Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/187

Rh he does not swagger. His one affectation is, that if by chance he has done something great in the ways of sport or war, he looks as if nothing had happened. There are things in life which he puts before the main chance. Such, more or less, is the sort of man in question, virile certainly, and one whom only the snobbery of intellect can despise. His is not a very common type in a materialised age, when even men of pleasure want their pleasure, as it were, at store prices, and everybody is climbing pecuniary and social ladders; it is a type that, I confess, I respect and like. At least it is indisputable that such men have done much for our country. Now Ouida, as I have admitted, has made many mistakes in her dealings with this type of man: who has altogether avoided them? They are many who find the pictures of him in Mr. Rudyard Kipling, superficially at least, far inferior to Mr. Kipling's "natives," and his three immortal Tommies. Ouida has made him ridiculously lavish, inclined to translate his genuine emotions into terms of sentimentalism, and to say things of his social inferiors which such a man may sometimes think, but is careful not to say. To affirm that the subject is good and the treatment of it bad, would be to give my case away. My contention is that the treatment, with many imperfections, leaves one assured that the subject has been, in essentials, perceived.

But her guardsman belongs to Ouida's earlier manner, and it is most unfair, in estimating her, to forget that this manner has been mellowed and quieted. In "Princess Napraxine" and in "Othmar"—the two most notable books, I think, of her later period—there are types of men more reasonably conceived and expressed more subtly. Geraldine, the cosmopolitan, but characteristic Englishman; Napraxine, the amiable, well-bred savage; Des Vannes, the calculating sensualist; Othmar himself, the disappointed idealist, these are painted, now and then, in somewhat glaring