Chapter XVII: Part 17

'And this,' said Goring scornfully, 'is what you call governing
Ireland, hanging up your law like a scarecrow in the garden till every
sparrow has learnt to make a jest of it. Your Popery Acts! Well, you
borrowed them from France. The French Catholics did not choose to
keep the Hugonots among them, and recalled the Edict of Nantes. As
they treated the Hugonots, so you said to all the world that you would
treat the Papists. You borrowed from the French the very language of
your Statute, but they are not afraid to stand by their law, and you
are afraid to stand by yours. You let the people laugh at it, and in
teaching them to despise one law, you teach them to despise all
laws--God's and man's alike. I cannot say how it will end; but I can
tell you this, that you are training up a race with the education
which you are giving them that will astonish mankind by and bye.'

Mr. Froude's resume of the history of Ireland is not without power though it is far from being really accurate. 'The Irish,' he tells us, 'had disowned the facts of life, and the facts of life had proved the strongest.' The English, unable to tolerate anarchy so near their shores, 'consulted the Pope. The Pope gave them leave to interfere, and the Pope had the best of the bargain. For the English brought him in, and the Irish . . . kept him there.' England's first settlers were Norman nobles. They became more Irish than the Irish, and England found herself in this difficulty: 'To abandon Ireland would be discreditable, to rule it as a province would be contrary to English traditions.' She then 'tried to rule by dividing,' and failed. The Pope was too strong for her. At last she made her great political discovery. What Ireland wanted was evidently an entirely new population 'of the same race and the same religion as her own.' The new policy was partly carried out:

Elizabeth first and then James and then Cromwell replanted the Island,
introducing English, Scots, Hugonots, Flemings, Dutch, tens of
thousands of families of vigorous and earnest Protestants, who brought
their industries along with them. Twice the Irish . . . tried . . .
to drive out this new element . . . They failed. . . . [But] England
. . . had no sooner accomplished her long task than she set herself to
work to spoil it again. She destroyed the industries of her colonists
by her trade laws. She set the Bishops to rob them of their religion.
. . . [As for the gentry,] The purpose for which they had been
introduced into Ireland was unfulfilled. They were but alien
intruders, who did nothing, who were allowed to do nothing. The time
would come when an exasperated population would demand that the land
should be given back to them, and England would then, perhaps, throw
the gentry to the wolves, in the hope of a momentary peace. But her
own turn would follow. She would be face to face with the old
problem, either to make a new conquest or to retire with disgrace.

Political disquisitions of this kind, and prophecies after the event, are found all through Mr. Froude's book, and on almost every second page we come across aphorisms on the Irish character, on the teachings of Irish history and on the nature of England's mode of government. Some of them represent Mr. Froude's own views, others are entirely dramatic and introduced for the purpose of characterisation. We append some specimens. As epigrams they are not very felicitous, but they are interesting from some points of view.

Irish Society grew up in happy recklessness. Insecurity added zest to
enjoyment.

We Irish must either laugh or cry, and if we went in for crying, we
should all hang ourselves.

Too close a union with the Irish had produced degeneracy both of
character and creed in all the settlements of English.

We age quickly in Ireland with the whiskey and the broken heads.

The Irish leaders cannot fight. They can make the country
ungovernable, and keep an English army occupied in watching them.

No nation can ever achieve a liberty that will not be a curse to them,
except by arms in the field.

[The Irish] are taught from their cradles that English rule is the
cause of all their miseries. They were as ill off under their own
chiefs; but they would bear from their natural leaders what they will
not bear from us, and if we have not made their lot more wretched we
have not made it any better.

'Patriotism? Yes! Patriotism of the Hibernian order. The country
has been badly treated, and is poor and miserable. This is the
patriot's stock in trade. Does he want it mended? Not he. His own
occupation would be gone.'

Irish corruption is the twin-brother of Irish eloquence.

England will not let us break the heads of our scoundrels; she will
not break them herself; we are a free country, and must take the
consequences.

The functions of the Anglo-Irish Government were to do what ought not
to be done, and to leave undone what ought to be done.

The Irish race have always been noisy, useless and ineffectual. They
have produced nothing, they have done nothing, which it is possible to
admire. What they are, that they have always been, and the only hope
for them is that their ridiculous Irish nationality should be buried
and forgotten.

The Irish are the best actors in the world.

Order is an exotic in Ireland. It has been imported from England, but
it will not grow. It suits neither soil, nor climate. If the English
wanted order in Ireland, they should have left none of us alive.

When ruling powers are unjust, nature reasserts her rights.

Even anarchy has its advantages.

Nature keeps an accurate account. . . . The longer a bill is left
unpaid, the heavier the accumulation of interest.

You cannot live in Ireland without breaking laws on one side or
another. Pecca fortiter, therefore, as . . . Luther said.

The animal spirits of the Irish remained when all else was gone, and
if there was no purpose in their lives, they could at least enjoy
themselves.

The Irish peasants can make the country hot for the Protestant
gentleman, but that is all they are fit for.

