Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 26

"In love!" she echoed, with less languor and more of impetuosity than she had ever displayed, "are you ever in love, any of you, ever? You have senses and vanity and an inordinate fear of not being in the fas.h.i.+on--and so you take your lovers as you drink your stimulants and wear your wigs and tie your skirts back--because everybody else does it, and not to do it is to be odd, or prudish, or something you would hate to be called. Love! it is an unknown thing to you all. You have a sort of miserable hectic pa.s.sion, perhaps, that is a drug you take as you take chlorodyne--just to excite you and make your jaded nerves a little alive again, and yet you are such cowards that you have not even the courage of pa.s.sion, but label your drug Friends.h.i.+p, and beg Society to observe that you only keep it for family uses like arnica or like glycerine. You want notoriety; you want to indulge your fancies, and yet keep your place in the world. You like to drag a young man about by a chain, as if he were the dancing monkey that you depended upon for subsistence. You like other women to see that you are not too _pa.s.see_ to be every whit as improper as if you were twenty. You like to advertise your successes as it were with drum and trumpet, because if you did not, people might begin to doubt that you had any. You like all that, and you like to feel there is nothing you do not know and no length you have not gone, and so you ring all the changes on all the varieties of intrigue and sensuality, and go over the gamut of sickly sentiment and nauseous license as an orchestra tunes its strings up every night! That is what all you people call love; I am content enough to have no knowledge of it."

"I would rather have the crudest original thing than the mere galvanism of the corpse of a dead genius. I would give a thousand paintings by Froment, Damousse, or any of the finest living artists of Sevres, for one piece by old Van der Meer of Delft; but I would prefer a painting on Sevres done yesterday by Froment or Damousse, or even any much less famous worker, provided only it had originality in it, to the best reproduction of a Van der Meer that modern manufacturers could produce."

"I think you are right; but I fear our old pottery-painters were not very original. They copied from the pictures and engravings of Mantegna, Raffaelle, Marcantonio, Marco di Ravenna, Beatricius, and a score of others."

"The application was original, and the sentiment they brought to it.

Those old artists put so much heart into their work."

"Because when they painted a _stemma_ on the glaze they had still feudal faith in n.o.bility, and when they painted a Madonna or Ecce h.o.m.o they had still childlike belief in divinity. What does the pottery-painter of to-day care for the coat of arms or the religious subject he may be commissioned to execute for a dinner service or a chapel? It may be admirable painting--if you give a very high price--but it will still be only manufacture."

"Then what pleasant lives those pottery painters of the early days must have led! They were never long stationary. They wandered about decorating at their fancy, now here and now there; now a vase for a pharmacy, and now a stove for a king. You find German names on Italian ware, and Italian names on Flemish gres; the Nuremberger would work in Venice, the Dutchman would work in Rouen. Sometimes, however, they were accused of sorcery; the great potter, Hans Kraut, you remember, was feared by his townsmen as possessed by the devil, and was buried ignominiously outside the gates, in his nook of the Black Forest. But on the whole they were happy, no doubt; men of simple habits and of worthy lives."

"You care for art yourself, M. Della Rocca?"

There came a gleam of interest in her handsome, languid, hazel eyes, as she turned them upon him.

"Every Italian does," he answered her. "I do not think we are ever, or I think, if ever, very seldom connoisseurs in the way that your Englishman or Frenchman is so. We are never very learned as to styles and dates; we cannot boast the huckster's eye of the northern bric-a-brac hunter; it is quite another thing with us; we love art as children their nurses'

tales and cradle-songs. It is a familiar affection with us, and affection is never very a.n.a.lytical. The Robbia over the chapel-door, the apostle-pot that the men in the stables drink out of; the Sodoma or the Beato Angelico that hangs before our eyes daily as we dine; the old bronze _secchia_ that we wash our hands in as boys in the Loggia--these are all so homely and dear to us that we grow up with a love for them all as natural as our love for our mothers. You will say the children of all rich people see beautiful and ancient things from their birth: so they do, but not _as_ we see them. Here they are too often degraded to the basest household uses, and made no more account of than the dust which gathers on them; but that very neglect of them makes them the more kindred to us. Art elsewhere is the guest of the salon--with us she is the playmate of the infant and the serving-maid of the peasant: the mules may drink from an Etruscan sarcophagus, and the pigeons be fed from a _patina_ of the twelfth century."

Taste, mon cher Della Rocca, is the only sure guarantee in these matters. Women, believe me, never have any principle. Principle is a backbone, and no woman--except bodily--ever possesses any backbone.

