OU I DA: A MEMOIR 
 
 ELIZABETH LEE 
 
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 PR 4528.L47 
 
 Ouida:a •nemoir- 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924013470319 
 
OUIDA: A MEMOIR 
 
PORTRAIT BUST OF OUIDA (iN PLASTER). 
 
 By Giuseppe Norfini. 
 
 (Ill the possession of the artist.) 
 
 Frontispiece- 
 
OUIDA: A MEMOIR 
 
 BY 
 
 ELIZABETH LEE 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 DUFFIELD & COMPANY 
 
 36-38 WEST 37th STREET 
 
/■ 
 
 
 {AH rights reserved') 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 My aim in writing this book has been to set forth a 
 plain statement of the facts of Ouida's life and career. 
 So many apocryphal stories had gathered round the 
 woman and the novelist that it seemed desirable to 
 clear the ground. As far as the material available 
 admitted, I have allowed Ouida to tell her own story, 
 and have intervened only when necessary to secure the 
 clearness and coherence of the narrative. 
 
 The letters which appear in this volume prove Ouida 
 to have been a woman of keen intelligence, marked 
 ability, and indomitable spirit, and in any judgment we 
 may pass on her we must never regard her only as a 
 popular novelist. Ouida hated 
 
 " All wrongdoing that is done 
 Anywhere always underneath the sun " ; 
 
 and at a time when it was less common than it is 
 to-day for a woman to descend into the public arena, 
 and to plead for those who were down-trodden and 
 oppressed, whether human beings or dumb animals, she 
 never hesitated to espouse the cause of the suffering ; 
 moreover, she had the courage of her opinions, although 
 
 5 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 they were rarely on the winning side. She advocated 
 peace, justice to the peasant, apd kindness to animals ; 
 she deplored the desecration of the Tuscan country- 
 side and the vandalism prevailir^g in Italian cities with 
 almost Ruskinian eloquence. To-day, such views are 
 held by most civilized men and women. In congratu- 
 lating ourselves on these improved conditions, let us 
 not forget to honour the pioneers. 
 
 Again, whatever be our estimate of Ouida's position 
 and influence as a writer, it is clear that in assimilating 
 and reproducing the spirit and charm of Italy as she 
 does in her best novels, she deserves a high place 
 among writers of fiction, and many who, following her, 
 derive their success from the local colour of the scenes 
 amid which the persons of their stories live and move, 
 owe something to Ouida's initiative and skill. As a 
 writer of short stories Ouida shows herself a true artist, 
 and as a critic of books and men reveals independence 
 of thought and judgment. 
 
 My information has been derived from many and 
 various quarters, and I desire to express here most 
 cordial thanks to all who have so kindly and readily 
 rendered me assistance. 
 
 Special thanks are due to Mr. Fisher Unwin, with 
 whom the idea of the memoir originated. After 
 reading my article on Ouida in the second Supplement 
 of the Dictionary of National "Biography, he suggested 
 to me to write a more extended biography. He has, 
 in addition, given me valuable advice and assistance in 
 
 6 
 
Prefatory Note 
 
 regard to the collecting of material, and permitted the 
 printing of extracts from his own correspondence with 
 Ouida. 
 
 I have also specially to thank Baron Tauchnitz for 
 permission to print generous extracts from the letters ' 
 that passed between Ouida and his firm during the 
 major period of her life,^ and for his ready assistance in 
 other ways during the preparation of the memoir. 
 
 To Mr. Montgomery Carmichael, British Consul at 
 Leghorn, who by reason of his office came much into 
 contact with Ouida during the latter years of her life, 
 special thanks are likewise due both for information 
 and for advice. 
 
 It is further my pleasant duty to offer sincere thanks 
 to Ouida's relatives, connections, and early friends, 
 Miss M. E. Mathias, Mrs. Francis Green, Miss Lock- 
 wood, Mrs. Charlotte Hunter, and Commander Claud 
 Harding for information about the early life, and for 
 the portrait of Mme. Rame ; to Mrs. Callander of 
 Ardinglas for information about Florentine society in 
 the seventies and early eighties of last century, and for 
 personal reminiscences of Ouida ; to Mr. Herbert 
 Danyell-Tassinari (Herbert Dansey) for personal re- 
 miniscences, and for permission to print extracts from 
 Ouida's correspondence with the Tassinari family and 
 to reproduce Captain Danyell's drawings of the Villa 
 
 ' Until 1892 the letters are addressed to his father ; after that 
 date they are addressed to himself. 
 * 1865 to 1907. 
 
 7 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Farinola and a drawing by Ouidai; to Mr. Lionel Robin- 
 son for personal reminiscences of Ouida in London and 
 Florence ; to Earl Curzon of Kedleston, the Right Hon. 
 Sir Rennell Rodd, British Ambassador at Rome, Wal- 
 burga, Lady Paget, Visconde George de Sarmento, Mr. 
 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, 
 Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Mr. 
 G. Milner-Gibson-CuUum, Vernon Lee, Countess 
 Baldelli, Miss Millais, Mrs. H. C. Huntington, Mr. 
 S. M. Ellis, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. H. S. Salt, 
 Mr. Henry James, Mr. Ralph Nevill, Mr. A. M. S. 
 Methuen, Mr. Clement Shorter, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, 
 Mr. A. L. WoodroiFe, Miss Bella Duffy, Miss Maria 
 Grant, Mrs. Fisher Unwin, Miss Julian Young, and 
 Mrs. Conway Thornton for general information, or 
 for permission to print letters and poems or to re- 
 produce portraits and other illustrations. 
 
 ELIZABETH LEE. 
 Kensington, January, 191 4. 
 
 ' See p. 115. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Prefatory Note 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Childhood and Girlhood {1839-185 7) 
 
 II. Life in London (1857-187 i) . 
 
 III. First Years in Florence (1871-1878) 
 
 IV. Later Years in Florence (1879-1894) 
 V. Lucca (1894-1903) 
 
 VI. Last Years and Death (1904- 1908) 
 VII. OuiDA AS Novelist 
 VIII. OuiDA AS Critic 
 
 IX. OuiDA AS Humanitarian 
 Reformer . 
 
 Bibliography . 
 
 Index . 
 
 AND 
 
 Social 
 
 PAGE 
 
 5 
 
 13 
 29 
 61 
 
 lOI 
 
 153 
 199 
 
 239 
 
 277 
 
 301 
 
 329 
 331 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PORTRAIT BUST OF OUIDA . . . Frontispiece 
 
 By Giuseppe Norfini (in the possession of the artist) 
 
 TO FACE PAGE 
 
 FREIHERR VON TAUCHNITZ (1816-1895) . . 36 
 
 FREIHERR CHRISTIAN KARL BERNHARD VON TAUCHNITZ 39 
 
 From a painting hy Vilma ParLaghy 
 
 VILLA FARINOLA . . . . -74 
 
 From a pencil draiving hy Arthur Danyell 
 
 VILLA FARINOLA : THE BILLIARD-ROOM . 76 
 
 From a pencil draiving by Arthur Danyell 
 
 VILLA FARINOLA : THE DOGs' CEMETERY . . 80 
 
 From a pencil draiving hy Arthur Danyell 
 
 OUIDA IN 1874 . . . . -89 
 
 Photograph by Adolphe Beau 
 
 OUIDA IN 1878 . ... . . -95 
 
 From a crayon draiving by Alice Danyell 
 
 A PEN DRAWING BY OUIDA . . . -US 
 
 MADAME RAME, OUIDa's MOTHER . . . I46 
 
 From a photograph 
 
 OUIDA IN 1896 ...... 157 
 
 From a chalk draiving by Sarmento in the possession of the artist 
 
 FACSIMILE OF LETTER TO T. FISHER UNWIN . . I78 
 
 OUIDA IN 1904 ...... 208 
 
 From a chalk drawing by Sarmento in the National Portrait Gallery, London 
 
 ouida's tomb at bagni di LUCCA . . . 229 
 
 By Giuseppe Norfini 
 
 THE OUIDA memorial AT BURY ST. EDMUNDS . . 2^0 
 
 By Ernest J. Gillick 
 
 DETAIL OF THE FIGURE OF OUIDA ON HER TOMB AT 
 
 BAGNI DI LUCCA . . . . .274 
 
 10 
 
I 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND 
 
 GIRLHOOD 
 
 1839—1857 
 
OUIDA: A MEMOIR 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND GIRLHOOD 
 
 1839— 1857 
 
 " ^TT^HE Burg, Bury, or ' Berry,' as they call it, of 
 X St. Edmund is still a prosperous brisk town ; 
 beautifully diversifying, with its clear brick houses, 
 ancient clean streets, twenty or fifteen thousand busy 
 souls, the general grassy face of Suffolk ; looking out 
 right pleasantly, from its hill-slope, towards the 
 rising sun : and on the eastern edge of it still runs, 
 long, black, and massive, a range of monastic ruins ; 
 Into the wide internal spaces of which the stranger 
 is admitted on payment of one shilling. Internal 
 spaces laid out, at present, as a botanic garden. Here 
 stranger or townsman, sauntering at his leisure amid 
 these vast grim venerable ruins, may persuade himself 
 that an Abbey of St. Edmundsbury did once exist." ' 
 So wrote Carlyle in 1843 of Bury St. Edmunds, a 
 
 ' Cf. Carlyle, Past and Present, Book II, chap. ii. 
 13 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 town that has many claims to remembrance both for 
 its historical and literary associations. 
 
 A monastery was founded there in the seventh 
 century by King Sigebercht, the first Christian king 
 of East Anglia, and to it was brought for burial, in 
 the ninth century, the body of Edmund, the last king 
 of East Anglia. But it was not until the eleventh 
 century that the great building of " hewn stone " 
 attained its full magnificence and importance. In 
 1 2 14 it was the scene of the secret meeting convened 
 by Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, at 
 which he read the articles that formed the foundation 
 of the Great Charter to the assembled barons, who, 
 after hearing them, took a solemn oath to exact a 
 charter embodying them from King John. 
 
 In St. Mary's Church is the tomb of Mary Tudor, 
 sister of Henry VIII, who married, first, Louis XII, 
 King of France, and then Charles Brandon, Duke of 
 Suffolk. John Lydgate, the poet, was a monk in 
 the Benedictine monastery of Bury in the fourteenth 
 century. Sir Thomas Hanmer, the editor of Shake- 
 speare, H. W. Bunbury, the caricaturist, C. J. Blomfield, 
 Bishop of London, and James Spedding, the biographer 
 and critic of Bacon, were among those educated at 
 the grammar school founded by Edward VI in 1550.' 
 
 ' Bury St. Edmunds has also played its part in fiction. Charles 
 Dickens makes it the scene of Mr. Pickwick's adventures at the 
 ladies' school and praises it in The Uncommercial Traveller as "a 
 handsome little town of thriving and cleanly appearance." 
 
 14 
 
Childhood and Girlhood 
 
 It was in this town, with its romantic past and its 
 pleasant surroundings, that the novelist to be known as 
 Ouida first saw the light. She was born at 3.30 p.m. 
 on January i, 1839, at No. i Union Terrace, i the 
 house of her grandmother, Mrs. Sutton. Her father, 
 Louis Rame, was a Frenchman who taught his native 
 tongue in different schools in the town. He was a 
 mysterious personage, and very little was known of 
 him or his antecedents ; he used to appear and disap- 
 pear erratically, and where he went in the meantime 
 no one knew. It would seem, indeed, that his wife's 
 ignorance of his doings equalled that of outsiders, for 
 in a diary kept by Mme. Rame in 1866 she writes : — 
 
 " Had I ever known my husband's pursuits in any 
 way and feigned ignorance of them, I should have been 
 wrong indeed, but I did not, and even now it is only 
 guesswork." 
 
 Rame was a friend of Louis Napoleon during his 
 exile in England, but quarrelled with him after the 
 coup d'itat oi 1852. Rame was much older than his 
 wife and of unprepossessing appearance. But he had 
 polished manners, was exceedingly clever, an admirable 
 and witty talker, and a good whist player. It was sup- 
 posed that he was connected with secret societies 
 abroad, and that his frequent visits to the Continent 
 and his sudden and unexpected entries and exits 
 
 ■ Now Hospital Road. The house has been named " Ouida," and 
 a memorial tablet affixed to it is inscribed " Ouida Louisa de la 
 Ramee, novelist." 
 
 IS 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 were connected with those societies. On December 
 20, 1865, Mme. Rame records in her diary : — 
 
 " This day recalls sad thoughts ; where now is the 
 one whose birthday it is ? ' Are my forebodings right 
 that we shall never see him again ? I wish my dear 
 Louise could think with me on that point. True, 
 he came so unexpectedly in '63 that there is no 
 wonder she thinks he may come any day again. My 
 own ideas are very different." 
 
 Rame seems to have been fond of his wife's family, 
 and to have been on good terms with them. Of one lady 
 who possessed the kind of temperament that revels in 
 woe, he used to say in his broken English, " She's never 
 so 'appy as when she is mee-serable." He evidently 
 had many English friends, for Mme. Rame mentions 
 a family in Devonport named Tolemarch whom her 
 husband knew well, and relates the following story : — 
 " When one of the daughters ran away they sent for 
 him to break the news to her father because he was so 
 violent a man none of his family dare approach him. 
 When M. Rame went to tell him, all he said was : 
 ' God bless my soul ! I did not think the girl had 
 so much spirit in her.' ". 
 
 Oulda's mother, Susan Sutton, was the second of 
 three sisters. Maria, the eldest, who was very 
 pretty, married William Brown Lockwood. Lock- 
 wood belonged to a Suffolk family : his three brothers 
 entered the Church and William was intended for the 
 ■ The last one spent together was in London in 1857. 
 i6 
 
Childhood and Girlhood 
 
 same career, but falling in love with pretty Maria 
 Sutton, and the opportunity of entering a wine- 
 merchant's business coming his way, he seized it and 
 married, instead of waiting until he should have 
 obtained a curacy. His wife died in 1831, having 
 borne him three daughters — Maria, Henrietta, and 
 Fanny — and one son, William. Lockwood subse- 
 quently married his sister-in-law, Mary Anne, the 
 youngest Miss Sutton, who was also very pretty, 
 and had by her one daughter, Marianne. Lock- 
 wood died in 1839, but his widow survived until 
 1889. 
 
 Mme. Rame named her daughter Maria Louise. 
 The godmothers were Maria Lockwood and Louisa 
 Le Neve {nie Thacker), a schoolfellow and life- 
 long friend of Mme. Rame. Mr. Le Neve died 
 within two years of the marriage, and his widow 
 married in 1840 Benjamin Harding, of Wadhurst 
 Castle, Sussex, where, in the forties, the Rames paid 
 them several visits. It is to their son, Commander 
 Claud Harding, that this memoir is indebted for much 
 information about these early years. The little girl, 
 unable to pronounce the name Louise or Louisa, 
 called herself something that sounded like Ouida ; it 
 was Maria Lockwood who evolved the orthography 
 of the strange appellation, and Ouida became the name 
 by which the future novelist was known and the one 
 which she preferred to all others ; indeed, after she 
 became famous she used to be very angry if she was 
 
 17 B 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 described in any other way. In a letter to Baron 
 Tauchnitz in 1882 she wrote: — 
 
 " The public has no business with what my name 
 is or is not. Ouida is all they have a right to 
 know." 
 
 Soon after she entered on her literary career, how- 
 ever, she styled herself Louise de la Rame, and for 
 some years signed herself so in her letters to friends. 
 
 In consequence of Rame's erratic ways his wife had 
 returned to her mother, Mrs. Sutton, at Bury St. 
 Edmunds. Mme. Rame had a little money of her 
 own when she married, but her husband soon dissi- 
 pated it. She also possessed a share in some family 
 house property in Suffolk, which in 1866 she sold 
 to the other participators. But there was never any 
 formal separation between the husband and wife. 
 During his absences Rame was glad that his wife 
 should have her mother's house to go to ; they 
 remained on good terms, and Mme. Rame had a 
 great admiration for her husband up to his final 
 disappearance. After the Commune of 1871 she 
 never again heard of him, and it is supposed that he 
 may have perished in the street fighting. 
 
 The marriage apparently brought Mme. Rame 
 little happiness beyond the child who was to be her 
 lifelong companion, and to whom she was passion- 
 ately devoted. 
 
 On the anniversary of her wedding day (January 
 1 6th) she writes in the diary for 1866 : — 
 
Childhood and Girlhood 
 
 "A day of sad memory indeed, were it not for 
 the one dear bright being who twelvemonths after 
 gladdened my eyes and heart." 
 
 Later comes the entry : — 
 
 " Would I could make her believe with me that 
 her poor papa has been wrongfully dealt with ; every- 
 thing tends to confirm it." 
 
 The little girl was sent to local schools, but seems 
 to have owed her chief education to her father. He 
 talked to her on many subjects and inspired in her 
 a love of history and mathematics. Every novelist, 
 great or small, writes at least one autobiographical 
 novel. In such a work fiction is certainly mingled 
 with truth, but enough of the latter is there to be 
 distinguishable. In 1878 Ouida published her novel 
 Friendship. Etoile, the heroine, is, we know, in- 
 tended to be herself, and Etoile says that her father, 
 the Count d'Avesnes, a Belgian noble, " was a man 
 of many ambitions, of no achievement. A politi- 
 cal gamester, a political conspirator, his life was 
 spent in the treacherous seas of political intrigue, 
 and he at the last perished in their whirlpool. 
 Little was known of him — by his daughter almost 
 nothing. . . . Her father had come and gone, come 
 and gone, as comets do. . . . He would kiss her care- 
 lessly, bid her do a problem or write a poem, stay 
 a few days, and go. . . . He ceased to come. . . . 
 His death was mysterious, like his life. He passed 
 away and made no sign." 
 
 19 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 We may certainly see here traits of M. Rame. 
 
 Ouida was a clever and precocious child. A diary 
 kept by her from April, 1850, to May 27, 1853, has 
 lately been printed ' in which she writes : " I must 
 study, or I shall know nothing when I am a woman." 
 She evidently read very much and very widely, for 
 her novels contain references to and quotations from 
 a large and varied number of writers in many tongues, 
 that show acquaintance with early and modern litera- 
 ture. Some features of Ouida's own girlhood and 
 upbringing are to be seen in those of Etoile, who 
 " studied in the big books, and strayed about in 
 the chestnut woods and orchards, and lived in her 
 own fancies more than in anything around her. . . . 
 The treasures of scholarship are sweet to all who open 
 them. But they are perhaps sweetest of all to a girl 
 that has been led both by habit and by nature to seek 
 them. The soul of a girl whilst passions sleep, desires 
 are unknown, and self-consciousness lies unawakened, 
 can lose itself in the impersonal as no male student 
 can. The mightiness and beauty of past ages become 
 wonderful and all-sufficient to it, as they can never do 
 to a youth beset by the stinging fires of impending 
 manhood. The very element of faith and of imagina- 
 tion, hereafter its weakness, becomes the strength of 
 the girl-scholar. The very abandonment of self, which 
 later on will fling her to Sappho's death, or mure her 
 in the cell of Heloise, will make her find a cloudless 
 " Cf. H. C. Huntington, Memories, Personages, People, Places (19H ). 
 
 20 
 
Childhood and Girlhood 
 
 and all-absorbing happiness in the meditations of great 
 minds, in the myths of heroic ages, in the delicate 
 intricacies of language, and in the immeasurable 
 majesties of thought." 
 
 Critics have over and over again ridiculed the in- 
 accuracies in Ouida's allusions and references. Those 
 inaccuracies cannot of course be defended, but the 
 variety of her allusions testifies to the fact that at one 
 time in her life books and reading played a great part. 
 Most of her reading was probably done in early life, 
 and she trusted later too much to her memory and 
 did not verify her references. 
 
 The self-absorption which was to become one of her 
 most marked characteristics was noticeable even in 
 childhood, for sometimes at a children's party, instead 
 of joining in the dancing and games, she would sit 
 apart absorbed in a book. She invented for herself 
 ingenious toys made of cardboard, representing a 
 tournament, the little figures of men and horses being 
 painted in gorgeous colours. She led a happy life 
 with her cousins, the Lockwoods, and their friends, and 
 many merry parties and picnics were enjoyed. There 
 was no luxury, but at the same time no poverty, and 
 the child grew up amid that middle-class life which 
 is fast vanishing out of England, because it is either 
 being absorbed in the artisan class, or, in its efforts 
 to imitate the wealthier class, is losing the special 
 characteristics that so long distinguished it. 
 
 In 1850 the little girl went with her mother to 
 
 21 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Boulogne to join Rame, and while there was taken to 
 call on the Princess Letitia Bonaparte. Ouida was 
 evidently fond of her father and regretted his many and 
 lengthy absences. In 1851 she had an apparently 
 light attack of smallpox : " I might have died, but, 
 thank God ! I recovered and without being pitted, which 
 of course I don't care about so much as my life, but 
 still I shouldn't have liked it," she observes in her 
 childish diary. She paid a visit to the Great Exhibi- 
 tion of 1 85 1. She took an interest in politics and 
 public events even at this early age, and records an 
 election at Bury — of which she makes use in one of 
 her earliest published tales — the death and funeral of 
 Wellington, and the proclamation of Louis Napoleon 
 as Emperor, commenting that thereby the fickleness 
 of the French nation was exemplified indeed : 
 " France is no longer the greatest nation of the 
 world." She was an ardent free-trader in those 
 childish years. 
 
 Ouida had great affection and admiration for her 
 godmother, Mrs. Harding, who again became a widow 
 in 1 849, when Wadhurst Castle was sold. In the early 
 fifties she married Mr. Drane and went to live at 
 Lee Lodge, near Lewisham. Ouida describes in her 
 diary a visit paid to them there, and records with 
 enthusiasm her feeling for her entertainers. "She 
 is so beautiful and so amiable and kind ; I do love her 
 so." The little girl calls her "the Queen" and quotes 
 the line from Wordsworth, " a perfect woman nobly 
 
 22 
 
Childhood and Girlhood 
 
 planned," in description of her. Mr. Drane, who was 
 a very handsome and attractive man, she calls "the 
 King." Writing In February, 1901, to Claud 
 Harding on his mother's death, Ouida says : — 
 
 " I can never forget the adoration I had for her in 
 childhood and the happy days at Lee Lodge." 
 
 Ouida's precocity showed itself in various ways. 
 At the age of fourteen she wrote a history of England. 
 At that age, too, she began to fall in love with any 
 man who treated her with ordinary politeness, and 
 imagined him to be equally in love with her. She 
 made no secret of her sentiments, and even used to 
 confide in "little Claud," then a boy of eight. No 
 one would have been more surprised had they heard 
 her confidences than the objects of her affection. 
 
 Ouida kept up a regular correspondence with Mrs. 
 Drane for about thirty years, and hundreds of letters 
 passed between them. Ouida's letters were very inter- 
 esting ; and in them she gave her views of politics, 
 society, and life generally with the greatest candour. 
 Mrs. Drane told Ouida that she had left those letters 
 to her son. She, however, begged that they might be 
 destroyed, and as she expressed herself so very strongly 
 on the subject, her wishes were carried out. When, on 
 Mrs. Drane's death, her son informed Ouida that 
 a legacy had been left her, she replied, ignoring the 
 legacy, but asking to be assured that all her letters 
 to his mother had been destroyed. 
 
 We have seen how, as a child, Ouida showed some 
 
 23 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 of the characteristics which later became so marked in 
 her : her self-absorption, her capacity for imagining 
 herself in love and others in love with her. Yet 
 another characteristic may be included which was to 
 play a large part both in her life and in her work — 
 her love of nature and her love of beauty. Sometimes 
 in her walks she would pick up a stone lying by the 
 wayside, take it home, and make a sort of pet of it, 
 saying it was lonely and uncared for. She acquired 
 a considerable collection of such objects, all of 
 which she endowed with the feelings of living beings. 
 As she grew older she transferred such affection to 
 dogs and horses, birds, and trees, and flowers. 
 
 Etoile, in whom we may always see Ouida, was 
 brought up by her grandmother in a village on 
 the Meuse, and the girl's love of nature is thus 
 described : — 
 
 "She knew the whereabouts of every rare wild 
 flower ; she knew every bird that haunted the woods 
 or the streams ; she loved the wind and the wild weather 
 as she loved the heat and the still moonshine when the 
 nightingales sang in the orchards ; she was not dismayed 
 if evening fell as she ran alone down a lone hill-side, 
 or if she bore down through the swift wild rain like 
 a little white boat through a surging sea ; she had 
 the love of nature of a German and the unconscious- 
 ness that she loved it of a Greek." 
 
 Close to the house in which Ouida lived at Bury 
 were the gates of Hardwick House, the property of 
 
 24 
 
Childhood and Girlhood 
 
 Sir Thomas G. CuUum, Bart.' The park and gardens 
 are very beautiful, and there Ouida used to walk 
 every day. She is remembered as a lean, lanky girl 
 in a crinoline, walking with her father. From the 
 windows of the drawing-room might be seen 
 " emerald lawns, a giant copper-beech tree, and dis- 
 tant shrubberies ; at the other end the window com- 
 manded a prospect of the northern terrace and the 
 extensive meadows, where grazed the black and white 
 cattle, which were so curiously marked that from a 
 distance they appeared to be carrying white blankets 
 across their backs for warmth." 2 
 
 In her last years Ouida's thoughts turned to the 
 haunts of her childhood, and in letters to Mr. G. 
 Milner-Gibson-CuUum she constantly refers to the 
 hawthorn -trees that are the glory of the park. From 
 Bagni di Lucca she writes in 1905 and 1906 : — 
 
 "Give my love to the blackbirds and hawthorns 
 of your Hardwick. . . ." 
 
 " If I were you, when the hawthorns are out I 
 should go to Hardwick and live in the trunk of a 
 hollow tree. . . ." 
 
 ' He died in 1855 ^'^^ ^^^ baronetcy became extinct. His 
 grandson, G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum, who became a friend of 
 Ouida in the later years of her life, succeeded to the property 
 in 1878. 
 
 = Cf George Vane, Tie Love Dream (1913). (See note, p. 131.) 
 
 25 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " If I had Hardwick I would live in a corner of 
 it and never leave it. . . ." 
 
 " Tell the trees, the flowers, the birds, I do not 
 forget the beauty of their home. Would it have been 
 better with me if I had stayed near them ? Si jeunesse 
 savait ! But, alas ! all that youth thinks of is to flee 
 away into the sunrise light of what it believes to be 
 the glory of the future. We are but unwise dreamers 
 at our wisest." ' 
 
 ' The original of the letter from which the last passage is taken 
 was presented by Mr. Milner-Gibson-Cullum to the Moyses Hall 
 Museum, Bury St. Edmunds. 
 
 26 
 
II 
 
 LIFE IN , 
 
 LONDON 
 
 1857—1871 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 LIFE IN LONDON 
 1857-1871 
 
 IN 1857 Mme. Rame with her mother, Mrs. 
 Sutton, and her young daughter left Bury 
 St. Edmunds for London. Ouida scarcely seems to 
 have cherished much sentiment for her native town. 
 When in 1907 it was decided to affix a tablet to the 
 house in which she was born, she wrote to Mr. G. 
 Milner-Gibson-CuUum : — 
 
 " This tomfoolery in Suffolk annoys me very much. 
 I identify myself with my father's French race and 
 blood, and I shall be greatly obliged if you would do 
 your best to prevent any inscription of the kind you 
 named being put as you say." 
 
 Yet a few days earlier she had in a letter to the same 
 correspondent expressed a wish to go and see the old 
 town if he would keep the secret of her identity. But 
 consistency had little part in Ouida's character. 
 
 There is little doubt that M. Rame's mysterious 
 comings and goings scandalized Mme. Rame's relatives 
 and the society of a small provincial town ; the girl, 
 
 29 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 who was certainly fond of her father, probably resented 
 the criticism. And when she had left the town and had 
 entered on her career as a novelist, her family doubtless 
 assumed a more or less mid-Victorian attitude towards 
 what for that time was the daring and outspokenness 
 of her books. After she had become famous, her 
 relatives, if passing through Florence, would call on 
 her, and she would go to see them when she visited 
 England if they chanced to be within easy distance, 
 but she never again visited her native town. Suffolk 
 plays no part in the various places in which Ouida lays 
 the scenes of her novels and tales. The sole reference 
 to it occurs in Puck.^ The opening scenes are in 
 Derbyshire, where the Lockwoods had gone to live, 
 and Ouida would have acquired her knowledge of that 
 district from visits paid to them. Here she intro- 
 duces as a passing character a Suffolk agricultural 
 labourer, who, in discussion with a Derbyshire miner, 
 describes his native county of " SufFeck." 
 
 "'Tis all butifuU and flat as yor hand theer, none o't 
 broke up into these nasty mounds o' yourn as is ony 
 made to lame man and beast. Ye may walk hunderds 
 of miles i' SufFeck, and hev it all as smooth and nice 
 as a mawther's ap'on wi' the starch in." 
 
 He has also much to say about the conditions of 
 labour, how in consequence of machinery " there's many 
 more men than theer be things to dew. I'm better 
 off nor most. I'd some schoolin when I was a brat ; 
 
 ' Published in 1870. 
 30 
 
Life in London 
 
 and I scraped — scraped till I got a cow, and I can 
 make ends meet wi' the butter in summer-time. But 
 there's a swarm o' men in the parish as dunno more'n 
 their beasts in stye. Dunno their God ; dunno their 
 letters ; never heard o' tha Queen, never put a mossel 
 o' mutton in their mouths — dunno nothin'. Field- 
 work is sickly-like, 'cos o' the wind and weather ; and 
 when yer comes to trampin' six mile out, and six in, 
 and ditchin' and ploughin' all day i' the wet, it stan' to 
 reason as how the rheumatic come hot and heavy arter 
 a bit, wi' min and wimmin tew. Farmers, they kip 
 their greyhounds t' run for cups and that loike ; and 
 kill sheep for 'em gainst their coursin-meetens ; but 
 their min they dew starve mostly ; and the cupboard 
 he's empty and the churchyard he's full. You see the 
 lands is too small and min they're too many. That's 
 wheer it be." 
 
