Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 57

A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than the woman who is fire to his ice. There is hope for him in the one, but only a dreary despair in the other. The ardours that intoxicate him in the first summer of his pa.s.sion serve but to dull and chill him in the later time.

A frog that dwelt in a ditch spat at a worm that bore a lamp.

"Why do you do that?" said the glow-worm.

"Why do you s.h.i.+ne?" said the frog.

When a name is in the public mouth the public nostril likes to smell a foulness in it. It likes to think that Byron committed incest; that Milton was a brute; that Raffaelle's vices killed him; that Pascal was mad; that Lamartine lived and died a pauper; that Scipio took the treasury moneys; that Thucydides and Phidias stole; that Heloise and Hypatia were but loose women after all--so the gamut runs over twice a thousand years; and Rousseau is at heart the favourite of the world because he was such a beast, with all his talent.

When the world is driven to tears and prayers by Schiller, it hugs itself to remember that he could not write a line without the smell of rotten apples near, and that when he died there was not enough money in his desk to pay his burial. They make him smaller, closer, less divine--the apples and the pauper's coffin.

"Get a great cook; give three big b.a.l.l.s a winter, and drive English horses; you need never consider Society then, it will never find fault with you, _ma tres-chere_."

She did not quite understand, but she obeyed; and Society never did.

Society says to the members of it as the Spanish monk to the tree that he pruned, and that cried out under his hook:

"It is not beauty that is wanted of you, nor shade, but olives."

Moral loveliness or mental depth, charm of feeling or n.o.bleness of instinct, beauty, or shade, it does not ask for, but it does ask for olives--olives that shall round off its dessert, and flavour its dishes, and tickle its sated palate; olives that it shall pick up without trouble, and never be asked to pay for; these are what it likes.

Now it is precisely in olives that the woman who has one foot in Society and one foot out of it will be profuse.

She must please, or perish.

She must content, or how will she be countenanced?

The very perilousness of her position renders her solicitous to attract and to appease.

Society follows a natural selfishness in its condonation of her; she is afraid of it, therefore she must bend all her efforts to be agreeable to it! it can reject her at any given moment, so that her court of it must be continual and expansive. No woman will take so much pains, give so much entertainment, be so willing to conciliate, be so lavish in hospitality, be so elastic in willingness, as the woman who adores Society, and knows that any black Sat.u.r.day it may turn her out with a bundle of rods, and a peremptory dismissal.

Between her and Society there is a tacit bond.

"Amuse me, and I will receive you."

"Receive me, and I will amuse you."

Of all lay figures there is none on earth so useful as a wooden husband.

You should get a wooden husband, my dear, if you want to be left in peace. It is like a comfortable slipper or your dressing-gown after a ball. It is like springs to your carriage. It is like a clever maid who never makes mistakes with your notes or comes without coughing discreetly through your dressing-room. It is like tea, cigarettes, postage-stamps, foot-warmers, eiderdown counterpanes--anything that smooths life, in fact. Young women do not think enough of this. An easy-going husband is the one indispensable comfort of life. He is like a set of sables to you. You may never want to put them on; still, if the north wind do blow--and one can never tell--how handy they are! You pop into them in a second, and no cold wind can find you out, my dear.

Couldn't find you out, if your s.h.i.+ft were in rags underneath! Without your husband's countenance, you have scenes. With scenes, you have scandal. With scandal, you come to a suit. With a suit, you most likely lose your settlements. And without your settlements, where are you in Society? With a husband you are safe. You need never think about him in any way. His mere existence suffices. He will always be at the bottom of your table, and the head of your visiting-cards. That is enough. He will represent Respectability for you, without your being at the trouble to represent Respectability for yourself. Respectability is a thing of which the shadow is more agreeable than the substance. Happily for us, Society only requires the shadow.

Very well; if you dislike dancing, don't dance; though if a woman don't, you know, they always think she has got a short leg, or a cork leg, or something or other that's dreadful. But why not show yourself at them?

At least show yourself. One goes to b.a.l.l.s as one goes to church. It's a social muster.

The art of pleasing is more based on the art of seeming pleased than people think of, and she disarmed the prejudices of her enemies by the unaffected delight she appeared to take in themselves. You may think very ill of a woman, but after all you cannot speak very ill of her if she has a.s.sured you a hundred times that you are amongst her dearest friends.

