Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida
The desire to be "great" possessed her. When that insatiate passion enters a living soul, be it the soul of a woman-child dreaming of a coquette's conquests, or a crowned hero craving for a new world, it becomes blind to all else. Moral death falls on it; and any sin looks sweet that takes it nearer to its goal. It is a passion that generates at once all the loftiest and all the vilest things, which between them ennoble and corrupt the world—even as heat generates at once the harvest and the maggot, the purpling vine and the lice that devour it. It is a passion without which the world would decay in darkness, as it would do without heat, yet to which, as to heat, all its filthiest corruption is due.
A woman's fair repute is like a blue harebell—a touch can wither it.
Viva had gained the "great world;" and because she had gained it all the old things of her lost past grew unalterably sweet to her now that they no longer could be called hers. The brown, kind, homely, tender face of grand'mère; the gambols of white and frolicsome Bébé; the woods where, with every spring, she had filled her arms with sheaves of delicate primroses; the quaint little room with its strings of melons and sweet herbs, its glittering brass and pewter, its wood-fire with the soup-pot simmering above the flame; the glad free days in the vineyard and on the river, with the winds blowing fragrance from over the clover and flax, and the acacias and lindens; nay, even the old, quiet, sleepy hours within the convent-walls, lying on the lush unshaven grass, while the drowsy bells rang to vespers or compline,—all became suddenly precious and dear to her when once she knew that they had drifted away from her for evermore.
Then he bent his head, letting her desire be his law; and that music, which had given its hymn for the vintage-feast of the Loire, and which had brought back the steps of the suicide from the river-brink in the darkness of the Paris night, which sovereigns could not command and which held peasants entranced by its spell, thrilled through the stillness of the chamber.
Human in its sadness, more than human in its eloquence, now melancholy as the Miserere that sighs through the gloom of a cathedral at midnight, now rich as the glory of the afterglow in Egypt, a poem beyond words, a prayer grand as that which seems to breathe from the hush of mountain solitudes when the eternal snows are lighted by the rising of the sun—the melody of the violin filled the silence of the closing day.
The melancholy, ever latent in the vivid natures of men of genius, is betrayed and finds voice in their Art. Goethe laughs with the riotous revellers, and rejoices with the summer of the vines, and loves the glad abandonment of woman's soft embraces, and with his last words prays for Light. But the profound sadness of the great and many-sided master-mind thrills through and breaks out in the intense humanity, the passionate despair of Faust; the melancholy and the yearning of the soul are there.
With Tricotrin they were uttered in his music.
"Let me be but amused! Let me only laugh if I die!" cries the world in every age. It has so much of grief and tragedy in its own realities, it has so many bitter tears to shed in its solitude, it has such weariness of labour without end, it has such infinitude of woe to regard in its prisons, in its homes, in its battlefields, in its harlotries, in its avarices, in its famines; it is so heart-sick of them all, that it would fain be lulled to forgetfulness of its own terrors; it asks only to laugh for awhile, even if it laugh but at shadows.
"The world is vain, frivolous, reckless of that which is earnest; it is a courtesan who thinks only of pleasure, of adornment, of gewgaws, of the toys of the hour!" is the reproach which its satirists in every age hoot at it.
Alas! it is a courtesan who, having sold herself to evil, strives to forget her vile bargain; who, having washed her cheeks white with saltest tears, strives to believe that the paint calls the true colour back; who, having been face to face for so long with blackest guilt, keenest hunger, dreadest woe, strives to lose their ghosts, that incessantly follow her, in the tumult of her own thoughtless laughter.
"Let me be but amused!"—the cry is the aching cry of a world that is overborne with pain, and with longing for the golden years of its youth; that cry is never louder than when the world is most conscious of its own infamy.
In the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Second Empire of Napoleonic France, the world, reeking with corruption, staggering under the burden of tyrannies, and delivered over to the dominion of lust, has shrieked loudest in its blindness of suffering, "Let me only laugh if I die!"
