BOOKS OF THE DAY
Ouida (Rose Macaulay) .. .
Europe Re-housed (Clough Williams-Ellis) .. Africa Emergent (Professor W. K. Hancock) .. Roosevelt is Not Hitler (D. W. Brogan) Three Guineas (Graham Greene) Five Lives (Evelyn Waugh)
PAGE PAGE
1104 Russia in Black and White (E. H. Carr) • • 1114 1106 News from Wales (Goronwy Rees) .. . . 1116
to6 The German Songs (Henry W. Nevinson) 1116 t to8 Romances of Detection (Nicholas Blake) irt8
III0 Fiction (Kate O'Brien) .. 1120 1112 Current Literature.. 1121
OUIDA
By ROSE MACAULAY A NEW memoir of this odd and unpleasing creature _s timely : it is- not too soon for it (as it was a little too soon in 1914, when Miss Lee wrote her detailed and excellent biography, which, .00 near its heroine and her foes, friends and feuds, was ham- pered inevitably by social discretion) and not quite, though nearly, too late. Miss ffrench has only pinned down her queer exotic specimen just in time, for the generation which knew her in the flesh is dying out; and its tales of her with it. There are still elderly Anglo-Florentines who can tell of their visits to the palatial villa and unpruned garden where presided the vanity-steeped megalomaniac in white satin or muslin, with her horde of pampered dogs and her romantic dreams of herself as the lovely heroine adored by gentlemen of the beau monde and persecuted by their spiteful-lady friends.
Miss ffrench does not claim to reveal much that is new, but she has used her material with skill, and her imagination and discernment with excellent effect, and produced an acute and admirable study, one of whose many good points is sympathy. No one can like Ouida (though apparently a few people who knew her actually did, anyhow for a time), but Miss ffrench does bring out her finer qualities, her generous humanitarianism, her courage in unpopular causes, even a certain critical intelli- gence not shown in her novels but in some of her essays. It would have been easy to draw her merely from the comic angle, which would have been superfluously to gild the lily. Ouida may be left to perform her comic gestures unaided. Miss ffrench has permitted her freely to do this, and has herself added an interesting interpretative commentary and story. Reading it, one feels again what an odd story it is. And the main oddity is that such a being was tolerated and even some- times admired by some of the fastidious and intelligent society of her day, though always laughed at by a good proportion of it (perhaps by the majority ? Few are left to tell us. Reviews, unfortunately, are little indication. According to Max Beer- bohm, the reviewers mocked for many years, and then, misled by one or two half-ironic appreciations from eminent critics, thought it prudent to applaud).
She seems from the first to have been somcthinil of a legend, since, in 1863, at the age of twenty-four, s:-e was delivered of her first guardsman, the exquisite Granville de Vigne, one of that long line of magnificent creatures which the little middle- class dreamer conceived in romantic idolatry and projected with every circumstance of passionate and eloquent ignorance. The fact that we all today know these gentlemen by repute is significant : since then we have had Miss Marie Corelli, Ouida's disciple; and oddly like her in style, point of view and person- ality (they both even affected walking costumes of white satin with blue sashes) and doubtless Miss Corelli, too, had her guardsmen, or their equivalents ; but who knows anything of these ? About them Max Beerbohm has written no essay ; in neither the literary not the smart world was the Corelli ever a topic of discussion or of serious comment ; whereas Ouida somehow became first a mystery (the oddest speculation about her, mentioned by Miss ffrench, was that she might be George Eliot under an alias !), then a best-seller whom everyone read and discussed and whom the great entertained (she was con- sidered rather risque), then, owing to her vindictively personal novel Friendship, a storm-centre of Florentine life, and finally a figure so eccentric, so aggressively individual, so passing Ouida : A Study in Ostentation. By Yvonne ffrench. (Cobden- Sanderson. 8s. 6d.) strange, that legends adhered to her with the delighted convic- tion characteristic at all times of the gossip of English residents abroad concerning their compatriots. Some of these legends have grown, like the Greek tales of the family life of the gods, slightly contradictory and obscure. There is, for example, the tale, shrouded in confusing mists; of the horsewhipping in the streets of FlorenCe (or rather in one street, for it is not said, unfortunately, to have been a habit), a drama in which the two agonists are traditionally alleged to have been Ouida and Mrs. Ross, the beautiful villainess of Ouida's roman a clef, Friendship : but which of the two was the protagonist and which played the subordinate and less active part, is a matter round which con- troversy appears to have been waged for some fifty years. Miss ffrench, calling the story unreliable; refers to Ouida as the legendary victim ; but there are those who say that it must have been the other way round, since Mrs. Ross was a. gentle- woman, and gentlewomen (unlike gentlemen) do not horsewhip their calumniators ; on the other hand, Ouida lacked both physique and (probably) a horsewhip, while Mrs. Ross, born to the saddle, had both. Be that as it may, it is a tale not to be lightly renounced, and one hopes for the best : that Mis: Ram& should, at least once in her life, have been horsewhipped, cannot but be a gratifying thought.
And the more one learns about her, the more gratifying such a thought must be. Even when one has granted what Miss ffrench claims for her—courage, idealism, devotion to causes and to dogs, a certain intelligence, and a luxuriously soaring imagination—she remains a personality revolting beyond most standards, though many authors have pitched the standard pretty high. Miss ffrench grants rather more to her than I am inclined to think she deserves ; " half genius," she calls her, " and half crazy . . . yet equipped with an integrity of ideas that wholly compensated for her wild defects." But her worst defects were less wild than small, mean, and vulgar ; petty snobbery, self-exaltation and lying, vindictive angers, greedy vanity : " she was curious," said Henry James, " in a common, little way." And, unless we use genius to mean exuberant fancy and zest in creation, it is a word too high for this dashing and eager romancer, with her grandiose heroes and heroines, her shallow and indignant moral cries, and her execrable style. Passion and sincere views she had in plenty, biit her thoughts and imaginings were of a meretricious, tawdry commonness, and the characters she created have no existence but as projec. dons of, or statements by, herself.
As an essay in sympathetic psychological presentment, Miss ffrench's study is admirable. She points out that Ouida's excessive vanity was not complacency or smugness_ (she was too sensitive for these) but a pathological condition,.and her outrageous outbursts of bombast were caused partly by the consciousness of being derided by the intellectual prigs. Much of her ill temper, again, Miss ffrench attributes to her frustrated passion for and pursuit of the Marchese Stufa—that unhappy affair of which the true version will never be written, now that the actors in it are dead, and only one of them has left a record, stamped with every mark of impassioned self-delusion. Ouida emerges from Miss ffrench's skilful and accurate pencil a vivid. indomitable figure : warped and vanity-crazed, unlikeable and absurd, she was, but full of tough loyalties and fiery, tilting; crusading zeals.
Yet it is by her absurdities that she lives, and will live ; her guardsmen and her high-life are her passport to fame.
Previous page
