Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 19

There was once a dog, my dear, that was. .h.i.t by three men, one after another, as they went by him where he lay in the sun; and in return he bit them--deep--and they let him alone then, and ever after sought to propitiate him. Well, the first he bit in the arm, where there was a brand for deserting; and the second he bit in the throat, where there was a hideous mole; and the third he bit in the shoulder, where there was the mark of a secret camorra. Now, not one of these three durst speak of the wounds in places they all wished to hide; and whenever afterwards they pa.s.sed the dog, they gave him fair words, and sweet bones, and a wide berth. It is the dogs, and the satirists, and the libellers, and the statesmen who know how to bite like that--in the weak part--that get let alone, and respected, and fed on the fat of the land.

For him by whom a thirsty ear is lent to the world's homage, the tocsin of feebleness, if not of failure, has already sounded.

The gladness of the man is come when the crowds lisp his name, and the gold fills his hand, and the women's honeyed adulations buzz like golden bees about his path; but how often is the greatness of the artist gone, and gone for ever!

Because when the world denies you it is easy to deny the world; because when the bread is bitter it is easy not to linger at the meal; because when the oil is low it is easy to rise with dawn; because when the body is without surfeit or temptation it is easy to rise above earth on the wings of the spirit. Poverty is very terrible to you, and kills your soul in you sometimes; but it is like the northern blast that lashes men into Vikings; it is not the soft, luscious south wind that lulls them into lotos-eaters.

I have grave doubts of Mrs. Siddons. She was a G.o.ddess of the age of fret and fume, of stalk and strut, of trilled R's and of nodding plumes.

If we had Siddons now I fear we should hiss; I am quite sure we should yawn. She must have been Melpomene always; Nature never.

Oh, how wise you are and how just!--if there be a spectacle on earth to rejoice the angels, it is your treatment of the animals that you say G.o.d has given unto you!

It is not for me, a little dog, to touch on such awful mysteries; but--sometimes--I wonder, if ever He ask you how you have dealt with His gift, what will you answer then?

If all your slaughtered millions should instead answer for you--if all the countless and unpitied dead, all the goaded, maddened beasts from forest and desert who were torn asunder in the holidays of Rome; and all the innocent, playful, gentle lives of little home-bred creatures that have been racked by the knives, and torn by the poisons, and convulsed by the torments, of your modern Science, should, instead, answer, with one mighty voice, of a woe no longer inarticulate, of an accusation no more disregarded, what then? Well! Then, if it be done unto you as you have done, you will seek for mercy and find none in all the width of the universe; you will writhe, and none shall release you; you will pray, and none shall hear.

"These fine things don't make one's happiness," I murmured pensively to Fanfreluche.

"No, my dear, they don't," the little worldling admitted. "They do to women; they're so material, you see. They are angels--O yes, of course!--but they're uncommonly sharp angels where money and good living are concerned. Just watch them--watch the tail of their eye--when a cheque is being written or an _eprouvette_ being brought to table. And after all, you know, minced chicken is a good deal nicer than dry bread.

Of course we can easily be sentimental and above this sort of thing, when the chicken _is_ in our mouths where we sit by the fire; but if we were gnawing wretched bones, out in the cold of the streets, I doubt if we should feel in such a sublime mood. All the praises of poverty are sung by the minstrel who has got a golden harp to chant them on; and all the encomiums on renunciation come from your _bon viveur_ who never denied himself aught in his life!"

Emotions are quite as detrimental to a dog's tail as they are to a lady's complexion. Joseph Buonaparte's American wife said to an American gentleman, whom I heard quote her words, that she "never laughed because it made wrinkles:" there is a good deal of wisdom in that cachinatory abstinence. There is nothing in the world that wears people (or dogs) so much as feeling of any kind, tender, bitter, humoristic, or emotional.

How often you commend a fresh-coloured matron with her daughters, and a rosy-cheeked hunting squire in his saddle, who, with their half-century of years, yet look so comely, so blooming, so clear-browed, and so smooth-skinned. How often you distrust the weary delicate creature, with the hectic flush of her rouge, in society; and the worn, tired, colourless face of the man of the world who takes her down to dinner.

