Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/282

268 she is, indeed, a kind of glorious anachronism, but from another standpoint her grooves of thought appear painfully narrow. Occasionally she airs a contempt for her own sex which makes us wish that with all her learning she knew a little more of the dispassionate repose taught by science and of its hardy feuds against a priori assumptions. Ouida has made declarations about womankind which cause us to wonder how she can possibly have been so unfortunate in her feminine friends, with the thousands of chaste and lovable women now to be met inside the limits of civilization. The mauvaise langue, when turned against womanhood, is nowadays classed among effete frivolities. What we forgave at the beginning of the century on this head we now simply dismiss as beneath anything like grave heed. The day has passed when such Byronics of misogyny, however gilt with flashing sarcasms, will either delude or solace. We leave "sneers at the sex" to the idleness of otherwise unemployed club-loungers, whose growls are innocuous. Still, in justice to Ouida, I should deny that her hatred of women ever reached anything like an offensive boiling-point except in the early novel "Puck," which has probably done as much to feed the spleen of her enemies as any work to which she has given her name. In subsequent novels she has created many women of great sweetness and high-mindedness, as Étoile in "Friendship," Vera in "Moths," Wanda in the story of that title, Yseult in "Princess Napraxine," and Damaris in "Othmar." Perhaps a depraved and sinful woman is more execrable than a man of the same perverted traits. This is a question open to debate, though Ouida somehow suggests an opposite judgment. It is true that the majority of her very bad people are not men, though she is capable, at a pinch, of some darkly Mephistophelian types.

On the other hand, her love for the helpless and the unfriended, her profound charity toward the down-trodden and destitute and neglected among humanity, is one of the several bonds between her own genius and that of Hugo,—a poet whom she resembles more than I have availed myself of opportunity to indicate.

But I do not claim that these words about Ouida—though I have called them "the truth," and though, as regards my own most sincere faith and equally sincere unfaith, I so insist upon calling them—are in any degree a satisfactory criticism. How this woman's littleness dies into a shadow beside her imaginative greatness, a real critic will hereafter tell. I have already stated in the pages of this magazine my fixed belief concerning the scientific method which every critic who at all merits the place of one should infallibly use. For myself, I wish to be thought no more than that purveyor of opinions whom I have previously sentenced with some emphasis. I simply print what I think