As we said before, if Mr. Froude intended his book to help the Tory Government to solve the Irish question he has entirely missed his aim. The Ireland of which he writes has disappeared. As a record, however, of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own wish, his book is not without value. It is dull, but dull books are very popular at present; and as people have grown a little tired of talking about Robert Elsmere, they will probably take to discussing The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. There are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people. There are others who will remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries, and that we have now to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but in the New.

The Two Chiefs of Dunboy: or An Irish Romance of the Last Century. By J. A. Froude. (Longmans, Green and Co.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES--V

(Woman's World, May 1889.)

Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald's volume of poems, Venetia Victrix, is dedicated to Mr. Robert Browning, and in the poem that gives its title to the book it is not difficult to see traces of Mr. Browning's influence. Venetia Victrix is a powerful psychological study of a man's soul, a vivid presentation of a terrible, fiery-coloured moment in a marred and incomplete life. It is sometimes complex and intricate in expression, but then the subject itself is intricate and complex. Plastic simplicity of outline may render for us the visible aspect of life; it is different when we come to deal with those secrets which self-consciousness alone contains, and which self-consciousness itself can but half reveal. Action takes place in the sunlight, but the soul works in the dark.

There is something curiously interesting in the marked tendency of modern poetry to become obscure. Many critics, writing with their eyes fixed on the masterpieces of past literature, have ascribed this tendency to wilfulness and to affectation. Its origin is rather to be found in the complexity of the new problems, and in the fact that self-consciousness is not yet adequate to explain the contents of the Ego. In Mr. Browning's poems, as in life itself which has suggested, or rather necessitated, the new method, thought seems to proceed not on logical lines, but on lines of passion. The unity of the individual is being expressed through its inconsistencies and its contradictions. In a strange twilight man is seeking for himself, and when he has found his own image, he cannot understand it. Objective forms of art, such as sculpture and the drama, sufficed one for the perfect presentation of life; they can no longer so suffice.

The central motive of Miss Caroline Fitz Gerald's psychological poem is the study of a man who to do a noble action wrecks his own soul, sells it to evil, and to the spirit of evil. Many martyrs have for a great cause sacrificed their physical life; the sacrifice of the spiritual life has a more poignant and a more tragic note. The story is supposed to be told by a French doctor, sitting at his window in Paris one evening:

How far off Venice seems to-night! How dim
The still-remembered sunsets, with the rim
Of gold round the stone haloes, where they stand,
Those carven saints, and look towards the land,
Right Westward, perched on high, with palm in hand,
Completing the peaked church-front. Oh how clear
And dark against the evening splendour! Steer
Between the graveyard island and the quay,
Where North-winds dash the spray on Venice;--see
The rosy light behind dark dome and tower,
Or gaunt smoke-laden chimney;--mark the power
Of Nature's gentleness, in rise or fall
Of interlinked beauty, to recall
Earth's majesty in desecration's place,
Lending yon grimy pile that dream-like face
Of evening beauty;--note yon rugged cloud,
Red-rimmed and heavy, drooping like a shroud
Over Murano in the dying day.
I see it now as then--so far away!

The face of a boy in the street catches his eye. He seems to see in it some likeness to a dead friend. He begins to think, and at last remembers a hospital ward in Venice:

'Twas an April day,
The year Napoleon's troops took Venice--say
The twenty-fifth of April. All alone
Walking the ward, I heard a sick man moan,
In tones so piteous, as his heart would break:
'Lost, lost, and lost again--for Venice' sake!'
I turned. There lay a man no longer young,
Wasted with fever. I had marked, none hung
About his bed, as friends, with tenderness,
And, when the priest went by, he spared to bless,
Glancing perplexed--perhaps mere sullenness.
I stopped and questioned: 'What is lost, my friend?'
'My soul is lost, and now draws near the end.
My soul is surely lost. Send me no priest!
They sing and solemnise the marriage feast
Of man's salvation in the house of love,
And I in Hell, and God in Heaven above,
And Venice safe and fair on earth between--
No love of mine--mere service--for my Queen.'

He was a seaman, and the tale he tells the doctor before he dies is strange and not a little terrible. Wild rage against a foster-brother who had bitterly wronged him, and who was one of the ten rulers over Venice, drives him to make a mad oath that on the day when he does anything for his country's good he will give his soul to Satan. That night he sails for Dalmatia, and as he is keeping the watch, he sees a phantom boat with seven fiends sailing to Venice:

I heard the fiends' shrill cry: 'For Venice' good!
Rival thine ancient foe in gratitude,
Then come and make thy home with us in Hell!'
I knew it must be so. I knew the spell
Of Satan on my soul. I felt the power
Granted by God to serve Him one last hour,
Then fall for ever as the curse had wrought.
I climbed aloft. My brain had grown one thought,
One hope, one purpose. And I heard the hiss
Of raging disappointment, loth to miss
Its prey--I heard the lapping of the flame,
That through the blanched figures went and came,
Darting in frenzy to the devils' yell.
I set that cross on high, and cried: 'To Hell
My soul for ever, and my deed to God!
Once Venice guarded safe, let this vile clod
Drift where fate will.'
And then (the hideous laugh
Of fiends in full possession, keen to quaff
The wine of one new soul not weak with tears,
Pealing like ruinous thunder in mine ears)
I fell, and heard no more. The pale day broke
Through lazar-windows, when once more I woke,
Remembering I might no more dare to pray.

