoming honeysuckle or hawthorn, and note his anguish of remembrance, his ecstasy of hope, his frantic effort to be free. ”

“ The Isle of St Elena at Venice is laid waste to serve as a railway factory. All the Ardennes are scorched and soiled, and sickened with stench of smoke and suffocating slag. The Peak Country and the Derwent vales are being scarred and charred for railway lines, mines, and factories. Amsterdam, so late the Venice of the North, is becoming an unmeaning mass of modern insignificance and ugliness; what has been done to the Venice of the South is such outrage that it might wake Tiziano from under his weight of marble in the Frari Church, and call the Veronese from his grave. ”

“ The rigid and indigestible character of modern education is not adapted, I repeat, to the Italian temperament, which is prime-sautier, subtle but inflammatory, impressionable but unresisting, and loses enormously when it is shut down in the hot stove of the so-called 'highest studies.' Even the national manners, naturally so graceful and charming in all ranks of Italian society, lose their suavity, their ease, their elegance, under the influence of the foreigner and the vulgarity of modern habits. ”

“ Good taste passes away with good manners; and pigeon-shooting, sleeping-cars, automobiles, bicycles and tramway crowds bring with them the breeding suitable to them; and the modern monuments, the modern squares, the modern houses, the whitewash daubed on old walls, the cast-iron bridges spanning classic waters, the straight, featureless, glaring, dusty streets, the electric trolleys cutting across ancient marbles, all conduce to make ignoble what was noble, and belittle all which was great. ”

“ Many of these little poems speak of the sea only; are full of that happy sense of return and recognition which so many amongst us feel when, after absence from the sea, we tread again its wet salt sands, and feel its white spray dance against our cheek. Swinburne is the great laureate of ocean, the chords of whose mighty lyre reverberate with the ocean storm and echo the thunder of breakers breaking upon iron shores, and of billows sweeping from pole to pole. The song of Auberon Herbert is the homing cry of the sea-swallows swaying on the crest of the waves. ”

“ What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What shall it profit the world to put a girdle about its loins in forty minutes when it shall have become a desert of stone, a wilderness of streets, a treeless waste, a songless city, where man shall have destroyed all life except his own, and can hear no echo of his heart's pulsation save in the throb of an iron piston. ”

“ The modern temper cannot respect, cannot appreciate, cannot love, but it can hate; and its hatred shows itself in damage and destruction everywhere, whether it set fire to the noble old house of the Hanseatic League at Antwerp, pull down the water towers of Dieppe, plant the jerry-builder before the Lateran, drag a railway train up to Murren, or trample down with ill-shod boy-soldiers the thyme and the bracken of the Conqueor's woods and the turf which the Druids trod. ”

“ Reflect but a moment upon all the divers and numerous qualities which are of necessity existent in the creator of a fine novel before it can be produced; not only imagination but wit, not only wit but scholarship, not only scholarship but fancy, not only fancy but discrimination, observation, knowledge of the passions, sympathy with the most opposite temperaments, the power to call up character from the void, as the sculptor creates figures from the clay, and, for amalgamating, condensing, and vivifying all these talents, the mastery of an exquisite subtlety, force, and eloquence in language. ”

“ What cows him is the apprehension of punishment, the fear of the men set above him. Fear is the keystone of the ark of the temple of Janus. The army is a laundry where they throw the consciences of men into a tub of soap-suds, and where the characters of men are wrung and twisted like wet linen, and are placed, shapeless, under the wooden beater of a brutalising discipline. It is only by means of fear that the military system has been able to establish itself. It is only by such fear that it maintains its position. ”

“ What to me is especially attractive in Mr Crawford's novels is the atmosphere of good breeding which one breathes in them. One feels in the company of a well-bred man. Their philosophy, their experiences, their views, are all those of a man of the world; and there is in them a tolerance and a total absence of prejudice (except in religious and political matters) which are refreshing, and which are a fair approach to, if not an actual attainment of, unbiassed liberality. There is in them no enthusiasm for anything, no altruism, no deep emotion. ”

“ It is exceedingly rare with him to give way to any sign of any emotion of pity. He sees human nature, in all its phases, with little compassion for it. He sees (and this is, too often, either through weakness or through policy, ignored by writers and thinkers) that the great majority of men are neither the martyrs nor the heroes, neither the victims nor the tyrants of their time, but a mass considerable alone by its numbers, inconsiderable by any mental or moral worth, and chiefly absorbed in different forms of selfishness and the desire of gain. ”

“ I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne away from them? ”

“ How weary are the days passed, with no other companions than the dying, whose characters are poisoned by suffering and whose cries of horror and anguish ring in one's ears! When, moved by the disgust and despair which comes over you in this fœtid hole filled with filth and misery, you drag yourself out on your trembling limbs into the sun, you feel so feeble, so exhausted, so helpless, you cannot walk a step. You sit down in the torrid heat; you are chilly, despite the high temperature; your teeth chatter, your body is drenched with sweat. ”

“ It may be easy to dismiss them with indifference, to underrate them with hypercritic sneer, and assuredly those who take pleasure in the strained archaic obscurities of much modern verse will find no more charm in them than the languid æsthete, musing over the pages of Verlaine and Mallarme, would find in a sea-wet breeze blowing across a hayfield at early morning. There is no studied mannerism, no sought-for darkness of expression, no exaggerated ecstasy or pessimism; there is such a natural feeling, of joy as of sorrow, as comes to the soul at once robust and sensitive ”

“ But even this supreme achievement of architects and engineers cannot lend to the cube, shared with a score of others, the charm, the idiosyncrasy, the meaning, the soul, which exhale from the smallest cottage where those who love dwell all alone, through whose lattices a candle shines as a star to the returning wanderer, and on whose lowly roof memory lies like a benediction.
According to the statistics of modern cities the mass of middle-class and labouring-class people change their lodgings or tenements every two or three years; three years is even an unusually long time of residence. ”

“ The people are beginning to awake and to resent the stupidity of those who, representing England in India, wantonly affront them, and unless the English public at home, with whom as yet the Indian races have no quarrel, becomes awake, too, to the danger of its own indifference, the irreparable result of a general race hatred will follow. Only it should be remembered that India is a vast continent peopled by races ten times more numerous than ourselves, and then the convulsion, when it comes, will be on a scale altogether out of proportion to our experience, and so the more alarming. ”

“ But here we merely meet again the hackneyed question whether the writer of talent is bound by patriotism or any other scruple to withhold truth, or whether he is not rather bound to disclose the truth as he believes it to be at all costs, whether to himself or to others. It is not necessary for me to say with which of these opinions I agree. The little which has been done towards any true progress of the human mind has been done by the expression of free thought, and by its fearless exposure of evils protected by the crystallisation of time, usage, and prejudice. ”

“ I believe that this monotony and lack of interest in the towns which they inhabit fatally affect the minds of those whose lot it is to go to and from the streets in continual toil, and produce in them fatigue, heaviness and gloom; what the scholar and the poet suffer from articulately and consciously, the people in general suffer from inarticulately and unconsciously. The gaiety of nations dies down as the beauty around them pales and passes. ”

“ If the fact did not face us at every step, it would seem incredible that, even in this age, such cities as Venice and Florence and Rome could have been sacrificed to the ignominious interests of wire-pullers. Each possessed, to protect it, unique beauty, splendour of association and tradition, an heroic past: and for each had the greatest of men laboured, in each had the charm of atmosphere and horizon lent a more than mortal loveliness to the architecture of man. ”