 " Gentry take up sa much o't wi' woods for shootin'," 
 grumbled the miner in answer. "If ye was ta til a' the 
 groun' wheer's wood " 
 
 " Nay, nay," objected the SufFolker. " That woan't 
 dew. Woods is health to land ; in field-work ye 
 maun gie an' take, as wi' yer fellows. If you doan't 
 gie timber elbow-room, yer soil '11 be parchin' wi' 
 dry loike a duck in a hay-loft. If ye fell yer wood 
 ivery wheers tha land she'll gape wi' cracks." 
 
 The SufFolker had never heard of emigration to 
 new countries. Even Derbyshire to him is something 
 very new indeed. "Ye 're main and queer, wi' yer 
 
 31 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 land all muddled like into these ups and downs. Ye 
 must ha' rare big moles to throw up such sky-high 
 mouns." The last remark betrays the proverbial 
 stupidity of the Suffolk yokel, for we are assured that 
 it was uttered with no sense of humour, but in a very 
 grave spirit of wonder and of inquiry. Ouida is 
 here drawing on her early observation of the people 
 among whom her girlhood was passed. 
 
 On coming to London Ouida, with her mother 
 and grandmother, lived first at 41 Lansdowne Road, 
 Kensington Park, and then at Bessborough House, 
 Ravenscourt Park, Hammersmith, Dr. W. Francis 
 Ainsworth, a cousin of W. Harrison Ainsworth the 
 novelist, was their medical attendant, and to him the 
 girl confided her attempts at writing stories. He 
 introduced Ouida to Ainsworth, who was at that time 
 editing Bentley's Miscellany. She submitted some of 
 the stories to him ; he at once recognized their merit, 
 and eagerly accepted them for his magazine. The 
 first, entitled Dashwood's Drag ; or. The Derby and 
 What came of It, appeared in the Miscellany for April 
 and May, 1859, and she contributed stories to each 
 succeeding number up to July, 1862 ; all of them 
 were signed " Ouida." 
 
 The tales are vivacious and sprightly, and are 
 remarkable for the knowledge displayed by a girl of 
 twenty of such varied places as Norwich, Cambridge, 
 Paris, a German Bad, Bohemia, Vienna, Scotland, 
 Chamonix, most of which she had certainly at that 
 
 32 
 
Life in London 
 
 time never seen. It is, however, this power of swiftly 
 absorbing local colour from what she had heard or 
 read, or from a very brief sojourn in the place in 
 question, that is one of Ouida's greatest gifts. 
 As she herself said later : " The supreme gift of the 
 true artist is a rapidity of perception and comprehen- 
 sion." Her novel of Pascarel (1873), the scene of 
 which is laid in Florence and in the smaller towns 
 and the country-side of Tuscany, is said to have 
 been written after Ouida had only spent six weeks 
 in Italy, and it remains one of the best descriptions 
 of the kind we possess of that district. 
 
 Ouida's stories formed one of the chief attractions 
 of the Miscellany in those years, and in the Epilogue 
 for i860 Ainsworth wrote: — 
 
 "We offer not our own opinion, but that of a 
 host of critical commentators, when we say that few 
 periodical writers have suddenly achieved a greater 
 success than the contributor who has chosen the 
 fanciful designation of Ouida ; whose sketches of 
 society, both in England and on the Continent, are 
 as graceful as they are accurate." 
 
 In 1867 fourteen of the tales were published in 
 a volume entitled Cecil Castlemaine' s Gage and Other 
 Novelettes. One of the best of them is " Blue and 
 Yellow," an election tale, the scene of which, Cantil- 
 borough, was probably Bury St. Edmunds, where Ouida 
 had, as a child, witnessed an election. In the story she 
 describes the place as "that clean, quiet, antiquated 
 
 33 c 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 town, that always puts me in mind of an old maid 
 dressed for a party ; that slowest and dreariest of 
 boroughs, where the streets are as full of grass as an 
 acre of pasture land, and the inhabitants are driven 
 to ring their own door-bells lest they should rust 
 from disuse." The tale appeared in a French trans- 
 lation in the Revue des Deux Monde!, under Buloz's 
 editorship, in April, 1 868.1 Jt is introduced with a 
 few words of criticism in which Ouida is described 
 as " un ecrivain dont I'exuberante imagination, la 
 verve facile, I'esprit courant, la desinvolture aristo- 
 cratique ont appele I'attention du public anglais." It 
 should be noted that by 1868 Ouida had published 
 the long novels Held in Bondage, Strathmore, Idalia, 
 Chandos, and Under 'Two Flags. Among the con- 
 tributors to the numbers of the Revue des Deux Mondes 
 in which Ouida's stories appeared were George Sand, 
 the Comte d'Haussonville, Erhile Burnouf, Paul 
 Janet, Emile de Laveleye and Emile Montegut. She 
 was thus in excellent company. 
 
 In January, 1861, Ouida's first long novel, Granville 
 de Vigne, a Tale of the Day, began to appear in The 
 New Monthly Magazine. It was concluded in June, 
 1863, when Tinsley published it in three volumes, 
 changing the title to Held in Bondage and paying the 
 author the sum of ;^50. Ouida was introduced to 
 Tinsley by Mr. Marsh, one of the principal managers 
 
 ' Another of the stories, "Lady Tattersall," had appeared in the 
 same periodical in January, 1868. 
 
 34 
 
Life in London 
 
 for Chapman and Hall, who published Bentleys 
 Miscellany for Ainsworth. Strathmore was begun in 
 The New Monthly Magazine in the following month 
 and ran until February, 1865 ; next month the first 
 instalment of Idalia appeared, and was concluded in 
 the number for February, 1867.' 
 
 Ouida was working hard in these years, and 
 rapidly acquiring fame. In her mother's diary for 
 the years 1865 and 1866 we find such entries as — 
 
 "October 13, 1865. 
 " Went to New Burlington Street. Mr. George 
 Bentley congratulated Louise very warmly upon the 
 success of Strathmore and told her she must eventually 
 take the highest position ; he spoke with great sin- 
 cerity. We went also to Beaufort House ; there 
 the printer told her how greatly it had sold. 
 
 " October 26. 
 " Drove into Piccadilly with Louise to speak with 
 Mr. Chapman about the publication of Chandos." 
 
 ' These three romances were all written for Harrison Ainsworth, 
 the proprietor of the two periodicals mentioned. It was at his 
 suggestion that the original title of Idalia was changed, for he 
 wrote to Ouida, on December 1 8, 1 864 : "I do not like the title 
 The Lady of His Dreams. It might do very well as the title of a 
 poem, especially of the Tennysonian school, which I abominate, but 
 it is too lackadaisical for a novel. If you can find nothing better, 
 give it the name of the hero or heroine." The latter suggestion 
 was adopted. 
 
 35 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 On January i, 1866, Mme. Rame records that it 
 is due to Ouida's exertions alone that they had a home 
 such as they "have always had." A week later the 
 entry runs : — 
 
 "I do try to economize as much as I can and 
 pay as quickly. . . . Everything Louise earns is 
 spent on the housekeeping, and except this one 
 summer's trip to Clophill for a fortnight, not one year 
 since our coming to London has she had change 
 of air." 
 
 There are continual references to interviews with 
 George Bentley and with Chapman, and also with 
 Lippincott, who was responsible for the American 
 publication of the novels, and who paid Ouida 200 
 dollars as her share of the sales of Strathmore. 
 
 News of Ouida's success had spread not only to 
 France but also to Germany, and Baron Tauchnitz, when 
 he visited London in the summer of 1865, called on 
 Ouida with a view to including her novels in his well- 
 known series. In October she offered him Strathmore, 
 and in her letter mentions its success in England 
 and America, " most triumphant," she writes, in the 
 latter country, and in March, 1866, she offered 
 Chandos, asserting " it is considered the most brilliant 
 of my books." This was the beginning of Ouida's 
 lifelong connection with the house of Tauchnitz ; she 
 soon came to regard the Tauchnitz, father and son, 
 not only as her publishers, but as her firm friends. 
 A correspondence was begun with them which con- 
 
 36 
 
FREIHEKR VON TADCHNITE. 
 1816—1895. 
 
 To face p. 36.. 
 
Life in London 
 
 tinued almost unbroken until 1907. While the cor- 
 respondence throws light on Ouida's life and character, 
 it testifies also to the unceasing kindness and con- 
 sideration shown to her by Baron Tauchnitz and his 
 son through that long series of years. From the 
 beginning of the eighties until the close of her life, 
 Ouida, through her reckless expenditure, her mis- 
 management, and her continual lawsuits, was always 
 in want of money. She constantly asked Baron 
 Tauchnitz for sums in advance for the work she was 
 to deliver, often requesting that the money should be 
 sent by return of post. To such requests a generous 
 response was invariably made. 
 
 Considering, then, this long friendship, it will not 
 be out of place here to say a word of the origin of 
 the Tauchnitz collection of British authors. Christian 
 Bernhard Tauchnitz, the founder of the firm, was 
 born in 18 16 at his father's estate of Schleinitz, near 
 Naumburg. His uncle, Karl Tauchnitz (1761-1836), 
 was the well-known publisher who issued the first col- 
 lection of cheap editions of the Greek and Latin classics 
 in Germany, and who first in Germany introduced 
 stereotyped plates into his printing-works. In 1837 
 Christian founded the firm we know as " Bernhard 
 Tauchnitz." 
 
 The chief undertaking of the firm, the collection 
 of British authors, was started in 1841, the year in 
 which the present head of the firm, Christian Carl 
 Bernhard Freiherr von Tauchnitz, was born. Bulwer- 
 
 37 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Lytton's Pelham, the first volume of the series, appeared 
 on September i, 1841. At the present date the 
 collection comprises about 4,500 volumes ; every 
 work, from first to last, has been published by special 
 agreement with the author or his representatives. The 
 leading idea of the collection was the publication of 
 a continental edition of English works in the original 
 language, authorized by the writers, whose interests 
 were to be protected. In 1 846 English works became 
 copyright on the Continent by literary treaties, but it 
 should be remembered that before that time they 
 enjoyed no protection. So, in a preliminary letter sent 
 to the most distinguished English authors, Tauchnitz 
 pointed out that he could embark on such an under- 
 taking without the authors' permission, and that his 
 proposal to pay the English authors a sum for the 
 right of publication on the Continent arose from a 
 wish to make the first step towards a literary relation- 
 ship between England and Germany. The proposal 
 found general acceptance on the conditions that an 
 honorarium should be paid to the author, that the 
 Tauchnitz edition should not be introduced into 
 England and the British Colonies, and that Tauchnitz 
 should have exclusive rights of publication for the 
 Continent. Tauchnitz at the same time undertook 
 not to hinder the sale of the original English edition 
 on the Continent. " I hope," he continued, " that 
 this first attempt to establish a connection with the 
 classical authors of England will lead to a long and 
 
 38 
 
FREIHERR CHRISTIAN KARL BERNHARD VON TAUCHNITZ. 
 From a painting by Vilma ParLaghy. 
 
 To face p. 39^ 
 
Life in London 
 
 advantageous relationship on both sides." That hope 
 has been fully realized. As a general rule it was the 
 author's popularity in his own country that secured 
 the inclusion of his work in the Tauchnitz edition, 
 but occasionally the merits of an English writer have 
 been first recognized at Leipzig. When a book, like 
 Du Maurier's Trilby, for example, was unusually suc- 
 cessful, an addition was made to the honorarium 
 originally paid. 
 
 In 1866 Freiherr von Tauchnitz took his eldest 
 son, Christian Carl Bernhard, the present head of the 
 firm, into partnership. He had spent a year and a half 
 in England, and* had come into touch with a number 
 of the most distinguished English writers of the day, 
 with many of whom his father was already on terms 
 of close friendship. Among them were Dickens, 
 Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Froude, Disraeli, Glad- 
 stone, Bulwer, George Eliot, Charles Reade, Kingsley, 
 Wilkie Collins, and TroUope.^ 
 
 The public were now becoming curious about 
 Ouida's identity and personality ; and gossip con- 
 cerning her began to be spread abroad. In the early 
 sixties it was a somewhat bold thing for three women 
 to settle down alone in London without husband, 
 son, or brother by way of protector, and for one of 
 
 ' An interesting selection from the correspondence with those 
 writers is printed in a little volume entitled Der Verlag Beimhard 
 Tauchnitz. 1837-1912, by Dr. Curt Otto, Tauchnitz's partner, 
 privately published on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary 
 of the foundation of the firm. 
 
 39 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 them to earn a living by writing. A report got about 
 that Ouida was divorced. " We want to know from 
 whom ! " writes Madame Rame in her diary, and 
 continues : — 
 
 " She is said to be Miss Evans, the author of Adam 
 Bede, on whom great scandal rests — scandal to which I 
 give little credence, knowing any about Louise or 
 myself to be perfectly false ; therefore in all proba- 
 bility it may be so of her. Still, knowing that the 
 highest in the land might be proud to call Louise 
 their wife both from her talents and her virtues, it 
 is hard to think vile and scandal-loving people should 
 have power to injure her so as to prevent her being 
 known as she ought to be." 
 
 But in spite of adverse gossip Ouida was gradually 
 attaining a position of her own, and people, especially 
 men, began to call on her — she was rarely throughout 
 her life particularly gracious to women. Among these 
 were Colonel Poulett Cameron, a distinguished Indian 
 officer to whom she dedicated Under Two Flags in 
 1867, and Mr. Hamilton Hume, who, when her dog 
 Beausire, to whom Ouida was greatly attached, died, 
 made her a gift of a fine Newfoundland named Sulla. 
 To Sulla Ouida dedicated, in 1870, her novel Puck, 
 as "to a faithful friend and a gallant gentleman." 
 People also discussed her books and hazarded con- 
 jectures as to the identity of her characters. She 
 contradicted a report that Benoni in Under Two 
 Flags was George Bentley. 
 
 40 
 
Life in London 
 
 Ouida's love of animals, especially of dogs, which 
 she preserved throughout her life, and which, despite her 
 exaggeration of the sentiment, was eminently genuine 
 and sincere, began early. Although Mme. Rame 
 shared her daughter's predilection for dumb animals, 
 her love for them was occasionally tempered by the 
 trouble the care of them entailed. Now and then 
 Beausire kept them awake all night with barking 
 and growling. Mme. Rame makes the following 
 reflections in her diary for 1866 : — 
 
 " No doubt the dog has his reasons, poor fellow, and 
 wants us to understand him. I only wish I could do 
 so, for of course one's sense tells one that no dog 
 so intelligent would be so uncomfortable unless some- 
 thing to his canine sense influenced him. He is a 
 beautiful creature and I am very fond of him, but it 
 is sadly wearing when he is so restless, and I am sorry 
 that ever Louise expressed a wish for a dog." 
 
 Ouida was photographed with this dog, and on his 
 death, in March, 1866, her mother records: — 
 
 " Noble Beausire died. Both Louise and self fell 
 ill after the dear dog's death." 
 
 Ouida was in the habit of carrying a portrait of 
 her favourite dog in a locket worn round her neck. 
 She would often detach it and hand it round for 
 inspection, with the remark, " This is my hero." 
 
 The death of Mrs. Sutton, Ouida's grandmother, on 
 September 22, 1866, in her ninety-fourth year, left 
 Ouida and her mother more freedom. Mrs. Sutton was 
 
 41 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 buried in the family vault in the churchyard of Bury 
 St. Edmunds. She was a very pretty old lady with 
 silky white hair, a fair complexion, and blue eyes. 
 Writing to Claud Harding many years after i from 
 Italy, Ouida says : — 
 
 " I am glad you remember dear grandmama. What 
 a lovely old lady she was ! — and beautiful even in 
 death. Save her, whom I loved dearly, all that early 
 life has quite faded into a dream ; sometimes I cannot 
 believe that I was ever out of Italy. It seems im- 
 possible." 
 
 The mother and daughter left Hammersmith, and 
 for a time had no fixed address. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 "51 Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square 
 
 {April, 1867]. 
 
 '■^ Idalia is about to be dramatized here on the 22nd, 
 with the loveliest of English actresses 2 in the role of 
 Idalia. I do not go to Paris yet, as the accounts 
 I hear are not very attractive of the Exhibition at 
 present ; and I have so many friends to see with the 
 London season. I have occupied fine apartments at 
 the above address a fortnight, and find them more 
 convenient." 
 
 A few days after the performance (April 26), Ouida 
 wrote to Tauchnitz that it was " quite a triumph." 
 ' About 1 880. 2 Mjs5 Herbert. 
 
 42 
 
Life in London 
 
 The " fine apartments " in Welbeck Street were 
 soon inadequate for the young novelist's growing fame 
 and social success, and she now, in 1867, began her 
 custom, long continued, of staying at the Langham 
 Hotel when in London. Here she gave parties, the 
 guests at which were men, Lady Burton being the 
 only exception, but Mme. Rame was always present. 
 Among the guests at different times were Sir Richard 
 and Lady Burton ; Colonel Meadows Taylor, author 
 of Confessions of a Thug ; Major Brackenbury, mili- 
 tary correspondent of The Times; Colonel Pemberton, 
 who, as correspondent for the same newspaper, was 
 killed in the Franco- Prussian War ; Whyte Melville, 
 General Hamley, R. S. Escott, Bierstadt, the American 
 landscape painter ; George Lawrence, the author of 
 Guy Livingstone, by whose work Ouida's earlier novels 
 were greatly influenced, and his umbra, H. Dering ; 
 Hamilton Aide, Mr. Lionel Robinson, Arthur 
 A'Beckett, Lord Henry Lennox, Lionel Lawson 
 (uncle of Lord Burnham), J. R. Planche, General 
 Breckenridge (of the Confederate Army), Serjeant 
 Ballantyne, Algernon Borthwick (afterwards Lord 
 Glenesk), Sir Alexander DufF-Gordon, and Longfellow. 
 
 These parties had a purpose on Ouida's part beyond 
 that of mere pleasurable social intercourse. She would 
 set her guests talking on a subject about which she 
 knew little or nothing, because she needed information 
 on it for the novel she was writing or projecting. 
 She was once asked how she knew so much of 
 
 43 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 life, and especially of men's lives. She replied, " I 
 hear a sentence and that illuminates all." On one 
 occasion she required to know something about 
 duelling and introduced the subject by asking 
 Hamilton Aide what he knew about it. She 
 either ignored or forgot the fact that his father was 
 killed in Paris in a duel in 1830. But then, as 
 throughout her life, Ouida cared little for any 
 embarrassment her rudeness or odd ways, due often 
 to her extraordinary absorption in herself, caused her 
 interlocutors. On another occasion, when some 
 young oifficers of the Guards were dining with her, 
 and pipes and cigars were lighted, she said, " Now, 
 gentlemen, suppose my mother and myself are out 
 of the room. Smoke and drink as if you were at 
 the club ; talk as if you were in the smoking-room 
 there ; never think about us." ^ And they obeyed 
 her to the letter. 
 
 In those days smoking in the presence of ladies 
 was considered a serious breach of good manners, and 
 any lady who permitted it was regarded, in the 
 jargon of the time, as " fast." But although Ouida 
 never smoked herself and was indeed throughout 
 her life strangely conventional and unbohemian in 
 her personal conduct, she could dispense with the 
 ordinary conventions on occasion, and she not only 
 wrote on the back of the menu card in French, " On 
 est prie d'attendre et de fumer," but cigarettes were 
 ' Cf. Tinsley, Random Recollections^ i. (1900). 
 44 
 
Life in London 
 
 often smoked in the middle of dinner. Nearly all 
 who assisted at these feasts in the late sixties and early 
 seventies have passed away, and even were they still 
 living it is unfortunately almost impossible to recapture 
 good talk. Personality is the one thing that cannot be 
 reproduced, and talk, if it be anything more than 
 a string of anecdotes, can scarcely be separated from 
 the personality of the speaker. But we may perhaps 
 discover Ouida's views of dinners and dinner-table 
 talk. There is a chapter in Puck entitled " His 
 Views on Dinners," in which the dog discourses on 
 the subject and doubtless expresses Ouida's own 
 experiences and conclusions. After laying down the 
 law that the guests should not number more than 
 eight, that the menu should be short — "a dozen ser- 
 vices are quite enough in all reason " — and that out-of- 
 the-season delicacies should be dispensed with, the 
 servants perfectly trained, the wines beyond reproach, 
 that the host or hostess should have the supreme 
 talent of selection, and also the supreme talent of 
 leading the conversation unostentatiously but skil- 
 fully. Puck continues : — 
 
 " The one great element of success at a dinner is the 
 talk ; and who shall give a recipe, as I say, for that ? 
 It is a thing that goes by nature, like the gift of colour 
 and of song. 
 
 " It is preposterous to say that your men do not talk 
 well, I have heard talk to the full as brilliant and epi- 
 grammatic as anything the cleverest writer can put into 
 
 45 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 the mouths of his imaginary characters. When I hear 
 people protest that in real life no such witty converse 
 as you find in very witty novels can ever be met, 
 I wonder where these protestants have had the mis- 
 fortune to live. 
 
 " I think it is a mistake to think that tremendously 
 clever people are required to obtain radiant conversa- 
 tion. Your very great genius, your very abstruse 
 scholar, is often a very stupid fellow, so far as lingual 
 utterances go. The best men at a dinner are such men 
 as are to be found by the dozen at the best clubs in 
 London ; men of quick intelligence, of good culture, 
 of consummate worldly knowledge, and of just that 
 sparkling, mischievous, pleasant social wit which is to 
 conversation what the truffle is to cookery or the 
 champagne is amongst wines. 
 
 " Those men are to be found, and better companions 
 need never be sought. True, at some tables they may 
 sit silent, morne, and as contemptuous as their polite- 
 ness permits, but, believe me, that is only because at 
 those tables you are boring them. Get them into a 
 congenial atmosphere, their tongues will go, their 
 mirth sparkle, and their laugh be heard as enjoyably 
 as any one can wish. They can be the most amusing 
 companions in the world ; if they are not so with you 
 it is your fault : you bore them in some way. 
 
 " Politics you should banish absolutely — if people are 
 not of one mind about them they are sure to quarrel 
 over them ; if they are of one mind no subject can be 
 
 46 
 
Life in London 
 
 drearier. Some little bit of political news, quite fresh 
 from some Legation or some Secretary of State, before 
 the world has heard it, is all that should be admissible, 
 
 " Any quite fresh scandal is a great relish ; especially 
 if you know something about it that no one else 
 knows. Perhaps you had better take heed that the 
 chief of the actors involved are not present ; though, 
 indeed, in this age you are all so entirely free from 
 prejudice on these points that (if you be discussing 
 a divorce, for instance) you need not mind the presence 
 of the relatives in the least, scarcely of the husband 
 nowadays ; the only person whose feelings must not 
 be hurt is the co-respondent. Where this last inter- 
 esting personage is in the plural you had better not 
 invite two of them at the same time ; they are sure to 
 have either too much jealousy or too much compassion 
 for one another. 
 
 " Du reste — Don Juan is always a delightful fellow, 
 and the most amusing guest you can ever obtain, 
 unless, indeed, it be weighing on his mind that he 
 will have to marry Julia Abbandonata. In which 
 case, of course, you cannot expect him to be lively." 
 
 A good host, like a poet, is born not made, but 
 a isw precautions help to ensure the success of a 
 party. 
 
 " In the first place, there is the care needful in the 
 selection of your guests ; they must suit one another 
 or you will have discord ; a mingling of classes or of 
 opposite political parties is, I think, a mistake : men 
 
 47 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 are more at ease in their own caste ; if you introduce 
 an ' outsider,' he or she must be a very brilliant one, 
 . . . There is a certain unity of feeling, and common 
 likeness of tone and manner, in an order, still more so 
 in each ' set ' of that ' order,' which is, if made use of, 
 an essential aid to harmony in itself. It is an infinite 
 ennui to a man to sit next to another who does not 
 catch his allusions flying ; it ruins conversation when 
 one person outside the pale fails to understand all that 
 is the cause for mirth or for chat within it. 
 
 " Likewise, you should be very careful not to let any 
 topic get worn threadbare ; the instant it is getting 
 the least bit of a bore, sweep it away with the brisk 
 besom of a fresh and welcome subject. 
 
 " A little scandal is, as I say, an excellent thing ; 
 nobody is ever brighter or happier of tongue than 
 when he is making mischief of his neighbour ; but it 
 is a two-edged sword that requires very dainty hand- 
 ling ; and all caps of slander unluckily fit so very 
 many heads that you must be heedful how you select 
 them. 
 
 " If it be a party of both sexes, ask people that are 
 a little, in love with each other, for people a little in 
 love are always eager to shine ; but banish all grandes 
 passions ; they have an eloquence of their own indeed, 
 but they are very stupid society at a dinner-table. 
 
 "If you be a woman, don't think of yourself. 
 Let your heart and soul be with your guests, let your 
 whole mind be given to the guidance and the surveil- 
 
 48 
 
Life in London 
 
 lance of the conversation. Remember that your dinner 
 is your campaign, and that on your skilful direction 
 depends your victory. 
 
 "But then withal you must be quite at ease, not 
 in the least preoccupied, or your influence will be nil ; 
 you must be always gay, alert, suave, ready to skim 
 over a difficulty, to supply an hiatus, and to prevent 
 a pause ; you must lead with radiance and with tact, 
 and yet you must be perfectly willing not to shine, and 
 to let your powers lie perdu if your guests are in full 
 career without you, and if your self-assertion would 
 be their interruption." 
 
 Whether Ouida at her own parties at the Langham 
 was actually the perfect hostess here described it is not 
 possible to discover, but it is quite certain that she 
 regarded herself as such, and it seems equally certain 
 that the men who were present thoroughly enjoyed 
 the evenings. 
 
 Ouida herself dined out in London a great deal 
 in these years. In 1868 William Allingham met her 
 at dinner, and described her In his diary i as " dressed 
 in green silk, with a clever, sinister face, her hair 
 down, small hands and feet, and a voice like a carving- 
 knife." Her notion of her own importance is clear, 
 since she told Mrs. Shirley Brooks,^ on whom she 
 
 ' Cf. H. Allingham and D. Radford, William Allingham, a Diary 
 (1907). 
 
 ' Cf. G. S. Layard, Shirley Brooks: A Great '■Punch' Editot 
 (1907). 
 
 49 D 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 made a favourable impression, " As I talk better than 
 others, I ought to be listened to even if singing is 
 going on." 
 
 Besides a passion for dogs, Ouida at this time 
 cherished a passion for Mario, the great tenor. 
 When he made his appearance at Covent Garden, 
 July 19, 1871, Ouida threw him a bouquet contain- 
 ing an ivory cigar-case, with these lines from 
 Dante : — 
 
 " Pietosi dissero gli Dei 
 Oda la terra una volta la musica 
 Del Ciel, e labbre toccaro di . . . 
 Mario ! " ' 
 
 She always had a large portrait of him in her 
 room in her Florentine villa. 
 
 Ouida now assumed the position of a celebrity. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitx. 
 
 " Langham Hotel, 
 "June 5, 1870. 
 
 " I am about to have a portrait painted by a cele- 
 brated artist, and this picture will then be engraved. . . . 
 My reputation has very greatly increased since Idalia 
 appeared." 
 
 There is a somewhat apocryphal story that after the 
 
 ' "With indulgence — quoth the gods — ^let the earth hear for 
 once the music of heaven. And they touched the lips of . . . 
 Mario." 
 
 50 
 
Life in London 
 
 publication of Idalia her father chanced to meet 
 her walking in Kensington Gardens. He stopped and 
 warmly congratulated her on her success ; she never 
 saw him again. 
 
 In offering Puck, which had been published in 
 May, 1870, to Tauchnitz, as "a perfectly fresh yet 
 already famous novel," she told him " there has been 
 quite a furore about it here." It was in process of 
 translation in the Revue des Deux Mondes when the 
 siege of Paris commenced. 
 
 Ouida always took the greatest interest in public 
 affairs, and her letters throughout her life are full of 
 comment, often very outspoken, on them and on those 
 who guided them. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 " Imperial Hotel, Torquay, 
 
 " September, 1870. 
 
 " What marvellous events within the brief space 
 since last I wrote you ! You have cause indeed for 
 triumph and my poor France for bitter repentance of 
 the submission she gave to a corrupt and emasculated 
 Government." 
 
 Ouida's sympathies, as will be seen later, were 
 altogether with France, which she was in the habit of 
 regarding as her native country. 
 
 She was now able to take holidays away from London. 
 One summer she went to Hastings. While staying 
 
 SI 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 at Torquay, in 1870, she was entertained by Bulwer- 
 Lytton, who was living at Argyll House. Ouida 
 was a conspicuous figure in the town, in a shiny sailor 
 hat and a pilot coat, always accompanied by her 
 big dog, who dragged her, a willing slave, up hill 
 and down dale. On one occasion, indeed, the dog 
 saved her from drowning. She had not perceived 
 the incoming tide, and he called her attention to 
 her peril by violent barking and frantic efforts to push 
 her from the road she was so unwisely pursuing. The 
 autumn of 1871 she spent at Brussels, where she 
 acquired the local colour for her delightful story, 
 A Dog of Flanders. She went on to Florence, where 
 she spent the winter, and was so enchanted with the 
 place that it became her settled home for the next 
 twenty-three years. 
 
 Before entering on that period of her career it 
 will be well to take a brief survey of the work she 
 had so far accomplished. 
 
 By 1 87 1 Ouida had published, besides the collected 
 edition of her magazine stories, Strathmore (1865), 
 Chandos (1866), Under Two Flags and Idalia (1867), 
 Tricotrin (1869), Puck (1870), and Folle-Farine 
 (1871). 
 
 The three first belong to the novels of society that 
 Ouida never ceased to write throughout her career. 
 The volume of stories issued in 1867 ' had evoked 
 a satirical article 2 contributed by Lord Strangford 
 
 ' See p. 33. ' September 21, 1867. 
 