Not as others! Why, my Waif? Is your foot less swift, your limb less strong, your face less fair than theirs? Does the sun shine less often, have the flowers less fragrance, does sleep come less sweetly to you than to them? Nature has been very good, very generous to you, Viva. Be content with her gifts. What you lack is only a thing of man's invention—a quibble, a bauble, a Pharisee's phylactery. Look at the river-lilies that drift yonder—how white they are, how their leaves enclose and caress them, how the water buoys them up and plays with them! Well, are they not better off than the poor rare flowers that live painfully in hothouse air, and are labelled, and matted, and given long names by men's petty precise laws? You are like the river-lilies. O child, do not pine for the glass house that would ennoble you, only to force you and kill you?
Wrong to be proud, you ask? No. But then the pride must be of a right fashion. It must be the pride which says, "Let me not envy, for that were meanness. Let me not covet, for that were akin to theft. Let me not repine, for that were weakness." It must be the pride which says, "I can be sufficient for myself. My life makes my nobility; and I need no accident of rank, because I have a stainless honour." It must be pride too proud to let an aged woman work where youthful limbs can help her; too proud to trample basely on what lies low already; too proud to be a coward, and shrink from following conscience in the confession of known error; too proud to despise the withered toil-worn hands of the poor and old, and be vilely forgetful that those hands succoured you in your utmost need of helpless infancy!
Philosophy, Viva, is the pomegranate of life, ever cool and most fragrant, and the deeper you cut in it the richer only will the core grow. Power is the Dead-Sea apple, golden and fair to sight while the hand strives to reach it, dry grey ashes between dry fevered lips when once it is grasped and eaten!
Pleasure is but labour to those who do not know also that labour in its turn is pleasure.
Happy! As a mollusc is happy so long as the sea sweeps prey into its jaws; what does the mollusc care how many lives have been shipwrecked so long as the tide wafts it worms? She has killed her conscience, Viva; there is no murder more awful. It is to slay what touch of God we have in us!
Have I been cruel, my child? Your fever of discontent needed a sharp cure. Life lies before you, Viva, and you alone can mould it for yourself. Sin and anguish fill nine-tenths of the world: to one soul that basks in light, a thousand perish in darkness; I dare not let you go on longer in your dangerous belief that the world is one wide paradise, and that the high-road of its joys is the path of reckless selfishness. Can you not think that there are lots worse than that of a guiltless child who is well loved and well guarded, and has all her future still before her?
It rests with you to live your life nobly or vilely. We have not our choice to be rich or poor, to be happy or unhappy, to be in health or in sickness; but we have our choice to be worthy or worthless. No antagonist can kill our soul in us; that can perish only from its own suicide. Ever remember that.
But they are hollow inside, you still urge? fie, for shame! What a plea that is! Have you the face to make it? If you have, let me bargain with you.
When all the love that is fair and false goes begging for believers, and all the passion that is a sham fails to find one fool to buy it; when all the priests and politicians clap in vain together the brazen cymbals of their tongues, because their listeners will not hearken to brass clangour, nor accept it for the music of the spheres; when all the creeds, that feast and fatten upon the cowardice and selfishness of men, are driven out of hearth and home, and mart and temple, as impostors that put on the white beard of reverence and righteousness to pass current a cheater's coin; when all the kings that promise peace while they swell their armouries and armies; when all the statesmen that chatter of the people's weal as they steal up to the locked casket where coronets are kept; when all the men who talk of "glory," and prate of an "idea" that they may stretch their nation's boundary, and filch their neighbour's province—when all these are no longer in the land, and no more looked on with favour, then I will believe your cry that you hate the toys which are hollow.
Can an ignorant or an untrained brain follow the theory of light, or the metamorphosis of plants? Yet it may rejoice in the rays of a summer sun, in the scent of a nest of wild-flowers. So may it do in my music. Shall I ask higher payment than the God of the sun and the violets asks for Himself?
Once there were three handmaidens of Krishna's; invisible, of course, to the world of men. They begged of Krishna, one day, to test their wisdom, and Krishna gave them three drops of dew. It was in the season of drought,—and he bade them go and bestow them where each deemed best in the world.
Now one flew earthward, and saw a king's fountain leaping and shining in the sun; the people died of thirst, and the fields and the plains were cracked with heat, but the king's fountain was still fed and played on. So she thought, "Surely, my dew will best fall where such glorious water dances?" and she shook the drop into the torrent.
