Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/279

Rh but as George Sand (whom she resembles in one way as much as she resembles Victor Hugo in another) always chose uncompromisingly to tell it. Her gorgeousness of surrounding has made her perfectly pure and reformatory motive dim to those who cannot eliminate from the scum and reek of a stagnant pool the iridescence filmed there. Ouida has seen the rainbow colors close-clinging to such malodorous torpor in human society, and she has striven to report of them as faithfully as of the brackish waters below. But she has intensified their baleful tints. She has made the ermine that wraps her sinful potentates too white and the black spots which indent this ermine too inky. She is and has always been incapable of saying to her muse what Mr. Lowell says in his profound and strangely unappreciated poem, "The Cathedral:"

No; Ouida determinedly delights in overplus, and when one thinks of her muse at all it is of a harried and overtaxed muse, with feverish imprecations against the wear and tear to which divinity has been heartlessly subjected. When I turn toward the novels which have succeeded "Moths," I am constrained to declare Ouida a writer more fertile in expedients for disillusioning her most, loyal adherents than any other known through the past centuries as one deserving the name of a genius. She is so incontestably a genius, however, that she can go on committing her excesses without alienating her leal devotees. She is like some monarch confident of his subjects' worship while he crowns himself with roses and quaffs wine from gold beakers to the detriment and discontent of throngs waiting at his gates. There are no throngs waiting at Ouida's gates, however; or rather the throngs are her entranced readers, and not by any means those fastidious about the requirements of true royalty. But a few, knowing her grand mind, regret the self-forgetfulness to which it has stooped.

"In Maremma" startled these few, as if it were a pledge of permanent return among the classic idealisms which have made this author's best right to assert herself one of the greatest figures in contemporary literature. And "In Maremma" is a tale of matchless grace and sweetness. We marvel as we read of the Italian girl who went and dwelt in the Etruscan tomb, loving the dead whom she found buried there, and finally meeting in it, by a most terrible satire of circumstances, him who dealt her a death-wound of passion,—we marvel, I say, as we