 52 
 
Life in London 
 
 to the Pall Mall Gazette that helped not a little to 
 bring Ouida into notice. It opened thus : — 
 
 " This ought to be an invaluable performance, not so 
 much from any intrinsic merits as from the light which 
 it incidentally throws upon the author and upon English 
 society. It is always interesting to see the first studies 
 of great writers and artists, and so to mark the first 
 germ of a thought that has afterwards formed the central 
 idea of a masterpiece. The first rough programme, 
 for example, which Milton prepared for Paradise Lost 
 will always have a literary interest quite independent 
 of its own merit. The slight stories which are col- 
 lected in this volume by Ouida will have similar attrac- 
 tions for the students of future centuries. In them 
 may be seen in their simplest form the elements which 
 are afterwards combined to excite the wonder of the 
 world. In her more elaborate fictions we may note 
 several distinct flavours which are harmonized into a 
 bewildering whole — the superhumanly beautiful woman 
 who breaks hearts as coolly as crockery ; the delightfully 
 wicked roue who ruins women by the score and shoots 
 men by the dozen ; the horsy young lady with a turn 
 for flirtation, and the sentimental cavalier after Sir 
 Walter Scott, succeed each other in dazzling suc- 
 cession," 
 
 With a hit at Macaulay, the reviewer continued : — 
 " Perhaps, however, the book will be almost more 
 valuable to the historian than to the critic of the 
 future. The Macaulay of a few generations hence 
 
 S3 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 will find ready-made some of those truthful yet 
 brilliant sketches in which his predecessor excelled." 
 
 The critic proceeds to draw a picture of society as if 
 written by a future Macaulay who would use Ouida 
 as one of his authorities : — 
 
 " ' Of the young men of the nineteenth century,' 
 he may say, ' we fortunately possess a portrait drawn 
 by no common hand. Ouida — for by this mysterious 
 name, which should perhaps be translated into our 
 present dialect as Yessiree, did the great painter of 
 manners describe herself — evidently moved in the 
 highest circles of society.'" 
 
 And after quoting at some length descriptions taken 
 from the stories, the article concludes : — 
 
 " If this be not a true picture of the English upper 
 classes in the middle of the nineteenth century, it 
 gives at least the ideal excellence to which the lower 
 classes aspired." 
 
 As is often the case with a review of this kind, 
 it created a demand for Ouida's novels and helped 
 to ensure her vogue. A review of Under Two Flags, 
 however, which appeared in the same journal a little 
 later,! while mercilessly showing up its absurdities, 
 praised several scenes as being in " a spirited style 
 and rather more truthful and natural than usual." 
 Strathmore and Chandos contain all Ouida's worst 
 faults and extravagances ; but the desert scenes of 
 Under Two Flags, notably Cigarette's desperate ride 
 ' December z6, 1867. 
 54 
 
Life in London 
 
 to save the man she loved, are full of life, passion, 
 and energy, and are written in a style that may 
 almost be called restrained. 
 
 If the tradition did not everywhere confront us 
 that Ouida wrote Idalia when she was sixteen, I 
 should be inclined to say that it was inspired by 
 Meredith's Sandra Belloni. But Idalia, who devotes 
 herself and her beauty to the wresting of her country's 
 liberties from its oppressors, is a purely imaginary 
 type of woman, and lacks the reality and conviction 
 of Meredith's heroine, and the hairbreadth 'scapes 
 of herself and the hero are more startling than con- 
 viiicing or interesting. French critics consider that 
 Idalia is inspired by the work of George Sand, with 
 which Ouida was well acquainted. The book, how- 
 ever, contains germs of some of the qualities that 
 were soon to distinguish Ouida's works. The scenery 
 of the Carpathian Mountains is well described, and the 
 setting is in harmony with the events that take place 
 among them. The Bosphorus, Venice, and the Bay of 
 Naples play a part in the story, and afford opportunity 
 for fine descriptive passages. It is curious to note in 
 a later novel — Wanda, published in 1883 — a similar 
 mountain setting, and a heroine who in some ways 
 recalls Idalia. 
 
 Tricotrin marks a new departure. It is the first of 
 the novels in which the heroine is a waif, a foundling, 
 and the hero a wanderer, a man of genius, a musician, 
 as here, or an actor, as in Pascarel — always an artist 
 
 55 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 who preferred a free life, unfettered by the conven- 
 tionalities of civilization, to the fame and wealth and 
 power that life in ordinary society would have brought 
 him. " No wise man binds himself," Tricotrin says. 
 " Though I am here to-day, I may be in the moon 
 to-morrow. Life is a game of chance ; so much the 
 better. . . . The only man happy is the man who is 
 free. And the only man free is the man who is at 
 once philosopher and wanderer. ' Sans pays, sans 
 prince, et sans loi ! ' His country, the world — his 
 prince, his art — his law, his conscience and his choice." 
 Ouida's work was becoming more and more known 
 and appreciated in America, and Tricoirin is dedicated 
 " To the American people, in cordial acknowledgment 
 of their reception of my works, and to those men 
 among them, both of North and South, whose 
 characters I honour and whose friendship honours 
 me." Folle-Farine, which appeared two years later, 
 belongs to the same class of work ; as In Tricotrin, 
 the scene is France, the heroine is a foundling, a 
 gipsy's daughter, but the hero this time is a sculptor, 
 who only comes into his own by the FoUe-Farine's 
 sacrifice not of her life,' but of her virtue. It is an 
 advance on Tricotrin; it contains good dialogue, the 
 tragic note is deeper, there is recognition of the 
 inevitableness of things and of the continual struggle 
 — a theme Ouida touches again and again — of the 
 artist against a callous, unappreciative society. 
 
 In the novel entitled Puck, the tale is told by Puck, 
 
 56 
 
Life in London 
 
 a tiny Maltese terrier. True, he is " only a dog," but 
 a dog with an immensely good opinion of himself and 
 of his powers of observation. He has studied life ; he 
 knows, or thinks he knows, everything about men, and 
 more especially about women. Puck has many adven- 
 tures and goes through many vicissitudes : he relates 
 what he sees, what he thinks, and much is to be learned 
 from his conversations with the other dogs he meets. 
 His conclusions, his philosophy of life, are set 
 before us :-7— 
 
 " Of course, dogs think a great deal ; when pqople 
 believe us asleep, nine times out of ten we are medi- 
 tating. . . . Everything in creation thinks, that's my 
 idea." 
 
 In all that Puck says we may certainly see Ouida's 
 own views concerning the society she describes, which 
 here again consists of fashionable folk of high degree, 
 of the demi-monde and the stage. Amid much that 
 is false, meretricious, extravagant, and even ugly, 
 there is a substratum of truth, and for the first time 
 Ouida treats a theme that later, for personal reasons, 
 came home to her — the cruelty of women to each 
 other when they are rivals in love. 
 
 We must remember that much that now seems 
 ridiculous to us in these novels of Ouida would have 
 then been quite unperceived by the larger number of 
 her readers. At that time classes were more sharply 
 divided : there was very little intercourse between 
 ordinary middle-class people and wealthy members of 
 
 57 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 the upper middle class, and none at all between them 
 and the aristocratic class. The bulk of those who 
 read these novels of Ouida were ordinary middle-class 
 folk, and to them the doings described would have 
 appeared quite probable and appropriate. 
 
 Signs of the vanity in the toils of which Ouida 
 was held to the end of her days are not lacking 
 in this first period of her literary and social career, 
 but when we are inclined to censure her we should 
 not ignore the extravagant praise bestowed on her 
 by distinguished persons. Bulwer-Lytton wrote her 
 an eight-page letter of praise on the publication 
 of FoUe-Farine, and Whyte Melville, after reading 
 Puck, wrote to her as follows : — 
 
 " I have just finished Puck and congratulate you 
 indeed. To my fancy it is far the best of yours, good 
 as the others are. It has all their imagination and 
 dramatic power, with a vein of the most beautiful 
 sympathy and feeling running through it, and a true 
 poetry in the descriptions that is entirely independent 
 of language, although clothed in the most beautiful 
 and appropriate words. It is quite a work even a man 
 might cry over, and that one would read many times 
 and like better each time. In short, I think it is a 
 first-rate, first-class, first-flight novel." 
 
 Praise of this kind could not but feed the vanity of 
 an inexperienced young woman. 
 
 58 
 
Ill 
 
 FIRST YEARS 
 IN FLORENCE 
 1871—1878 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 FIRST YEARS IN FLORENCE 
 1871-1878 
 
 THE great white Seasons of the Santa Trinita 
 rose like snow against the golden air. Monte 
 Oliveto towered dark against the rosy glory of the 
 west. There was a sweet sea wind blowing which 
 fanned out as it went all the spiced odours of the 
 pharmacies and all the scents of the budding woods. 
 The shops of the goldsmiths, mosaic sellers, and 
 alabaster workers gleamed and sparkled in the light. 
 Everywhere there was some beauty, some fragrance, 
 some treasure ; and above it all rose the wondrous 
 shaft of the Campanile, glancing like gold and ivory 
 in the sun. 
 
 " Where lies the secret spell of Florence ? — a spell 
 that strengthens, and does not fade with time ? 
 
 " It is a strange, sweet, subtle charm that makes those 
 who love her at all love her with a passionate, close- 
 dinging faith in her as the fairest thing that men have 
 ever builded where she lies amidst her lily-whitened 
 meadows. 
 
 61 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " Perhaps it is because her story is so old and her 
 beauty is so young. 
 
 " The past is so close to you in Florence. You touch 
 it at every step. Every line, every road, every gable, 
 every tower, has some story of the past present in it. 
 In the winding, dusky, irregular streets, with the out- 
 lines of their loggie and arcades and the glow of 
 colour that fills their niches and galleries, the men who 
 ' have gone before ' walk with you. The beauty of 
 the past goes with you at every step in Florence. 
 Everywhere there are flowers, and breaks of songs, and 
 rills of laughter, and wonderful eyes that look as if 
 they too, like their poets, had gazed into the heights 
 of heaven and the depths of hell. And then you 
 will pass out at the gates beyond the city walls, 
 and all around you there will be a radiance and 
 serenity of light that seems to throb in its intensity 
 and yet is divinely restful, like the passion and the 
 peace of love when it has all to adore and nothing to 
 desire. 
 
 " The water will be broad and gold, and darkened 
 here and there into shadows of porphyrine amber. 
 Amidst the grey and green of the olive and acacia 
 foliage there will arise the low, pale roofs and flat- 
 topped towers of innumerable villages. 
 
 "Everywhere there will be a wonderful width of 
 amethystine hills and mystical depths of seven-chorded 
 light. Above, masses of rosy cloud will drift, like 
 rose-leaves leaning on a summer wind. And, like a 
 
 62 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 magic girdle which has shut her out from all the curse 
 of age and death and man's oblivion, and given her a 
 youth and loveliness which will endure so long as 
 the earth itself endures, there will be the circle of the 
 mountains, purple, white, and golden, lying around 
 Florence." 
 
 Thus Wrote Ouida in 1873' of Florence, the city 
 in which she had settled two years earlier, and which 
 was to be her home until 1894. 
 
 In August, 1 871, Ouida and her mother went to 
 Brussels, staying at the Hotel de I'Europe. Excursions 
 were made into the Ardennes, and to the cities of 
 Belgium. The scene of the most charming of her dog 
 stories, A Dog of Flanders, published in 1872, is laid in 
 Antwerp and its neighbourhood, and there, as always, 
 she has seized the spirit of the locality and expressed 
 its characteristics with fidelity and charm. She reached 
 Florence in November, travelling through Germany 
 and the Tyrol,^ and stayed first at the Hotel d'ltalie, and 
 then rented a furnished apartment for three months at 
 6 Via Garibaldi, Lung' Arno. " Florence is charming 
 just now and her climate quite perfect," she wrote to 
 Tauchnitz on November loth. 
 
 Florence, " the beautiful small city set along its 
 shining waters, with all the grace of its classic descent, 
 
 ' Cf. Pascaril, chap, x, 
 
 " She wrote to Tauchnitz, November 3, 187 1 : — 
 " I was delighted with the autumnal splendour of the German 
 forests as I passed through them into the Tyrol." 
 
 63 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 its repose of contemplative rest, its sanctity of im- 
 perishable greatness," ' had not yet sunk into a " little 
 town of the provinces." For some years Ouida 
 frequented its best society, which still retained much of 
 its former brilliance, and the salons of Lady Orford, 
 of Mme. Emilie de TchiatchefF — a kinswoman of the 
 Dalhousie family, married to a Russian — both of 
 whom were Ouida's firm friends, of the Princess 
 Anna Corsini, nee Barberini, of the Marchesa Isabella 
 Piccolletti, gathered all that was best in Florentine 
 society. Youth, beauty, art, politics, the diplomatic 
 world, were all represented at those houses. The 
 author of a new play or a new poem, a new singer, 
 invariably found his way to the Palazzo Piccolletti, just 
 as any distinguished Englishman or Englishwoman 
 would go to Lady Orford's. She was a very important 
 personage. She received on Sundays after midnight. 
 She was always attired in the fashion of thirty years 
 before, and wore a sort of sacque-shaped jacket and 
 a full round skirt that looked as if it missed its original 
 companion, the crinoline. In the evening she discarded 
 the jacket for an early- Victorian evening bodice which 
 on gala occasions, was cut straight across from shoulder 
 to shoulder. But, whether in morning or evening attire, 
 she dredged her pale reddish hair with flour, evidently 
 using the kitchen dredger in the process, scattering 
 the flour impartially over her chignon and a huge 
 heavy plait across her head, and over her shoulders, 
 
 ■ Cf. In « Winter City. 
 64 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 whether clad in velvet or satin or bared for the 
 evening. She never wore any jewellery. She smoked, 
 in the fashion known as " chain smoking," cigarette 
 after cigarette of " Caporal " tobacco, rolling them one 
 after the other, lighting the fresh one from the stump 
 of the one she was throwing away, and very seldom 
 using the evil-smelling sulphurous match of the 
 country. In the evening a long rank Italian cigar 
 with a straw in it was substituted for the cigarette. 
 She used to drive about in an old shandrydan with 
 all the stuffing showing through and foxes' brushes 
 wobbling at the horses' ears to keep the flies off, and 
 skins much the worse for wear stretched at her feet. 
 
 But, despite her oddities, she was in great request, 
 and scarcely ever had an evening disengaged, and for 
 all her strange dress and queer habits she always 
 looked the great lady and had the beautiful manners 
 of the old regime. She had a very caustic tongue, a 
 fund of anecdote, and was the wittiest old lady 
 imaginable. She had an amazing knowledge of every- 
 one's family history, and was keenly interested in and 
 had an astonishing grip of international politics. She 
 was a prejudiced Tory, and could see no necessity for 
 change of any sort, except in the marriage laws, her 
 own matrimonial venture having been singularly 
 unfortunate. She was a prolific letter-writer, and 
 invariably wrote a long epistle in violet ink, signed 
 " H. O." and scattered with pounce, when a couple of 
 lines would have sufficed. She became a sincere friend 
 
 65 E 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 to Ouida, who described her in her novel, Friendship, 
 as Lady Cardiff in these terms ' : — 
 
 " The Marchioness of Cardiff loved to call herself 
 an old woman. But she had kept three things of 
 youth in her — a fair skin, a frank laugh, and a fresh 
 heart. She was a woman of the world to the tips 
 of her fingers ; she had had a life of storm and a 
 life of pleasure ; she turned night into day ; she 
 thought no romance worth reading save Balzac's and 
 Fielding's; she did not mind how wicked you were 
 if only you never were dull. She was majestic and 
 still handsome, and looked like an empress when 
 she put on her diamonds and sailed down a salon. 
 On the other hand, she would laugh till she cried ; 
 she would do an enormity of good and always conceal 
 it ; she honoured unworldliness, when she saw it, 
 though she regarded it as a kind of magnificent 
 dementia ; and, with all her sharpness of sight, the 
 veriest impostor that ever whined of his misery could 
 woo tears to her eyes and money from her purse. 
 She always wintered in Rome, and never lived 
 with Lord Cardiff. He and she were both people 
 who were delightful to everybody else, but not to 
 each other. She was a Tory of the old school and 
 a Legitimist of the first water ; she believed in 
 Divine right, and never could see why the Reform 
 Bill had been necessary. Nevertheless, Voltaire was 
 
 ' Cf. Friendship (1878), chap. xii. The scene is laid in Rome, 
 but Ouida is describing the Florentine society she knew. 
 
 66 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 her prophet and Rochefoucauld her breviary ; and 
 though she saw no salvation outside the Almanack de 
 Gotha, her quick wit almost drove her at times near 
 the wind of Democracy. Anomalies are always amusing, 
 and Lady Cardiff was one of the most amusing 
 women in Europe." 
 
 Mme. de Tchiatcheff was another of Ouida's 
 intimate friends. She was a charming woman and 
 her salon was the rendezvous of most of the members 
 of the Anglo-Italian community. 
 
 During these years, the winter in Florence was 
 filled with a "joie de vivre," with a gaiety and 
 " entrain " that afterwards departed from it. Certain 
 fetes and entertainments stand out, like the fancy- 
 dress ball given by the Comte de Talleyrand, at which 
 most of the Florentines present represented some 
 distinguished ancestor or ancestress, and the famous 
 hunt " Corso," when every one, men and women, wore 
 red coats and which ended with a mammoth dinner- 
 party at Doney's. One year half the town tore off to 
 Milan to see Garibaldi make a progress through 
 the city, one of his last public appearances. Queen 
 Victoria, the Duke and Duchess of Teck, Prince 
 Leopold — whom Ouida came to know fairly well and 
 of whom she had a high opinion — were several times 
 in Florence in the eighties. But curiously enough there 
 was one side of Florentine society, the literary and 
 artistic side, in which Ouida took no interest what- 
 ever. Although she would put herself out of the 
 
 67 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 way to make the acquaintance of, and then to entertain 
 lavishly, some statesman or ambassador, or a member 
 of some great aristocratic family — but even these had 
 to be brought to her — such persons as John Sargent, 
 the painter, Maclean, the sculptor, Eugene Lee- 
 Hamilton, Vernon Lee, Mary Robinson, Paul Bourget, 
 all living in or frequently visiting Florence, she 
 entirely ignored. The acquaintance of these people 
 would have been of much service to her, but un- 
 fortunately in social matters she put worldly before 
 intellectual rank. Sometimes, it is true, the Due de 
 Dino, a charming old man, and his nephew, Charles 
 Talleyrand, who was at one time ambassador at Berlin, 
 were to be seen at her house, but even for such 
 persons, whose friendship again would have been of 
 great advantage to her, she had not the necessary 
 patience. 
 
 It is probable that Ouida had only intended to 
 spend the winter of 1 871-2 in Florence, but several 
 reasons determined her to settle there. The beauty 
 of the city and its surroundings and the delightful 
 climate appealed to her artistic sense ; her worldly 
 aspirations would be more easily realized since 
 Florentine society was less exclusive than that of 
 London, and, chief cause of all, perhaps, she had been 
 introduced on November ist, 1 871, to an Italian noble- 
 man, the Marchese Lotteringhi Delia Stufa, gentleman- 
 in-waiting to the King, and had conceived for him 
 the one great passion of her life. 
 
 68 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 Before finding a permanent home she lived at 
 various addresses in Florence until, in 1874, she took 
 the Villa Farinola at Scandicci, which she occupied 
 until the end of 1888. She was writing busily during 
 those early years in Florence between 1871 and 1874. 
 Four short stories that had appeared in Lippincott' s 
 Magazine were published in a volume entitled A 
 Dog of Flanders and Other Stories in 1872, and 
 illustrated with four mediocre drawings by Enrico 
 Mazzanti, of Florence. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 "Florence 
 [September, 1872]. 
 
 " The Dog of Flanders is causing great admiration, 
 I hear, in England. Lord Lytton just writes me word 
 how charming he finds them, ' full of such delicate 
 grace of style.' " 
 
 One of the stories in the volume, " A Leaf in the 
 Storm," dealt with an incident in the Franco-German 
 War of 1870-71, and when it became a question 
 of issuing it in the Tauchnitz edition, the Baron 
 asked her to agree to omit the passage : " The soldiers ' 
 kicked aside the warm and quivering body. It was 
 only a peasant killed ! " " My dearest Miss de la 
 Rame," ^ he wrote, " we are not so barbarous as you 
 
 ' The Uhlans. 
 
 " Ouida, soon after going to London, had expanded the name of 
 Rame into de la Rame. 
 
 69 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 think." At the same time he admired the stories, in 
 which he found " an irresistible charm of poetry," and 
 desired to issue them. Ouida strongly objected to 
 make the change and the following correspondence 
 ensued. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitx. 
 
 [Floren'ce,] 
 " October 12, 1872. 
 
 " I am very glad you esteem the stories so highly. 
 It is generous in a German to feel so truly the pathos 
 of tales which personally are antagonistic in many 
 points to your country. Apropos of this, I should 
 not like my English altered. . . . Surely a victorious 
 nation can afford to endure adverse opinions.'' The 
 severity with which the war was conducted was no 
 doubt strictly politic and logical, and from a German 
 point of view perhaps justifiable, but nothing can 
 extenuate to the dispassionate observer many actions 
 in it for which there was no military precedent — the 
 burning of the villages and hanging of franc-tireurs 
 were to me most inexcusable in any campaign, and 
 I frankly own that the ending of the whole question 
 in such an enormous financial fine is of heavy ill- 
 omen to the future of the world. However, on those 
 points you and I will always ' agree to differ,' and I 
 promise faithfully not to weary you with any state- 
 ment of these perverse views when I have the very 
 great pleasure (I hope ere long) of welcoming you, my 
 dear Baron, to Florence." 
 
 70 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 Baron Tauchnitz ' to Ouida. 
 
 " Leipzig, 
 \October, 1872]. 
 
 " I am sorry that you do not consent to make 
 some alterations in ' A Leaf in the Storm ' ; the value 
 of the tale would not diminish by it. But I am 
 quite of your opinion : ' we agree to differ.' I detest 
 with you the brutalities of war. They have been com- 
 mitted in every war ; they may have been committed 
 in the last war on both parties, for vulgar passions 
 cannot always be ruled. Therefore the responsibility 
 rests on those who have so frivolously provoked the 
 war, the French. If you were acquainted with the 
 heavy sorrows, the deep afflictions, the heartrending 
 scenes in German families caused by the war, your 
 gifted pen would find much matter. Not all families 
 have been so fortunately preserved as my own, though 
 we had to go through great excitement. My two 
 sons-in-law and my own youngest son were as 
 officers with our troops, my son — officer in the 
 Prussian Guards — severely wounded at Sedan. But 
 God protected life and health of all three." 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz, 
 
 " Florence, 
 "October 26 [1872]. 
 
 " A Teuton like you and a Latin like me can never 
 possibly view the war in the same light either in its 
 ' He always writes in English. 
 71 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 causes or efFects, But this opinion need never, and 
 I trust never will, interfere with the cordiality of 
 our personal regard. 
 
 " Pray do not say the French nation wished the war. 
 It was the effort of Olivier i and Napoleon to bolster 
 up a waning dynasty ; it was like all L.N.'s policy, 
 a gambler's risk — he threw and lost — and, alas ! the 
 country pays the penalty." 
 
 Baron Tauchnitz to Ouida. 
 
 " Leipzig, 
 " November 5, 1872. 
 
 " There cannot be the least doubt that our differ- 
 ing opinions about Germany and France will — as to 
 me — never touch our personal relations. In the 
 contrary, I hope and wish that our cordiality will 
 last for ever." 
 
 Ouida was now engaged on Pascarel, the first of her 
 novels that dealt with Italy. The scene is laid in 
 Florence and the surrounding country. Incidentally, 
 nearly every town in Tuscany is described, and the 
 book still forms an admirable guide to the historical, 
 literary, and artistic associations and the natural 
 beauty of the district. It was published in 1873 in 
 London and in the Tauchnitz collection. An Italian 
 translation also appeared that year. Ouida told 
 Tauchnitz that she thought it would be always in 
 
 ' Ouida's spelling of proper names is not always impeccable. 
 
 72 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 demand on the Continent. Throughout her life Ouida 
 persisted in believing that her books had a larger sale 
 on the Continent than was actually the case, and so she 
 fell into the habit of asking Tauchnitz for a larger 
 honorarium. The fee paid her was gradually increased. 
 Tauchnitz told her that so far i Idalia had been the 
 most successful of her books. Unfortunately, no 
 record is available of the sums she received at this 
 period from her English publishers. Until the royalty 
 system became general — a system she intensely dis- 
 liked — she sold her copyrights outright. She said 
 herself that j^i,6oo was the largest sum she ever 
 received for a novel. But current report in Florence 
 in the days of her greatest vogue — the seventies and 
 early eighties — credited her with an income of ^^ 5,000 
 a year. However this may be, she assumed her own 
 superiority as a novelist, and continually depreciated 
 her contemporaries. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [November 24, 1872.J 
 " What frightful trash English novel-literature has 
 become ! That Simpleton and New Magdalen are a 
 disgrace to any men who know aught of the world. 
 Those Adventures of a Phaeton ought to have been 
 very pretty, but it has no plot and ends so stupidly. 
 Silk Attire by that author contains the most egregious 
 social blunders." 
 
 ' This was in i8jz. 
 73 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 In January, 1873, she went to Rome for the first 
 time, returning to Florence in March, and her appre- 
 ciation of the Eternal City later found expression in 
 Ariadne. She was now writing Two Little Wooden 
 Shoes, and tells Tauchnitz that she was illustrating it 
 herself Ouida prided herself on her powers as a 
 painter. Throughout her life she was accustomed to 
 paint portraits of her friends, and adorned the walls 
 of her rooms with them. She also drew and painted 
 landscapes and flowers. But she had no talent what- 
 ever for such works. The portraits were caricatures 
 — unconscious, of course, on her part — and those who 
 looked on them found it difficult to refrain from 
 laughter. She continually presented little paintings to 
 her friends, who had to accept them with the best 
 grace they could. For example, she made Mr. Henry 
 James an offrande of a small painted panel, a view 
 of a Lucca street. He characterizes it as "of a 
 childishly primitive ' art ' : really a child of seven or 
 eight might have done it." Walburga, Lady Paget, 
 who possessed many examples, presented them after 
 Ouida's death to the Anti-Vivisection Society, the 
 funds of which benefited by their sale. 
 
 Ariadne was published in 1874, and had, Ouida 
 declared, "immense success all over Europe." 
 
 In 1874 Ouida took up her residence at the Villa 
 Farinola. It was situated at Scandicci, about three 
 miles from Florence. It was a grand old house, dating 
 back to the eleventh century, standing high, sur- 
 
 74 
 
IX, .g 
 J 73 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 rounded by gardens commanding beautiful views. 
 The country round it is some of the loveliest in 
 Tuscany, " with winding roads under high hedges, 
 gray old farm-houses hidden in olives and poplars, 
 and fields going up hill and down dale, with the vines 
 hanging everywhere, and the earth in spring-time 
 yellow and scarlet with the multitudes of wild tulips, "i 
 The villa belonged to the Marchese Farinola, grandson 
 of Gino Capponi. 
 
 Ouida had her own villa in mind when she wrote 
 this description of an Italian villa in Pascarel : — 
 
 " The villa was high up on the mountain side — 
 vast, dusky, crumbling, desolate without, as all such 
 places are, and within full of that nameless charm of 
 freedom, space, antiquity, and stillness that does nO' 
 less perpetually belong to them. 
 
 " Where these old villas stand on their pale olive 
 slopes, those who are strange to them see only the 
 peeling plaster, the discoloured stone, the desolate 
 courts, the grass-grown flags, the broken statues, the 
 straying vines, the look of loneliness and of decay. 
 
 " But those who know them well, love them and 
 learn otherwise ; learn the infinite charm of those vast 
 silent halls, of those endless echoing corridors and 
 cloisters, of those wide wind-swept, sun-bathed 
 chambers, of those shadowy loggie, where the rose 
 glow of the oleander burns in the dimness of the 
 arches ; of those immense windows wreathed with 
 
 ' Cf. Edmund Yates, Cekbrities at Home, first series (1877). 
 
 75 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 sculpture and filled with the glistening silver of olive 
 woods, and mountain snows, and limitless horizons ; 
 of those great breadths of sunlight, of those white 
 wide courts, of those tangled gardens, of those breezy 
 open doors, of those wild rose-trees climbing high 
 about the ^Etrurian torso, of those clear waters falling 
 through acanthus leaves into their huge red conches ; 
 of that sense of infinite freedom, of infinite solitude, 
 of infinite light, and stillness, and calm. . . . 
 
 " It belonged to a great family, and the old chambers 
 were still full of ancient and costly treasures." 
 
 Etoile's Villa Rocaldi in Friendship, although de- 
 scribed in the novel as near Rome, is really the Villa 
 Farinola. In a letter to Claud Harding, dated 
 January 12, 1881, she wrote of the viUa thus: — 
 
 "The villa is lovely inside and out. I wish I 
 may show it you sometime. Across the woods and 
 fields some four miles ofF lies Castagnolo ; beyond 
 that Signa. I have a number of grand dogs, my 
 horses are great pets, the place peoples itself with 
 birds of all kinds." 
 
 The vestibule, decorated with palms, and plants, and 
 the busts of the old Nerle in niches in the walls, 
 led into what was formerly a vast banqueting-hall 
 but then a billiard-room. It was carried up the whole 
 height of the building and surrounded by a gallery 
 communicating with the rooms of the upper story. 
 Out of it opened the ballroom, which looked on the 
 upper garden. Choice prints of Bartolozzi and 
 
 76 
 
VILLA FARINOLA: THE BILLIARD-ROOM. 
 From a pencil drawing by Arthur Danyell. 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 Smith hung on the walls, and lovely Turkey rugs 
 were spread on the floor. On the left of the vestibule 
 was a miniature-room, so called from the number of 
 miniatures which decorated the walls, in which was 
 displayed "objets d'art" of all kinds that Ouida had 
 collected. She was an inveterate hunter of bric-a- 
 brac, but had little real knowledge of it. Sometimes 
 she chanced on a beautiful object, but sometimes 
 got hold of mere rubbish. On the right of the 
 vestibule was a room that Ouida made a winter 
 working-room. Her writing-table was a beautiful 
 and valuable one of Cinquecento work, oil paintings 
 by herself hung on the walls, and her books, chiefly 
 on art and history, found accommodation in this 
 apartment, out of which opened the dining-room — 
 a room that Ouida thought ought always to be one of 
 the brightest in the house. 
 