The second hovered over the sea, and saw the Indian oysters lying under the waves, among the sea-weed and the coral. Then she thought, "A rain-drop that falls in an oyster's shell becomes a pearl; it may bring riches untold to man, and shine in the diadem of a monarch. Surely it is best bestowed where it will change to a jewel?"—and she shook the dew into the open mouth of a shell.
The third had scarcely hovered a moment over the parched white lands, ere she beheld a little, helpless brown bird dying of thirst upon the sand, its bright eyes glazed, its life going out in torture. Then she thought, "Surely my gift will be best given in succour to the first and lowliest thing I see in pain?"—and she shook the dew-drop down into the silent throat of the bird, that fluttered, and arose, and was strengthened.
Then Krishna said that she alone had bestowed her power wisely; and he bade her take the tidings of rain to the aching earth, and the earth rejoiced exceedingly. Genius is the morning dew that keeps the world from perishing in drought. Can you read my parable?
To die when life can be lived no longer with honour is greatness indeed; but to die because life galls and wearies and is hard to pursue—there is no greatness in that? It is the suicide's plea for his own self-pity. You live under tyranny, corruption, dynastic lies hard to bear, despotic enemies hard to bear, I know. But you forget—what all followers of your creed ever forget—that without corruption, untruth, weakness, ignorance in a nation itself, such things could not be in its rulers. Men can bridle the ass and can drive the sheep; but who can drive the eagle or bridle the lion? A people that was strong and pure no despot could yoke to his vices.
No matter! He must have race in him. Heraldry may lie; but voices do not. Low people make money, drive in state, throng to palaces, receive kings at their tables by the force of gold; but their antecedents always croak out in their voices. They either screech or purr; they have no clear modulations; besides, their women always stumble over their train, and their men bow worse than their servants.
Ere long he drew near a street which in the late night was still partially filled with vehicles and with foot-passengers, hurrying through the now fast-falling snow, and over the slippery icy pavements. In one spot a crowd had gathered—of artisans, women, soldiers, and idlers, under the light of a gas-lamp. In the midst of the throng some gendarmes had seized a young girl, accused by one of the bystanders of having stolen a broad silver piece from his pocket.
She offered no resistance; she stood like a stricken thing, speechless and motionless, as the men roughly laid hands on her.
Tricotrin crossed over the road, and with difficulty made his way into the throng of blouses and looked at her. Degraded she was, but scarcely above a child's years; and her features had a look as if innocence were in some sort still there, and sin still loathed in her soul. As he drew near he heard her mutter,
"Mother, mother! She will die of hunger!—it was for her, only for her!"
He stooped in the snow, and letting fall, unperceived, a five-franc piece, picked it up again.
"Here is some silver," he said, turning to the infuriated owner, a lemonade-seller, who could ill afford to lose it now that it was winter, and people were too cold for lemonade, and who seized it with rapturous delight.
"That is it, monsieur, that is it. Holy Jesus! how can I thank you? Ah, if I had convicted the poor creature—and all in error!—I should never have forgiven myself! Messieurs les gendarmes, let her go! It was my mistake. My silver piece was in the snow!"
The gendarmes reluctantly let quit their prey: they muttered, they hesitated, they gripped her arms tighter, and murmured of the prison-cell.
"Let her go," said Tricotrin quietly: and in a little while they did so,—the girl stood bareheaded and motionless in the snow like a frost-bound creature.
Soon the crowd dispersed: nothing can be still long in Paris, and since there had been no theft there was no interest! they were soon left almost alone, none were within hearing.
Then he stooped to her: she had never taken off him the wild, senseless, incredulous gaze of her great eyes.
"Were you guilty?" he asked her.
She caught his hands, she tried to bless him and to thank him, and broke down in hysterical sobs.
"I took it—yes! What would you have? I took it for my mother. She is old, and blind, and without food. It is for her that I came on the streets; but she does not know it, it would kill her to know; she thinks my money honest; and she is so proud and glad with it! That was the first thing I stole! O God! are you an angel? If they had put me in prison my mother would have starved!"
He looked on her gently, and with a pity that fell upon her heart like balm.
"I saw it was your first theft. Hardened robbers do not wear your stricken face," he said softly, as he slipped two coins into her hand. "Ah, child! let your mother die rather than allow her to eat the bread of your dishonour: which choice between the twain do you not think a mother would make? And know your trade she must, soon or late. Sin no more, were it only for that love you bear her."