Well, to my fancy, you may be utterly wrong. An easy egotism, a contented sensualism, may have carried the first comfortably and serenely through their bank-note-lined paradise of commonplace existence. How shall you know what heart-sickness in their youth, what aching desires for joys never found, what sorrowful power of sympathy, what fatal keenness of vision, have blanched the faded cheek, and lined the weary mouth, of the other twain?

"Sheep and men are very much alike," said Trust, who thought both very poor creatures. "Very much alike indeed. They go in flocks, and can't give a reason why. They leave their fleece on any bramble that is strong enough to insist on fleecing them. They bleat loud at imagined evils, while they tumble straight into real dangers. And for going off the line, there's nothing like them. There may be pits, thorns, quagmires, spring-guns, what not, the other side of the hedge, but go off the straight track they will--and no dog can stop them. It's just the sheer love of straying. You may bark at them right and left; go they will, though they break their legs down a limekiln. Oh, men and sheep are wonderfully similar; take them all in all."

Ah! you people never guess the infinite woe we dogs suffer in new homes, under strange tyrannies; you never heed how we shrink from unfamiliar hands, and shudder at unfamiliar voices, how lonely we feel in unknown places, how acutely we dread harshness, novelty, and scornful treatment.

Dogs die oftentimes of severance from their masters; there is Greyfriars' Bobby now in Edinboro' town who never has been persuaded to leave his dead owner's grave all these many years through. You see such things, but you are indifferent to them. "It is only a dog," you say; "what matter if the brute fret to death?"

You don't understand it of course; you who so soon forget all your own dead--the mother that bore you, the mistress that loved you, the friend that fought with you shoulder to shoulder; and of course, also, you care nothing for the measureless blind pains, the mute helpless sorrows, the vague lonely terrors, that ache in our little dumb hearts.

Lucretius has said how charming it is to stand under a shelter in a storm, and see another hurrying through its rain and wind; but a woman would refine that sort of cruelty, and would not be quite content unless she had an umbrella beside her that she refused to lend.

"Oh, pooh, my dear!" cried Fanfreluche. "He has robbed his host at cards, and abused his host behind his back; to fulfil the whole duty of a nineteenth century guest it only remains for him to betray his host in love!"

"You think very ill of men?" I muttered; I was, indeed, slightly weary of her sceptical supercilious treatment of all things; your pseudo-philosopher, who will always think he has plumbed the ocean with his silver-topped cane, is a great bore sometimes.

"I think very well of men," returned Fanfreluche. "You are mistaken, my dear. There are only two things that they never are honest about--and that is their sport and their women. When they get talking of their rocketers, or their runs, their pigeon-score, or their _bonnes fortunes_, they always lie--quite unconsciously. And if they miss their bird or their woman, isn't it always because the sun was in their eyes as they fired, or because she wasn't half good-looking enough to try after?--bless your heart, I know them!"

"If you do, you are not complimentary to them," I grumbled.

"Can't help that, my dear," returned Fanfreluche. "Gracious! whatever is there that stands the test of knowing it well? I have heard Beltran say, that you find out what an awful humbug the Staubbach is when you go up to the top and see you can straddle across it. Well, the Staubbach is just like everything in this life. Keep your distance, and how well the creature looks!--all veiled in its spray, and all bright with its prismatic colours, so deep, and so vast, and so very impressive. But just go up to the top, scale the crags of its character, and measure the height of its aspirations, and fathom the torrent of its pa.s.sions, and sift how much is the foam of speech, and how little is the well-spring of thought. Well, my dear, it is a very uncommon creature if it don't turn out just like the Staubbach."

I think if you knew what you did, even the most thoughtless amongst you would not sanction with your praise, and encourage with your coin, the brutality that trains dancing-dogs.

Have human mimes if you will; it is natural to humanity to caper and grimace and act a part: but for pity's sake do not countenance the torture with which Avarice mercilessly trains us "dumb beasts" for the trade of tricks.