The idea of the story is extremely powerful, and Venetia Victrix is certainly the best poem in the volume--better than Ophelion, which is vague, and than A Friar's Story, which is pretty but ordinary. It shows that we have in Miss Fitz Gerald a new singer of considerable ability and vigour of mind, and it serves to remind us of the splendid dramatic possibilities extant in life, which are ready for poetry, and unsuitable for the stage. What is really dramatic is not necessarily that which is fitting for presentation in a theatre. The theatre is an accident of the dramatic form. It is not essential to it. We have been deluded by the name of action. To think is to act.

Of the shorter poems collected here, this Hymn to Persephone is, perhaps, the best:

Oh, fill my cup, Persephone,
With dim red wine of Spring,
And drop therein a faded leaf
Plucked from the Autumn's bearded sheaf,
Whence, dread one, I may quaff to thee,
While all the woodlands ring.

Oh, fill my heart, Persephone,
With thine immortal pain,
That lingers round the willow bowers
In memories of old happy hours,
When thou didst wander fair and free
O'er Enna's blooming plain.

Oh, fill my soul, Persephone,
With music all thine own!
Teach me some song thy childhood knew,
Lisped in the meadow's morning dew,
Or chant on this high windy lea,
Thy godhead's ceaseless moan.

But this Venetian Song also has a good deal of charm:

Leaning between carved stone and stone,
As glossy birds peer from a nest
Scooped in the crumbling trunk where rest
Their freckled eggs, I pause alone
And linger in the light awhile,
Waiting for joy to come to me--
Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
Only the sunlight on the sea.

I gaze--then turn and ply my loom,
Or broider blossoms close beside;
The morning world lies warm and wide,
But here is dim, cool silent gloom,
Gold crust and crimson velvet pile,
And not one face to smile on me--
Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
Only the sunlight on the sea.

Over the world the splendours break
Of morning light and noontide glow,
And when the broad red sun sinks low,
And in the wave long shadows shake,
Youths, maidens, glad with song and wile,
Glide and are gone, and leave with me
Only the dawn beyond yon isle,
Only the sunlight on the sea.

Darwinism and Politics, by Mr. David Ritchie, of Jesus College, Oxford, contains some very interesting speculations on the position and the future of women in the modern State. The one objection to the equality of the sexes that he considers deserves serious attention is that made by Sir James Stephen in his clever attack on John Stuart Mill. Sir James Stephen points out in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, that women may suffer more than they have done, if plunged into a nominally equal but really unequal contest in the already overcrowded labour market. Mr. Ritchie answers that, while the conclusion usually drawn from this argument is a sentimental reaction in favour of the old family ideal, as, for instance, in Mr. Besant's books, there is another alternative, and that is the resettling of the labour question. 'The elevation of the status of women and the regulation of the conditions of labour are ultimately,' he says, 'inseparable questions. On the basis of individualism, I cannot see how it is possible to answer the objections of Sir James Stephen.' Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his Sociology, expresses his fear that women, if admitted now to political life, might do mischief by introducing the ethics of the family into the State. 'Under the ethics of the family the greatest benefits must be given where the merits are smallest; under the ethics of the State the benefits must be proportioned to the merits.' In answer to this, Mr. Ritchie asks whether in any society we have ever seen people so get benefits in proportion to their merits, and protests against Mr. Spencer's separation of the ethics of the family from those of the State. If something is right in a family, it is difficult to see why it is therefore, without any further reason, wrong in the State. If the participation of women in politics means that as a good family educates all its members, so must a good State, what better issue could there be? The family ideal of the State may be difficult of attainment, but as an ideal it is better than the policeman theory. It would mean the moralisation of politics. The cultivation of separate sorts of virtues and separate ideals of duty in men and women has led to the whole social fabric being weaker and unhealthier than it need be. As for the objection that in countries where it is considered necessary to have compulsory military service for all men, it would be unjust and inexpedient that women should have a voice in political matters, Mr. Ritchie meets it, or tries to meet it, by proposing that all women physically fitted for such purpose should be compelled to undergo training as nurses, and should be liable to be called upon to serve as nurses in time of war. This training, he remarks, 'would be more useful to them and to the community in time of peace than his military training is to the peasant or artisan.' Mr. Ritchie's little book is extremely suggestive, and full of valuable ideas for the philosophic student of sociology.

* * * * *

Mr. Alan Cole's lecture on Irish lace, delivered recently before the Society of Arts, contains some extremely useful suggestions as to the best method of securing an immediate connection between the art schools of a country and the country's ordinary manufactures. In 1883, Mr. Cole was deputed by the Department of Science and Art to lecture at Cork and at Limerick on the subject of lace-making, and to give a history of its rise and development in other countries, as well as a review of the many kinds of ornamental patterns used from the sixteenth century to modern times. In order to make these lectures of practical value, Mr. Cole placed typical specimens of Irish laces beside Italian, Flemish, and French laces, which seem to be the prototypes of the lace of Ireland. The public interest was immediately aroused. Some of the newspapers stoutly maintained that the ornament and patterns of Irish lace were of such a national character that it was wrong to asperse them on that score. Others took a different view, and came to the conclusion that Irish lace could be vastly improved in all respects, if some systematic action could be taken to induce the lace-makers to work from more intelligently composed patterns than those in general use. There was a consensus of opinion that the workmanship of Irish laces was good, and that it could be applied to better materials than those ordinarily used, and that its methods were suited to render a greater variety of patterns than those usually attempted.