Their priests and their teachers and their mothers fill them with doctrines and conventionalities--all things of mere word and wind. No woman has any settled principles; if she have any vague ones, it is the uttermost she ever reaches, and those can always be overturned by any man who has any influence over her. But Taste is another matter altogether. A woman whose taste is excellent is preserved from all eccentricities and most follies. You never see a woman of good sense _afficher_ her improprieties or advertise her liaisons as women of vulgarity do. Nay, if her taste be perfect, though she have weaknesses, I doubt if she will ever have vices. Vice will seem to her like a gaudy colour, or too much gold braid, or very large plaits, or b.u.t.tons as big as saucers, or anything else such as vulgar women like. Fastidiousness, at any rate, is very good _postiche_ for modesty: it is always decent, it can never be coa.r.s.e. Good taste, inherent and ingrained, natural and cultivated, cannot alter. Principles--ouf!--they go on and off like a slipper; but good taste is indestructible; it is a compa.s.s that never errs. If your wife have it--well, it is possible she may be false to you; she is human, she is feminine; but she will never make you ridiculous, she will never compromise you, and she will not romp in a cotillon till the morning sun shows the paint on her face washed away in the rain of her perspiration. Virtue is, after all, as Mme. de Montespan said, "une chose tout purement geographique." It varies with the hemisphere like the human skin and the human hair; what is vile in one lat.i.tude is harmless in another. No philosophic person can put any trust in a thing which merely depends upon climate; but, Good Taste----

Gossip is like the poor devil in the legend of Fugger's Teufelspalast at Trent; it toils till c.o.c.k-crow picking up the widely-scattered grains of corn by millions till the bushel measure is piled high; and lo!--the five grains that are _the_ grains always escape its sight and roll away and hide themselves. The poor devil, being a primitive creature, shrieked and flew away in despair at his failure. Gossip hugs its false measure and says loftily that the five real grains are of no consequence whatever.

The Lady Hilda sighed. This dreadful age, which has produced communists, petroleuses, and liberal thinkers, had communicated its vague restlessness even to her; although she belonged to that higher region where n.o.body ever thinks at all, and everybody is more or less devout in seeming at any rate, because disbelief is vulgar, and religion is an "affaire des moeurs," like decency, still the subtle philosophies and sad negations which have always been afloat in the air since Voltaire set them flying, had affected her slightly.

She was a true believer, just as she was a well-dressed woman, and had her creeds just as she had her bath in the morning, as a matter of course.

Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There was another world, and saints and angels and eternity; yes, of course--but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into it? Who could, by any stretch of imagination, conceive Madame Mila and Maurice des Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity?

And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of pa.s.sion and crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue?

There might be paradise for virtue and h.e.l.l for crime, but what in the name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all Folly? Perhaps they would be always flying about like the souls Virgil speaks of, "suspensae ad ventos," to purify themselves; as the sails of a s.h.i.+p spread out to dry. The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish they catch; well, why should they not? a fish has a soul if Modern Society has one; one could conceive a fish going softly through s.h.i.+ning waters for ever and for ever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could conceive Modern Society in the spheres?

"One grows tired of everything," she answered with a little sigh.

"Everything that is artificial, you mean. People think Horace's love of the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After the strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan court, the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to him. I know it is the fas.h.i.+on to say that a love of Nature belongs only to the Moderns, but I do not think so. Into Pindar, Theocritus, Meleager, the pa.s.sion for Nature must have entered very strongly; what _is_ modern is the more subjective, the more fanciful feeling which makes Nature a sounding-board to echo all the cries of man."

"But that is always a northern feeling?"

"Inevitably. With us Nature is too _riante_ for us to grow morbid about it. The suns.h.i.+ne that laughs around us nine months of every year, the fruits that grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw to the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very sea sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow up amongst from infancy, makes our love of Nature only a kind of unconscious joy in it; but here even the peasant has that, and the songs of the men that cannot read or write are full of it. If a field labourer sing to his love he will sing of the narcissus and the crocus, as Meleager sang to Heliodora twenty centuries ago."

That is an Italian amorous fancy. Romeo and Oth.e.l.lo are the typical Italian lovers. I never can tell how a northerner like Shakespeare could draw either. You are often very unfaithful; but _while_ you are faithful you are ardent, and you are absorbed in the woman. That is one of the reasons why an Italian succeeds in love as no other man does. "L'art de bruler silencieus.e.m.e.nt ment le coeur d'un femme" is a supreme art with you. Compared with you, all other men are children. You have been the supreme masters of the great pa.s.sion since the days of Ovid.