"The Clown-dog draws throngs to laugh and applaud," says some advertis.e.m.e.nt: yes, and I knew a very clever clown-dog once. His feet were blistered with the hot irons on which he had been taught to dance; his teeth had been drawn lest he should use his natural weapons against his cowardly tyrants; his skin beneath his short white hair was black with bruises; though originally of magnificent courage, his spirit had been so broken by torture that he trembled if a leaf blew against him; and his eyes--well, if the crowds that applauded him had once looked at those patient, wistful, quiet eyes, with their unutterable despair, those crowds would have laughed no more, unless they had indeed been devils.

Who has delivered us unto you to be thus tortured, and martyred?

Who?--Oh, that awful eternal mystery that ye yourselves cannot explain!

Believe me, it is the light or the darkness of our own fate that either gives "greenness to the gra.s.s and glory to the flower," or leaves both sickly, wan, and colourless. A little breadth of sunny lawn, the spreading shadow of a single beech, the gentle click of a little garden-gate, the scent of some simple summer roses--how fair these are in your memory because of a voice which then was on your ear, because of eyes that then gazed in your own. And the grandeur of Nile, and the l.u.s.tre of the after-glow, and the solemn desolation of Carnac, and the wondrous beauty of the flushed sea of tossing reeds, are all cold, and dead, and valueless, because in those eyes no love now lies for you; because that voice, for you, is now for ever silent.

For, write as you will of the glory of poverty, and of the ennui of pleasure, there is no life like this life, wherein to the sight and the sense all things minister; wherefrom harsh discord and all unloveliness are banished: where the rare beauty of high-born women is common; where the pa.s.sions at their wildest still sheathe themselves in courtesy's silver scabbard; where the daily habits of existence are made graceful and artistic; where grief, and woe, and feud, and futile longing for lost loves, can easiest be forgot in delicate laughter and in endless change. Artificial? Ah, well, it may be so! But since nevermore will you return to the life of the savage, to the wigwam of the squaw, it is best, methinks, that the Art of Living--the great _Savoir Vivre_--should be brought, as you seek to bring all other arts, up to uttermost perfection.

Men are very much in society as women will them to be. Let a woman's society be composed of men gently born and bred, and if she find them either coa.r.s.e or stupid, make answer to her--"You must have been coa.r.s.e or stupid yourself."

And if she demur to the _tu quoque_ as to a base and illogical form of argument, which we will grant that it usually is, remind her that the cream of a pasturage may be pure and rich, but if it pa.s.s into the hands of a clumsy farm serving-maid, then shall the cheese made thereof be neither Roquefort nor Stilton, but rough and flavourless and uneatable, "like a Banbury cheese, nothing but paring." Now, the influence of a woman's intelligence on the male intellects about her is as the churn to the cream: it can either enrich and utilise it, or impoverish and waste it. It is not too much to say that it almost invariably, in the present decadence of the salon and parrot-jabbering of the suffrage, has the latter effect alone.

Humiliation is a guest that only comes to those who have made ready his resting-place, and will give him a fair welcome. My father used to say to me, "Child, when you grow to womanhood, whether you be rich or poor, gentle or simple, as the balance of your life may turn for or against you, remember always this one thing--that no one can disgrace you save yourself. Dishonour is like the Aaron's Beard in the hedgerows, it can only poison if it be plucked." They call the belladonna Aaron's Beard in the country, you know; and it is true that the cattle, simple as they are, are never harmed by it; just because, though it is always in their path, they never stop and taste it. I think it may just be so with us; with any sort of evil.

"Every pleasure has its penalty. If a woman be celebrated, the world always thinks she must be wicked. If she's wise, she laughs. It is the bitter that you must take with the sweet, as you get the sorrel flavour with the softness of the cream, in your soup a la Bonne Femme. But the cream would clog without it, and the combination is piquant."

"Only to jaded palates," I retorted; for I have often tasted the Bonne Femme, and detest it.