Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/193

Rh condemned to a sordid life in a town, can hardly be made absurd. But the mere fact of unrequited affection, being so very common, requires more than a little talent to be impressive, even to a sentimentalist, in a novel, and Ouida, I think, has made this common fact impressive over and over again, because, however imperfect be the expression, the feeling, being real, appeals without fail to a sympathetic imagination.

The two qualities, I think, which underlie the best of Ouida's work, and which must have always saved it from commonness, are a genuine and passionate love of beauty, as she conceives it, and a genuine and passionate hatred of injustice and oppression. The former quality is constantly to be found in her, in her descriptions —accurate or not—of the country, in her scorn of elaborate ugliness as contrasted with homely and simple seemliness, in her railings against all the hideous works of man. It is not confined to physical beauty. Love of liberty, loyalty, self-sacrifice—those moral qualities which, pace the philosophers, must in our present stage of development seem beautiful to us—she has set herself to show us their beauty without stint of enthusiasm. Nobody can read her tales of Italian peasant life without perceiving how full is her hatred of inhumanity and wrong. In a book of essays recently published by her this love and hatred have an expression which in truth is not always judicious, but is not possibly to be mistaken. They are qualities which, I believe, arc sufficiently rare in contemporary writers to deserve our attention and gratitude.

In fine, I take the merits in Ouida's books to balance their faults many times over. They are not finished works of art, they do not approach that state so nearly as hundreds of books with a hundred