These and other circumstances seem to have prompted the promoters of the Cork Exhibition to further efforts in the cause of lace-making. Towards the close of the year 1883 they made fresh representations to Government, and inquired what forms of State assistance could be given. A number of convents in the neighbourhood of Cork was engaged in giving instruction to children under their care in lace and crochet making. At some, rooms were allotted for the use of grown-up workers who made laces under the supervision of the nuns. These convents obviously were centres where experiments in reform could be tried. The convents, however, lacked instruction in the designing of patterns for laces. An excellent School of Art was at work at Cork, but the students there had not been instructed in specially designing for lace. If the convents with their workrooms could be brought into relation with this School of Art, it seemed possible that something of a serious character might be done to benefit lace-makers, and also to open up a new field in ornamental design for the students at the School of Art. The rules of the Department of Science and Art were found to be adapted to aid in meeting such wants as those sketched out by the promoters at Cork. As the nuns in the different lace-making convents had not been able to attend in Cork to hear Mr. Cole's lectures, they asked that he should visit them and repeat them at the convents. This Mr. Cole did early in 1884, the masters of the local Schools of Art accompanying him on his visits. Negotiations were forthwith opened for connecting the convents with the art schools. By the end of 1885 some six or seven different lace-making convents had placed themselves in connection with Schools of Art at Cork and Waterford. These convents were attended not only by the nuns but by outside pupils also; and, at the request of the convents, Mr. Cole has visited them twice a year, lecturing and giving advice upon designs for lace. The composition of new patterns for lace was attempted, and old patterns which had degenerated were revised and redrawn for the use of the workers connected with the convents. There are now twelve convents, Mr. Cole tells us, where instruction in drawing and in the composition of patterns is given, and some of the students have won some of the higher prizes offered by the Department of Science and Art for designing lace- patterns.

The Cork School of Art then acquired a collection of finely-patterned old laces, selections from which are freely circulated through the different convents connected with that school. They have also the privilege of borrowing similar specimens of old lace from the South Kensington Museum. So successful has been the system of education pursued by Mr. Brennan, the head-master of the Cork School of Art, that two female students of his school last year gained the gold and silver medals for their designs for laces and crochets at the national competition which annually takes place in London between all the Schools of Art in the United Kingdom. As for the many lace-makers who were not connected either with the convents or with the art schools, in order to assist them, a committee of ladies and gentlemen interested in Irish lace-making raised subscriptions, and offered prizes to be competed for by designers generally. The best designs were then placed out with lace-makers, and carried into execution. It is, of course, often said that the proper person to make the design is the lace-maker. Mr. Cole, however, points out that from the sixteenth century forward the patterns for ornamental laces have always been designed by decorative artists having knowledge of the composition of ornament, and of the materials for which they were called upon to design. Lace pattern books were published in considerable quantity in Italy, France and Germany during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and from these the lace-makers worked. Many lace- makers would, no doubt, derive benefit from practice in drawing, in discriminating between well and badly shaped forms. But the skill they are primarily required to show and to develop is one of fine fingers in reproducing beautiful forms in threads. The conception, arrangement, and drawing of beautiful forms for a design, have to be undertaken by decorative artists acquainted with the limitations of those materials and methods which the ultimate expression of the design involves.

This lovely Irish art of lace-making is very much indebted to Mr. Cole, who has really re-created it, given it new life, and shown it the true artistic lines on which to progress. Hardly 20,000 pounds a year is spent by England upon Irish laces, and almost all of this goes upon the cheaper and commoner kinds. And yet, as Mr. Cole points out, it is possible to produce Irish laces of as high artistic quality as almost any foreign laces. The Queen, Lady Londonderry, Lady Dorothy Nevill, Mrs. Alfred Morrison, and others, have done much to encourage the Irish workers, and it rests largely with the ladies of England whether this beautiful art lives or dies. The real good of a piece of lace, says Mr. Ruskin, is 'that it should show, first, that the designer of it had a pretty fancy; next, that the maker of it had fine fingers; lastly, that the wearer of it has worthiness or dignity enough to obtain what is difficult to obtain, and common-sense enough not to wear it on all occasions.'

