Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/278

264 tones and terms of a most scathing irony; again it is handled with mixed disdain and ridicule; and still again it is openly grieved over and deplored. But I fail to find a single instance of the vileness of adultery being either condoned or alleviated. To choose an uncanny subject is very different from handling that subject with the grosser motive of extenuating what is base in it. I should assert that Ouida never—absolutely never—does the latter. There are one or two scenes in "Moths" which have a shocking nudity of candor. But they are never dwelt upon for the purpose of pandering to any despicable taste in the reader. They form a link in the dolorous chain-work of the heroine's ills, and they are introduced for the purpose of rendering her final step of rebellion against the world's legally imposed pressure more pardonably consistent with the whole scheme of her unsolicited mishaps. While revealing what she believes to be low and contemptible in society of to-day, Ouida employs merely the weapons which Juvenal himself made use of. She is never sympathetic with wrong-doing, any more than the Latin poet was in fulminating against Roman decadence. Witness, as an example of this impersonal sincerity, her unsparing denunciations hurled at such characters as Lady Joan in "Friendship" and Lady Dolly in "Moths." How cordially she seems to detest the artificiality of every mauvais sujet she describes! She lays bare alike the sordid and the sensual aim; she pierces with her shafts of wit and hate the adventurer, the hypocrite, the scandal-monger, the titled voluptuary, the mendacious and guileful male flirt, the modest-visaged and still more deceptive intrigante. But there is no revelation through all her danse macabre of ill-behaved people which may even faintly indicate that she is in any way sympathetic with their indiscreet or reckless caperings. For those who shout Ouida down as abominable because she chooses to touch the abominable, I have no answer. All that point of view merely involves the question of whether the abominable can be touched or not in literature, provided it is so approached and so grasped that the author makes its mirk and stain seem nothing but the soilure and grossness which they really are. I am acquainted with several American men of letters who have told me that they deeply regret the broad public distaste against so-called "indecency" in novel-writing. These men have already written novels of merit and force, but they greatly desire to write novels which may express the full scope and depth of life as they see and feel it. They declare themselves, however, debarred from such performance by the stringent edicts of their publishers and editors. It seems to me that Ouida has quietly contemned the inclinations of her publishers and editors. She has chosen to tell the whole truth,—not as Zola tells it,