Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida | Page 5

we live; because grief
does not always kill, and often does not speak.
* * *
I crept through the myrtles downward, away from the house where the
statue lay shattered. The earliest of the nightingales of the year was
beginning her lay in some leafy covert hard by, but never would he
hear music in their piping again; never, never: any more than I should
hear the song of the Faun in the fountain.
For the song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in
our hearts.
And his heart, I knew, would be for ever empty and silent, like a temple
that has been burned with fire, and left standing, pitiful and terrible, in

mockery of a lost religion, and of a forsaken god.
* * *
Men and women, losing the thing they love, lose much, but the artist
loses far more; for him are slaughtered all the children of his dreams,
and from him are driven all the fair companions of his solitude.
* * *
Love art alone, forsaking all other loves, and she will make you happy,
with a happiness that shall defy the seasons and the sorrows of time, the
pains of the vulgar and the changes of fortune, and be with you day and
night, a light that is never dim. But mingle with it any human love--and
art will look for ever at you with the eyes of Christ when he looked at
the faithless follower as the cock crew.
* * *
And, indeed, there are always the poor: the vast throngs born century
after century, only to know the pangs of life and of death, and nothing
more. Methinks that human life is, after all, but like a human body,
with a fair and smiling face, but all the limbs ulcered and cramped and
racked with pain. No surgery of statecraft has ever known how to keep
the fair head erect, yet give the trunk and the limbs health.
* * *
For in a great love there is a self-sustaining strength by which it lives,
deprived of everything, as there are plants that live upon our barren
ruins burned by the sun, and parched and shelterless, yet ever lifting
green leaves to the light.
* * *
And indeed after all there is nothing more cruel than the impotence of
genius to hold and keep those commonest joys and mere natural
affections which dullards and worse than dullards rejoice in at their

pleasure; the common human things, whose loss makes the great
possessions of its imperial powers all valueless and vain as harps
unstrung, or as lutes that are broken.
* * *
"This world of our own immediate day is weak and weary, because it is
no longer young; yet it possesses one noble attribute--it has an acute
and almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate
into a false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of
egotism. We have escaped both the gem-like hardness of the Pagan,
and the narrowing selfishness of the Christian and the Israelite. We are
sick for the woe of creation, and we wonder why such woe is ours, and
why it is entailed on the innocent dumb beasts, that perish in millions
for us, unpitied, day and night. Rome had no altar to Pity: it is the one
God that we own. When that pity in us for all things is perfected,
perhaps we shall have reached a religion of sympathy that will be purer
than any religion the world has yet seen, and more productive. 'Save
my country!' cried the Pagan to his deities. 'Save my soul!' cries the
Christian at his altars. We, who are without a god, murmur to the great
unknown forces of Nature: 'Let me save others some little portion of
this pain entailed on all simple and guileless things, that are forced to
live, without any fault of their own at their birth, or any will of their
own in their begetting.'"
* * *
How should we have great Art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of
some sort is the lifeblood of Art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to
excite any veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture
both lost their greatness. When the Madonna and her son lost that
mystery and divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters
they possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we
carve a Venus now, she is but a light woman; when we paint a Jesus
now, it is but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner. We want a great
inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really beautiful,
but we are not