* * * * *

The High-Caste Hindu Woman is an interesting book. It is from the pen of the Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati, and the introduction is written by Miss Rachel Bodley, M.D., the Dean of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. The story of the parentage of this learned lady is very curious. A certain Hindu, being on a religious pilgrimage with his family, which consisted of his wife and two daughters, one nine and the other seven years of age, stopped in a town to rest for a day or two. One morning the Hindu was bathing in the sacred river Godavari, near the town, when he saw a fine-looking man coming there to bathe also. After the ablution and the morning prayers were over, the father inquired of the stranger who he was and whence he came. On learning his caste, and clan, and dwelling-place, and also that he was a widower, he offered him his little daughter of nine in marriage. All things were settled in an hour or so; next day the marriage was concluded, and the little girl placed in the possession of the stranger, who took her nearly nine hundred miles away from her home, and gave her into the charge of his mother. The stranger was the learned Ananta Shastri, a Brahman pundit, who had very advanced views on the subject of woman's education, and he determined that he would teach his girl-wife Sanskrit, and give her the intellectual culture that had been always denied to women in India. Their daughter was the Pundita Ramabai, who, after the death of her parents, travelled all over India advocating the cause of female education, and to whom seems to be due the first suggestion for the establishment of the profession of women doctors. In 1866, Miss Mary Carpenter made a short tour in India for the purpose of finding out some way by which women's condition in that country might be improved. She at once discovered that the chief means by which the desired end could be accomplished was by furnishing women teachers for the Hindu Zenanas. She suggested that the British Government should establish normal schools for training women teachers, and that scholarships should be awarded to girls in order to prolong their school-going period, and to assist indigent women who would otherwise be unable to pursue their studies.

In response to Miss Carpenter's appeal, upon her return to England, the English Government founded several schools for women in India, and a few 'Mary Carpenter Scholarships' were endowed by benevolent persons. These schools were open to women of every caste; but while they have undoubtedly been of use, they have not realised the hopes of their founders, chiefly through the impossibility of keeping caste rules in them. Ramabai, in a very eloquent chapter, proposes to solve the problem in a different way. Her suggestion is that houses should be opened for the young and high-caste child-widows, where they can take shelter without the fear of losing their caste, or of being disturbed in their religious belief, and where they may have entire freedom of action as regards caste rules. The whole account given by the Pundita of the life of the high-caste Hindu lady is full of suggestion for the social reformer and the student of progress, and her book, which is wonderfully well written, is likely to produce a radical change in the educational schemes that at present prevail in India.

(1) Venetia Victrix. By Caroline Fitz Gerald. (Macmillan and Co.)

(2) Darwinism and Politics. By David Ritchie, Jesus College, Oxford. (Swan Sonnenschein and Co.)

(3) The High-Caste Hindu Woman. By the Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati. (Bell and Sons.)

OUIDA'S NEW NOVEL

(Pall Mall Gazette, May 17, 1889.)

Ouida is the last of the romantics. She belongs to the school of Bulwer Lytton and George Sand, though she may lack the learning of the one and the sincerity of the other. She tries to make passion, imagination, and poetry part of fiction. She still believes in heroes and in heroines. She is florid and fervent and fanciful. Yet even she, the high priestess of the impossible, is affected by her age. Her last book, Guilderoy as she calls it, is an elaborate psychological study of modern temperaments. For her, it is realistic, and she has certainly caught much of the tone and temper of the society of our day. Her people move with ease and grace and indolence. The book may be described as a study of the peerage from a poetical point of view. Those who are tired of mediocre young curates who have doubts, of serious young ladies who have missions, and of the ordinary figureheads of most of the English fiction of our time, might turn with pleasure, if not with profit, to this amazing romance. It is a resplendent picture of our aristocracy. No expense has been spared in gilding. For the comparatively small sum of 1 pound, 11s. 6d. one is introduced to the best society. The central figures are exaggerated, but the background is admirable. In spite of everything, it gives one a sense of something like life.

What is the story? Well, we must admit that we have a faint suspicion that Ouida has told it to us before. Lord Guilderoy, 'whose name was as old as the days of Knut,' falls madly in love, or fancies that he falls madly in love, with a rustic Perdita, a provincial Artemis who has 'a Gainsborough face, with wide-opened questioning eyes and tumbled auburn hair.' She is poor but well-born, being the only child of Mr. Vernon of Llanarth, a curious recluse, who is half a pedant and half Don Quixote. Guilderoy marries her and, tiring of her shyness, her lack of power to express herself, her want of knowledge of fashionable life, returns to an old passion for a wonderful creature called the Duchess of Soria. Lady Guilderoy becomes ice; the Duchess becomes fire; at the end of the book Guilderoy is a pitiable object. He has to submit to be forgiven by one woman, and to endure to be forgotten by the other. He is thoroughly weak, thoroughly worthless, and the most fascinating person in the whole story. Then there is his sister Lady Sunbury, who is very anxious for Guilderoy to marry, and is quite determined to hate his wife. She is really a capital sketch. Ouida describes her as 'one of those admirably virtuous women who are more likely to turn men away from the paths of virtue than the wickedest of sirens.' She irritates herself, alienates her children, and infuriates her husband:

'You are perfectly right; I know you are always right; I admit you
are; but it is just that which makes you so damnably odious!' said
Lord Sunbury once, in a burst of rage, in his town house, speaking in
such stentorian tones that the people passing up Grosvenor Street
looked up at his open windows, and a crossing-sweeper said to a match-
seller, 'My eye! ain't he giving it to the old gal like blazes.'

