Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida | Page 6

sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does dominate us
is a passion for nature; for the sea, for the sky, for the mountain, for the

forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day. Perhaps when we are
thoroughly steeped in this we shall reach greatness once more. But the
artificiality of all modern life is against it; so is its cynicism. Sadness
and sarcasm make a great Lucretius as a great Juvenal, and scorn makes
a strong Aristophanes; but they do not make a Praxiteles and an Apelles;
they do not even make a Raffaelle, or a Flaxman.
Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful in
the sight of the multitudes--the perpetual adoration of that loveliness,
material and moral, which men in the haste and the greed of their lives
are everlastingly forgetting: unless it be that it is empty and useless as a
child's reed-pipe when the reed is snapt and the child's breath spent.
Genius is obligation.
* * *
"No woman, I think, ever loved you as this woman does, whom you
have left as I would not leave a dog," said Maryx, and something of his
old ardent eloquence returned to him, and his voice rose and rang
clearer as the courage in him consummated the self-sacrifice that he
had set himself for her sake. "Have you ever thought what you have
done? When you have killed Art in an artist, you have done the
cruellest murder that earth can behold. Other and weaker natures than
hers might forget, but she never. Her fame will be short-lived as that
rose, for she sees but your face, and the world will tire of that, but she
will not. She can dream no more. She can only remember. Do you
know what that is to the artist?--it is to be blind and to weary the world;
the world that has no more pity than you have! You think her consoled
because her genius has not left her: are you a poet and yet do not know
that genius is only a power to suffer more and to remember
longer?--nothing else. You say to yourself that she will have fame, that
will beguile her as the god came to Ariadnê; perhaps; but across that
fame, let it become what it may, there will settle for ever the shadow of
the world's dishonour; it will be for ever poisoned, and cursed, and
embittered by the scorn of fools, and the reproach of women, since by
you they have been given their lashes of nettles, and by you have been
given their by-word to hoot. She will walk in the light of triumph, you

say, and therefore you have not hurt her; do you not see that the fiercer
that light may beat on her, the sharper will the eyes of the world search
out the brand with which you have burned her. For when do men
forgive force in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the
woman's greatness? and when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that
is higher than its fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have
had such power to wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so
long as her name shall be spoken, so long will the wrong you have
done her cling round it, to make it meet for reproach. A mere woman
dies, and her woe and her shame die with her, and the earth covers her
and them; but such shelter is denied for ever to the woman who has
genius and fame; long after she is dead she will lie out on common soil,
naked and unhouselled, for all the winds to blow on her and all the
carrion birds to tear."
* * *
"No, no. That is accursed! To touch Art without a right to touch it,
merely as a means to find bread--you are too honest to think of such a
thing. Unless Art be adored for its own sake and purely, it must be left
alone. Philip of Macedon had every free man's child taught Art! I
would have every boy and girl taught its sacredness; so, we might in
time get back some accuracy of taste in the public, some
conscientiousness of production in the artist. If artistic creation be not a
joy, an imperious necessity, an instinct of all the forces of the mind, let
the boy go and plough, and the girl go and spin."
* * *
Maybe you turn your back on happiness. I have heard that wise people
often do that. They look up so at the sun and the stars, that they set their
foot on the lark that would have sung