 In summer Ouida worked in the ballroom, or 
 garden-room as she called it. It was almost empty 
 of furniture ; the large round table at which she 
 wrote, an old ottoman sofa, an Italian stove, and 
 a large portrait of Mario, and later of Stufa, formed 
 its whole equipment. 
 
 The great glory of the villa was the garden, 
 which Ouida has herself described for us in Signa. 
 
 " The delights of an Italian garden are countless. 
 It is not like any other garden in the world. It 
 is at once more formal and more wild, at once 
 greener with more abundant youth and venerable 
 
 77 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 with more antique age. It has all Boccaccio between 
 its walls, all Petrarca in its leaves, all Raffaelle in 
 its skies. And then the sunshine that beggars words 
 and laughs at painters ! — the boundless, intense, 
 delicious, heavenly light ! What do other gardens 
 know of that, save in the orange-groves of Granada 
 and rose-thickets of Damascus.'' 
 
 " The old broken marble statues, whence the water 
 dripped and fed the water-lily ; the great lemon-trees 
 in pots big enough to drown a boy, the golden globes 
 among their emerald leaves ; the magnolias, like 
 trees cast in bronze, with all the spice of India in 
 their cups ; the spires of ivory bells that the yuccas 
 put forth, like belfries for fairies ; the oleanders, taller 
 than a man, red and white and blush colour ; the 
 broad velvet leaves of the flowering rush ; the dark, 
 majestic ilex oaks, that made the noon like twilight ; 
 the countless graces of the vast family of acacias ; the 
 high box hedges, sweet and pungent in the sun; 
 the stone ponds, where the goldfish slept through 
 the sultry day ; the wilderness of carnations ; the 
 huge roses, yellow, crimson, snow-white, and the 
 small noisette and the banksia with its million of 
 pink stars ; myrtles in dense thickets, and camellias 
 like a wood of evergreens ; cacti in all quaint shapes, 
 like fossils astonished to find themselves again alive ; 
 high walls, vine-hung and topped by pines and 
 cypresses ; low walls with crowds of geraniums on 
 their parapets, and the mountains and the fields beyond 
 
 78 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 them ; marble basins hidden in creepers where the 
 frogs dozed all day long ; sounds of convent bells 
 and of chapel chimes ; green lizards basking on 
 the flags ; great sheds and granaries beautiful with 
 the clematis and the wistaria and the rosy trumpets 
 of the bignonia ; great wooden places cool and shady, 
 with vast arched entrances, and scent of hay, and 
 empty casks, and red earthen amphorae, and little 
 mice scudding on the floors, and a sundial painted 
 on the wall, and a crucifix set above the weathercock, 
 and through the huge unglazed windows sight of 
 the green vines with the bullocks in the harvest carts 
 beneath them, or of some hilly sunlit road with a 
 mule-team coming down it, or of a blue high hill 
 with its pine-trees black against the sky, and on 
 its slopes the yellow corn and misty olive." 
 
 After the house and garden a great feature of the 
 place was the dogs. Ouida adored them, and was 
 always surrounded by a troop of them whom she fed 
 and attended to herself. She was continually worried 
 by people trying to sell her dogs. The peasants 
 around her villa called her "la mamma dei cani." 
 In a letter to a member of the Tassinari family she 
 wrote : — 
 
 "You can't imagine the devices of your beloved 
 Italians to get soldi. One man once implored me to 
 take his puppy to save it. I told him I didn't want 
 it, didn't wish for it, but he begged so hard and 
 looked so miserable, I at last did take it and gave 
 
 79 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 him some money out of pity. A year and a half 
 afterwards he brought an action against me as owing 
 him 30 francs for a dog ! The funny thing was 
 that the poor pup had died in the interim." 
 
 In a corner of the garden was a dogs' cemetery with 
 costly monuments in marble and granite to her 
 departed pets. It was so like a real gi'aveyard that 
 the Italians were shocked ; they considered it irre- 
 ligious and wasteful. 
 
 The beginning of Ouida's friendship with the 
 Cavaliere Tassinari i and his family was due to a dog. 
 A beautiful Newfoundland dog had been stolen from 
 his villa of Sant' Ilario, near Lastra a Signa. He 
 searched high and low for it and offered rewards, but 
 without result. A year elapsed and the episode was 
 almost forgotten, when one day Tassinari, passing by 
 the Villa Farinola, was attracted by a dog barking at 
 him over the wall. He recognized his own New- 
 foundland, and inquired who lived at the villa. He 
 discovered it was Ouida, the famous novelist. He 
 asked to see her and stated the facts. The evident 
 joy of the dog at seeing him proved his case and 
 Ouida acknowledged his right to the creature. She 
 told him she had bought the dog from a contadino 
 
 ' Cavaliere Giovanni Tassinari was in the Grand-Ducal days 
 Grand Chamberlain to the Duke of Tuscany : he married a sister 
 of Sir Edward Thornton, G.C.B. Tassinari's grandson, Herbert 
 Danyell-Tassinari, has kindly allowed me to print extracts from 
 Ouida's letters to his grandmother, and to his mother, Mrs. 
 Danyell, and has himself given much valuable information. 
 
 80 
 

 /■ ' '•■, 
 
 
 Si<4i:M\ 
 
 '-- ^ 
 
 VILLA FARINOLA ; THE DOGS CEMETERY. 
 From a pencil drawing by Arthur Danyell. 
 
 To face p. 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 who said that it was his. Her mother had, however, 
 become so deeply attached to Fido, as the dog had 
 been re-christened, that Ouida begged Tassinari to 
 leave it with her. She had spent a great deal of 
 money on him, even taking a house in the hills for 
 him during the summer months, so that he might 
 not suffer from the great heat. Tassinari was touched 
 by Ouida's evident distress at the idea of losing Fido, 
 and as he had supplied his place by a boarhound, he 
 promised to think the matter over. Next day Ouida, 
 accompanied by Lady Orford, called on him and 
 renewed her entreaties, describing her mother's distress 
 when she heard the reasons of Tassinari's visit. 
 Tassinari and his wife then gave up all claim to the 
 dog, and so earned a title to Ouida's gratitude. A 
 friendship ensued which lasted for many years and 
 was of great advantage to Ouida. 
 
 As soon as she was settled in the villa, Ouida 
 assumed all the airs and graces of a great lady, and 
 showed all the caprices that are usually supposed to 
 belong to genius. She set out to organize her exist- 
 ence in accordance with this estimation of herself 
 and of what was due to so magnificent an abode. 
 
 It was a big place for Ouida to rent and keep up. 
 A large regular income was necessary, and even then, 
 if debt was to be avoided, prudence and business 
 habits, which Ouida wholly lacked, would have been 
 essential. 
 
 Besides the house servants and gardeners, a coach- 
 
 8i F 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 man and groom were required, for Ouida set up her 
 carriage, and her little victoria lined with oyster-grey 
 satin soon became very well known in Florence. It 
 was drawn by chestnut ponies named Mascherino and 
 Birichino, with bells and bunches of pheasants' feathers 
 stuck in their harness. Later on she drove a pair of 
 white ponies and the carriage was lined with white 
 satin. 
 
 She dressed extravagantly, and in that way attracted 
 attention, for to many she appeared plain and with- 
 out charm, a fact she never seems to have realized ; 
 indeed, she believed herself to be exactly like Etoile 
 in Friendship. She was of medium height and 
 had beautifully shaped, very small hands and feet, a 
 characteristic of the Sutton family and one of which 
 Ouida was inordinately proud. She always wore her 
 sleeves and skirts short in order to display the one 
 beauty she possessed. She had large blue eyes with a 
 rapt expression. She wore her hair, which was "chest- 
 nut coloured, with a good deal of gold light on it,"' 
 hanging down till she was long past middle age. She 
 had her gowns made by Worth, the great Paris dress- 
 maker of that period, and they were always of satin, 
 fine cloth, or muslin. White was her favourite colour, 
 but she sometimes wore pale blue or mouse-colour. 
 Her shoes were of satin to match the gown, and she 
 wore the same foot-gear in garden or meadow. She 
 liked to receive guests dressed in white satin, seated 
 
 ' Letter to Baron Tauchnitz, November 3, 1874. 
 82 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 in a red satin arm-chair, her feet stretched out to show 
 their beautiful proportions. She usually made her 
 mother dress in black by way of contrast. It is said 
 of her by those who knew her at this period in Florence 
 that she always dressed to fit the position of the 
 heroine she was depicting at the time — white muslin if 
 a peasant girl, white satin if a great lady. It was 
 also her custom to reproduce in her books the clothes 
 of the people she met. 
 
 Surrounded by her great white Maremma dogs, 
 occupied with her books and her painting, she seemed 
 to pass her life in a sort of novel of her own. She 
 wove a web of romance round herself and her 
 belongings, and only showed interest in those things 
 and people that could in some way be woven into it. 
 
 "The first time I saw Ouida," writes the Countess 
 Baldelli, " she was in her own apartment before an 
 open fireplace, standing on a white bearskin dressed 
 in a white flowing garment with wide open sleeves — 
 in short, like a heroine of romance. Unfortunately, 
 her physique did not correspond to its surroundings, 
 and these only set off her disadvantages. Her voice, 
 too, was monotonous, and I was disappointed. I 
 expected a lively and interesting conversation and 
 found her dull. There was a picture of a gentleman 
 painted by her in the room. It was very like the 
 person represented,' but looked more like a caricature, 
 and a clever one, when to my surprise I found out 
 
 ' Stufa. 
 83 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 the person represented was a dear friend and the 
 picture meant to be a faithful portrait. . . . She 
 disappointed my expectations as a woman of talent." 
 
 Ouida instituted receptions on Mondays from three 
 to six. Her coachman and groom acted as butler 
 and footman. Her mother presided over the tea, which 
 was served in the dining-room. It consisted of the 
 worst Italian form of the beverage, served in cups of 
 priceless Capo di Monte ; little cakes covered with pine 
 kernels, a very cheap Italian delicacy ; and plates of 
 the most expensive bonbons from Doney's, the famous 
 confectioner in the Via Tornabuoni. For many years 
 all Florence went out to see her on Monday afternoons, 
 and every visitor of distinction of all nationalities 
 attended these receptions. She could, however, be 
 very rude, especially if she thought she was being 
 made a show of, but was equally angry if her rooms 
 were not filled. She never at any time encouraged 
 casual visitors, and was invariably extremely annoyed 
 if she was caught unprepared. She treated women, 
 except her few intimate friends like Lady Orford, 
 Mme. de TchiatchefF, Lady Paget, Lady Windsor," 
 Mrs. Callander, Mrs. Danyell, with scant courtesy, 
 and many anecdotes are told of her rudeness to them. 
 On one occasion when M. and Mme. Waddington had 
 accepted an invitation to tea, Mme. Waddington, as 
 it happened, arrived before her husband, and before 
 she could explain that he was following in another 
 ' Now the Countess of Plymouth. 
 84 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 carriage, Ouida exclaimed, " Et M. Waddington — 
 il ne vient done pas," wholly indifferent to the 
 presence of his wife.i Ouida and her mother, 
 when the novelist was at the beginning of her career, 
 once stayed for a short time in rooms at Clophill, 
 near Ampthill, in Bedfordshire, where a connec- 
 tion of the family was curate. He gave an evening 
 party for the distinguished authoress, whom many 
 persons were anxious to meet. She arrived late, and 
 on entering the porch of the little house was much 
 disappointed to be shown in by a homely maid-servant. 
 She evidently expected an ovation, and exclaimed in 
 an indignant voice, loud enough to be heard in the 
 drawing-room, " Where are your gentlemen ? Is 
 there no one to take my cloak ? " Needless to say, 
 this had a disconcerting effect on the few gentlemen 
 present. 
 
 Among those who attended her Monday receptions 
 were the Earl of Lytton, Lord Dufferin, Sir Augustus 
 Lumley, Lord Savile, Lady Anne Chandos Pole, Lord 
 and Lady Wolverton, and, indeed, all the distinguished 
 residents in or visitors to Florence of every nationality. 
 Ouida spoke both French and Italian fluently, but 
 not by any means perfectly ; she had, moreover, a 
 deplorable accent, Italians not being always able to 
 understand her. 
 
 Ouida rarely dined out in Florence on account of her 
 delicate bronchial tubes, and when she did her hosts found 
 ' Cf. Italian Letters of a Diplomat's Wife (1905). 
 85 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 her very difficult to deal with. If she met some one whom 
 she did not desire to meet she would sulk the whole 
 evening, and sometimes, even, would leave directly 
 dinner was over. She had practised the same principles 
 in London. Dining one evening at the Cashel Hoeys', 
 Mr. Cashel Hoey took her in to dinner. Ouida began 
 by asking him as a Civil Servant who were his acquaint- 
 ances among the aristocracy. This was disconcerting 
 to a modest official, and conversation became difficult. 
 Ouida felt bored and insisted on going upstairs to the 
 drawing-room before dinner ended. There she lay 
 down on a sofa, rang for the servant, and asked if her 
 carriage had come. It had not, and she remained 
 silent on her sofa until its arrival. She was equally 
 capricious in her likes and dislikes, and had none of the 
 savoir-faire that enables persons accustomed to society 
 to deal with an awkward moment. 
 
 These years were filled with her infatuation for the 
 Marchese della Stufa. The story is a thorny one in the 
 path of the biographer, and would be best ignored, 
 were it not that the circumstance helped in determin- 
 ing Ouida to settle in Florence, and produced a lasting 
 effect on her mind and art. She herself showed little 
 reticence on the subject ; she talked and wrote openly 
 of her feelings in the matter to her intimate friends, 
 and declared that everything in her novel Friendship, 
 which is based on the affair, was true, and the Floren- 
 tines knew quite well for whom the characters were 
 intended. It is probably a case where " everything is 
 
 86 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 true and nothing is exact," to quote Maurice Barres' 
 rendering of Goethe's phrase : Wahrheit und Dichtung. 
 It is sufficient to state here that Etoile is Ouida herself, 
 and Prince loris, Stufa. After the publication of that 
 book in 1878, Ouida's light in Florence from the 
 social point of view waned, though certain of her 
 friends stood staunchly by her. But the larger number 
 resented the implied meaning of the book and withdrew 
 from her the light of their countenance. 
 
 That she was passionately and sincerely attached to 
 Stufa there is no manner lof doubt, nor that she 
 genuinely believed he intended to make her his wife. 
 We have no means of discovering what his feelings 
 towards her actually were. He was unmarried, but it 
 is probable that a connection of old standing formed 
 a bar to matrimony on his part. Some of his friends 
 averred that he never meant anything serious in 
 regard to Ouida. Others thought that being himself 
 poor, as were most Italian noblemen at that time, 
 he imagined that Ouida was a wealthy woman, and 
 when he discovered his error cautiously withdrew 
 from any promise he might have made. But despite 
 Ouida's love of Italy and of its people she never 
 fully understood the Latin temperament, which often 
 indulges in amatory talk and letter-writing without 
 any serious underlying meaning, nor did she perhaps 
 realize that a man can be in love with a woman and 
 yet not desire matrimony (especially when she is 
 past her youth, and Ouida was thirty-one when she 
 
 87 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 first met Stufa), or not sufficiently so to break entirely 
 with old ties that have become an inveterate habit. 
 And on the other hand, Ouida herself, notwithstanding 
 the characters in and the subjects of her novels, that 
 made them anathema to so many people in the seventies 
 and early eighties of the nineteenth century, was in her 
 own person eminently virtuous and respectable — a 
 totally different thing from being unconventional — and 
 would never have consented to enter into any irregular 
 relationship. Yet it seems strange that, finding Stufa 
 made no effort to demolish the obstacle that Ouida 
 rightly or wrongly believed to exist, her pride and 
 dignity did not cause her to accept the situation and 
 bear her disappointment in silence. Temperaments 
 differ, and an unfulfilled love may improve a woman's 
 character, may widen her sympathies and deepen her 
 capacity for feeling, may teach her what it means to 
 care for another far more than for herself, or it may, 
 and this undoubtedly is what more often happens, 
 embitter and harden her, may narrow her sympathies, 
 and intensify the self-absorption of a nature already too 
 prone to make everything revolve round itself. And 
 perhaps the secret of Ouida's infatuation is to be found 
 in this very self-absorption. Her passion was possibly 
 three parts begotten and fed by her own imagination, 
 and in it, as in so many other things in her life, she 
 lacked a sense of proportion. A woman may be very 
 sure that when a man really cares deeply and sincerely 
 for her and knows his love to be returned, he will find 
 
 88 
 
OUIDA IN 1874. 
 Photograph by Adolphe Beau. 
 
 To face p. 89.. 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 a way out of a previous entanglement, be it what it 
 may. But Ouida never ceased to believe, and to find 
 consolation in the belief, that Stufa was being kept 
 away from her against his will, and that one day or 
 other he would return to her and redeem the promise 
 she considered him to have made. 
 
 The winter of 1874 seems to have been less gay 
 than usual in Florence. In January Ouida wrote to 
 Baron Tauchnitz : — 
 
 " Florence is very sad this season. Duels and mis- 
 fortunes of all kinds. The gentlemen and the populace 
 are at feud, and all go armed against each other like 
 Guelfs and Ghibelins, so there will be no Carnival." 
 
 She was now writing Signa, a story of peasant-life 
 in the part of Tuscany in which her villa was situated. 
 The Marchese della Stufa, who knew the district well, 
 helped her very greatly with the local colour. For the 
 Tauchnitz edition she sent, at the Baron's request, a 
 photograph of herself, to be engraved as a frontispiece. 
 When the engraving was submitted to her, she wrote 
 to Tauchnitz : — 
 
 " Florence, 
 " December 14 [1874]. 
 
 " I like the portrait very much. There is only one 
 fault, due, I think, to the American drawing — that the 
 upper lip is much longer and straighter than my own 
 is. I have been much pleased with it, however." 
 
 Signa was published in 1875. 
 
 89 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 In the autumn Ouida had a bad attack of diphtheria, 
 but was able to issue eariy in 1876 her novel, In 
 a Winter City, dealing with society in Florence. She 
 made the Duke of Albany's acquaintance and held a 
 very high opinion of his abilities. When he died 
 in 1884, she expressed in print her regret for the loss 
 of one who would have done so much for the progress 
 and appreciation of the arts in England. She was now 
 writing her Roman novel, Ariadne, which, however, 
 could not be published till the end of January, 1877, 
 because she found it necessary to go to Rome in order 
 to verify allusions and descriptions. It is in the letter 
 to Tauchnitz in which she tells him this that we find 
 the first hint of those financial difficulties that were 
 now to pursue her to the end of her life. Although 
 she was receiving large sums, as such payments went 
 then, for her books, her manner of life required a 
 princely income. In a letter dated August 22, 1876, 
 in referring to some money difficulties due to other 
 people's affairs, she wrote : " I have such a horror 
 of pecuniary entanglements." She goes on to observe 
 that " my fame has increased in England extra- 
 ordinarily the last two years," and then proceeds 
 to ask Baron Tauchnitz for an advance and to raise 
 the honorarium for her forthcoming novel, Ariadne. 
 From this time forward Ouida constantly asked him 
 for advances, almost invariably requesting that the 
 sum should be sent by return of post. Her petitions 
 met with generous response. Tauchnitz's forbearance 
 
 90 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 and kindness do honour to the profession to which 
 he belongs. 
 
 Ouida now became extremely exigent with regard 
 to the details of the publication of her books, and her 
 letters show her many anxieties regarding the fit way 
 in which they should be presented to the public, and 
 incidentally her exalted opinion of her own work. 
 She asked Tauchnitz not to advertise Ariadne until 
 it was nearly ready. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 '■'■October z, 1876. 
 
 " I find that when the public knows the name of 
 a work long beforehand it takes off its freshness, wears 
 out speculations concerning it, and altogether spoils 
 its success." 
 
 In February, 1877, she went to Rome in order to 
 
 verify certain passages in Ariadne, where she had a 
 
 delightful and brilliant time " at Court and Embassies, 
 
 etc.," she wrote to Tauchnitz. Her growing fame on 
 
 the Continent was attested by a portrait in a Leipzig 
 
 paper. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [Marci, 1877.] 
 " The woodcut is too dreadful. It is a fat, sensual- 
 looking creature, and a kind of union between a cook 
 and a Bacchante." 
 
 Comments on public affairs abound in the letters. 
 
 91 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 "■ April z\, 1877. 
 " I fear we are fairly lance on war. Your oracle 
 of Varzin might stiU prevent it, and England might 
 have done with ease a few months ago. Palmerston 
 used to say Gladstone ' would go mad or ruin England.' 
 He bids fair to do both." 
 
 At last Ariadne was published. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 {June, 1877.] 
 
 " Ariadne has a great success everywhere, and com- 
 mands the homage of great artists who, after all, are 
 the only people that can really understand it." 
 
 And in a later letter (October 14, 1877) she declares 
 " Ariadne creates deep emotion in many people." 
 
 The book was dedicated " a mon amie, la Duchesse 
 de Castiglione," and its Roman setting is delightful. 
 The story, a very slight one, is marred by exaggera- 
 tion, and shows a lack of proportion in estimating 
 human character. But the novel is full of striking 
 passages that deal with surprising insight either 
 with scenery or with art, and clearly show Ouida's 
 appreciation of beauty and her considerable powers 
 of criticism and her independent, even if prejudiced, 
 point of view. 
 
 Until now Ouida's books had been published by 
 Chapman and Hall, but at the end of the year they 
 
 92 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 were transferred to the firm of Chatto and Windus. 
 Ouida declared that it was without her knowledge or 
 consent; and that she had refused Chatto's higher offers 
 three years previously, in order to stay with her old 
 friends, Chapman and Hall. Mr. Chatto went out to 
 Florence to see her, and matters were amicably settled. 
 M. Buloz, the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, 
 paid her a visit this year. French translations of two of 
 her early stories had ' appeared in the Revue in 1868 ; 
 in 1873, the " Branch of Lilac," one of the stories in 
 A Dog of Flanders, was similarly published. Ouida's 
 work was then much appreciated in France, partly 
 because of her sympathy with the nation in its mis- 
 fortunes, and also because of its " qualites litteraires : 
 I'esprit souple, mordant, independant, aventureux, 
 une grace a part, mondaine et cavaliere." Thus 
 writes the French critic in a brief preface to the 
 translation. He also says that she scandalized her 
 countrymen and women, " par des audaces dont ils 
 n'ont pas I'habitude. Certes les Dickens et les 
 Thackeray auxquels on I'accuse de se croire superieure, 
 eussent hesite devant les sujets quelle choisit volontiers ; 
 on va jusqu'a lui attribuer cette reponse caracteristique 
 faite a ceux qui la blamaient d'alarmer ses chastes 
 lectrices par le dedain du mariage et par des peintures 
 trop vives des entrainemens du coeur ou trop indul- 
 gentes des faiblesses masculines : ' Je n'ecris pas pour 
 les femmes, j'ecris pour les militaires.' " 
 
 " See p. 34. 
 93 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 At the end of 1877 her banker went off in debt a 
 million and a half and at sixty-five years of age eloped 
 with a ballet-girl. It caused her some awkwardness in 
 pecuniary matters, but they were soon righted. The 
 next year she published her novel Friendship, the 
 roman a, clefm which she told her own love-story from 
 her own point of view. Her friends tried to dissuade 
 her from publishing the book. She answered them 
 that a writer of celebrity could not " be limited to 
 the ideas and the limits of a few Florentine opinions." 
 
 Its appearance was the beginning of her troubles in 
 Florence, and brought her the bitter resentment of 
 those persons who considered themselves drawn to 
 the life in the novel. They were influential people 
 who had it in their power to make life in Florence 
 very unpleasant for Ouida. Florence, indeed, was 
 divided into two parties : pro-Ouidaites and anti- 
 Ouidaites. She made no pretence of conciliation, and 
 writing to Claud Harding, January 12, 1881, said, 
 " Everything in Friendship is true as solemnly as I 
 can declare it." In England the significance of the 
 book was scarcely grasped and the critics reviewed it 
 as an ordinary novel and one not up to Ouida's usual 
 standard. Ouida herself thought that the early chapters 
 of Friendship contained her best work. Few, if any, 
 will agree with her to-day. 
 
 The doubtful reception of the book in Florence 
 led Ouida to withdraw herself to a great extent from 
 society, seeing only a few intimate friends. But the 
 
 94 
 

 OUIDA IN 1878. 
 From a crayon drawing by Alice Danyell. 
 
 To face p. 95^ 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 flow of visitors from England who wished to make 
 her acquaintance was unceasing, and she was always 
 willing to receive persons of rank, distinction, and 
 importance. 
 
 In the summer of 1878 Mrs. Danyell i drew a crayon 
 portrait of Ouida, which appeared with a notice con- 
 taining extravagant praise in the Whitehall Review 
 for October 5, 1878. The original drawing was 
 much altered by the engravers, and Ouida was justly 
 indignant. 
 
 Ouida to Mrs. Danyell. 
 
 [1878.] 
 
 " You are far too lenient to the horrid portrait ; 
 your picturesque graceful drawing is entirely effaced ! 
 — yet I made it a condition that it should be followed 
 line for line. Did ever you see such dogs ? — they 
 would suit a vivisector's portrait." 
 
 The hot months of this year were spent in Austria, a 
 country of which Ouida was very fond. 
 
 Tauchnitz kept her well supplied with the new 
 English novels, and she criticized them freely in her 
 letters to him. She found that English novelists paid too 
 little attention to symmetry and strength of structure. 
 Moreover, Ouida had a way of discovering that other 
 novelists took their stories from hers. She considered 
 that the motif of The First Violin was taken from 
 " Daughter of Cavaliere Tassinari. 
 95 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Under 'Two Flags. She thought it was written by two 
 hands, the German and musical part being very clever, 
 " the girl's portion poor and rather vulgar." 
 
 Ouida's method of working illustrates her general 
 extravagance. She used sheets of a large size foolscap 
 paper, writing on it lengthwise in her large sprawling 
 hand. These she threw unnumbered on to the floor 
 or anywhere out of her way as she worked and never 
 looked at them again until the proofs came. Her way 
 with proofs is well illustrated in the following note 
 to Mr. Frederic Harrison on receiving from him 
 proofs of an address delivered by him during the Boer 
 War and published by the South African Conciliation 
 Committee. 
 
 '■^November lo [1900]. 
 "Dear Sir, — 
 
 " Accept my thanks for your kind reply. 
 " Proofs are to me an immense joy ; they are the 
 wet clay to the sculptor, and my own thoughts some- 
 times wear to me a wholly different aspect when I see 
 them in type. 
 
 " I beg to remain, 
 
 " Yours obliged, 
 
 Ouida." 
 
 She sometimes demanded as many as seven con- 
 secutive revises of one book. Needless to say that 
 her publishers' views on proofs did not coincide 
 with hers. 
 
 96 
 
First Years in Florence 
 
 It may be mentioned here that her extravagant spirit 
 showed itself in another way. To the end of her life, 
 even in days of direst poverty, she used most expensive 
 writing-paper and envelopes, in earlier years decorated 
 with a large monogram formed of the five letters of 
 the name Ouida. The same monogram also appears 
 on some of the title-pages of the first editions of 
 her early novels. 
 
 Ouida's literary work from 1870 to 1878 comprised 
 eight novels and a volume of short stories. Among 
 these are Pascaril, Signa, and Ariadne, which with In 
 Maremma, to be published in 1882, form the quartette 
 of Italian novels, the best work she ever did and on 
 which, with some of her short stories, her literary 
 reputation must rest. To this decade also belongs 
 The Dog of Flanders and the other stories in that 
 volume, and Two Little Wooden Shoes, a pathetic and 
 prettily written tale, spoilt by an absurdly overdrawn 
 lurid scene at the end. In In a Winter City, which 
 is of course Florence, Ouida gives a picture of Floren- 
 tine society in the seventies, but so much imagination 
 is mingled with her description that the book is less 
 interesting than might be expected. The period was 
 ended by Friendship, the roman a clefvfhxch. so greatly 
 harmed Ouida's social career. 
 
 These years were undoubtedly the time of 
 Ouida's greatest vogue. One proof of this may 
 be found in Sir F. C. Burnand's parody of Strath- 
 more as Strapmore ! a Romance, hy Weeder, which 
 
 97 G 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 appeared in Punch in 1878. It extends to eighteen 
 chapters, and burlesques in most diverting fashion 
 both the novels of society and the ItaUan peasant 
 stories. 
 
 9% 
 
IV 
 
 LATER YEARS 
 IN FLORENCE 
 1879—1894 
 
-J 
 
 O] 
 
 l9 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 LATER YEARS IN FLORENCE 
 1879 — 1894 
 
 OUIDA'S friendship with Baron Tauchnitz had 
 grown closer, and in December, 1878, he began 
 a practice of sending her a Dresden china figure as a 
 Christmas gift. This time it was a shepherd. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 "January 16, 1879. 
 
 " You have exactly divined my greatest weakness — 
 rare china ! and the lovely Saxe shepherd is one of 
 the most exquisite figures that I ever saw. Once more 
 accept my heartfelt thanks for the pleasure you have 
 given me — a twofold pleasure in the object itself 
 and in the kind friendship that sent it me." 
 
 [June 25, 1879.J 
 "Your beautiful little shepherd is smiling at me 
 from a Louis XV writing-table, and is much admired." 
 
 Next Christmas Tauchnitz sent a shepherdess to 
 match the shepherd. 
 
 lOI 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 In May, 1880, Ouida had a bad attack of bronchitis, 
 an illness to which she was subject throughout her 
 life, and was for a time in danger. Her recovery 
 was slow and difficult. Her novel Moths was pub- 
 lished this year, and the hero was probably based 
 on Mario. The story was dramatized by Henry 
 Hamilton and produced at the Globe Theatre, 
 London, March 25, 1883. It made a very effective 
 play ; the leading part was taken by Mrs. Bernard 
 Beere. 
 