The noblest character in the book is Lord Aubrey. As he is not a genius he, naturally, behaves admirably on every occasion. He begins by pitying the neglected Lady Guilderoy, and ends by loving her, but he makes the great renunciation with considerable effect, and, having induced Lady Guilderoy to receive back her husband, he accepts 'a distant and arduous Viceroyalty.' He is Ouida's ideal of the true politician, for Ouida has apparently taken to the study of English politics. A great deal of her book is devoted to political disquisitions. She believes that the proper rulers of a country like ours are the aristocrats. Oligarchy has great fascinations for her. She thinks meanly of the people and adores the House of Lords and Lord Salisbury. Here are some of her views. We will not call them ideas:

The House of Lords wants nothing of the nation, and therefore it is
the only candid and disinterested guardian of the people's needs and
resources. It has never withstood the real desire of the country: it
has only stood between the country and its impetuous and evanescent
follies.

A democracy cannot understand honour; how should it? The Caucus is
chiefly made up of men who sand their sugar, put alum in their bread,
forge bayonets and girders which bend like willow-wands, send bad
calico to India, and insure vessels at Lloyd's which they know will go
to the bottom before they have been ten days at sea.

Lord Salisbury has often been accused of arrogance; people have never
seen that what they mistook for arrogance was the natural, candid
consciousness of a great noble that he is more capable of leading the
country than most men composing it would be.

Democracy, after having made everything supremely hideous and
uncomfortable for everybody, always ends by clinging to the coat tails
of some successful general.

The prosperous politician may be honest, but his honesty is at best a
questionable quality. The moment that a thing is a metier, it is
wholly absurd to talk about any disinterestedness in the pursuit of
it. To the professional politician national affairs are a manufacture
into which he puts his audacity and his time, and out of which he
expects to make so much percentage for his lifetime.

There is too great a tendency to govern the world by noise.

Ouida's aphorisms on women, love, and modern society are somewhat more characteristic:

Women speak as though the heart were to be treated at will like a
stone, or a bath.
Half the passions of men die early, because they are expected to be
eternal.
It is the folly of life that lends charm to it.
What is the cause of half the misery of women? That their love is so
much more tenacious than the man's: it grows stronger as his grows
weaker.
To endure the country in England for long, one must have the rusticity
of Wordsworth's mind, and boots and stockings as homely.
It is because men feel the necessity to explain that they drop into
the habit of saying what is not true. Wise is the woman who never
insists on an explanation.
Love can make its own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot.
Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous; often even
polyandrous.
Moralists say that a soul should resist passion. They might as well
say that a house should resist an earthquake.
The whole world is just now on its knees before the poorer classes:
all the cardinal virtues are taken for granted in them, and it is only
property of any kind which is the sinner.
Men are not merciful to women's tears as a rule; and when it is a
woman belonging to them who weeps, they only go out, and slam the door
behind them.
Men always consider women unjust to them, when they fail to deify
their weaknesses.
No passion, once broken, will ever bear renewal.
Feeling loses its force and its delicacy if we put it under the
microscope too often.
Anything which is not flattery seems injustice to a woman.
When society is aware that you think it a flock of geese, it revenges
itself by hissing loudly behind your back.

Of descriptions of scenery and art we have, of course, a large number, and it is impossible not to recognise the touch of the real Ouida manner in the following:

It was an old palace: lofty, spacious, magnificent, and dull. Busts
of dusky yellow marble, weird bronzes stretching out gaunt arms into
the darkness, ivories brown with age, worn brocades with gold threads
gleaming in them, and tapestries with strange and pallid figures of
dead gods, were all half revealed and half obscured in the twilight.
As he moved through them, a figure which looked almost as pale as the
Adonis of the tapestry and was erect and motionless like the statue of
the wounded Love, came before his sight out of the darkness. It was
that of Gladys.

It is a manner full of exaggeration and overemphasis, but with some remarkable rhetorical qualities and a good deal of colour. Ouida is fond of airing a smattering of culture, but she has a certain intrinsic insight into things and, though she is rarely true, she is never dull. Guilderoy, with all its faults, which are great, and its absurdities, which are greater, is a book to be read.

Guilderoy. By Ouida. (Chatto and Windus.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES--VI

(Woman's World, June 1889.)

A writer in the Quarterly Review for January 1874 says:

No literary event since the war has excited anything like such a
sensation in Paris as the publication of the Lettres a une Inconnue.
Even politics became a secondary consideration for the hour, and
academicians or deputies of opposite parties might be seen eagerly
accosting each other in the Chamber or the street to inquire who this
fascinating and perplexing 'unknown' could be. The statement in the
Revue des Deux Mondes that she was an Englishwoman, moving in
brilliant society, was not supported by evidence; and M. Blanchard,
the painter, from whom the publisher received the manuscripts, died
most provokingly at the very commencement of the inquiry, and made no
sign. Some intimate friends of Merimee, rendered incredulous by
wounded self-love at not having been admitted to his confidence,
insisted that there was no secret to tell; their hypothesis being that
the Inconnue was a myth, and the letters a romance, with which some
petty details of actual life had been interwoven to keep up the
mystification.