Boredom is the ill-natured pebble that always _will_ get in the golden slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure.

"They say," the great a.s.sa.s.sin who slays as many thousands as ever did plague or cholera, drink or warfare; "they say," the thief of reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; "they say," a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous will-o'-the-wisp, when you would seize and choke it; "they say," mighty Thug though it be which strangles from behind the purest victim, had not been ever known to touch the Lady Hilda.

All her old philosophies seemed falling about her like shed leaves, and her old self seemed to her but a purposeless frivolous chilly creature.

The real reason she would not face, and indeed as yet was not conscious of; the reason that love had entered into her, and that love, if it be worth the name, has always two handmaidens: swift sympathy, and sad humility, keeping step together.

The Femme Galante has pa.s.sed through many various changes, in many countries. The dames of the Decamerone were unlike the fair athlete-seekers of the days of Horace; and the powdered coquettes of the years of Moliere, were sisters only by the kins.h.i.+p of a common vice to the frivolous and fragile f.a.ggot of impulses, that is called Frou-frou.

The Femme Galante has always been a feature in every age; poets, from Juvenal to Musset, have railed at her; artists, from t.i.tian to Winterhalter, have painted her; dramatists, from Aristophanes to Congreve and Dumas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her; satirists, from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavarni, have poured out their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of to-day has been missed hitherto.

Frou-frou, who stands for her, is not in the least the true type.

Frou-frou is a creature that can love, can suffer, can repent, can die.

She is false in sentiment and in art, but she is tender after all; poor, feverish, wistful, changeful morsel of humanity. A slender, helpless, breathless, and frail thing who, under one sad, short sin, sinks down to death.

But Frou-frou is in no sense the true Femme Galante of her day.

Frou-frou is much more a fancy than a fact. It is not Frou-frou that Moliere would have handed down to other generations in enduring ridicule, had he been living now. To her he would have doffed his hat with dim eyes; what he would have fastened for all time in his pillory would have been a very different, and far more conspicuous offender.

The Femme Galante, who has neither the scruples nor the follies of poor Frou-frou, who neither forfeits her place nor leaves her lord; who has studied adultery as one of the fine arts and made it one of the domestic virtues; who takes her wearied lover to her friends' houses as she takes her m.u.f.f or her dog, and teaches her sons and daughters to call him by familiar names; who writes to the victim of her pa.s.sions with the same pen that calls her boy home from school; and who smooths her child's curls with the same fingers that stray over her lover's lips; who challenges the world to find a flaw in her, and who smiles serene at her husband's table on a society she is careful to conciliate; who has woven the most sacred ties and most unholy pleasures into so deft a braid, that none can say where one commences or the other ends; who uses the sanct.i.ty of her maternity to cover the lawlessness of her license; and who, incapable alike of the self-abandonment of love or of the self-sacrifice of duty, has not even such poor, cheap honour as, in the creatures of the streets, may make guilt loyal to its dupe and partner.

This is the Femme Galante of the pa.s.sing century, who, with her hand on her husband's arm, babbles of her virtue in complacent boast; and ignoring such a vulgar word as Sin, talks with a smile of Friends.h.i.+p.

Beside her Frou-frou were innocence itself, Marion de l'Orme were honesty, Manon Lescaut were purity, Cleopatra were chaste, and Faustine were faithful.

She is the female Tartuffe of seduction, the Precieuse Ridicule of pa.s.sion, the parody of Love, the standing gibe of Womanhood.

She was always in debt, though she admitted that her husband allowed her liberally. She had eighty thousand francs a year by her settlements to spend on herself, and he gave her another fifty thousand to do as she pleased with: on the whole about one half what he allowed to Blanche Souris, of the Chateau Gaillard theatre.

She had had six children, three were living and three were dead; she thought herself a good mother, because she gave her wet-nurses ever so many silk gowns, and when she wanted the children for a fancy ball or a drive, always saw that they were faultlessly dressed, and besides she always took them to Trouville.

She had never had any grief in her life, except the loss of the Second Empire, and even that she got over when she found that flying the Red Cross flag had saved her hotel, without so much as a teacup being broken in it, that MM. Worth and Offenbach were safe from all bullets, and that society, under the Septennate, promised to be every bit as _leste_ as under the Empire.