 Ouida felt that a change was necessary before her 
 health could be entirely restored, and contemplated 
 a visit to Rome. She was weak and depressed and 
 easily worried. The woman engaged to take care of 
 the house and the dogs while she and her mother 
 were away failed at the last moment. Indeed, her 
 difficulties with her servants, except with Gori, the 
 maid, who was faithful to her to the last, were 
 always more or less acute. On one occasion, when 
 she had contemplated a visit to Germany, she wrote 
 to Mrs. Danyell : — 
 
 "To your surprise no less than to mine I am 
 still here ! The week before last, as I was just 
 about to join friends at Homburg, the servant you 
 recognized, furious (I suppose) at having been given 
 warning, rushed on me with a great broom-handle 
 three inches round and attempted to brain me. I 
 threw up my left arm and caught the blow slanting 
 on that ; if it had come down straight it must have 
 
 102 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 broken the bone ; as it was, it has given me a bad 
 blow, so that to-day is the first time I can wear a 
 sleeve, I couldn't travel with it. I hear that the 
 man did stab a person in Florence and went to prison 
 for it." 
 
 To the same correspondent she wrote on the 
 occasion of the contemplated visit to Rome : — 
 
 Ouida to Mrs. DanyelL 
 
 "January, 1881. 
 " I am very sick at heart of such perpetual dis- 
 appointment : of course, I could go alone, but my 
 mother wants change much and it seems unkind to 
 leave her alone. . . . The only thing that makes me 
 doubt about Rome is that it will look like following 
 him." I 
 
 She told her friends, the Tassinari : — 
 " The days seem so blank and strange here ~ with- 
 out seeing his face ; life is death to me. ... I always 
 feel so much better when near him." 
 
 And so Ouida overcame her scruples, if ever she 
 really had any, and spent two months in Rome. 
 Before her departure from Florence she wrote to 
 Baron Tauchnitz the letter containing the famous 
 sentence about herself and George Eliot. 
 
 ^ I.e., Stufa, who was on duty at the Quirinal as gentleman-in- 
 waiting to King Humbert and Queen Margherita. 
 * In Florence. 
 
 »03 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 ^^ January io[i88i]. 
 
 " I find Endymion very poor stuff, and were it by 
 an unknown author no one would buy it. What a 
 state the British Government is in ! 
 
 " I hope to go to Rome in a week or so for the 
 month of Carnival. I cough still and want some 
 change of air and of society. . . . 
 
 " English literature is very sorry stuff nowadays. 
 You must make much of me, for now George Elliott ^ 
 is gone there is no one else who can write English." 
 
 The visit to Rome occupied February and March, 
 and Ouida, notwithstanding the break, for Stufa no 
 longer took any notice of her, found a delight in 
 being near him. 
 
 Mme. Rame did not accompany her daughter, 
 but remained behind to look after the villa and all 
 the numerous pets and plants that demanded careful 
 attention. It was the first time that the mother 
 and daughter had been separated, and Mme. Rame 
 wrote almost daily letters, giving Ouida all the home 
 news and expressing her adoring affection. Great 
 efforts were made that Ouida might cut a distinguished 
 figure in Roman society. Much time and thought 
 were expended on her clothes, and one of the Italian 
 servants wenti with her to act as lady's-maid. Mme. 
 Rame, however, with all her adoration of her daughter, 
 took a wise view of the Stufa affair, and gently told 
 
 ' So spelt by Ouida. 
 104 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 her that it would be more dignified on her part not 
 to run after him, since his manner of acting went 
 to prove that he was not sufficiently in love to over- 
 come whatever were the obstacles in his path. Ouida's 
 reckless expenditure was evidently beginning to tell, 
 for there are many references in Mme. Rame's letters 
 to the scarcity of money. " With the greatest care," 
 she writes on one occasion, *' money will make itself 
 wings in housekeeping." 
 
 Ouida wrote constantly to the Tassinari family 
 of her doings in Rome, and over and over again 
 refers to Stufa : — 
 
 " He has a wonderfully good position in Rome, and 
 people adore him. He has his suite of rooms in the 
 Palace, and every one is in raptures over his courtesies 
 and grace. . . . He looked so well at the Royal 
 ball on Monday ; they placed me in the seats for 
 foreigners of distinction in front of the throne ; then, 
 when the Queen moved and people were free to move 
 too, I sat in the Circle of the Ambassadresses. I 
 could not but think of his being told no decent 
 woman would know me ! ! It is very beautiful 
 weather here ; last night as I drove home from the 
 French Embassy, Rome looked Ariadne's Rome — 
 made of silver and ivory. , . . 
 
 " My rooms look on the Storys' garden, and I 
 am constantly with them. I see a good deal of the 
 Pagets and the Noailles." 
 
 lOS 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Ouida to Claud Harding. 
 
 " Rome, 
 "February 23, 1881. 
 
 " Prdy never give the curiosity of those people any 
 biographical materials ; the less said to them or their 
 kind the better. Rome is brilliant as usual. My 
 mother stays with her flowers and dogs, while I pass 
 some months here. . . . [Stufa] is in waiting all this 
 time, but he is so fearfully changed that he has 
 nothing of what he once was, save his perfect manner. 
 ... I go to Court and all the great balls, for the 
 sake of ' what the world says,' but society is sadder 
 than solitude with him for ever before me. . . . The 
 ball last night at the German Embassy was the 
 grandest, I think, of this year. . . . The Royal balls 
 are ill-managed and dull, and we all catch cold, the 
 Quirinal is so draughty," 
 
 Ouida to Mrs. Danyell. 
 
 "Rome [Marck, iSSi]. 
 "1 see the Queen en tete-a-tete to-morrow ; of 
 course, I have seen her at all the great parties, but not 
 to have a long conversation, . . . The Paget ball was 
 brilliant ; very exclusive, as even the Royal list was 
 much cut down." 
 
 When the Roman visit had long been a thing of the 
 past, Ouida wrote to Mrs. Danyell : — 
 
 " I hear the Queen spoke of me the other day with 
 
 106 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 increased kindness and interest ; this must tell, and 
 her friendship is most valuable. How far ofF it 
 seems, all that brilliant life of Rome ! " 
 
 She returned to Florence at the end of March 
 and in June fell ill with peritonitis and spent two 
 months in bed. In August she was still very ill, 
 and in September told Tauchnitz that the expenses 
 of the illness were very burdensome and asked for an 
 advance : 
 
 "I had to pay to-day my 3,000 francs ^ of rent, 
 which in this country one must always pay for the 
 year to come, which is very unjust, as one might never 
 live to inhabit the house. I wish you would come 
 to Florence and see me. This villa would delight 
 you, and now the weather is cool it is a paradise." 
 
 For some time Ouida had been engaged on an 
 Italian novel of a new character. It was entitled 
 A Village Commune, and was the first of a number 
 of novels and tales in which she fulminated against the 
 oppression of the peasants by the Italian Government 
 and against what she considered the vandalisms that 
 were being carried out in the land. She expressed her 
 views, not only in her novels, but also in articles in 
 magazines and in letters to newspapers. Thus she 
 brought on herself the hatred of the officials of the 
 country, and even of persons in high places. She was 
 well aware of it, for she wrote to a friend : — 
 
 " I suspect the sovereigns here are irritated at my 
 
 107 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Times letters, but I would rather write in The Times 
 than please all the crowned heads of Europe." 
 
 Her well-wishers in Florence tried in vain to 
 restrain her, but to their pleading she only answered : — 
 
 " I have always occupied myself with politics at 
 intervals — once in London I wrote what threw a 
 Bill out of the Commons, and you know how rare it 
 is for a writer to turn the votes in England. But I 
 think they don't here in the least understand my power." 
 
 She was obsessed with an idea of her extra- 
 ordinary influence in European politics, and she 
 used to talk seriously of the men she should select for 
 ambassadors at different Courts. She fully believed 
 that her place in history would be with Semiramis, 
 Aspasia, Cleopatra, Mme. de Stael, and others of 
 similar fame. 
 
 She was, however, wholly sincere in espousing the 
 cause of the Italian peasants, and she really hoped to 
 help the Italian lower classes by her writings. 
 
 Ouida to Claud Harding.^ 
 
 " Ireland is in a frightful state ; it wants military 
 law ; it is nothing less than criminal in a Govern- 
 ment to allow any nation to think murder is legal and 
 patriotic, I would have shot every second man on 
 Mountmorris estates unless they had given up the 
 murderer. But Parliament is only a clumsy govern- 
 
 " About 1 88 1. 
 I08 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 ing machine after all, and unhappily seldom represents 
 the national will. 
 
 " I am now printing a story of the Italian people, 
 who suffer far more than the Irish and say nothing." 
 
 The story was A Village Commune. In the appendix 
 she wrote : — 
 
 " No one can accuse me of any political prejudices. 
 My writings have alternately been accused of a 
 reactionary conservatism and a dangerous socialism, 
 so that I may, without presumption, claim to be 
 impartial : I love conservatism when it means the 
 preservation of beautiful things ; I love revolution 
 when it means the destruction of vile ones. 
 
 " What I despise in the pseudo-liberalism of the age 
 is that it has become only the tyranny of narrow minds, 
 veiled under high-sounding phrases, and the deification 
 of a policeman. I would give alike to a Capucin as to 
 a Communist, to a Mormon as to a monk, the free 
 choice of his opinions and mode of life. But this true 
 liberty is nowhere to be found in Europe, and still 
 less to be found in America ; and this pseudo-liberty 
 meddles with every phase of private life and would 
 dictate the rule of every simple act. 
 
 • a • • » 
 
 " I know the Italian people well ; I mean the poor, 
 the labouring people. I am attached to them for 
 their lovableness, their infinite natural intelligence, 
 
 109 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 their wondrous patience ; they are a material of 
 which much might be made. 
 
 " They are but little understood by foreigners, even 
 by foreign residents ; they are subtle and yet simple, 
 of an infinite good-nature, and yet sadly selfish ; 
 they are very docile, yet they have great sensitive- 
 ness, and I see no more greed in them than in the poor 
 of all countries, . . . There are sundry people, very, 
 very poor, to each of whom 1 give a little sum 
 weekly ; not one of these people has ever asked for 
 more than the allotted sum, not one has ever made 
 it an excuse to plead for further gifts. 
 
 " ' How can you write books about these bir- 
 bonaccie ? ' said an Italian nobleman to me, meaning 
 about the contadini in Signa. ' They spend their 
 whole lives in fleecing us. You should never believe a 
 word that they say.' " 
 
 Ruskin took the same view as Ouida, and in his 
 Art of England ' wrote : — 
 
 " There is probably no more oppressed, no more 
 afflicted order of gracious and blessed creatures — God's 
 own poor, who have not yet received their consola- 
 tion — ^than the mountain peasantry of Tuscany and 
 Romagna. What their minds are, and what their 
 state, and what their treatment, those who do not 
 know Italy may best learn, if they can bear the grief 
 of learning it, from Ouida's photographic story of 
 A Village Commune." 
 
 ' 1883. 
 no 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 A Village Commune roused great animosity against 
 her. One person who thought himself the butt of 
 her pen threatened to tear her out of her carriage 
 the next time he saw her, and on one occasion she was 
 certainly shot at when driving back to Scandicci from 
 Florence, and only the skill of her coachman pre- 
 vented the ponies from bolting. 
 
 " I don't think the men meant to shoot me" she 
 wrote to the Tassinari, " but they were close to 
 the pony's head and fired ; probably in brutal 
 scherzo. It was quite daylight. They were roughs. 
 I shall not imitate other people by making a fuss 
 about it." 
 
 But this antagonism to the laws of the land in 
 which she lived, and to those whose duty it was to 
 execute them, had far-reaching consequences, for, on 
 the least provocation, Ouida would appeal to justice. 
 If a muzzling order for dogs was issued, if her dogs 
 frightened people or bit children, if her servants 
 misbehaved themselves, if a tradesman in her opinion 
 overcharged her, she went to law. She invariably lost 
 the case, and not only had to pay the sum in dispute 
 but heavy lawyers' bills in addition. Sometimes even 
 she would call in another lawyer to fight the one she 
 had previously employed. It was such lawsuits on 
 the top of her reckless personal extravagance that 
 crippled her resources and ultimately brought her 
 to ruin. 
 
 Notwithstanding these distractions, the practice of 
 
 III 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 her art filled the greater part of her time. When 
 Claud Harding sent her a manuscript asking her 
 opinion on it, her reply forms sensible criticism on 
 the art of writing in general, and serves also to 
 illustrate her own opinion of herself. 
 
 Ouida to Claud Harding. 
 
 ^'■December 1 6, 1881. 
 " Composition is a great Art, like painting or music, 
 and requires a life absolutely dedicated to it, also 
 continual study of classic and other literature. I 
 know, as you justly observe, that nine-tenths of the 
 tales in periodicals are very silly and weak. But this 
 is unfortunately because publishers do not know good 
 writing ; and also that great writers require costlier 
 payments than magazines can afford to give. Un- 
 luckily, almost every one thinks he or she can write, 
 whereas Literature is, believe me, an art and a 
 difficult one, like music or sculpture. Even the 
 common fluency of common prose writers is only 
 to be acquired by study and continual practice. I 
 was ' born to write ' as larks to sing ; but I have 
 destroyed probably three times as much MS. as 
 I have printed. Balzac did the same ; only he 
 more wasteful, tore up proofs. I shall always be 
 most happy to answer you, and only hope you 
 will not feel to me as the Archbishop did to 
 Gil Bias. I say what I think — but then I am not 
 infallible." 
 
 112 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 Similarly characteristic is the following extract from 
 a letter to The Times, entitled " English Novels," in 
 May, 1882 :— 
 
 " My own name is fully as well known from Tobolsk 
 to Tangier as that of Cherbuliez or Alphonse Daudet. 
 • • • • « 
 
 " The greatest injury to the novel is, in my opinion, 
 the feuilleton form (in France) and the serial form 
 (in England), which so often precedes publication as a 
 whole : in it the writer sacrifices form and harmony 
 to the object of attaining an exciting fragment for 
 each division of his work." 
 
 With middle age Ouida's sense of her dignity 
 and importance, which had been placed by her very 
 high from the first, increased. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [March, i88z.] 
 " Please to address me Madame de la Rame or 
 Madame Ouida at all times." 
 
 When the Baron asked the reason of this desire 
 she replied : — 
 
 " I cannot tell you all my reasons — but even if I 
 had none, it is the more correct way to address a 
 woman of eminence. You always see Mme, Sarah 
 Bernhardt." 
 
 She was at this time about to publish a volume 
 of children's stories entitled Bimbi^ and in asking 
 
 113 H 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Tauchnitz to take them declared : "Whatever I wrote 
 would be read with the same eagerness." 
 
 The Royal Family of Italy had shown Ouida much 
 kindness, and she dedicated Bimbi to " S.A.R. Vittorio 
 Emanuele Principe di Napoli." The stories are 
 excellent.! fhe first, " The Niirnberg Stove," is full 
 of charm and pathos ; another, " Meleagris Gallopavo," 
 is a capital animal story, which foreshadows Rostand's 
 Chantecler. Another, "The Little Earl," had been 
 written for a small boy of Ouida's acquaintance, and 
 she sent him the book with this note : — 
 
 " Dear Bertie, — Here is the book. Like a loyal 
 subject, vous rendez place au Prince in your rights to 
 the Little Earl. Perhaps some day when he is King 
 and you are his grand scudiere you and he will talk 
 of me and tell your children of Ouida." 
 
 The boy in question was Herbert Danyell, Cava- 
 liere Tassinari's little grandson, to whom Ouida 
 took a great fancy. At her request the boy was often 
 sent to visit her, and the days spent at the Villa 
 Farinola with her and her dogs and horses were 
 some of the happiest of his childhood. It was in 
 the "Rondo "at the back of the villa that he was 
 first put on a horse, an event a child never forgets. 
 But what made those days so delightful were the 
 
 " The book was translated into French for the " Bibliotheque 
 Rose." 
 
 114 
 
to 
 
 I 
 
 o 
 
 ;>■ 
 
 o 
 z 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 stories that Ouida used to tell him as they sat in 
 one of the shady nooks of the gardens or under some 
 tree by the river. Thus the little boy heard such 
 tales as "The Little Earl," i and "Birds in the 
 Snow," 2 and many others long before any one else 
 read them in print. Ouida's harsh voice always 
 became soft and pleasing when she spoke to children. 
 She taught this boy to love and appreciate the sights 
 and sounds of nature, and awoke his imagination. 
 " To Ouida," he says, " I owe the joy of knowing 
 that there is no such thing as loneliness as long as 
 there are woods and moors and rivers and mountain 
 brooks." 
 
 The drawing, " The Choice of Hercules," was made 
 by Ouida for Bertie Danyell when it was decided that 
 he was old enough to discard sailor suits and 
 assume trousers and the ordinary clothes of growing 
 youth. She was distressed to find that the child 
 was developing so fast, and the boy feared he might 
 now be considered too old to eat the bonbons with 
 which Ouida liberally provided him. 
 
 There is no evidence that Ouida had a general 
 love for children, but she took fancies to them now 
 and again, as she did to grown-up people, and was 
 always anxious to inculcate in them a love for 
 animals 3 and for nature. 
 
 ' In A Dog of Flanders and Other Stories. 
 " In Pipistrello and Other Stories. 
 3 See pp. 307-309. 
 
 "5 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 To the same year belongs In Maremma, one 
 of Ouida's best novels. The plot is more concen- 
 trated ; the action, though slight, is swifter, and 
 there is a unity and a harmony of composition 
 scarcely to be met elsewhere in her books. Indeed, 
 were it not that, as usual, it is spoiled by an 
 absurd Ouida-esque scene at the end, it would take 
 high rank as a piece of literature. Leaving the story 
 aside, the book breathes the very spirit of the locality : 
 we feel as if we had actually lived there among 
 its people. The heroine, Musa, is delightful in her 
 freshness, simplicity, and dignity. For once Ouida 
 seems to have been wholly the artist, and to have 
 created a heroine who is not merely the embodiment 
 of her idealization of herself. 
 
 The book abounds in charming passages. As an 
 example we may take the following : — 
 
 " ' Do you ever think that I shall die .'' ' she ' said 
 abruptly to the child, who looked at her in some 
 surprise. 
 
 " ' Die ? ' she echoed. ' That is going away into 
 the earth, you mean, as everything does, and then 
 it goes upward and lives with God, they say ; would 
 you wish that ? ' 
 
 " ' I will have to do it whether I wish or not, and 
 about living with God I do not know. I am a sinful 
 soul, though not worse than most. But you do not 
 
 ' Chap. iv. Joconda had adopted and brought up Musa, the 
 daughter of a brigand of the district. 
 
 Ii6 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 understand. When I am dead, under the earth, 
 as you say, what will you do ? ' 
 
 "' I do not know.' 
 
 " She did not, she had never thought of the matter ; 
 her mind was blank, though her body was vigorous. 
 Then she added, after a little thought :— 
 
 " * I will give myself to the sea ; that is the way 
 I will die.' 
 
 " ' You ! I speak of myself.' 
 
 " ' I will die if you do.' 
 
 " Joconda looked at her amazed and keenly touched. 
 
 " ' Do you love me so much then ? ' she cried 
 suddenly. 
 
 '"Is that love ? * said the child. * I should not 
 like to live if you were not here ; I do not know if 
 you call that love.' 
 
 " ' It is love,' said Joconda. 
 
 " She felt her eyes full of the slow tears of age 
 — tears salt as the crystals the sea left on the shore. 
 ' Ah, my dear, my dear ! ' she muttered, ' it is not 
 myself that will cause you to die for love, but it 
 may be some other — when I am gone and cannot 
 help you ! Ah, child ! why were you born ? ' 
 
 " Musa did not hear ; she was standing with her 
 brown hand on the white head of her dog, looking 
 out seaward ; the words that had been spoken had 
 not saddened her because they were vague to her. 
 Joconda had always been there — why should she go 
 away to earth or sky ? " 
 
 "7 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Ouida's- ardent love of nature and her close obser- 
 vation of its processes are well brought out in this 
 book. There is a wonderful description i as seen 
 from the Maremma of " that miracle — perhaps of 
 all the greatest miracle — of nature, the migration of the 
 winged nations of the air." We might almost be 
 reading White's Selborne. 
 
 Meanwhile her life continued its usual way, and she 
 wrote often to Tauchnitz. 
 
 Ouida to "Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [May 27, 1882.] 
 " I wish you could see this house ; it is such a 
 grand old place and so much wood around it, so rare 
 a blessing in Italy." 
 
 [Au^t6, 1882.] 
 " I am much interested in Egypt ; England is quite 
 right, and I only hope she will go through with the 
 matter and make a Protectorate there." 
 
 On some great occasion Ouida would issue from her 
 semi-seclusion. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [November, 1882.] 
 " We have had our Royal people here, and they 
 gave one very pretty soiree, when old Pitti looked 
 ' Chap. xiv. 
 
 118 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 very grand lighted up — but, alas ! things are bad 
 with the country in general and the foreign policy 
 execrable." 
 
 To her friends the Tassinari she wrote on the same 
 occasion :-;— 
 
 " It was very pretty last night and the Palazzo Pitti 
 looked beautiful. After the reception we had a con- 
 cert. There were only the Italian nobility present ; 
 no foreigners save myself, the Due de Dino, and 
 Talleyrand. The King and Queen were very kind ; 
 the King told me three times to be sure and go to Rome 
 in this winter. How beautiful the Sala degli Stucchi 
 is lighted up ! it is the noblest room in Europe. The 
 Queen looked very pretty in a cream and carnation 
 brocade with her thirteen rows of pearls." , 
 
 Her letters now show that her mind was much 
 occupied with public affairs. 
 
 Ouida to Captain Danyell. 
 
 [1882.J 
 
 " I fear they are muffing Egypt after all. Arabi 
 should have been shot in the twenty-four hours ; now 
 the war will come over again in a few years' time." 
 
 " This superb swift course of victory recalls the 
 campaigns of Alexander rather than any prosaic 
 modern warfare. I condone Gladstone's previous sins 
 in view of his having had the sense and courage to 
 trust Garnet Wolseley. . . . 
 
 119 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " The gain of England in this war is the world's 
 gain, for it means a death-blow to Moslem revolt and 
 bigotry and a deep wound to all radicalism, socialism, 
 and nihilism throughout the earth." 
 
 She gave expression to her feelings in the following 
 lines, which were published in 'The "TimeSy September 5, 
 1882 I :— 
 
 " Great England put her armour by, and stretch'd 
 Her stately limbs to slumber in the sun. 
 The nations, seeing then how long she slept, 
 Commun'd together, and in whispers said : 
 'Lo! She is old and tired; let us steal 
 The crown from off her brows. She will not know ! ' 
 And Goneril and Regan, over seas. 
 Mocking her, cried : ' Her time is past. Her blood 
 Is sluggish, and her rusted sword from out 
 Her scabbard she will draw no more ! ' And so. 
 Thus gibing, flung with cruel hands the seeds 
 Of discord and of hate amidst her sons. 
 But from the East there came a blast too loud. 
 As from the West there came a taunt too much ; 
 And she, awaking, rais'd her head, and saw 
 Around her all her faithless friends, and all 
 Her sisters and her children jeering her. 
 And crying ' She is old ! ' and meting out 
 Her lands amongst themselves, and parcelling 
 Her honour. Then, swift as lightning flashes 
 From blue skies, her glance of scorn fell on them, 
 And they crouch'd, like wolves that are o'ermastered. 
 England stretch'd out her hand, and touch'd the world — 
 England arose, and spake, and calmly said : 
 'Nay! I am mistress still.'" 
 
 ' Reprinted here by kind permission. 
 120 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 January 3 [1883]. 
 " What a strange thing, Gambetta's death ! — it is 
 very like arsenical poisoning — so was mine,i but we 
 could prove nothing. He was a great enemy to 
 Germany — but for France I imagine it will be a 
 calamity, because I fear the Republicans will fly to some 
 more violent communist as a leader, and then the mad 
 destroying fires may spread beyond French frontiers." 
 
 [January 23, 1883.] 
 
 "How France is disgracing herself! Bismarck is 
 quite right in thinking that while she is Republican 
 she will be always miserably disunited and weak." 
 
 [March i, 1883.] 
 " All these troubles in England and France make 
 the fortunes of us poor rentiers very overshadowed. 
 I am, I confess, very disturbed at the state of England. 
 There is a curious apathy in the whole of the country 
 which renders it unfit to meet the severe trials of the 
 present crisis." 
 
 Wanda, dedicated to Lady Paget, some of whose 
 traits are to be found in the heroine of In a Winter City, 
 was published in 1883. The scene is laid in the 
 Austrian Tyrol, a district which Ouida greatly loved. 
 Information about the Austrian pride of race, on which 
 
 ' Ouida refers here to her own illness, see p. 107, 
 121 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 the story mainly turns, was given Ouida by her friend 
 Mrs. Callander, and Tauchnitz helped her with the 
 German words and expressions. 
 
 The same year she contributed a letter on 
 " Romance and Realism " to The 'Times (October 12) 
 which is reprinted in Frescoes, a collection of dramatic 
 sketches also issued in 1883. 
 
 She was enlarging her circle of friends and renewing 
 older acquaintances. There are numerous references in 
 her letters to Lord Lytton,' to whom, after Stufa's 
 defection, she seems to have transferred her adoration. 
 She had probably first known him in London in 1867 
 and 1870. He spent April and May, 1884, in 
 Florence. She wrote to Baron Tauchnitz in June, 
 1884:— 
 
 " Would you kindly send me Robert, Lord Lytton's 
 Poems and Fables ? He has been much with me of 
 late, and I am anxious to study his printed thoughts." 
 
 Newer acquaintances were Sir Rennell Rodd and 
 Earl Curzon of Kedleston. She was introduced to 
 the former when a young man of one or two and 
 twenty at Florence, and then he met her in London 
 in 1887. After that time they never met again, but 
 about 1893 Ouida began to write to him spasmodically. 
 When he was in Rome (1901-1904) she wrote often, 
 confiding her affairs, which were then in very bad case, 
 to him, and he was of much assistance to her. After 
 he left Rome she wrote to him constantly, and learning 
 
 ' Owen Meredith. 
 122 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 her difficulties from other sources, he got a group of 
 friends quite quietly to help a little through Mr. 
 Carmichael, the British Consul at Leghorn. Ouida 
 wrote an article on Rennell Rodd's poems, which she 
 greatly admired. 
 
 Lord Curzon first made her personal acquaintance 
 when he went to lunch with her at the Villa Farinola 
 on Easter Sunday, 1885. From that time Ouida 
 wrote fairly regularly to him, and about all things 
 that interested her. She wrote of dogs and animals, 
 breathing her fierce resentment against the muzzling 
 of dogs in England when rabies had to be stamped 
 out ; she expressed her unreasoning hostility to certain 
 British statesmen of whom she would admit no good. 
 She greatly sympathized with Lord Curzon's efforts 
 in India to preserve and restore the monuments of 
 earlier ages, and in reply to some remarks in which 
 he had denounced the native fashion of smearing over 
 the most exquisite fabrics and sculpture with white- 
 wash, and the atrocities committed in that country by 
 military engineers, wrote in 1 900 ' : — 
 
 " Were the names altered from Hindostanee to 
 Italian, what you say might read as a record of the 
 barbarisms of our Communes. It is a piteous sight 
 all the world over and greed is the chief motor-power. 
 Would that whitewash had never been known ! No 
 sooner is a noble and ancient building taken for any 
 public office than the army of daubers is set to work. 
 
 ' From Lucca. 
 123 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Military men are horrible destroyers everywhere ; 
 but here engineers and contractors are the worst 
 of all. There is nothing in existing education or 
 influences to inspire good taste or reverence for the 
 past." 
 
 When Lord Curzon in 1905 resigned the Vice- 
 royalty of India, Ouida wrote to him in great sympathy 
 and indignation ; and among her papers when she 
 died were found, carefully preserved, a draft telegram 
 to him in her handwriting' and Lord Curzon's 
 reply.2 
 
 "Viceregal Lodge, Simla, 
 " September 27, 1905. 
 "My dear Ouida, — 
 
 " How very good of you to have thought of 
 me from your Italian retreat. My resignation, after 
 much that I had experienced, was one of the happiest 
 and proudest moments of my public life : and I leave 
 India a happy man, my work for the most part 
 done — and most of the harvest in the barn. How 
 seldom we can feel this ! 
 
 " I deserve congratulation therefore rather than 
 solace ! 
 
 " Yours sincerely, 
 
 "Curzon." 
 
 ' It runs : " Congratulate you and the country on your decision, 
 —Ouida." 
 
 = The letter is endorsed " Private," and is printed here by 
 Earl Curzon's kind permission. 
 
 124 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 Such a letter bears eloquent testimony to the 
 estimation in which Ouida's intelligence was held 
 by those who were in touch with her and could 
 sympathize mth her aims and ideals. In the declining 
 years of her life, when Ouida was destitute and lonely, 
 Lord Curzon was prominent among those who rendered 
 her generous assistance. 
 
 Between 1885 and 1887 Ouida used sometimes 
 to go and see Eugene Lee- Hamilton, who was at 
 that time an invalid and living with his half-sister, 
 Vernon Lee. They were much exercised by Ouida's 
 absurd appearance in her white satin garb, and found 
 her talk dull or even worse, for she liberally emphasized 
 her preference for " gens du monde " over authors 
 and artists. 
 
 Only a few impressions of those who visited her 
 at Farinola at this period are available. Mr. A. L. 
 WoodrofFe went out to lunch with her one cold day 
 in March, taking with him Wills, the dramatist. 
 His impression was of a woman with a tallowy com- 
 plexion, straight black hair, red nose, dressed in a 
 decollete gown of blue glistening silk, covered with 
 lace resembling a curtain, the skirt very short to dis- 
 play her beautiful feet, cased in blue satin shoes. She 
 was surrounded by dogs, who never left her for a 
 moment. Wills was a raconteur, but with a slow 
 manner. He was telling a tale when Ouida turned 
 aside to feed one of the dogs. Wills stopped. When 
 Ouida had finished, she asked Wills, " Why don't you 
 
 125 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 go on ? " " Oh ! " he replied, " I won't interrupt 
 the dog." When her visitors left, Ouida accompanied 
 them part of the way back, walking through the 
 meadows in her strange costume, and gathering for 
 them the big red anemones which grew there in pro- 
 fusion. 
 
 Miss Maria Grant, the novelist, who saw Ouida in 
 Florence,' thus records her impressions of the woman 
 and her surroundings. They are worth quoting at 
 length because they testify to Ouida's powers of 
 conversation, so often depreciated. 
 