But an artist like Merimee would not have left his work in so unformed a state, so defaced by repetitions, or with such a want of proportion between the parts. The Inconnue was undoubtedly a real person, and her letters in answer to those of Merimee have just been published by Messrs. Macmillan under the title of An Author's Love.

Her letters? Well, they are such letters as she might have written. 'By the tideless sea at Cannes on a summer day,' says their anonymous author, 'I had fallen asleep, and the plashing of the waves upon the shore had doubtless made me dream. When I awoke the yellow paper-covered volumes of Prosper Merimee's Lettres a une Inconnue lay beside me; I had been reading the book before I fell asleep, but the answers--had they ever been written, or had I only dreamed?' The invention of the love-letters of a curious and unknown personality, the heroine of one of the great literary flirtations of our age, was a clever idea, and certainly the author has carried out his scheme with wonderful success; with such success indeed that it is said that one of our statesmen, whose name occurs more than once in the volume, was for a moment completely taken in by what is really a jeu-d'esprit, the first serious joke perpetrated by Messrs. Macmillan in their publishing capacity. Perhaps it is too much to call it a joke. It is a fine, delicate piece of fiction, an imaginative attempt to complete a real romance. As we had the letters of the academic Romeo, it was obviously right that we should pretend we had the answers of the clever and somewhat mondaine Juliet. Or is it Juliet herself, in her little Paris boudoir, looking over these two volumes with a sad, cynical smile? Well, to be put into fiction is always a tribute to one's reality.

As for extracts from these fascinating forgeries, the letters should be read in conjunction with those of Merimee himself. It is difficult to judge of them by samples. We find the Inconnue first in London, probably in 1840.

Little (she writes) can you imagine the storm of indignation you
aroused in me by your remark that your feelings for me were those
suitable for a fourteen-year-old niece. Merci. Anything less like a
respectable uncle than yourself I cannot well imagine. The role would
never suit you, believe me, so do not try it.

Now in return for your story of the phlegmatic musical animal who
called forth such stormy devotion in a female breast, and who, himself
cold and indifferent, was loved to the extent of a watery grave being
sought by his inamorata as solace for his indifference, let _me_ ask
the question why the women who torment men with their uncertain
tempers, drive them wild with jealousy, laugh contemptuously at their
humble entreaties, and fling their money to the winds, have twice the
hold upon their affections that the patient, long-suffering, domestic,
frugal Griseldas have, whose existences are one long penance of
unsuccessful efforts to please? Answer this comprehensively, and you
will have solved a riddle which has puzzled women since Eve asked
questions in Paradise.

Later on she writes:

Why should all natures be alike? It would make the old saws useless
if they were, and deprive us of one of the truest of them all,
'Variety is the spice of life.' How terribly monotonous it would be
if all the flowers were roses, every woman a queen, and each man a
philosopher. My private opinion is that it takes at least six men
such as one meets every day to make one really valuable one. I like
so many men for one particular quality which they possess, and so few
men for all. Comprenez-vous?

In another place:

Is it not a trifle dangerous, this experiment we are trying of a
friendship in pen and ink and paper? A letter. What thing on earth
more dangerous to confide in? Written at blood heat, it may reach its
destination when the recipient's mental thermometer counts zero, and
the burning words and thrilling sentences may turn to ice and be
congealed as they are read. . . . A letter; the most uncertain thing
in a world of uncertainties, the best or the worst thing devised by
mortals.

Again:

Surely it was for you, mon cher, that the description given of a
friend of mine was originally intended. He is a trifle cynical, this
friend, and decidedly pessimistic, and of him it was reported that he
never believed in anything until he saw it, and then he was convinced
that it was an optical illusion. The accuracy of the description
struck me.

They seem to have loved each other best when they were parted.

I think I cannot bear it much longer, this incessant quarrelling when
we meet, and your unkindness during the short time that you are with
me. Why not let it all end? it would be better for both of us. I do
not love you less when I write these words; if you could know the
sadness which they echo in my heart you would believe this. No, I
think I love you more, but I cannot understand you. As you have often
said, our natures must be very different, entirely different; if so,
what is this curious bond between them? To me you seem possessed with
some strange restlessness and morbid melancholy which utterly spoils
your life, and in return you never see me without overwhelming me with
reproaches, if not for one thing, for another. I tell you I cannot,
will not, bear it longer. If you love me, then in God's name cease
tormenting me as well as yourself with these wretched doubts and
questionings and complaints. I have been ill, seriously ill, and
there is nothing to account for my illness save the misery of this
apparently hopeless state of things existing between us. You have
made me weep bitter tears of alternate self-reproach and indignation,
and finally of complete miserable bewilderment as to this unhappy
condition of affairs. Believe me, tears like these are not good to
mingle with love, they are too bitter, too scorching, they blister
love's wings and fall too heavily on love's heart. I feel worn out
with a dreary sort of hopelessness; if you know a cure for pain like
this send it to me quickly.

