Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida | Page 7

to them and woke them brightly
in the morning--and kill it.
* * *
Landscape painting is the only original form of painting that modern
times can boast. It has not exhausted itself yet; it is capable of infinite

development. Ruysdael, Rembrandt, and the rest, did great scenes, it is
true, but it has been left to our painters to put soul into the sunshine of a
cornfield, and suggest a whole life of labour in a dull evening sky
hanging over a brown ploughed upland, with the horses going tired
homewards, and one grey figure trudging after them, to the hut on the
edge of the moor. Of course the modern fancy of making nature answer
to all human moods, like an Eölian harp, is morbid and exaggerated,
but it has a beauty in it, and a certain truth. Our tenderer souls take
refuge in the country now, as they used to do in the cloister.
* * *
I think if people oftener saw the break of day they would vow oftener
to keep that dawning day holy, and would not so often let its fair hours
drift away with nothing done that were not best left undone.
* * *
We are the sons of our Time: it is not for us to slay our mother. Let us
cover her dishonour if we see it, lest we should provoke the Erinyes.
* * *
How one loves Canova the man, and how one execrates Canova the
artist! Surely never was a great repute achieved by so false a talent and
so perfect a character. One would think he had been born and bred in
Versailles instead of Treviso. He is called a naturalist! Look at his
Graces! He is always Coysevax and Coustou at heart. Never purely
classic, never frankly modern. Louis XIV. would have loved him better
than Bernini.
* * *
If Alexander had believed himself a bubble of gas instead of the son of
a god, he would not have changed the face of the world. Negation
cannot be the parent of heroism, though it will produce an indifference
that counterfeits it not ill, since Petronius died quite as serenely as ever
did the martyrs of the Church.

* * *
Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the
influence of its begetting. Augustus could have Horace and Ovid; he
could never have had Homer and Milton.
* * *
I do not think with you. Talent takes the mark of its generation; genius
stamps its time with its own impression. Virgil had the sentiment of an
united Italy.
* * *
Tell her that past she thinks so great was only very like the Serapis
which men worshipped so many ages in Theophilis, and which, when
the soldiers struck it down at last, proved itself only a hollow Colossus
with a colony of rats in its head that scampered right and left.
* * *
Falconet struck the death-note of the plastic arts when he said, "Our
marbles have almost colour." That is just where we err. We are
incessantly striving to make Sculpture at once a romance-writer and a
painter, and of course she loses all dignity and does but seem the jay in
borrowed plumes of sable. Conceits are altogether out of keeping with
marble. They suit a cabinet painting or a piece of china. Bernini was the
first to show the disease when he veiled the head of his Nile to indicate
that the source was unknown.
* * *
Whosoever has any sort of fame has lighted a beacon that is always
shining upon him, and can never more return into the cool twilight of
privacy even when most he wishes. It is of these retributions--some call
them compensations--of which life is full.
* * *

Men have forgotten the virile Pyrrhic dance, and have become
incapable of the grace of the Ionian; their only dance is a Danse
Macabre, and they are always hand in hand with a skeleton.
* * *
By night Rome is still a city for the gods; the shadows veil its wounds,
the lustre silvers all its stones; its silence is haunted as no other silence
is; if you have faith, there where the dark gloss of the laurel brushes the
marble as in Agrippa's time, you will see the Immortals passing by
chained with dead leaves and weeping.
* * *
A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes save one life; for one life alone the
sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and the
stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem but
ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth