Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/276

262 entertainment, of diversion. Its sarcastic scorn of fashionable frailties and flippancies even surpasses that which made "Friendship" notorious. Social life among the most aristocratic people of Europe is drawn so sumptuously and prismatically that without ever having enjoyed the honor of dining or supping with princes and duchesses, we still own to a secret revolt against the verisimilitude of their recorded pastimes and dissipations. In "Moths," as in all her purely fictional and unpoetic Work, Ouida gives us the belief that she is flying her kite entirely too high, that she is too greatly enamoured of the rank and titles of her dukes and earls, that the European beau monde, as an idea, has too bewilderingly intoxicated her fancy. As Balzac delighted in letting us know the exact number of francs per annum possessed by almost every member of his Comédie Humaine, so Ouida loves to tell us of her grandees' castles and palaces, of their fêtes and musicales, of their steam yachts and their four-in-hands, of their "private physicians" (it is rarely one simple physician with her), of their multitudinous retainers and servants. Her heroines go to their apartments to dress, and in so doing give themselves up to their "women:" it is seldom that any one of them is humbly enough placed to have merely a single femme de chambre. All the horses are blooded animals, all the jewels priceless, all the repasts miracles of gastronomy, all the ladies' toilets royally costly. Saloons and boudoirs and bedchambers are adorned with wonders of modern art, on canvas or in marble, in tapestry or bric-à-brac, in panellings or frescos. Nearly every new book that she writes is a sort of édition de luxe of itself. I am by no means sure that she does not smile at the dazzling glories which she evokes, while continuing to spread them before us with a secret conviction that they will allure hundreds and even thousands, though they repel tens and twenties, of those whom they confront. What to many refined observers may have seemed a streak of trivial childishness in her may be, after all, a shrewder cleverness than these accredit her with. For Ouida is superlatively clever; indeed, it may be added by those whom none of her sham glitterings have blinded to the genuineness of her actual gold, that she is lamentably clever. Had she thought less of a certain transient applause which writers incomparably beneath her may win, she might much sooner have attained that firm fame during her lifetime which her death alone will now create. In "Moths" the cleverness to which I have alluded is everywhere apparent. She has made it a story that the shop-girl or the dry-goods clerk may read with thrills and tears. Vera's horrible misfortune in having been sold by her mother to the brutish Russian prince admits of no misinterpretation. The vast command of wealth and the lofty station which now follow for