 " That sweet, fair, restful place, with its encircling 
 woods and ' choir of birds,' and its lovely, sunlit 
 landscape. In the distance, blue dreamy hills and 
 green shadowy valleys and soft fertile plains ; and 
 in the foreground the gray tower and ramparts of 
 Certosa. . . . Who could ever forget hours spent at 
 Farinola, or the vivid personality stamped on the 
 whole place ? The sense of seclusion resting within 
 its encircling walls, in the shelter of which dwell so 
 many — old and young, strong and feeble, man and 
 beast ! How vividly one recalls them all : — the 
 picturesque dark-eyed Tuscan attendants, the great 
 snow-white Maremma hounds, lying in the winter 
 sunshine on the marble steps or in the warmth of the 
 fire-glow in the crimson, satin-lined, miniature room. 
 The sense of beauty everywhere, so satisfying and so 
 complete. The cool, softly-shaded hall, full of 
 
 ' Cf. Cara Roma, by Miss Grant, vol. ii,, 1885. 
 126 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 towering palms and green fernery, where we sat 
 often in converse during the hot bright hours of 
 the day, watching the sun gleam on the blue hills 
 in the distance, and listening to the birds' glad choral 
 in the woods below. And the large darker room, the 
 beautiful shadowy dining-room, where we circled round 
 the cosy home-like table for tea, and where, as the chill 
 of the short winter day crept on, the great logs burnt 
 cheerily in the wide chimney-corner. And then the 
 ever kindly welcome from the sweet, old, bright-eyed 
 lady who presides over that home, and from her, the 
 centre of all, who dwells so quietly there, and whom 
 people of all climes and nations come from all regions 
 of the earth to see. And then the bright memory of 
 those hours of converse ! The vivid imagination 
 illuminating the dullness of one's own, like a fire- 
 flash in a dusky corner ; the sparkling, satirical, and 
 yet playful and sunny wit ; the intellect, so quick, so 
 clear, so ' fine ' ; the wealth of literary and aesthetic 
 culture, the vast and versatile knowledge of the world 
 of many lands ; and, above all, that warm, kind 
 nature, so sympathetic, so intensely ^ sensible^ to all 
 things that are beautiful and great and good, and at 
 the same time so acutely ' sensible ' to the pain and 
 the lutte and the passion of every created thing — of 
 every being that lives and that suffers — because, in all 
 nature, pain is the one inheritance that is inseparable 
 from life." 
 
 Mr. Lionel Robinson, a friend of long standing 
 
 127 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 and to whom she often submitted her novels in 
 manuscript or proof, paid Ouida a visit at the villa. 
 She asked him so to arrange his plans as to arrive 
 at night, and told him to look out at the station for 
 ponies with silver trappings. He complied with her 
 wish, although, like most people, he preferred to arrive 
 at a new and unknown place by daylight. Next day 
 he asked Ouida her reason, and she replied that she 
 wished his first impression of Farinola to be the view 
 from it in the early morning. 
 
 In 1884 Ouida published Pipistrello, a collection 
 of short stories, and Princess Nafraxine, again a novel 
 of society. Othmar, a sequel to it, was printed first 
 as a feuilleton, a mode of publication Ouida detested. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [May I, 1885.] 
 
 " I hate feuilletons, but the times are so bad now, 
 thanks to that madman Gladstone, that one is forced 
 to accept many things one dislikes." 
 
 A letter to the Marchesa Incontri, formerly Princess 
 Galitzin, shows what Ouida was thinking and doing 
 at this time. 
 
 "May 17, 1885. 
 
 " I fear Canut ' will suffer with the heat in that 
 lowlying fortress ; if you write to his guardian, caution 
 him never to walk him out when the sun is warm. 
 
 ' A dog. 
 128 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 Half the big dogs in Italy are killed by being dragged 
 about in the heat. Ghino is merry and well ; his late 
 mistress is gone and has sold her ponies and horses. . . . 
 "Are you writing any more Russian studies.? There 
 is no country more interesting, or qui a plus d'avenir. 
 A very great English statesman, were there such a 
 thing, would have seen the grandeur of an alliance 
 which, giving Russia Constantinople and talcing 
 Afghanistan for Great Britain, would have laid the 
 foundations of a durable accord and held the ambition 
 of Germany in check. Politics have a great fascination 
 for me. . . . All our friends are picnicking on wet 
 grass in Royal company every day — it has rained 
 incessantly all May. Everything looks luxuriant, but 
 we get no strawberries." 
 
 When in 1885 Ouida urged Tauchnitz to issue 
 more of her books, he told her — 
 
 " The sale of English literature on the Continent 
 is so limited now, that we are inclined to reduce con- 
 siderably the number of new publications, but your 
 books are always welcome." 
 
 At this time Ouida began the custom of writing 
 " topical " poems. She used to send them to her 
 friends in England, asking that they would get them 
 published in the British Press. On December 7, 1885, 
 she sent Tauchnitz a poem entitled The New Franchise, 
 and on the loth wrote : — 
 
 " The poem was not for publication. When I have 
 
 129 I 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 more like it I will make a volume of them.' It did 
 a great deal of good in England, but that dear country 
 is in a bad way, being led by false prophets who only 
 care for their own interests." 
 
 Among Ouida's visitors at the Villa Farinola was a 
 boy who had been enchanted by her early novels as by 
 beautiful and wonderful fairy-tales, a light in which 
 they appeared to the young people of the late Victorian 
 era. He was the Visconde George de Sarmento. 
 When he came to Italy he felt he must meet Ouida, 
 " the magician," and his mother therefore wrote to 
 Ouida, who replied that she would be glad to see them. 
 Ouida received them in her usual attitude, standing 
 on a white bearskin rug dressed in pink satin 
 with long white gloves. The boy expressed his 
 admiration for her books. The visit was repeated 
 the following year. But it was not until 1893, 
 after she had left the Villa Farinola, that Ouida's 
 close friendship with Sarmento began. She corre- 
 sponded with him regularly until January 2, 1908. 
 She wrote on an average four letters a month, and 
 they touched on every conceivable subject. It is to 
 Sarmento that we owe portraits of Ouida in her later 
 years. He made three drawings of her, in 1895, 
 18965 and 1904. The first, in black and white 
 chalk, he presented in 1909 to the Moyses Hall 
 Museum, Bury St. Edmunds. The second, in red 
 chalk, is in his own possession, and is here repro- 
 
 ' This plan she never carried out . 
 130 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 duced by his special permission ; the third, also 
 in red chalk, he presented to the National Portrait 
 Gallery in 1 908.1 
 
 Ouida spent the summer of 1886 at Homburg, and 
 declared in the July of that year that she was so 
 much occupied with English politics that she could 
 attend to nothing else. Early in December Ouida 
 went to London, where she stayed for five months, 
 taking up her quarters again at the Langham Hotel, 
 and enjoyed all the " ' grand mouvement ' of such an 
 interesting moment." Her mother did not accompany 
 her, and Ouida wrote to her that she found herself 
 " the idol of the great world." She met the 
 Abercorns, Borthwicks, Sir John Millais, whom she 
 frequently visited in his studio, and who made her 
 laugh heartily on one occasion by quoting passages 
 from Burnand's Strapmore, and other distinguished 
 persons, and on April i, 1887, dined at the House 
 of Commons with the Home Secretary ,2 the President 
 of the Board of Trade,3 the Lord Advocate, and 
 others. She was entertained at many of the great 
 London houses : she was invited to Stafford House, 
 en petit comiti, when only a few persons of high rank 
 and position were asked to meet her ; a party was 
 
 ' Sarmento has kindly furnished much valuable information for 
 this memoir. Under the pseudonym " George Vane " he is the 
 author of two English novels. The scene of one of them, A Love 
 Dream (191 3), is Hardwick House, Bury St. Edmunds. 
 
 » H. Matthews. 
 
 3 Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 given in her honour at the French Embassy. The 
 following extracts from letters to her mother during 
 the visit to London show that she had a saner judg- 
 ment of her own position than might be imagined 
 from her usual utterances : — 
 
 " You will be amused that Hartington, having 
 excited his imagination by Ariadne, was so disgusted 
 with Rome that he exclaimed 'Why, it's no better 
 than Dublin ! ' " 
 
 " Thank you so much for your unselfish pleasure 
 in my social success. Unfortunately it costs so much ! ! 
 — if I had only money. . . . Though London is 
 so good to me, my opinion of the decay of England 
 is, alas ! greatly confirmed. The Cabinet is a troop 
 of unruly horses with no master mind amongst 
 them. There is not one man who is a statesman 
 or anything like it. Life here is not elegant 
 nor is it enjoyed ; everybody is bored and in 
 a hurry. The men are clever, but the cleverest are 
 the most despairing and inert. The American women 
 have the front rank, and though they are good-looking 
 and agreeable they are very shallow and common at 
 bottom. I do not in the least [deceive] myself as 
 to the social adoration I receive, and I don't think 
 they care two straws about intellect : — it is just now 
 the fashion to come to me, and so my room fills 
 with great people." 
 
 132 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 Ouida to Mrs. Danyell. 
 
 [London, 1887.] 
 
 " You will see by the papers that the weather is 
 very bad here, but the houses are so warm and the 
 society so delightful that it is far more agreeable 
 than Florence, malgre the alternations of snow and 
 fog. I am always warm here, and in Florence (in 
 winter) never. The moment, too, is very interesting, and 
 politically pregnant of great changes. Lord Orford's 
 sister, Lady Dorothy Nevill, is at Sandringham, but 
 I breakfast with her next week. 
 
 " My headquarters are in my old salon at the 
 Langham Hotel, and my friends fill it with hothouse 
 flowers." 
 
 Her " salon " at the Langham, well warmed and 
 filled with rare hot-house flowers, the gifts of admiring 
 friends, had quite an Italian atmosphere and formed 
 a pleasing contrast to the inclement weather outside. 
 A brilliant company was always to be found there, 
 including, among others, Browning, Lord and Lady 
 Lytton, Violet Fane, Oscar Wilde, Lady Dorothy 
 Nevill, Winifred, Lady Howard of Glossop, Lady 
 Llandafi^, and Mr. Walter of The Times. 
 
 The visit to London, however, ended in gloom, 
 and indeed resembled the passage of a brilliant meteor. 
 For Ouida's financial resources did not warrant her 
 extravagant expenditure, and she found herself 
 practically stranded in London through her many 
 
 133 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 debts ; even her hotel bill was unpaid. It was then 
 that Lady Dorothy Nevill, who characterized Ouida as 
 one of the most hopelessly extravagant women she 
 had ever known, aided by a few friends, came to 
 her assistance and enabled her to return to Florence. 
 She never again visited England. It may be stated 
 here that the novelist's eccentricities and vagaries never 
 impaired the pleasant relations that prevailed between 
 her and Lady Dorothy Nevill, who kept up a 
 correspondence with Ouida until the end, and was 
 a staunch admirer of her best novels and tales. 
 
 On her return to Florence Ouida was still oppressed 
 with financial difficulties. Notwithstanding that she 
 had received ;^900 from Chatto and Windus in 
 advance for Guilderoy, ' in July she asked Tauchnitz 
 for advances so that she might pay her rent due on 
 June I . 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 "I am very much straightened in money matters 
 just now, owing to my long absence. . . . 
 
 " My landlord will turn me out without any regard 
 to the immense benefits I have done to his property ; 
 indeed, he will be glad to get an excuse to let the 
 place at an increased rental." 
 
 Tauchnitz, as usual, gave her some assistance. 
 
 ' She declared the sum to be ^^400 less than usual, and that 
 another firm had offered her j^i,8oo. The book was published 
 in 1889. See p. 150. 
 
 134 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 In April, 1888, she was much grieved at Matthew 
 Arnold's death ; his love of dogs and of nature and 
 of calm drew her to him, and she composed some 
 verses in his memory, sending a copy of them to 
 Millais. 
 
 Ouida to Sir John Millais. 
 
 [Florence, April zt,, 1888.] 
 
 " I think you may like to have these lines on your 
 dead friend, and I have sent them to The Times, but 
 they may not perhaps have room for them.' I often 
 think of your delicious studio and our pleasant hours. 
 Lady Windsor has been here some months, and when 
 she returns to London you must go and see her and 
 talk of me." 
 
 The verses show feeling, and run thus : — 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 April, 1888. 
 
 O Kai ! Thy master follows thee 
 Into the dread eternal night ; 
 He whose fair hope and aim was light 
 Has sunk beneath the moonless sea. 
 
 The scholar, poet, prophet, seer. 
 Is dead, as dead as Geist and Kai.^ 
 He whose heart thrilled at every cry 
 Lies deaf and blind upon his bier. 
 
 ■ The Times did not issue them. They are printed here for the 
 first time by the kind permission of Miss Millais. 
 
 = Matthew Arnold's two dachshunds, to whom he was much 
 attached. 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 To him the torrent and the wold 
 As old familiar friends were dear. 
 The ocean far, the hill-side near, 
 Wak'd worship from his soul deem'd cold 
 
 By men who saw such little way 
 Into that clear and lofty mind 
 Which, mate to Plato's, still could find 
 Sport in a doggie's simple play. 
 
 The world is dark with war and greed. 
 Rebellion, anarchy, and lies ; 
 111 can it spare his lessons wise, 
 111 can it lose his classic creed. 
 
 Sweet lyrist in a noisy day. 
 
 Pure teacher of a vulgar crowd 
 
 Whose voice reach'd flutelike through the loud 
 
 Uproar of furious faction-frays. 
 
 The earth doth shake beneath the tread 
 Of armM nations hot with lust 
 Of conquest, and no sword may rust 
 Within the scabbard lest the dread 
 
 Of rising peoples scare the sleep 
 From rich men's couch, from monarch's bed ; 
 And he who in sweet numbers wed 
 Wisdom with grace, he whom we weep 
 
 To-day, who call'd the weary age 
 To rest by the Pierian fount 
 Deep in wild-thyme on Hybla's mount 
 To hear the singer and the sage — 
 
 He whom we mourn to-day is dead. 
 As dead as humble Geist and Kai. 
 Gone from the living world for aye. 
 The one Greek soul by Muses fed. 
 136 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 O Geist and Kai ! If we shall meet 
 Your master midst the fadeless bloom 
 Of asphodels, so from your tomb 
 You too shall rise and kiss his feet. 
 
 Later she again referred to Matthew Arnold in a 
 pleasant passage : — 
 
 "To the philosopher the difference between the 
 human and the other races cannot appear very great, 
 whilst to the poet the solidarity of all sentient life must 
 always seem unquestionable. That friend, and scholar, 
 and poet, for whom I mourn as freshly as though he 
 had died but yesterday, did not disdain to greet a 
 brother's spirit in 
 
 ' That liquid, melancholy eye 
 
 From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs, 
 Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry, 
 The sense of tears in mortal things,' 
 
 for these lines were written by Matthew Arnold to 
 'only a dog.'" 
 
 Ouida observed that Arnold not only loved his dogs, 
 Geist and Kai, but he also respected them, " for who- 
 ever does not in a fair degree, as with a human friend, 
 respect the freedom, the preference, and the idiosyn- 
 crasy of an animal will never reach true comprehension 
 of him." I 
 
 About this time Ouida's exaggerated feeling for 
 dogs caused division between her and the Cavaliere 
 Tassinari. A mad dog had passed by his villa, and 
 ' Cf. Critical Studies, "The Quality of Mercy " (1900). 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 the authorities ordered all the dogs in the commune 
 to be shut up or chained up, a fine of 40 francs to be 
 paid for each dog found loose. Tassinari naturally 
 obeyed, and shut up his dogs in the stable-yard. On 
 hearing this Ouida wrote to his daughter, Mrs. 
 Danyell : — 
 
 " I hasten to enclose this for your father. It is 
 horrible to put two great dogs together, and their 
 blood boils till they become unsafe. If he does not 
 let the dogs be free I will cease all friendship for him 
 and consign him to the disgust of posterity as second 
 to the Cenci father in cruelty. If you do not answer 
 me I shall do something." 
 
 And from that time Tassinari ceased to exist for 
 her, although, as will be seen, his services and those of 
 his family were always at her disposal in her many 
 difficulties. From another letter ' we gather still more 
 of her strange methods with dogs. 
 
 " Dogs are so very susceptible that no worrying 
 ought to be permitted to them. Pan has just made a 
 wreck of four fine geraniums, and killed them and 
 taken another hat — but I don't touch him. I tell him 
 he is naughty, and he is very repentant — till next time." 
 
 She felt also a strong sympathy with the vegetable 
 kingdom, and that feeling and her unreasonable ob- 
 stinacy caused a quarrel between her and the 
 Marchese Farinola, the landlord of her villa, which 
 ended in her total discomfiture and obliged her to quit 
 " To a member of the Tassinari family. 
 138 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 the house. She sternly refused to have the tall laurel 
 hedges of the old Italian garden clipped and trimmed. 
 The Marchese sent his bailiff to expostulate, and to ask 
 her to keep the park in order. She answered him with, 
 *' How would the Marchese like to have his own arms 
 and legs lopped off?" Her obstinacy made the 
 Marchese resolve to cancel his agreement with her and 
 regain possession of the villa. But, not wishing to be 
 discourteous, he asked Sir Dominic Ellis Colnaghi, then 
 British Consul in Florence, to intervene. Colnaghi 
 wrote to Captain Danyelli; — 
 
 ''June 3, 1888. 
 
 " The day before yesterday the Marchese Farinola 
 called on me with reference to his villa at Scandicci 
 now tenanted by Madame de la Rame. It appears, if 
 I understand him correctly, that there is some difficulty 
 with regard to the cessation of the tenancy, and before 
 taking any final legal measure the Marchese is anxious 
 that an opportunity of a friendly settlement should not 
 be lost. I said the question was one in which for 
 various reasons I did not see that I could interfere 
 officially, but that I knew a friend of Madame de la 
 Rame to whom I could write a private line on the 
 subject. . . . 
 
 " The landlord requires possession of his villa and 
 intends to take every legal step in his power to 
 obtain it." 
 
 I Son-in-law of the Cavaliere Tassinari. 
 139 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Ouida, however, refused to listen to reason or to 
 take advice from any quarter, and was consequently 
 submitted to ill-treatment on the part of the gendarmes 
 and peasants sent by the Marchese to force an eviction. 
 Describing what happened, she wrote : — 
 
 " They forced the gates, then forced the shutters 
 of the ante-room, which took them two hours, entered 
 so and forced every door in the house, these filthy 
 peasants covering me with abuse." 
 
 In the evening the men were withdrawn. Captain 
 Danyell busied himself on Ouida's behalf and went 
 to his friend Senator Gadda, the Prefect of Florence, 
 in the hope of obtaining some redress. On being 
 informed of this Ouida replied : " A thousand thanks. 
 Am waiting for my lawyer. Am a French subject 
 and was presented at the Quirinale by the French 
 Ambassadress." The statement of her French nation- 
 ality was startling and unexpected. The French 
 Consul, to whom Danyell then appealed, said he would 
 willingly intervene if Ouida would furnish him with 
 documents proving that she was a French subject. 
 Danyell told this to Ouida, who indignantly replied : 
 " What does the Consul mean by establishing facts ? 
 They are established. Unhappily I have no papers 
 of any kind ; my father disappeared after the Com- 
 mune and his papers with him." 
 
 She then went herself to see the Prefect, and her 
 account of the interview is characteristic : — 
 
 " I saw Gadda ; he was violent — said I dreamed 
 
 140 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 things that could occur to no one else ; declared that 
 Farinola could not have been paid.' Then he said 
 if he had been, there were the tribunals of the country. 
 I said quand un gentilhomme se conduit comme un 
 cuistre, il me semble que les autres gentilhommes du 
 pays doivent le rappeler a raison par I'arret d'un 
 tribunal beaucoup plus haut que celui des Cours 
 d'Assizes. He was alarmed and changed his tone 
 and conducted me to the carriage. ... I fear nothing 
 much can be done until I can go to Rome, but in 
 any event I can always bring an action against the 
 police. There is so much worry and so much 
 injustice in this lovely but unhappy country." 
 
 The matter ended, however, in the Marchese's 
 complete victory. 
 
 Ouida then went to live in Florence itself, and 
 notwithstanding her lack of means took an apartment 
 of thirty rooms, with a magnificent terrace for the dogs, 
 in the Palazzo Feroni in the Via de Serragli. She still 
 had great and influential friends who were ready to give 
 her substantial pecuniary help. She seemed, however, 
 to have lost all sense of proportion. One morning she 
 wrote a frantic letter to the Marchesa Incontri, who had 
 already lent her large sums, asking for the immediate 
 loan of 500 francs. The Marchesa replied : " I 
 
 ' There was a dispute as to whether the rent (3,000 francs) had 
 been paid, Ouida maintaining that it had and the Marchese 
 denying that he had ever received it, and declaring the receipt 
 which was forthcoming after a while to be a forgery. 
 
 141 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 have not got 500 francs, but I send you 50." The 
 same afternoon Ouida drove up to thank her in a 
 carriage and pair. A rich and influential friend had 
 bought her furniture for 30,000 francs, leaving it, 
 however, in her possession for her own use, while 
 morally, of course, it belonged to him. Following her 
 principle, often enounced, that people with money 
 ought to pay for people with brains, she allowed her 
 creditors to seize it, and it was all sold by auction ; 
 even her manuscripts were hawked about and her 
 most cherished possessions and souvenirs scattered to 
 the winds. 
 
 Then began Ouida's painful odyssey from hotel 
 to hotel, from villa to villa. From each she and 
 her dogs would be ignominiously expelled when her 
 bills became too large to allow of further transactions. 
 It is even said that she wandered all one night on 
 the Lung' Arno with her pets. The Tassinari offered 
 her their villa at Signa as a haven of refuge. She 
 answered : "I cannot tolerate people who forget." 
 To one of her most constant friends, who offered her 
 a little villino, Ouida, after viewing the place, 
 answered, although she knew not where to turn at 
 the time, " Woman, do you think I can live in 
 a box .'' " 
 
 Meanwhile she continued to write to Baron Tauch- 
 nitz, whose son and daughter-in-law had made her 
 personal acquaintance in Florence. 
 
 142 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 Ouida to "Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 ''January [1889]. 
 " The whole system of English publication is under- 
 going so great a change, owing to the cheap newspaper 
 Press, that I confess I look forward with apprehension 
 to its future. I very much regret that I did not write 
 my books in my own tongue (French) ; however, 
 I should not in that case have had such pleasant 
 intercourse with your house, so all things have their 
 compensations." 
 
 In 1890 she made a new friend in Mrs. H. C. 
 Huntington, who occupied a beautiful villa, the 
 situation of which Ouida greatly admired. Mrs. 
 Huntington remained her firm friend to the last. 
 " I envy you the beautiful old Castellani," Ouida 
 writes, " and that divine sunset view across the plain 
 to Signa and Monte Albano." In September she went 
 to Austria and Venice. The demolition of old 
 buildings and the erection of new ones in Florence 
 were a great trouble to her. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 -'March 13 [1891]. 
 
 " The winter here has been odious and the demoli- 
 tions of the centre of the city fill the iair with putrid 
 dust and germs. Everybody has been ill in some way 
 or another. I am longing to get away either to the 
 Riviera or to Venice." 
 
 143 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 She had been a constant reader of, and sometimes 
 a contributor to, The Times, but she ceased after what 
 she described as the " Parnell-Pigott fiasco." She read 
 and criticized the novels of her contemporaries, and 
 found them dreary and long-winded. But she ad- 
 mired George Meredith's novels and asked Tauchnitz 
 why he did not publish more of them ; his reply is 
 interesting. 
 
 Baron Tauchnitz to Ouida. 
 
 '■'■May, 1 89 1. 
 " We often publish books of which we know they 
 will not have an exterior success, for the reputation 
 of our series, so we tried it with three works of that 
 author, but the sale was too limited, so we were 
 obliged to discontinue the publication." 
 
 Ouida had never ceased to admire Lord Lytton, 
 and pursued him with attentions. " I had a breakfast 
 for the Windsors on Saturday and Lord Lytton came 
 — he also spent Sunday with me and will spend 
 to-morrow. He is very delightful," she wrote to 
 Mme. Tassinari. Ouida had paid one visit to Kneb- 
 worth, where she had hoped for a tete-a-tete with its 
 owner. She found, however, to her disappointment 
 that a party was assembled. Among her fellow-guests 
 was Alfred Austin. She wrote a poem in one of her 
 books which she sent him in April, 1891, and in the 
 following years she used often to write to him. 
 
 144 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 On Lord Lytton's death in 1891 she wrote to 
 Tauchnitz : — 
 
 " The death of my beloved friend Lord Lytton 
 makes it impossible for me to attend to anything." 
 
 Tauchnitz was issuing a little magazine containing 
 short stories, and asked Ouida if she could suggest 
 some writers of such things. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 " September 24 [1891]. 
 
 " I can recommend you some stories of Frank 
 Harris in the Fortnightly Review ; they are very clever ; 
 as a rule the English cannot write short stories : their 
 construction is too loose and their style too careless." 
 
 In 1 89 1 the new Copyright Act, by which the 
 copyright of a book could be secured to the English 
 author and publisher if it was printed in America, 
 was being negotiated. Ouida approved of it and 
 deplored the agitation in the Press, " promoted," as she 
 wrote to Tauchnitz, " by the printers, binders, and 
 paper-makers, who are afraid of their trade going over 
 to America. The interests of the writers of books are 
 always the last considered." 
 
 Ouida continued her migrations from villa to 
 villa, and at the same time her requests for advances. 
 At one time she was living at the Villa del Corona, 
 Bellosguardo, which she describes as " a beautiful old 
 place, and was for seven centuries a monastery, until 
 
 145 K 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 it was secularized by the Great Napoleon," scarcely 
 a residence suited to cramped financial resources. 
 In the spring of 1893 her mother had a bad fall, 
 which resulted in her serious illness and death. Mme. 
 Rame had throughout worried greatly over their 
 financial difficulties, and was not in a condition to 
 throw off the effects of the accident. On August 2nd, 
 Ouida asks Tauchnitz for an advance and tells him : 
 " If I do not pay my rent for this villa ' on the 
 eighth I shall be turned out of it. . . . My mother has 
 had a bad fall and is very ill, and if she had to leave 
 the house it would kill her." 
 
 Tauchnitz replied five days later, sending Ouida a 
 sum of money, and, commenting on the fact that he 
 had received no book of hers for some time, told her 
 that " our readers much miss your famous pen in our 
 series." 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 " August II [1893]. 
 " I am most grateful for your kind response to my 
 request. . . . The house laws are most harsh and 
 entirely in the landlord's favour." 
 
 "August ■io[\^()i\. 
 " My mother has been in a condition in which she 
 might die at any moment. . . . This prolonged illness 
 of my mother's (four months) has crippled me terribly." 
 
 ' Probably the Villa la Carapora, Bellosguardo. 
 146 
 
MADAME RAME : OUIDA'S MOTHER. 
 From a photograph. 
 
 To face p. 146^ 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 " September 9, 1893. 
 " It is a most costly and cruel illness." 
 
 " September 10, 1893. 
 "She is dead." 
 
 " September 24 [1893]. 
 
 " I thank you infinitely for your kind sympathy, 
 and for the practical aid which you gave me during a 
 period of unspeakable suffering, both physical and 
 mental. I shall never forget the goodness of you 
 and of your son. You are a real friend ; the world 
 holds but few." 
 
 ''November 8 [1893]. 
 
 " I cannot tell you how I miss my mother, nor how 
 I am haunted by the remembrance of all her great 
 sufferings after her fall. Her eyes were so beautiful 
 to the last, and like those of a woman of twenty. 
 Her little dog Rex is still very unhappy, though none 
 of his habits are changed, and he is fond of me." 
 
 So crippled were Ouida's resources that her mother 
 was actually buried in the pauper's portion of the 
 Allori Cefiietery at Florence. It seems incredible that 
 this need have been, and it is quite certain that had 
 they known the exact condition of things Ouida's 
 friends would have prevented it, but her foolish pride 
 stood in the way. 
 
 Mme. Rame's death was a great blow to Ouida. She 
 would have fully endorsed Gray's remark on a similar 
 
 147 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 occasion, " We can only have one single mother." 
 The mother and daughter had only been separated 
 two or three times in the fifty-three years since Oiiida's 
 birth. Ouida never ceased to miss her mother's ador- 
 ing affection and admiration. Writing to Alfred 
 Austin some time after the sad event, she said : " I shall 
 miss her as long as I live, and if the knowledge that 
 all are dead who cared for me be bracing, I have 
 that tonic." 
 
 To another correspondent, • she wrote several years 
 later : — 
 
 " I am so sorry you have lost your mother. It is a 
 loss one feels more, not less, with each succeeding 
 year. I lost mine five years ago. She gave me the 
 happiest childhood ever led on earth ; and I know 
 now that I was always utterly ungrateful. A Floren- 
 tine peasant said once to me : ' Whilst one's mother 
 lives one is never old, for there is always some one for 
 whom one is young.' " 
 
 Rex, the little Maltese terrier that belonged to Mme. 
 Rame, was inconsolable at her death. He refused all 
 food for three weeks, and was kept alive by nourishment 
 artificially administered. He sat up and begged day 
 after day before her bed and before her favourite chair, 
 until he dropped from sheer exhaustion. Whenever 
 the door opened he thought she entered. He ran and 
 looked into every stranger's face. He knew every- 
 thing which had belonged to her. His sorrow injured 
 
 ' Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, see p. 172. 
 148 
 
Later Years in Florence 
 
 his health ; his heart became weak, and he died of 
 cardiac paralysis at six years old. Ouida, in relating 
 this fact, asks, "What could human affection offer 
 superior in fidelity and feeling ? " 
 
 Ouida's loneliness was naturally increased by the loss 
 of her mother, and as a consequence the obstinacy, 
 unreasonableness, and foolish pride that had already 
 marked Ouida's actions were intensified, and as time 
 progressed it became more and more difficult to give 
 her the assistance which, to the credit of all concerned, 
 be it said, was always forthcoming. She would tear 
 up and then return the cheques sent her, and when 
 a kind friend arranged that meals should be provided 
 her from one of the best restaurants in Florence, Ouida 
 gave the food to the dogs, that they might enjoy their 
 meals and feel no want, and continued herself to live 
 on tea and biscuits. "I am weary of everything," 
 she wrote, " except my dogs." 
 