Their lives had drifted asunder, as two boats drift north and south on a river, the distance betwixt them growing longer and longer with each beat of the oars and each sigh of the tide. And for the lives that part thus, there is no reunion. One floats out to the open and sunlit sea; and one passes away to the grave of the stream. Meet again on the river they cannot.
"They shudder when they read of the Huns and the Ostrogoths pouring down into Rome," he mused, as he passed toward the pandemonium. "They keep a horde as savage, imprisoned in their midst, buried in the very core of their capitals, side by side with their churches and palaces, and never remember the earthquake that would whelm them if once the pent volcano burst, if once the black mass covered below took flame and broke to the surface! Statesmen multiply their prisons, and strengthen their laws against the crime that is done—and they never take the canker out of the bud, they never save the young child from pollution. Their political economy never studies prevention; it never cleanses the sewers, it only curses the fever-stricken!"
"What avail?" he thought. "What avail to strive to bring men nearer to the right? They love their darkness best—why not leave them to it? Age after age the few cast away their lives striving to raise and to ransom the many. What use? Juvenal scourged Rome, and the same vices that his stripes lashed then, laugh triumphant in Paris to-day! The satirist, and the poet, and the prophet strain their voices in vain as the crowds rush on; they are drowned in the chorus of mad sins and sweet falsehoods! O God! the waste of hope, the waste of travail, the waste of pure desire, the waste of high ambitions!—nothing endures but the wellspring of lies that ever rises afresh, and the bay-tree of sin that is green, and stately, and deathless!"
He himself went onward through the valley, through the deep belt of the woods, through the avenues of the park. The whole front of the antique building was lighted, and the painted oriels gleamed ruby, and amber, and soft brown, in the dusky evening, through the green screen of foliage.
The fragrance of the orange alleys, and of the acres of flowers, was heavy on the air; there was the sound of music borne down the low southerly wind; here and there through the boughs was the dainty glisten of gliding silks:—it was such a scene as once belonged to the terraces and gardens of Versailles.
From beyond the myrtle fence and gilded railings which severed the park from the pleasaunce, enough could be seen, enough heard, of the brilliant revelry within to tell of its extravagance, and its elegance, in the radiance that streamed from all the illumined avenues.
He stood and looked long; hearing the faint echo of the music, seeing the effulgence of the light through the dark myrtle barrier.
A very old crippled peasant, searching in the grass for truffles, with a little dog, stole timidly up and looked too.
"How can it feel, to live like that?" he asked, in a wistful, tremulous voice.
Tricotrin did not hear: his hand was grasped on one of the gilded rails with a nervous force as from bodily pain.
The old truffle-gatherer, with his little white dog panting at his feet, crossed himself as he peered through the myrtle screen.
"God!" he muttered; "how strange it seems that people are there who never once knew what it was to want bread, and to find it nowhere, though the lands all teemed with harvest! They never feel hungry, or cold, or hot, or tired, or thirsty: they never feel their bones ache, and their throat parch, and their entrails gnaw! These people ought not to get to heaven—they have it on earth!"
Tricotrin heard at last: he turned his head and looked down on the old man's careworn, hollow face.
"'Verily they have their reward,' you mean? Nay, that is a cruel religion, which would excruciate hereafter those who enjoy now. Judge them not; in their laurel crowns there is full often twisted a serpent. The hunger of the body is bad indeed, but the hunger of the mind is worse perhaps; and from that they suffer, because from every fulfilled desire springs the pain of a fresh satiety."
The truffle-hunter, wise in his peasant-fashion, gazed wistfully up at the face above him, half comprehending the answer.
"It may be so," he murmured; "but then—they have enjoyed! Ah, Christ! that is what I envy them. Now we—we die, starved amidst abundance; we see the years go, and the sun never shines once in them; and all we have is a hope—a hope that may be cheated at last; for none have come back from the grave to tell us whether that fools us as well."
"I incline to think you live twenty centuries too late, or—twenty centuries too early."
Viva turned on him a swift and eager glance.
"Of course!" she said, with a certain emotion, whose meaning he could not analyse. "Was there ever yet a man of genius who was not either the relic of some great dead age, or the precursor of some noble future one, in which he alone has faith?"
