Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 58

The weird sisters were forms of awe and magnitude proportionate to the woes they dealt out, to the destiny they wove. But the very littleness of the daily chances that actually shape fate is, in its discordance and its mockery, more truly terrible and most hideously solemn--it is the little child's laugh at a frisking kitten which brings down the avalanche, and lays waste the mountain side, or it is the cackle of the startled geese that saves the Capitol.

To be the prey of Atropos was something at the least; and the grim _Deus vult perdere_, uttered in the delirium of pain, at the least made the maddened soul feel of some slender account in the sight of the G.o.ds and in the will of Heaven. But we, who are the children of mere accident and the sport of idlest opportunity, have no such consolation.

Of course they will stone you, as village b.u.mpkins run out and stone an odd stray bird that they have never seen before; and the more beautiful the plumage looks, the harder rain the stones. If the bird were a sparrow the b.u.mpkins would let it be.

Love that remembers aught save the one beloved may be affection, but it is not love.

Ariel could not combat a leopardess; Ithuriel's spear glances pointless from a rhinoceros' hide. To match what is low and beat it, you must stoop, and soil your hands to cut a cudgel rough and ready. She did not see this; and seeing it, would not have lowered herself to do it.

Which is the truth, which is the madness?--when the artist, in the sunlit ice of a cold dreamland, scorns love and adores but one art; or when the artist, amidst the bruised roses of a garden of pa.s.sion, finds all heaven in one human heart?

There is a story in an old poet's forgotten writings of a woman who was queen when the world was young, and reigned over many lands, and loved a captive, and set him free, and thinking to hurt him less by seeming lowly, came down from her throne and laid her sceptre in the dust, and pa.s.sed amongst the common maidens that drew water at the well, or begged at the city gate, and seemed as one of them, giving him all and keeping nought herself: "so will he love me more," she thought; but he, crowned king, thought only of the sceptre and the throne, and having those, looked not amongst the women at the gate, and knew her not, because what he had loved had been a queen. Thus she, self-discrowned, lost both her lover and her kingdom. A wise man amongst the throng said to her, "Nay, you should have kept aloof upon your golden seat and made him feel your power to deal life or death, and fretted him long, and long kept him in durance and in doubt, you, meanwhile, far above. For men are light creatures as the moths are."

They had lived in London and Paris all their lives, and had, before this, heard patriotism used as a reason for a variety of things, from a minister's keeping in office against the will of the country, to a newspaper's writing a country into bloodshed and bankruptcy; they were quite aware of the word's elasticity.

It was the true and perfect springtide of the year, when Love walks amongst the flowers, and comes a step nearer what it seeks with every dawn.

Without Love, spring is of all seasons cruel; more cruel than all frost and frown of winter.

In the early days of an illicit pa.s.sion concealment is charming; every secret stairway of intrigue has a sweet surprise at its close; to be in conspiracy with one alone against all the rest of humanity is the most seductive of seductions. Love lives best in this soft twilight, where it only hears its own heart and one other's beat in the solitude.

But when the reverse of the medal is turned; when every step on the stairs has been traversed and tired of, when, instead of the heart's beat, there is but an upbraiding voice, when it is no longer _with_ one but _from_ one that concealment is needed, then the illicit pa.s.sion is its own Nemesis, then nothing were ever drearier, wearier, more anxious, or more fatiguing than its devious paths become, and they seem to hold the sated wanderer in a labyrinth of which he knows, and knowing hates, every wind, and curve, and coil, yet out of which it seems to him he will never make his way back again into the light of wholesome day.

My dear, the days of Fontenoy are gone out; everybody nowadays only tries to get the first fire, by hook or by crook. Ours is an age of cowardice and cuira.s.sed cannon; chivalry is out of place in it.

With a woman, the vulgarity that lies in public adulation is apt to nauseate; at least if she be so little of a woman that she is not vain, and so much of one that she cares for privacy. For the fame of our age is not glory but notoriety; and notoriety is to a woman like the bull to Pasiphae--whilst it caresses it crushes.

Had she your talent the world would have heard of her. As it is, she only enjoys herself. Perhaps the better part. Fame is a cone of smoke.

Enjoyment is a loaf of sugar.

There is no such coward as the woman who toadies Society because she has outraged Society. The bully is never brave.

"Oignez vilain il vous poindra: poignez vilain il vous oindra," is as true of the braggart's soul still, as it used to be in the old days of Froissart, when the proverb was coined.

She was of opinion with Sganarelle, that "cinq ou six coups de baton entre gens qui s'aiment ne font que ragaillarder l'affection."

But, like Sganarelle also, she always premised that the right to give the blows should be hers.

She was only like any other well-dressed woman after all, and humanity considers that when genius comes forth in the flesh the touch of the coal from the altar should have left some visible stigmata on the lips it has burned, as, of course anybody knows, it invariably leaves some smirch upon the character.

Humanity feels that genius ought to wear a livery, as Jews and loose women wore yellow in the old golden days of distinction.

"They don't even paint!" said one lady, and felt herself aggrieved.

Calumny is the homage of our contemporaries, as some South Sea Islanders spit on those they honour.

Popularity has been defined as the privilege of being cheered by the kind of people you would never allow to bow to you.

Fame may be said to be the privilege of being slandered at once by the people who do bow to you, as well as by the people who do not.

n.o.body there knew at all. So everybody averred they knew for certain.

n.o.body's story agreed with anybody else's, but that did not matter at all. The world, like Joseph's father, gives the favourite coat of many colours which the brethren rend.

"Be honey, and the flies will eat you," says the old saw, but, like most other proverbs, it will not admit of universal application. There is a way of being honey that is thoroughly successful and extremely popular, and const.i.tutes a kind of armour that is bomb-proof.

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity.

She forgot that love likes to preserve its illusions, and that it will bear better all the sharpest deprivations in the world than it will the cruel tests of an unlovely and unveiled intercourse.