 In 1894 Ouida left Florence for Lucca. She never 
 again visited Florence. 
 
 In the period 1880 to 1889, Ouida produced thir- 
 teen works, including long novels and volumes of short 
 stories, and dramatic sketches. Of the longer books, 
 In Maremma (1882) is certainly the best, A tillage 
 Commune ( 1 8 8 1 ) inaugurates the stories that deal with 
 the woes of the Italian peasantry, Wanda (1883) is on 
 the lines of the novels of the seventies, and in its 
 setting and some of its characteristics recalls Idalia, 
 while in Moths (1880), Princess Napraxine (1884), 
 
 149 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 and its sequel, Othmar (1885) Ouida develops a new 
 type of heroine, a sort of Undine of fashionable 
 life, who only finds her soul after destroying those 
 of many other people. In Guilder oy (1889) some 
 people chose to see a fancy portrait of Lord Lytton. 
 Ouida herself, in a letter to Lady Dorothy Nevill 
 (January 12, 1888), described it as " a very harmless 
 novel, very Conservative, and containing a eulogy of 
 Lord Salisbury." She had been greatly irritated at 
 the delayed publication of this novel — it had been 
 finished and paid for in 1886 — and even thought that 
 the publishers had received a large sum of money to 
 suppress it altogether. i A House Party (1887) was 
 the outcome of a play she had tried and failed to write 
 for the Bancrofts. One of the volumes of short stories, 
 Bimbi (1882), contains four ' delightful tales for chil- 
 dren, though none of them equals in charm and pathos 
 A Dog of Flanders, published ten years earlier. 
 
 Between 1890 and 1894, years, as we have seen, of 
 great stress, Ouida wrote only a few short stories 
 and magazine articles. Some of the latter were after- 
 wards reprinted.2 The most notable was perhaps a 
 violent diatribe against vivisection entitled The New 
 Priesthood.^ 
 
 ' Cf. Lady Dorothy Nevill, Under Five Reigns (1910), Chap. viii. 
 
 ' Cf. yiews and Opiniom (1895) ; cf. Chap. viii. 
 
 3 Reprinted in Toxin and Other Papers (Tauchnitz, 1896). 
 
 150 
 
LUCCA 
 1894-1903 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 LUCCA 
 
 1894-1903 
 
 OUIDA left Florence in a very depressed state of 
 mind. She chose Lucca as a place of refuge 
 in her troubles, not because she liked the city, but 
 because under the circumstances it offered certain 
 advantages. Soon after her arrival she wrote to Mrs. 
 Huntington : — 
 
 " I dont like Lucca. ... I don't think I shall ever 
 like anything ever again. ... I should not like to 
 live and die here ; it does not seem Italy at all, and 
 one never sees a flower." 
 
 She did not stay very long in Lucca itself By June 
 she had moved to Sant' Alessio, three miles from 
 Lucca, where she took a villa for the summer. Her 
 letters refer to lack of money and reveal her general 
 distress. For three or four months after leaving 
 Florence she did not write to Tauchnitz. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 " Lucca, per S. Alessio, 
 
 " June 20, 1 894. 
 
 " I have had great misfortunes since I wrote to you, 
 personal and financial, which occupied my mind too 
 
 153 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 painfully to leave me thought for correspondence. I 
 have been two months at the sea, which did me good, 
 and now have taken this villa for the summer. It 
 is very beautiful." 
 
 From now onwards Ouida's letters to Tauchnitz 
 contain references to her financial difficulties : — 
 
 " S. Alessio, Lucca, 
 ''June 30 [1894]. 
 
 " I am at this moment utterly impoverished by 
 the infamies of my men of business. ... In a few 
 months my fortunes will mend." 
 
 '■'■ December () [1894?]. 
 " I have had very heavy losses, due to dishonest 
 lawyers and absconding bankers, but the tide has 
 now turned and the worst is passed. Many people 
 in Florence lost everything in the krach ; five banks 
 went down in a single year." 
 
 At this period Ouida was writing only short 
 stories, many of which were published in the Illustrated 
 London News and the Sketch under the editorship of 
 Mr. Clement Shorter. Her offer to illustrate 
 them herself was declined. She could still command 
 a certain public, but English readers have never 
 taken kindly to volumes of short stories, and thus, 
 while she had no long novel to offer, it was not 
 
 IS4 
 
Lucca 
 
 an easy matter to find publishers. It was about 
 this time that her connection with Mr. T. Fisher 
 Unwin, to whom this memoir owes its being, began. 
 Ouida was drawn to him not only in the way of 
 business, but also through his well-known sympathy 
 with many of the causes that she had at heart. 
 In addition, his political views coincided with hers, 
 as we shall see later, in the South African War and 
 in the estimate of Joseph Chamberlain. 
 
 In June, 1894, Mr. Unwin published The Silver 
 Christ in his " Pseudonym Library " ; Toxin appeared 
 in the same series in October, 1895. Some discussion 
 arose between author and publisher as to the length of 
 those stories, and Ouida wrote : — 
 
 "The B.P. is not brilliant, but I cannot believe 
 it is so imbecile as to buy books only by their 
 length." 
 
 While the negotiations concerning Toxin were 
 proceeding, Ouida drew the publisher's attention to 
 her conditions of work : — 
 
 Ouida to T. Fisher Unwin. 
 
 " September 16, 1894. 
 
 " I never state name, place, or story of any novel 
 before it is purchased. I have never done so. I have 
 always received the entire money down before giving 
 the MS. Indeed, I have frequently received it before 
 the work was written." 
 
 15s 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 In December Mr. Unwin sent her some reviews of 
 her stories, which she thus acknowledged : — 
 
 " You have sent me a number of foolish extracts, 
 miscalled reviews. They are not worth the postage. 
 They are for the most part the envious yapping of 
 ' those who have failed in literature and art.' " 
 
 In 1895 she published with Mr. Methuen a col- 
 lection of essays she had contributed to various 
 periodicals, under the title of Views and Opinions. 
 The essays showed that Ouida possessed critical power 
 of no low degree. 
 
 Her letters this year are greatly occupied with her 
 publishing difficulties. The royalty system had 
 become the rule, and to it she strongly objected. 
 
 By January, 1895, she was settled in the Villa 
 Massoni at Sant' Alessio, which became her home until 
 November, 1903. Its fine gardens had particularly 
 tempted her, as they reminded her of those of the 
 Villa Farinola. The trees were even finer, but it 
 was very solitary, and in later years she wrote to 
 Mrs. Huntington that perhaps it had been a mistake, 
 as it isolated her from society. 
 
 " It is a paradise for dogs, and very good for writing 
 and reading, as it is wholly out of the world. There is 
 a very pretty view of the little city across the woods." 
 
 She found the climate better than that of Florence 
 on the whole, as the cold, biting wind was absent, 
 but the sun was less bright. Of course, it goes 
 without saying that in the precarious state of her 
 
 156 
 
^>v^j<a^a^ ^ 
 
 / 
 
 
 OUIDA IN 1896. 
 From a chalk drawing by Sarmento in the possession of the artist. 
 
Lucca 
 
 finances Ouida acted most unwisely in again taking 
 a large house. She seems to have managed to pay 
 the rent, but fell into debt for everything besides. 
 
 The isolation weighed on her at times, and shows 
 itself in her letters. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 " S. Alessio, Lucca 
 [March 8, 1896]. 
 
 " The loss of one's mother ' is so dreadful, cutting 
 down a love which has been our mainstay ever since 
 we can remember. I assure you my regret for' my 
 own grows greater every day." 
 
 [September 16, 1896.] 
 " This place is very lovely ; it is three miles from 
 Lucca, with very fine trees, and gets the sea scent and 
 sea breeze. But it is quite out of the world — my 
 world. Perhaps so much the better." 
 
 She continued to follow with interest all that was 
 going on in the world, though actually she saw very 
 few people. 
 
 Ouida to Mrs. Huntington. 
 
 " Lucca, 
 '' April IT [ligS]. 
 
 " I knew Oscar Wilde very well ; he sent me 
 Dorian Grey, and I did understand it ; I do not 
 think he is a clever man ; he was a successful poseur 
 ' Baron Tauchnitz had just lost his mother. 
 
 157 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 and plagiarist ; he was essentially the cabotin. ' I 
 have written three comedies in one year,' he said to a 
 friend of mine, and my friend replied : ' A great 
 exercise of memory ! ' The Italian papers assign him 
 a much higher place than that which he held in 
 London society. I am most grieved for his mother, 
 a talented and devoted woman who has had nothing 
 but sorrow all her life. It may be very immoral of 
 me, but I do not think the law should meddle 
 with these offences. The publicity caused does much 
 more harm than the offence itself." 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [October 13, 1896.] 
 " Poor Du Maurier ! Death is always mal- 
 apropos, and takes those to whom life is worth 
 most." 
 
 "October 19 [1896]. 
 " I think Trilby was made by the Press partly, and 
 partly by its brio and freshness. The first volume 
 is charming. The second I think is rubbish. / liked 
 his Peter Ibbetson, which most found tiresome." 
 
 Again and again a note of depression is sounded, 
 and in January, 1897, she writes : — 
 
 " One clings to old friendships and old memories 
 as the sun of life sinks lower." 
 
 In 1897 she published The Massarenes, the first 
 long novel she had issued for some years. Tauchnitz 
 
 IS8 
 
Lucca 
 
 had informed her that the sale of her books was 
 falling ofF, and when she expressed to him her doubts, 
 he gave her, in an interesting letter, what he thought 
 were the probable reasons. 
 
 Baron Tauchnitz to Ouida. 
 
 " Leipzig, 
 "March 2'}, 1897. 
 
 " I rather thought of the general state of things 
 on the market of English literature, amongst which 
 I might point out the enormous over-production and 
 the wonderfully varying taste of the public. As to 
 the over-production, I do whatever is in my power to 
 limit it on the Continent ; against the taste of the 
 public I am quite powerless. You know best your- 
 self that real merits arid popularity in literature are 
 sometimes together, but unfortunately sometimes not, 
 and there is many a riddle which we publishers cannot 
 explain, in spite of the longest experience." 
 
 The publication of The Massarenes seems to have 
 afforded Ouida some temporary pecuniary relief. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 "Lucca, 
 " Man/) 27, 1897. 
 
 " I think you will find The Massarenes worth ten 
 
 thousand Trilby s.^ But it will be certainly extremely 
 
 unpopular. 
 
 ' Tauchnitz told her in a previous letter that Trilb') had had the 
 biggest sale of any novel in his series for many years. 
 
 159 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 "... Look at the poverty of the best English 
 reviews. Compare them with the R. d. D. Mondes 
 or the Revue de Paris. I had to wait six months 
 for the Fortnightly to screw up its courage to publish 
 my d'Annunzio in this month's number. . . ." 
 
 Ouida herself set great store by The Massarenes 
 and was delighted at its success. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 " April 12, 1897. 
 
 " Are you reading The Massarenes ? ^f course the 
 English Press loathes it, belonging, as that Press does, 
 to the ' richards,' and in some instances to new peers. 
 I can assure you it is not a whit overdrawn." 
 
 '* "^/nV 25 [1897]. 
 
 " The Massarenes makes a great impression and 
 sells largely. ... It is impossible to exaggerate the 
 greed of English society. I saw with my own eyes 
 their rush for the Mackays. . . . 
 
 " There is not an iota of exaggeration in my book, 
 and I am thankful I have lived to show them them- 
 selves as they are. The Englishman of our old ideal 
 is dead — or nearly so. . . . 
 
 "•I would not say the whole of English society is 
 thus, but the whole of what we call ' smart society ' 
 (which used to be called ' high ' society) is so. . . . 
 The book is brasse dans le vrai. 
 
 " Don't you think it is worth many Trilbys ? " 
 
 160 
 
Lucca 
 
 The book is an overdrawn, lurid picture of the 
 vices, manners, and customs of the so-called " smart 
 set " of the period, and of the entry into it of the 
 American millionaire, who is received solely by 
 reason of his wealth. According to Ouida, in the set 
 she describes no woman is virtuous, no man's children 
 are his own; her personages are either monsters of 
 vice or impossible perfections of virtue. A Royal 
 personage easily to be distinguished is shown in a very 
 unpleasant light. Yet with it all the book is not 
 ill-constructed, and the character of the wicked heroine 
 neither wholly inconsistent nor wholly inconceivable. 
 Ouida declared that ten years ago Mudie would 
 have refused to circulate it, and that it was thought 
 " ripping good fun " by London society. 
 
 The rejoicings in England for Queen Victoria's 
 Diamond Jubilee roused all Ouida's ire. An article 
 expressing a similar view to her own appeared in the 
 journal of the Humanitarian League, a society in 
 which, as will be seen, Ouida was greatly interested. 
 It was written by Henry S. Salt, the Hon. Secretary 
 of the Association, and after reading it Ouida wrote 
 
 to him : — 
 
 " 17 July [1897]. 
 
 " I write to you myself to express my full sym- 
 pathy with your Jubilee views. It has been the 
 apotheosis of Philistia, and was, I think, a crime as 
 well as a vulgarity, at a moment when famine and 
 plague tortured India. And with all this bombast 
 
 161 L 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 England could not stand against the Franco-Russian- 
 German-Turkish coalition, which is quite on the 
 cards, against her. She is only civil to Italy, who, 
 in such an event, neither could or would do anything 
 to assist her. 
 
 " .... I have not touched Vegetarianism, ' and 
 I fear it will never become general. I wish we could 
 live by smelling flowers, like the happy people in La 
 Fontaine's story." 
 
 This year Ouida published also a story called The 
 Altruist, intended to show how impossible it was for 
 a man of rank and wealth to live in accordance with 
 the socialistic views he had adopted. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [October 28, 1897.] 
 
 " I hear Lord Salisbury says The Altruist is the 
 cleverest thing that has been written for ages. I can- 
 not return the compliment as to his foreign policy, for 
 never was any policy more fatal, at once weak and 
 inflammatory, and the ' Concert ' as to Crete is 
 grotesque. The Sultan jockeys them all. 
 
 " Would you kindly send me The Martians ? There 
 is a dear big dog in it, I see," 
 
 Finding that she could not always easily dispose of 
 
 ' Mr. Salt had asked for an article from her on that subject for 
 his paper. 
 
 162 
 
Lucca 
 
 her short stories and that even for long novels, 
 had she any on the stocks, protracted negotiations 
 were now required, Ouida turned her attention to 
 criticism, both literary and political, and began to 
 write for the serious reviews, chiefly for the Fortnightly, 
 the Nineteenth Century, and the North American 
 Review. In March, 1897, appeared an article by her 
 in the Fortnightly on " Gabriele d'Annunzio," the 
 first ever printed in English on that writer. It is an 
 admirable piece of criticism, and I shall endeavour to 
 show in a later chapter the fine qualities of Ouida's 
 critical power. It was followed in September by an 
 article on " Georges Darien," the author of novels 
 on the subject of the Franco-German War of 1870-71 
 and all its horrors. She also contributed articles in 
 Italian to the Nuova Antologia, which she afterwards 
 translated into English herself. Some of those dealt 
 with the condition of Italy, of course, as Ouida saw it. 
 
 In answer to a request from Mr. W. H. Stead, she 
 wrote at the time of the Milan riots (April — May, 
 1898) an article^ in the Review of Reviews entitled 
 " An Impeachment of Modern Italy " which is a 
 scathing indictment of the Italian methods of govern- 
 ment. 
 
 The editor of the Nineteenth Century asked Ouida to 
 write for him an article on " The Italian Novels of 
 Marion Crawford." She complied, and it appeared in 
 October, 1898. The article is more interesting 
 perhaps for the light it throws on Ouida's own attitude 
 
 163 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 to and knowledge of Italy than for its criticism of the 
 novelist. Take the following passages, for example : — 
 
 " In Italy he ' lives only for the people around 
 him as he would live in Pall Mall, or Broadway, or the 
 Champs Elysees. That passion with which Italy has 
 inspired Shelley, Byron, George Sand, De Musset, 
 Owen Meredith, even the calm analytic mind of Taine, 
 has never touched him. He has never felt the ecstasy 
 which is embodied in that single phrase of Taine's, 
 ' On nage dans la lumiere.^ One would say that the 
 moonlight shining on the waters of Tiber, under the 
 bridge of St. Angelo, is no more to him than a flash- 
 light illumining a grain elevator on the Hudson. All 
 which is still Italy, of colour, of perfume, of light, of 
 legend, of rapture, of emotion, has wholly escaped 
 him ; he has never felt its hysterica passio ; he has never 
 known its eternal youth, he has never seen its lost gods 
 rise and walk through its blossoming grass as the star 
 rays shine in the white cups of the narcissus of its 
 fields." 
 
 Again, Ouida combats from her own experience 
 Crawford's statement that the Italians have no 
 imagination : — 
 
 " This is but partially true ; I am not sure that it 
 is true at all. Their modern poetry is beautiful, more 
 beautiful than that of any other nation. Their 
 popular songs are poetic and impassioned as those of 
 no other nation are, and one may hear among their 
 
 ' Crawford. 
 164 
 
Lucca 
 
 peasantry expressions of singular beauty of senti- 
 ment and phrase. A woman of middle age, a contadina, 
 said to me once, ' So long as one's mother lives, one's 
 youth is never quite gone, for there is always some- 
 body for whom one is young.' A rough, rude man, 
 a day-labourer, who knew not a letter and spent all 
 his life bent over his spade or plough, said to me 
 once, one lovely night in spring, as he looked up at 
 the full moon, ' How beautiful she is ! But she has 
 no heart. She sees us toiling and groaning and 
 suffering down here, and she is always fair and calm, 
 and never weeps ! ' Another said once, when a tree 
 was hard to fell, ' He is sorry to come away, it has 
 been his field so long.' And when a flock of solan 
 geese flew over our lands, going from the marches to 
 the mountains on their homeward way, and descended 
 to rest, the peasants did not touch them : ' They are 
 tired, poor souls,' said one of the women ; ' one 
 must not grudge them the soil for their lodging.' 
 Surely such ideas as these in people wholly uneducated 
 indicate imagination in the speakers } " 
 
 Crawford, however, was as outspoken in his 
 criticism of things Italian as Ouida was, and perhaps 
 more so. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 '■^February 26 [1899]. 
 
 " I hear Crawford is banished from Court in Rome 
 because the Queen is so angry at what he said about 
 
 16S 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 the Quirinal, etc. She would be wiser to reflect 
 that when two persons so unlike each other as Craw- 
 ford and I both condemn a regime, there must be 
 grave faults in it. But Royal people put their heads 
 in a sack and never see daylight." 
 
 Ouida watched the Dreyfus case with great interest. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [August, 1899.] 
 
 '* I am deeply anxious about the Dreyfus affair ; — 
 not for the man, of whose guilt I am convinced — but 
 lest it should bring on war between France and 
 Germany." 
 
 In December, 1899, Ouida published in Italian, in 
 the Nuova Antologia, a scathing article on Chamber- 
 lain, a translation of which, as we shall see, was later 
 published in her Critical Studies.^ 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 '■^December 31, 1899. 
 
 " I must send you a word of greeting and also of 
 memory at the close of this century, in which I have 
 received so many acts of kindness and friendship from 
 your father and from you. I think you know how 
 deeply I have felt these. 
 
 " You *do not read Italian, or I would send you an 
 
 ' Unwin, 1900. 
 166 
 
Lucca 
 
 article of mine against Chamberlain in the Nuova 
 Antologia which has made some stir. 
 
 " Pray accept my warmest wishes for your happiness 
 and prosperity." 
 
 In the spring of 1900 Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt 
 stopped at Pisa, and with Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell, who 
 was travelling with him, paid Ouida a visit at Sant' 
 Alessio. Ouida had already corresponded with Mr. 
 Blunt, and had published an article on him and his 
 works, reprinted in Critical Studies. There she says 
 of him I : — 
 
 " There are few men of our time more interesting 
 than the man who bears this name. Fresh with 
 English air and dark with desert suns, passionately 
 liberal in thought and nobly independent in opinion, 
 spending his winters on the shores of the Nile, on the 
 edge of the desert, and his summers between the vale 
 of Shoreham and the alder-shaded water of the humble 
 Mole, he touches, and has always touched, life at its 
 most different facets. 
 
 " His private life, likewise, is equally of interest to 
 the most indifferent, since he is the husband of Byron's 
 granddaughter, the father-in-law of Neville Lytton, 
 the companion in youth of Owen Meredith, the friend 
 of the Arab, the champion of the dumb, and the 
 standard-bearer of all lost causes." 
 
 Mr. Blunt has kindly contributed to this volume 
 
 • Of. Critical Studies (1900). 
 167 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 some extracts from Ouida's letters to him, a most 
 interesting account from his diary of the visit of 
 April, 1900, as well as his estimate of her as a 
 novelist,' and as a worker in the cause of humanity.^ 
 
 The following extracts are from letters written to 
 Mr. Blunt before their meeting. 
 
 Ouida to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. 
 
 " November 30, 1899. 
 " Words, however powerful, utterly fail to turn the 
 tide of the sort of brutal insanity which is now pos- 
 sessing the English nation. I fear that for many 
 thousands of years Africa will be a field of battle. 
 The powers who hate each other are there cheek by 
 jowl, like live snakes shut up in a basket, and the 
 natives will always suffer as long as they are allowed 
 to live. I am extremely anxious as to France ; she 
 is completely isolated and, if Chamberlain continues 
 the leader of England, he will ' go for ' Madagascar 
 before very long. I have written an article on him 
 in the Nuova Antologia of the ist December. What 
 do the Philistines say to your poem and the magnifi- 
 cent indictment by Satan ? Matthew Arnold would 
 have understood and appreciated it. I thank you for 
 the courageous words of the preface and the supreme 
 truths of Satan's reproach. What you say of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race is absolutely true, and I myself have drawn 
 down on me bitter enmity by saying similar things." 
 
 ' See pp. 273-4.. " See p. 327. 
 
 168 
 
Lucca 
 
 " February 5, 1 900. 
 
 " I do the little I can to make the nation recover 
 its sanity, but it seems a hopeless task. Chamberlain 
 has bought all the London Press except the W. G., 
 the Star, and the Morning Leader ; and the war party 
 sends lecturers to rouse even remote little provincial 
 towns with the most horrible stories of the 'atrocities' 
 of the Boers. It makes one think of the Bulgarian 
 atrocities, when ' the impaled Christians ' turned out 
 to be posts of wood to mark the height of the river. 
 You do not say anything of Egypt ; but surely it 
 would be a favourable moment for the Egyptians to 
 turn out the English. Do say something of these 
 tortured lions. " It is so frightful to degrade the 
 desert majesty thus, and surely it is a most demoraliz- 
 ing spectacle for the public. I have heard that their sub- 
 jection is obtained by means of unmentionable cruelties. 
 Something certainly most frightful must be done to 
 them. I assure you the cruelty of the world makes 
 me miserable, and it appears to me a thousand times 
 worse than twenty years ago. How can we hope that 
 such a world will see the beauty and truth of your Satan ? " 
 
 The account of the visit to Sant' Alessio, taken 
 from Mr. Blunt's diary of the time, is as follows : — 
 
 " jipril 21, 1900. 
 
 " We went, Cockerell and I, to call on Ouida at her 
 villa at S. Alessio, Our driver did not know the 
 
 ' Probably an allusion to beasts kept in menageries. 
 169 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 house or understand who it was that we wanted to 
 visit, but at last suggested, in answer to our questions, 
 ' The lady with the many dogs.' ' Oh yes,' we said, 
 ' the lady with the dogs.' And so, sure enough, 
 it was. Arrived there, we found it to be a nice old 
 villa, with trees and a high garden wall and an eigh- 
 teenth-century iron gate, towards which, from inside, 
 seven or eight dogs, poodles and nondescripts, came 
 at us openmouthed. The noise was deafening, and 
 it was some time before we could make our ringing 
 heard. At last the bell was answered by a portly 
 man-cook in cap and apron, who, after some delay 
 consequent on my sending in my card, admitted us. 
 At the end of ten minutes we were shown into a front 
 hall, and there found the lady of the house, seated at 
 a small table (as one finds in the opening scene of a 
 play) — a little old lady, dressed in white, who rose to 
 meet us and to reprove her dogs, who were yelping 
 at us still in chorus. A mild reproof it was, nor did 
 it save us from their caresses. The largest poodle 
 placed his paws upon my knees, and another took my 
 hat in his mouth. ' They do not often bite,' she 
 explained, ' except beggars.' 
 
 " We sat down and talked. I had been prepared, by 
 the violence of some of her writings and by what I 
 had just heard of her,' to find her somewhat loud and 
 masculine ; but she proved the reverse of this. In 
 
 ' Mr. Blunt had just been in Florence, and had heard the tales 
 current there about Ouida. 
 
 170 
 
Lucca 
 
 face Ouida is much more French than English ; her 
 father, she told us, was French, M. Rame, and her 
 mother an Englishwoman. She is small-featured, 
 soft and distinguished, though she can never have been 
 pretty, with a high forehead, rather prominent blue 
 eyes, dulled and watery with age, almost white hair, 
 and that milk-and-roses complexion which old people 
 sometimes get, and which gives them a beatified look. 
 It was difficult to understand her capable of such a 
 malevolence as her Friendship. She can never, I 
 think, have been a sensual woman or have inspired 
 a sensual affection, whatever passions she may display 
 in her writings. Her conversation is good, intellectual, 
 but not affected or the talk of a blue-stocking ; it 
 gives one the impression of a woman who has thought 
 out her ideas and has the courage still of her opinions. 
 We talked about the inhumanity of modern Europe, 
 and especially of modern England, and the rage for 
 slaughter which is its chief feature. We talked also 
 about Italy and Crispi, who is her bite noire here, as 
 Chamberlain is in England. She talks English per- 
 fectly, as she says she does also French and Italian, 
 and she complained to us of the slip-shod writing of 
 the day. It was evidently a pleasure to her to talk 
 and to find us such good listeners. She was greatly 
 taken with Cockerell, perhaps for his modesty, and 
 was curious as to who he could be, for I had not 
 introduced hira. ' Who is he .? ' she said to me in 
 private, ' who is he really ' } " 
 
 171 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " When at the end of a couple of hours we moved 
 to go, she would have detained us and made us both 
 promise to come again. She cannot go now to 
 England on her dogs' account, for these monopolize 
 her life. Altogether she is a somewhat pathetic figure, 
 condemned to solitude, not by choice but by necessity, 
 and regretting the cheerful society of Florence. The 
 exile from it has, I fancy, been the work of her books, 
 for she has had a bitter pen. ' The world takes its 
 revenge on us,' she said, ' for having despised it.' 
 We both left her with feelings of respect, almost of 
 affection, certainly of sympathy." 
 
 They neither of them found an opportunity of 
 repeating their visit, but both maintained a corre- 
 spondence with her until near the day of her death. 
 
 The visit was a source of great satisfaction to 
 Ouida. Writing to Mr. Blunt on April 24, she 
 said : " I cannot tell you the great pleasure your 
 visit gave me. ... I should be in England this 
 summer probably, were it not for the dog laws of the 
 worst Government the century has seen. . . . When 
 you write, tell me a little about your companion. ^ I 
 thought him delightful." 
 
 A long and fairly regular correspondence ensued 
 between Ouida and Mr. Cockerell, her last letter to 
 him being written, as will be seen, only a week before 
 her death. Mr. Cockerell has most kindly permitted 
 me to make extracts from the letters, and his co- 
 " Mr. Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 172 
 
Lucca 
 
 operation is of the greatest value to this memoir. 
 For Ouida's letters to him show in many ways the 
 best of her serious " soul-side." Due, perhaps, to the 
 oncoming of age or to certain teachings of experience, 
 or may be to the good influence of the temperament 
 of her correspondent — for when we wish to stand well 
 with a person, because we like and esteem him, we 
 are sure to be at our best — there is, in these letters, 
 less of the personal vanity that mars so many of her 
 utterances. Their tone is often very serious, and they 
 reveal in some ways her attitude to the great problems 
 of life and to the pressing questions of the day. Many 
 of her opinions are, however, as usual, couched in 
 vehement language, and some of her remarks on 
 persons ill-considered and extravagant. 
 
 Ouida was greatly exercised about the Boer War, 
 and in speech and writing frankly declared herself 
 Pro-Boer throughout ; most of her letters written 
 during 1900 and 1901 contain observations on the 
 war very strongly expressed. She always insisted 
 on calling it a financiers' war. Curiously enough, in 
 1 891 a mining company at Kimberley had named 
 itself the " Ouida Prospecting Syndicate " ; Its 
 promoters doubtless imagined they were paying a 
 welcome compliment to the authoress. She, however, 
 took a different view, and wrote to The Times ^ to say 
 that she had nothing to do with it, and continued : 
 " I consider the appropriation of my name the greatest 
 ' Her letter appeared on March 6, 1891. 
 173 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 impertinence. ... I abhor the greedy and shameless 
 parcelling out of Africa by a mob of European 
 speculators." 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 ^'January 18 [1900]. 
 
 " The [book] trade is suffering from this vile war. 
 The English nation seems quite insane, and I think 
 it would be well if Europe gave it a lesson." 
 
 January 30 [igoo]. 
 " How disgraceful is the state of politics, Press, and 
 public opinion in the British nation ! It amazes me." 
 
 [February ^ 1900.] 
 " The war kills all reasonable things and all 
 impersonal interests. The English nation is mad 
 pro tem." 
 
 [February, 1900.] 
 " English Literature as a whole has fallen low of 
 late years. . . . 
 
 " I have been writing a good deal politically of late, 
 both in Italian and English. It is a frightful thing 
 that this war should be carried on solely to suit 
 the manoeuvres of Chamberlain, Rhodes, and the 
 Stock Exchange. Europe should have intervened 
 last August. 
 
 " PS. I just see in your catalogue that you append 
 another name to Ouida. ' Please take it out. I have 
 ' Louise de la Rame. 
 174 
 
Lucca 
 
 no other name in Literature. And it should not be 
 put in inverted commas." 
 