Society always had its fixed demands. It used to exact birth. It used to exact manners. In a remote and golden age there is a tradition that it was once contented with mind. Nowadays it exacts money, or rather amus.e.m.e.nt, because if you don't let other folks have the benefit of your money, Society will take no account of it. But have money and spend it well (that is, let Society live on it, gorge with it, walk ankle-deep in it), and you may be anything and do anything; you may have been an omnibus conductor in the Strand, and you may marry a duke's daughter; you may have been an oyster-girl in New York, and you may entertain royalties. It is impossible to exaggerate an age of anomaly and hyperbole. There never was an age when people were so voracious of amus.e.m.e.nt, and so tired of it, both in one. It is a perpetual carnival and a permanent yawn. If you can do anything to amuse us you are safe--till we get used to you--and then you amuse no longer, and must go to the wall. Every age has its price: what Walpole said of men must be true of mankind. Anybody can buy the present age that will bid very high and pay with tact as well as bullion. There is nothing it will not pardon if it see its way to getting a new sensation out of its leniency.

Perhaps no one ought to complain. A Society with an india-rubber conscience, no memory, and an absolute indifference to eating its own words and making itself ridiculous, is, after all, a convenient one to live in--if you can pay for its suffrages.

If you are only well beforehand with your falsehood all will go upon velvet; n.o.body ever listens to a rectification. "Is it possible?"

everybody cries with eager zest; but when they have only to say "Oh, wasn't it so?" n.o.body feels any particular interest. It is the first statement that has the swing and the success; as for explanation or retractation--pooh! who cares to be bored?

Those people with fine brains and with generous souls will never learn that life is after all only a game--a game which will go to the shrewdest player and the coolest. They never see this; not they; they are caught on the edge of great pa.s.sions, and swept away by them. They cling to their affections like commanders to sinking s.h.i.+ps, and go down with them. They put their whole heart into the hands of others, who only laugh and wring out their lifeblood. They take all things too vitally in earnest. Life is to them a wonderful, pa.s.sionate, pathetic, terrible thing that the G.o.ds of love and of death shape for them. They do not see that coolness and craft, and the tact to seize accident, and the wariness to obtain advantage, do in reality far more in hewing out a successful future than all the G.o.ds of Greek or Gentile. They are very unwise. It is of no use to break their hearts for the world; they will not change it. _La culte de l'humanite_ is the one of all others which will leave despair as its harvest. Laugh like Rabelais, smile like Montaigne; that is the way to take the world. It only puts to death its Sebastians, and makes its Sh.e.l.leys not sorrowful to see the boat is filling.

Society always adheres to its principles; just as a Moslem subscribes none the less to the Koran because he may just have been blowing the froth off his b.u.mper of Mumm's before he goes to his mosque.

Pleasantness is the soft note of this generation, just as scientific a.s.sa.s.sination is the harsh note of it. The age is compounded of the two.

Half of it is chloroform; the other half is dynamite.

You make us think, and Society dislikes thinking. You call things by their right names, and Society hates that, though Queen Bess didn't mind it. You trumpet our own littleness in our ear, and we know it so well that we do not care to hear much about it. You shudder at sin, and we have all agreed that there is no such thing as sin, only mere differences of opinion, which, provided they don't offend us, we have no business with: adultery is a _liaison_, lying is gossip, debt is a momentary embarra.s.sment, immorality is a little slip, and so forth: and when we have arranged this pretty little dictionary of convenient pseudonyms, it is not agreeable to have it sent flying by fierce, dreadful, old words, that are only fit for some book that n.o.body ever reads, like Milton or the Family Bible. We do not want to think. We do not want to hear. We do not care about anything. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money, and let us outs.h.i.+ne our neighbours. There is the Nineteenth Century Gospel. My dear, if Ecclesiasticus himself came he would preach in vain. You cannot convince people that don't want to be convinced. We call ourselves Christians--Heaven save the mark!--but we are only the very lowest kind of pagans. We do not believe in anything--except that nothing matters. Well, perhaps nothing does matter. Only one wonders why ever so many of us were all created, only just to find _that_ out.

Love to the looker-on may be blind, unwise, unworthily bestowed, a waste, a sacrifice, a crime; yet none the less is love, alone, the one thing that, come weal or woe, is worth the loss of every other thing; the one supreme and perfect gift of earth, in which all common things of daily life become transfigured and divine. And perhaps of all the many woes that priesthoods have wrought upon humanity, none have been greater than this false teaching, that love can ever be a sin. To the sorrow and the harm of the world, the world's religions have all striven to make men and women shun and deny their one angel as a peril or a shame; but religions cannot strive against nature, and when the lovers see each other's heaven in each other's eyes, they know the supreme truth that one short day together is worth a lifetime's glory.

Genius is like the nautilus, all sufficient for itself in its pretty sh.e.l.l, quite at home in the big ocean, with no fear from any storm. But if a wanton stone from a boat pa.s.sing by break the sh.e.l.l, where is the nautilus then? Drowned; just like any common creature!

There are times when, even on the bravest temper, the ironical mockery, the cruel despotism of trifling circ.u.mstances, that have made themselves the masters of our lives, the hewers of our fate, must weigh with a sense of involuntary bondage, against which to strive is useless.