Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/192

174 tolerable to read. It may be true that to know fully the savour and sense of English, and to use it as one having that knowledge, a writer must be a scholar. I do not suppose that Ouida is a scholar, but I am sure that the scholarship that is only just competent to get a familiar quotation aright is not a very valuable possession. In fine, I respect an unrestrained and incorrect eloquence more than a merely correct and periphrastic nothingness. I would not take Ouida's for a model of style, but I prefer it to some others with which I am acquainted.

Perhaps to be a good judge of sentiment one should not be an easy subject for its influence. In that case nothing I can say on the question of Ouida's sentiment can be worth much, for I am the prey of every sort of sentiment under heaven. If I belonged to a race whose males wept more readily than those of my own, I should be in a perpetual state of tears. Any of the recognised forms of pathos affects me with certainty, so it be presented without (as is sometimes the case) an overpowering invitation to hilarity. In these days, however, if one does not insist on sentiment all day long, if one has moods when some other emotion is agreeable, if one is not prepared to accept every profession for an achievement of pathos, one is called a "cynic." At times the pathos of Ouida has amused me, and I too was a cynic. But, as a rule, I think it genuine. Despised love, unmerited misfortunes, uncongenial surroundings—she has used all these motives with effect. The favourite pathos of her earlier books, that of the man who lives in a whirl of pleasure with a "broken heart," appeals very easily to a frivolous mood, and may be made ridiculous to anybody by a touch, but its contrasts may be used with inevitable effect, and so Ouida has sometimes used them. Dog-like fidelity, especially to a worthless man or woman, can be ridiculous to the coarse-grained only. Love of beauty unattainable, as of the country in one condemned