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.