Yet, in the very next letter, she says to him:

Although I said good-bye to you less than an hour ago, I cannot
refrain from writing to tell you that a happy calm which seems to
penetrate my whole being seems also to have wiped out all remembrance
of the misery and unhappiness which has overwhelmed me lately. Why
cannot it always be so, or would life perhaps be then too blessed, too
wholly happy for it to be life? I know that you are free to-night,
will you not write to me, that the first words my eyes fall upon to-
morrow shall prove that to-day has not been a dream? Yes, write to
me.

The letter that immediately follows is one of six words only:

Let me dream--Let me dream.

In the following there are interesting touches of actuality:

Did you ever try a cup of tea (the national beverage, by the way) at
an English railway station? If you have not, I would advise you, as a
friend, to continue to abstain! The names of the American drinks are
rather against them, the straws are, I think, about the best part of
them. You do not tell me what you think of Mr. Disraeli. I once met
him at a ball at the Duke of Sutherland's in the long picture gallery
of Stafford House. I was walking with Lord Shrewsbury, and without a
word of warning he stopped and introduced him, mentioning with
reckless mendacity that I had read every book he had written and
admired them all, then he coolly walked off and left me standing face
to face with the great statesman. He talked to me for some time, and
I studied him carefully. I should say he was a man with one steady
aim: endless patience, untiring perseverance, iron concentration;
marking out one straight line before him so unbending that despite
themselves men stand aside as it is drawn straightly and steadily on.
A man who believes that determination brings strength, strength brings
endurance, and endurance brings success. You know how often in his
novels he speaks of the influence of women, socially, morally, and
politically, yet his manner was the least interested or deferential in
talking that I have ever met with in a man of his class. He certainly
thought this particular woman of singularly small account, or else the
brusque and tactless allusion to his books may perhaps have annoyed
him as it did me; but whatever the cause, when he promptly left me at
the first approach of a mutual acquaintance, I felt distinctly
snubbed. Of the two men, Mr. Gladstone was infinitely more agreeable
in his manner, he left one with the pleasant feeling of measuring a
little higher in cubic inches than one did before, than which I know
no more delightful sensation. A Paris, bientot.

Elsewhere, we find cleverly-written descriptions of life in Italy, in Algiers, at Hombourg, at French boarding-houses; stories about Napoleon III., Guizot, Prince Gortschakoff, Montalembert, and others; political speculations, literary criticisms, and witty social scandal; and everywhere a keen sense of humour, a wonderful power of observation. As reconstructed in these letters, the Inconnue seems to have been not unlike Merimee himself. She had the same restless, unyielding, independent character. Each desired to analyse the other. Each, being a critic, was better fitted for friendship than for love. 'We are so different,' said Merimee once to her, 'that we can hardly understand each other.' But it was because they were so alike that each remained a mystery to the other. Yet they ultimately attained to a high altitude of loyal and faithful friendship, and from a purely literary point of view these fictitious letters give the finishing touch to the strange romance that so stirred Paris fifteen years ago. Perhaps the real letters will be published some day. When they are, how interesting to compare them!

The Bird-Bride, by Graham R. Tomson, is a collection of romantic ballads, delicate sonnets, and metrical studies in foreign fanciful forms. The poem that gives its title to the book is the lament of an Eskimo hunter over the loss of his wife and children.

Years agone, on the flat white strand,
I won my sweet sea-girl:
Wrapped in my coat of the snow-white fur,
I watched the wild birds settle and stir,
The grey gulls gather and whirl.

One, the greatest of all the flock,
Perched on an ice-floe bare,
Called and cried as her heart were broke,
And straight they were changed, that fleet bird-folk,
To women young and fair.

Swift I sprang from my hiding-place
And held the fairest fast;
I held her fast, the sweet, strange thing:
Her comrades skirled, but they all took wing,
And smote me as they passed.

I bore her safe to my warm snow house;
Full sweetly there she smiled;
And yet, whenever the shrill winds blew,
She would beat her long white arms anew,
And her eyes glanced quick and wild.

But I took her to wife, and clothed her warm
With skins of the gleaming seal;
Her wandering glances sank to rest
When she held a babe to her fair, warm breast,
And she loved me dear and leal.

Together we tracked the fox and the seal,
And at her behest I swore
That bird and beast my bow might slay
For meat and for raiment, day by day,
But never a grey gull more.

Famine comes upon the land, and the hunter, forgetting his oath, slays four sea-gulls for food. The bird-wife 'shrilled out in a woful cry,' and taking the plumage of the dead birds, she makes wings for her children and for herself, and flies away with them.

'Babes of mine, of the wild wind's kin,
Feather ye quick, nor stay.
Oh, oho! but the wild winds blow!
Babes of mine, it is time to go:
Up, dear hearts, and away!'

And lo! the grey plumes covered them all,
Shoulder and breast and brow.
I felt the wind of their whirling flight:
Was it sea or sky? was it day or night?
It is always night-time now.

Dear, will you never relent, come back?
I loved you long and true.
O winged white wife, and our children three,
Of the wild wind's kin though you surely be,
Are ye not of my kin too?

Ay, ye once were mine, and, till I forget,
Ye are mine forever and aye,
Mine, wherever your wild wings go,
While shrill winds whistle across the snow
And the skies are blear and grey.