"Chut!" said Tricotrin, rapidly; he could not trust himself to hear her speak in his own defence. "Fine genius mine! To fiddle to a few villagers, and dash colour on an alehouse shutter! I have the genius of indolence, if you like. As to my belonging to a bygone age,—well! I am not sure that I have not got the soul in me of some barefooted friar of Moyen Age, who went about where he listed, praying here, laughing there, painting a missal with a Pagan love-god, and saying a verse of Horace instead of a chant of the Church. Or, maybe, I am more like some Greek gossiper, who loitered away his days in the sun, and ate his dates in the market-place, and listened here and there to a philosopher, and—just by taking no thought—hit on a truer philosophy than ever came out of Porch or Garden. Ah, my Lord of Estmere! you have two hundred servants over there at Villiers, I have been told; do you not think I am better served here by one little, brown-eyed, brown-cheeked maiden, who sings her Béranger like a lark, while she brings me her dish of wild strawberries? There is fame too for you—his—the King of the Chansons! When a girl washes her linen in the brook—when a herdsman drives his flock through the lanes—when a boy throws his line in a fishing-stream—when a grisette sits and works at her attic lattice—when a student dreams under the linden leaves—he is on their lips, in their hearts, in their fancies and joys. What a power! What a dominion! Wider than any that emperors boast!"
"And," added Estmere, with a smile, "if you were not Tricotrin you would be Béranger?"
"Aye! Hymns forbad at noonday are ever so sung at night; and oftentimes, what at noon would have been a lark's chant of liberty, grows at night to a vampire's screech for blood!" he murmured. "They are gay at your château up yonder."
Be not a coward who leaves the near duty that is as cruel to grasp as a nettle, and flies to gather the far-off duty that will flaunt in men's sight like a sun-flower.
"A great Character!" says Society, when it means—"a great Scamp!"
Estmere laid the panel down as he heard.
"Whoever painted it must have genius."
"Genius!" interrupted Tricotrin. "Pooh! What is genius? Only the power to see a little deeper and a little clearer than most other people. That is all."
"The power of vision? Of course. But that renders it none the less rare."
"Oh yes, it is rare—rare like kingfishers, and sandpipers, and herons, and black eagles. And so men always shoot it down, as they do the birds, and stick up the dead body in glass cases, and label it, and stare at it, and bemoan it as 'so singular,' having done their best to insure its extinction!"
Estmere looked keenly at him.
"Surely genius that secretes itself as your friend's must do," he said, touching the panel afresh, "commits suicide, and desires its own extinction."
"Pshaw!" said Tricotrin, impatiently, and with none of his habitual courtesy. "You think the kingfisher and the black eagle have no better thing to live for than to become the decorations of a great personage's glass cabinets. You think genius can find no higher end than to furnish frescoes and panellings for a nobleman's halls and ante-chambers. You mistake very much; the mistake is a general one in your order. But believe me, the kingfisher enjoys his brown moorland stream, and his tufts of green rushes, and his water-swept bough of hawthorn; the eagle enjoys his wild rocks, and his sweep through the air, and his steady gaze at the sun that blinds all human eyes;—and neither ever imagine that the great men below pity them because they are not stuffed, and labelled, and praised by rule in their palaces! And genius is much of the birds' fashion of thinking. It lives its own life; and is not, as your connoisseurs are given to fancy, wretched unless you see fit in your graciousness to deem it worth the glass-case of your criticism, and the straw-stuffing of your gold. For it knows, as kingfisher and eagle knew also, that stuffed birds nevermore use their wings, and are evermore subject to be bought and be sold."
Against the foreign foes of your country die in your youth if she need it. But against her internecine enemies live out your life in continual warfare. When I tell you this, do you dream that I spare you? Children!—you have yet to learn what life is! Who could think it hard to die in the glory of strife, drunk with the sound of the combat, and feeling no pain in the swoon of a triumph? Few men whose blood was hot and young would ask a greater ending. But to keep your souls in patience; to strive unceasingly with evil; to live in self-negation, in ceaseless sacrifices of desire; to give strength to the weak, and sight to the blind, and light where there is darkness, and hope where there is bondage; to do all these through many years unrecognised of men, content only that they are done with such force as lies within you,—this is harder than to seek the cannons' mouths, this is more bitter than to rush, with drawn steel, on your tyrants.