 " March 2, 1900. 
 " Many thanks. It is of no great consequence, 
 but it is always a pity to confuse the public with two 
 names. Besides, I love ' Ouida.' It is my very own, 
 as the children say. I don't care for any other of the 
 names I bear." 
 
 To Mr. Fisher Unwin Ouida wrote frequently 
 during this period. He had published her Waters of 
 Edera. Mr. G. K. Chesterton was then acting as his 
 reader, and his report on it is amusing, for it is 
 characteristic of the writer ' and also contains pertinent 
 criticism of Ouida's methods : — 
 
 " This is, of course, a picturesque, animated, poetic, 
 eloquent, and supremely nonsensical story : it is by 
 Ouida : and age does not wither nor custom stale her 
 infinite lack of variety. Here we have the old division 
 of humanity into a vast majority of brutal and brainless 
 modern people and a small minority of beautiful 
 peasants and beautiful patricians. The story is really 
 fascinating in its description of the Italian country- 
 folk : those of them that are not too pedantically 
 pagan. It is the story of a peasant who apparently 
 owned the whole of a river (which strikes us as 
 improbable), and whose river the detestable Govern- 
 
 ' It is printed here by permission of Mr. G. K. Chesterton and 
 Mr. Unwin. It was written in 1 899. 
 
 17s 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 ment of modern Italy diverted from its course, wholly 
 regardless of the fact that the peasant in question 
 'looked like a picture by Giorgione.' 
 
 " Then there is an old priest, a scholar and a gentle- 
 man, who goes to Rome to point out this pictorial 
 resemblance, and any other arguments he may have, 
 to the execrable Government, and who comes back 
 well primed up in his 'Ouida' to inform the 
 peasant that there is now no God but gold, and that 
 all modern civilization is going down hill with a rush. 
 But though it is impossible not to smile at Ouida, 
 it is equally impossible not to read her. Whatever 
 the peasant may have been, she is really like an early 
 Italian picture. In the gorgeous and symbolic 
 colouring, intoxicating to the eyes, we forget the 
 silliness of the subjects and the absurdity of the human 
 anatomy." 
 
 Ouida sent a copy of the book to her friend 
 Sarmento. 
 
 Ouida to Sarmento. 
 
 " March 6 [1900]. 
 
 " You are first amongst the fe.^ people whose 
 appreciations of a work of mine are delightful to me 
 because they are so intelligent and select the true 
 qualities which merit most praise and sympathy. 
 I always told you that you had the making in you 
 of a great critic ; a second Ste.-Beuve. I desired to 
 make the story as realistic as possible. It was 
 suggested to me by a precious scheme now before 
 
 176 
 
Lucca 
 
 the Camera to turn aside and use for such works a 
 beautiful tumbling stream called the [Brembo] above 
 Brescia. 
 
 "The dreadful project to make a tramway from 
 Mestre and so through Venice is, I fear, likely to be 
 carried, though there is not the slightest need for it. 
 Just now I can think of nothing but of the disasters 
 of the brave Boers and the disgusting drunken vileness 
 of the English nation. 
 
 " I am sorry not to have been in Rome. I get stucca ' 
 
 here, and to my horror they are cutting down all the 
 
 woods above here, so that the sole charm of the place 
 
 will by summer be gone. En verite je n'ai pas de 
 
 chance." 
 
 ^'^ April % [1900]. 
 
 " I shall indeed be glad if you come to V.2 It seems 
 years since I saw you and there are things I should 
 like to ask you about. We can then speak, too, of 
 your writing criticisms for the Press. I should love 
 to see a journal of criticism without fear or favour. 
 All those existing are worthless. 
 
 " I cannot agree that Rostand is a genius or even a 
 poet. He is obnoxious to me with his jeweller's 
 similes. When the Due de Reichstadt is asked what 
 he would go first to see in Paris, he says the Vendome 
 Column ! Look at this : — 
 
 " ' Le bon St. Pierre 6tant son aureole d'or 
 Pour ne pas Itre trahi par ses feux. ..." 
 
 ' Weary. " Viareggio. 
 
 177 M 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 He writes dramatically for the stage, and he has 
 enormous reclame ; but he is no poet." 
 
 Ouida's opinion of her own merits did not decrease 
 as she grew older. The letter of which we print 
 a facsimile was written to Mr. Unwin in 1900. 
 She also told him that she had refused several offers 
 for the translation of The Massarenes, " as I am con- 
 vinced it is untranslatable, except by myself, and I 
 cannot take the trouble." 
 
 In other letters to the same correspondent she 
 characterized Mrs. Craigie's plays as "very poor 
 stuff; there is no plot at all and the little action 
 there is, wholly improbable." 
 
 About this time, too, she received a letter from 
 a newspaper syndicate offering her £2^ for two 
 stories. She endorsed it: "What impudence! Of course 
 I shall not answer." Similarly, when in February, 
 1899, an offer had been made her for a Christmas 
 story, she wrote to Mr. Unwin : — 
 
 " I do not write Christmas stories, i.e., tales 
 glorifying that epoch of slaughter and gluttony." 
 
 She now began to discuss with Mr. Unwin the 
 question of collecting the articles she had written in the 
 various Reviews and publishing them in volume form. 
 
 Ouida to T. Fisher Unwin. 
 
 " March 17, 1900. 
 
 " I had forgotten the essays. Let us issue them ; I 
 will add to those you have — a short one on Auberon 
 
 178 
 
il O t>.. - Q^ 9tA^. A/2ct^^ 
 
 
 •cJCm. «_«> 
 
 
 FACSIMILE OF LETTER TO T. FISHER UNWIN. 
 
 To face p. 178. 
 
Lucca 
 
 Herbert ; the Unwritten Literary Laws ; and my 
 Chamberlain of the Nuova Antologia. I wrote it in 
 Italian, but will put it into English myself." 
 
 She made it quite clear that she thought highly 
 of the essays, and declared that she did not desire to 
 re-issue them for the sake of payment, but "to preserve 
 work which has in it much thought which is, I venture 
 to say, worthy of preservation ; and this is more than 
 can be said of ninety-nine out of every hundred 
 volumes published in London ; for English literature 
 was never at a lower level." 
 
 Ouida desired to print in the volume an English 
 translation of her article on Chamberlain pub- 
 lished in the Nuova Antologia for December, 1 899.1 
 It was, however, of so personal and vehement a nature 
 that there was some doubt as to the advisability of 
 issuing it in England. Eventually it was decided 
 that, as the article appeared in the nature of fair 
 criticism of a public man, it should be included in 
 the volume. 
 
 The book contained thirteen essays reprinted from 
 the Fortnightly, the Nineteenth Century, and the Nuova 
 Antologia : those that had appeared in the last Ouida 
 herself translated into English. The essays dealt with 
 a variety of subjects : with books and literature, 
 
 ' Ouida was most anxious that friends in England should read 
 the article, and on May 27, 1900, wrote to Mr. Cockerell : "Tell 
 me, when you write, if you read Italian. Frederic Harrison is the 
 only Englishman 1 know who does." 
 
 179 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 English, French, and Italian ; with men and matters, 
 political and social ; with art ; with the woes of 
 animals. Their critical value will be dealt with 
 in a later chapter. The book had success. Published 
 in August, it was reprinted in September and 
 November. Ouida wrote to Mr. Unwin in 
 September : — 
 
 " Keep my book at the head of your advertisement 
 lists. You have nothing to equal it." 
 
 And again : — 
 
 " You should not put author of anything on the 
 title-page when the writer is well-known." 
 
 Ouida sent the volume to Mr. Cockerell, and 
 his appreciation greatly pleased her and gave her 
 opportunity for emphatic assertion of the sincerity 
 of her views. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 " August 1 8 [1900]. 
 " Your letter gave me great pleasure. It is delight- 
 ful to be understood. Do you think ' Joe ' will read 
 what I say .? — I fear not. . . . 
 
 " It does demand a certain courage to go against 
 the current of the time ; and it makes one lose both 
 friends and money ; and the Jingo Press is a bad 
 enemy ; but oh ! the supreme joy of saying the truth 
 as one sees it ! and if there be a duty on earth it is 
 this. I have never in my life written a word which I 
 did not entirely believe. . . . 
 
 180 
 
Lucca 
 
 " I don't think anything would turn the tide of 
 British swagger yet. Those people who do see, and 
 can keep their heads, are too silent." 
 
 In October, 1900, Ouida sent some verses entitled 
 "The Brass Orchid" to the Speaker, asking the editor 
 if he did not see fit to publish them to send them on 
 to Mr. Cockerell. They were violently abusive of 
 Chamberlain and wholly unsuited for publication in 
 the Press of Great Britain. The first stanza runs : — 
 
 " O red red Rose of England ! Hide your head. 
 The Duke of Birmingham commands, instead 
 A metal orchid, as the emblem meet 
 Of Britain kneeling at great Joseph's feet." ' 
 
 She continued her diatribes against things in general 
 in her letters to her friends. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 " November 17, 1900. 
 
 " I love Morris's 2 eloquence, but in his remedies 
 
 I cannot believe. The plebs will never be much better 
 
 than they are as regards taste and light. Their life 
 
 would be unendurable to them if they saw it as it is ; 
 
 ' At the head wsre these words quoted from the Mot-ning 
 Post : — " Mr. Chamberlain's supporters have a new badge ; they 
 wear a metal orchid in their buttonholes, as symbol of their 
 political chief and creed." 
 
 ^ I.e., William Morris. 
 
 181 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 and the sweaters' victims are worse ofF than were the 
 slaves of Imperial Rome." 
 
 " December 19, 1900. 
 
 " What a spectacle the two Houses at Westminster 
 give to Europe ! Was it utterly impossible for Lord 
 Salisbury to find men whose hands were clean? I 
 am told that the Opposition dare not attack Joe on 
 account of the tripotages of Asquith and Campbell- 
 Bannerman. 
 
 " I had a very pleasant and sympathetic letter from 
 Curzon, He is doing all he can to preserve the 
 architecture of Hindostan ; the destruction there in 
 the last century has been unspeakably ruinous. The 
 English have behaved there just as modern Italians 
 do here." 
 
 Ouida to T. Fisher Unwin. 
 
 [1900.J 
 
 " Alas ! the few who are sane like ourselves on 
 
 English matters are a very small minority. The 
 
 Parliamentary Opposition has let slip a fine opportunity 
 
 and is miserably weak. . . . The English are in a 
 
 bad plight in the Transvaal. If the country would 
 
 only have listened to us earlier, how many lives would 
 
 have been saved." 
 
 Ouida to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. 
 
 [1900.] 
 
 "It is frightful to think that the ^^ 114,000,000 
 wasted in this wicked war would have fed all these 
 
 182 
 
Lucca 
 
 poor famished natives and their animals.' How 
 dreadful, too, to deny them salt ! Here 2 the people 
 must not take a bucket of sea-water, lest they should 
 try to get a little salt by evaporating it in the sun. 
 Verily, in brutality of government, tutto il mondo e 
 paese." 
 
 At the end of 1900 Ouida wrote some verses 
 embodying an appeal to Queen Victoria to stop the 
 war. She sent copies to those of her friends who 
 were, like herself, pronounced Pro-Boers. In forward- 
 ing them to Mr. Frederic Harrison she ' asked him 
 to get them published for her. The verses are of a 
 violent character, and entirely ignore the constitutional 
 position of a British sovereign. Mr. Harrison, very 
 naturally, refused to make any attempt in the direction 
 of publication, and Ouida was extremely indignant 
 with him, even accusing him of cowardice. In en- 
 closing the verses to Mr. Blunt she wrote : " I send 
 you some verses which Frederic Harrison says would 
 cause any one who published them to pass two years 
 in prison. Yet I am sure Byron would have said 
 what I say in them, and history will do so " ; and to 
 Mr. Unwin under similar circumstances she said : 
 " I send you for your private pleasure and discretion 
 some verses which are I am sure what history will 
 say and Byron would have said." 
 
 ' A reference to the famine in India. 
 = In Italy. 
 
 183^ 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 A few lines, which may perhaps be quoted without 
 offence, will serve to show something of the character 
 of the poem, but it should be borne in mind that the 
 verses breathe the vindictiveness that colours so much 
 of Ouida's work and which is so often the result of 
 lack of information about or insight into the real 
 causes of things. 
 
 " Before your failing sight, the hot-red glare 
 Of burning homesteads must enflame the night. 
 Through your brief troubled sleep, the piteous cries 
 Of widowed women, homeless children, all 
 The human wreckage on the sea of war, 
 Must surely pierce your dull and weary ear ! 
 The smoking cornfields, and the roofless hearths. 
 The tortured horses, and the hamstrung herds, 
 The whitening bones which choke the river's course. 
 The eyeless skulls which strew the flame-scorched plain. 
 Labour undone, youth slaughtered, childhood slain, 
 Mothers and virgins driven in flocks like sheep — 
 These visions, surely, in the dead of night. 
 Must make you weep that you have lived so long ! 
 
 Could you not, even in the chills of age, 
 
 Have found some strength to rise and to refuse ? 
 
 And to the Nation said, as your last word, 
 
 ' I cannot lead : I will not follow you ! 
 
 Death is too near : I dare not share a crime. * 
 
 Leave my hands clean to fold on my dead breast." 
 
 Why did you not ? So had your name been blest." 
 
 In a letter to Mr. Cockerell, to whom she also 
 sent the " Victoria R. and I." verses, dated January 23, 
 
 184 
 
Lucca 
 
 1 90 1, she had permitted herself a torrent of abuse 
 of the Queen in prose which ended with the sentence : 
 
 " Worst of all, when her dogs were ill, or old, she 
 sent them away and took new ones ! " 
 
 And in a later letter to the same correspondent 
 Ouida declared : — " The long reign of Victoria R. 
 and I. has been a long triumph of the mediocri- 
 ties, the hypocrisies, and the shams." She went on 
 to say that she did not expect much of Edward VII, 
 but " at least he is a man of the world, and he won't 
 publish silly books in bad English." 
 
 Ouida had conceived a violent prejudice against 
 royalty in general and contemporary sovereigns in 
 particular. These views she embodied in her un- 
 finished novel Helianthus, and also expressed them, 
 often with an unmeasured violence of language which 
 cannot be reproduced here, in letters to her friends. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 '■'■ April s^, 1 90 1. 
 
 "The late Queen' was always antagonistic to me. 
 
 She had no real feeling for animals ; in Landseer's 
 
 pictures we see her with grallocked stags at her feet 
 
 and her children playing with wild ducks just shot. . . . 
 
 " I enjoyed the article 2 of Mark Twain immensely, 
 
 ' Victoria. 
 
 " Cf. North American Review, February, 1901, "To the Person 
 sitting in Darkness," a very eloquent defence of the Chinese against 
 the demands of the American Government for compensation in con- 
 nection with the Soxer rising. 
 
 185 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 but usually he bores me with his ceaseless strain after 
 jokes ; and he is very obtuse about many matters, 
 being uneducated." 
 
 [Decemier 8, 1901.] 
 
 " The state of the English mind is disgraceful. 
 There is one thing the nation at least might do, 
 i.e., kick out the most brutal and inept of governments. 
 What worse government can they possibly conceive? 
 If I were a partizan of the war, I should despise 
 it as much as I do being an opponent of the 
 war. . . . 
 
 "Thanks for the Tolstoy. He is a great and 
 eloquent writer,' but many of his opinions, such as 
 those on the relations of the sexes, I think most 
 mischievous. I cannot conceive how, with his genius, 
 he can hold them. 
 
 " Have you read Wells's Anticipations ? They 
 hold out a dreary and sickening prospect, and it 
 makes one's heart ache to have had so little influence 
 on the human mind, which has gone from bad to 
 worse steadily throughout these twenty years, and 
 grows only in one direction — that of scientific 
 tyranny. . - . 
 
 *M have written next to nothing, but I have been 
 four years, at wide intervals, creating a work of which 
 more another day." 
 
 ' In a later letter (December 23) Ouida says : — " Tolstoy is far 
 from a great thinker — though a great writer." 
 
 1 86 
 
Lucca 
 
 "■^December i8, 1901. 
 " The book i I named to you has been more than 
 three years slowly creating itself. It is in a measure 
 a satire on royalty. Would it be well or ill to issue 
 it before the coronation ? The English are rendering 
 themselves odiously flunkey ; and why choose mid- 
 summer to sweat under ermine and velvet robes .? 
 Poor little ermines ! — or are they kittens' tails ? " 
 
 After reading Mr. A. M. S. Methuen's Peace or 
 War in South Africa 2 Ouida wrote to the author : — 
 
 " I have read your book with sympathy and 
 admiration. The style is lucid and eloquent : and 
 the reasonings would convince any one whose mind 
 was not closed by self-interest or stupidity. 
 
 " I cannot comprehend how even those who approve 
 the war can approve the manner in which it is con- 
 ducted and the disgraceful Ministry which boasts of 
 death, disease, and defeat as of three gods in one." 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 ^''December 23 [1901]. 
 
 " It is kind of you to send me Erewhon. I have 
 never read it. There was far more wit thirty years 
 ago, and more enjoyment of good literature. The 
 tearing pace at which people live now is not conducive 
 to intellectual brilliancy." 
 
 ' Helianthus. '' Published 1901. 
 
 187 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 The Tauchnitz edition of Critical Studies was 
 published in 1901, but without the article on 
 Chamberlain, and with the omission of certain passages 
 reflecting on the German Emperor in the article 
 on George Darien's novels. Ouida strongly objected 
 to these omissions, over which there was much corre- 
 spondence. 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [1901.] 
 
 " Do not send ime any of the Critical Studies, as 
 it would vex me to see the volume without its casti- 
 gations of Joseph Chamberlain and your Kaiser." 
 
 Ouida's belief in her power to influence politics 
 never left her, and in December, 1901, she wrote to 
 Lord Rosebery, although she was not acquainted with 
 him personally, in the hope that her words might 
 bear fruit in a great speech he was to make at 
 Chesterfield on the 1 9th of the month ; she began 
 by asking him how a man of his breeding could 
 support Chamberlain, and was terribly disappointed 
 when Lord Rosebery took no sort of notice of her appeal. 
 
 In 1902 Ouida had a project of going to England, 
 which she had not visited since 1887. She wrote to 
 Mr. Cockerell in March : — 
 
 " If I can affbrd it I shall come to England in 
 the summer ; there are many friends I want to see, 
 and one loses much pecuniarily, never to see and 
 speak with one's men of business." 
 
 188 
 
Lucca 
 
 Her native land was evidently much in her 
 thoughts at this time, and she writes to him again 
 in April : — 
 
 " The description of Essex makes me sigh for a 
 little place my mother mortgaged and lost, she never 
 knew very well how ; it was near Castle Hedingham 
 and had oak-panelled rooms, and great elms in its 
 meadows. I might have made an English pied a terre 
 of it." 
 
 Public affairs and public men formed as usual the 
 subjects of her letters, with an occasional expression 
 of her disgust at the dog-laws of Italy. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 " April 'i [1902]. 
 " His [Cecil Rhodes] perspicacity was small ; vide 
 his predictions at beginning of the war. I think he 
 was kept dull and gross by his heavy eating and by 
 the common men who were his associates. His love 
 of classic literature would suggest that he had a soul 
 in him somewhere. His death is pitiful. Africa 
 makes Englishmen exceedingly coarse. It did not 
 have that effect on Scipio and other Latins." 
 
 [April 27, 1902.] 
 
 " One hundred and fifty filthy Calabrians are 
 sleeping on straw here in the beautiful cloister of 
 S. Francesco, and they think a nice clean dog walking 
 in the streets a peril to health ! ! ! " 
 
 189 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 "June 17, 1902. 
 ' ' No, dear sir, I have no mixed feelings. I have 
 an unmixed disgust and disappointment. I thought 
 the Boers, at least, knew how to die, and would show 
 the old Thermopylean spirit to the end. Whereas, 
 everything collapses, and finishes in a grotesque and 
 pantomime-like manner, and one does not see why or 
 for what they have been resisting two years and eight 
 months. . . . The whole thing is sickening and more 
 like a Christmas burlesque than a chapter in the history 
 of Great Britain." 
 
 Ouida's financial troubles now began to grow thick 
 upon her. She had made no sort of provision for old 
 age, or for the possibility of her vogue falling off, or 
 for illness, all causes that might prevent her from 
 writing. Her vanity did not allow her to take what 
 she considered low fees for her stories, nor did it 
 permit her to accept graciously the help that was 
 readily forthcoming from her friends. Her glad 
 acceptance or indignant refusal of such assistance 
 depended, as we have seen, on her mood of the 
 moment. Yet she never failed easily to reconcile 
 herself to asking, and accepting, advances from her 
 publishers for work to be done. And the readiness 
 with which they responded to her appeals does honour 
 to a profession that is sometimes not credited with 
 the virtue of generosity. 
 
 In August, 1902, Ouida, in asking for further 
 
 190 
 
Lucca 
 
 advances for Helianthus,^ told Baron Tauchnitz that 
 she had " had nothing but losses all this year. 
 When Fortune once frowns she remains sullen so 
 long." The Baron acceded to her request and Ouida 
 replied : 
 
 "Dear Friend, — You are always kind. How 
 beautiful a thing is kindness ! — Would there were 
 more of it in this life." 
 
 The Villa Massoni at Sant' Alessio, which Ouida had 
 rented since 1894, belonged to Mme. Grosfils {nie 
 Massoni), wife of the Belgian Consul at Lucca. In 
 the summer of 1903, wanting the villa, as she said, 
 for her husband and family, she gave Ouida a short 
 notice to quit. There are indications that things had 
 not been going quite smoothly, for in a letter to 
 Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt dated April 20, Ouida 
 wrote : — 
 
 " Can you tell me if there be revolvers small and light 
 enough for me to fire, yet sternly effective .? My life 
 is in danger here, and it is very necessary to be armed. 
 Tell me what price one would be and the best 
 maker." 
 
 Ouida asked for a little longer time, in view of the 
 improvements she had made in the place, but her 
 request was refused. Through Mr. Carmichael, the 
 British Consul at Leghorn, Mme. Grosfils did all she 
 could to induce Ouida to leave the villa in a quiet 
 
 ' More than a year had passed since Ouida had promised him 
 Helianthus. The novel was not published until after her death. 
 
 191 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 manner. One of the reasons given later by the 
 Grosfils for their conduct was that they desired to 
 protect Ouida from the threats of her creditors and 
 their own property from eventual manumission. But 
 Ouida was obdurate, and as peaceful measures availed 
 nothing, Mme. Grosfils procured an eviction order for 
 November 17th, Then she made a great mistake. 
 Instead of waiting till that day, when in all probability 
 Ouida would have left the house without giving trouble, 
 on the afternoon of the i6th the sons of Mme. 
 Grosfils took possession of the villa by force and 
 treated Ouida in a disgraceful and cruel manner. 
 
 Ouida afterwards described what took place in letters 
 to her friends. Writing to Sarmento in the following 
 December, she complained in very strong language of 
 the treatment she had received, and sent him a brief 
 account of what took place. A year and a half later 
 she wrote a detailed account to Baron Tauchnitz. It 
 appears that on the afternoon in question the sons of 
 Mme. Grosfils, accompanied by some rough men from 
 their farms, broke into the grounds of the villa and 
 proceeded to lock up two greenhouses containing some 
 three hundred plants belonging to Ouida. They then 
 entered the house. Ouida ordered them to go, but they 
 insisted on remaining there, went into all the rooms, 
 ransacked everything, locked up and affixed seals to 
 each room, and flung all the MSS. and books they 
 found into a box. Ultimately they kept by force all 
 Ouida's paintings, china, books, unpublished MSS. 
 
 192 
 
Lucca 
 
 and letters from friends, especially the dispatch-box 
 containing those written to her by Lord Lytton. 
 When Ouida expostulated and protested they pursued 
 her shrieking : "Si puo rubare ! We shall seize 
 everything ! everything is ours ! " They then went 
 downstairs to a room next the kitchen, and sat 
 there drinking, singing, and bawling till they fell 
 asleep about 2 a.m. To continue in her own 
 words : — 
 
 " At 7 a.m. they came up and insisted on me and 
 my maid getting into a vehicle they had sent for and 
 going to Viareggio (where I intended to go), eighteen 
 miles, without bath or breakfast. I was foolish not to 
 send for the carabiniers, but I was not sure what rights 
 I had, as it was the last day, and I was very ill from 
 fasting and sleeplessness, I took the dogs, of course ; 
 they would not let me take anything else except some 
 linen." ' 
 
 After this " nuit d'enfer," as she characterized it, 
 she reached the Hotel de Russie, Viareggio, where she 
 remained for the next seven months in a state of 
 exhaustion bordering on prostration. She never 
 really recovered from the shock she received that 
 night. 
 
 It was not to be expected that Ouida would tamely 
 submit to such treatment, and she proceeded at once to 
 institute a case against the Grosfils in the ordinary 
 court of Lucca. 
 
 ' Letter to Baron Tauchnitz, June, 1905. 
 
 193 N 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Ouida to Sarmento. 
 
 [December i, 1903.] 
 
 " I have left S. Alessio and have been vilely treated 
 by the Grosfils, though I do not owe them a centime. 
 What money and years wasted ! " 
 
 " December 18. 
 
 " I find this brouillon of what the Grosfils (did) and 
 think you may like to read it. 
 
 " My lawyer here tells me it will be imprisonment 
 and fines for them." 
 
 " December 22, 1903. 
 "The matter is in the hands of the law already. 
 Thanks all the same.' The name is Grosfils. Her 
 son broke open my box in her presence with a chisel ! 
 The brouillon I sent you was for your own reading ; 
 a more detailed copy had already gone to RenneU Rodd. 
 I would not live at Viareggio if you gave me the town. 
 Except the sea, it is everything I abhor. D' Annunzio's 
 villino is a mere cotton-box with a dirty, dreary 
 waste around it. The pines are nearly all cut down. 
 The house has no view of the sea. By road it is 
 four miles through an ugly flat country. He took 
 it for six months and only stayed two. The contadino 
 said that he ^ piangeva tanto.' I understand his tears 
 in that howling desert ! From the back the place looks 
 charming." 
 
 ■ For the address of a lawyer. 
 194 
 
Lucca 
 
 The Grosfils and their relations left no stone un- 
 turned in order to prevail on Ouida to condone the 
 grave ofFence. This she absolutely refused to do, 
 and so the legal proceedings slowly went their way. 
 They included a criminal action for wrongful entry 
 of her domicile and an action for damages with regard 
 to the seizure of her property, the rent having been 
 duly paid. 
 
 The literary output of this period included, besides 
 the novel The Massarenes (1897) and the two volumes 
 of collected essays. Views and Opinions (1895), and 
 Critical Studies ( 1 900), nothing of first-rate importance. 
 Stories in the compass of one small volume and 
 collections of short tales previously contributed to 
 magazines were all that came from her pen. She 
 turned them out with apparent ease, but seemed in- 
 capable of any sustained effort in the way of writing. 
 She never accomplished another long novel, and for 
 the remaining years of her life her active brain found 
 its chief outlet in letter-writing. 
 
 19s 
 
VI 
 
 LAST YEARS 
 AND DEATH 
 I904r-1908 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LAST YEARS AND DEATH 
 1904-1908 
 
 IT is a remarkable fact that while Ouida was 
 engaged in troublesome and disagreeable litigation 
 with the Grosfils, she was able to detach her mind 
 from the worries connected with it and to write the 
 following interesting letters to Mr. Cockerell, interest- 
 ing for the subject matter, and as a proof that she 
 could now sometimes forget herself and contemplate 
 literature and public affairs and the problems of life 
 from an objective standpoint. 
 
 Mr. Cockerell had visited Tolstoy in 1903, and 
 this led to a discussion of his qualities as a thinker 
 and writer. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 [VlAREGGIo], 
 
 " January 2 [1904]. 
 " To me Tolstoy has not much intellect. Many 
 of his doctrines are absolutely foolish. He has little 
 iudgment of literature, and not much, surely, of men. 
 
 199 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 His admiration of Dickens proves the non-intellectual 
 fibre of his mind ; and his morality and monogamy 
 are against common sense and nature. 
 
 "It is very injurious to my interests not to come 
 to England, but (money apart) I have no one whom 
 I can trust with the dogs. My maid likes them and 
 has been with me twenty-three years, but I should not 
 be sure of her if I were absent. You cannot trust 
 Italians out of sight. The sea here is very beautiful 
 and it has strengthened me ; but mentally I am wholly 
 indisposed to do anything, even to read the papers ! 
 What is the use of writing or speaking ? On ne 
 preche qu'aux convertis ! — or rather it is only the 
 ' deja convertis ' who come to our church." 
 
 [ViAREGGio, January 6, 1904.] 
 
 " Thanks for the Tolstoys. But I know all his 
 views and arguments. When he says that ' any 
 rational being requires to believe in a god,' he shows 
 how limited his mind is. Probably if he had not 
 been a Russian he would have been a much greater 
 man. In many ways he is absolutely silly. In vulgar 
 parlance, his doctrines ' will not wash.' Observe, 
 too, how he ignores the fact that fighting is natural 
 to man. See a little child's rage before it can speak ; 
 its angry gestures, its inflamed face, its dumb fury. 
 Men would not live in peace together if armies were 
 abolished. Tolstoy does not realize that man is a 
 
 200 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 very rudimentary, imperfect creature, occupying a very 
 small place in an immense and unknown universe." 
 
 [ViAREGGio, January 23, 1904.] 
 
 " Do not mistake me ; I think Tolstoy a great 
 novelist, a great character for courage and self-sacrifice ; 
 but I cannot think a man who believes in Christianity 
 is a man of great intellect, and his logic is sadly 
 defective in many other ways. He judges the rest 
 of the world by Russia. . . . 
 
 "I mean to take the Westminster Gazette. It is the 
 best of English papers, I think. . . . 
 
 "Surely the infants of to-day will be the men of 
 twenty years hence ; I do not believe the human race 
 will ever be much altered ; and it degenerates physically. 
 War, as we know it, may end, because armies will 
 mutually blow each other into space ; but something 
 equally bad will come in its stead, until the earth 
 vanishes, as a scientist foresees, by the combustion 
 of the atmosphere by electricity." 
 
 Ouida professed no dogmatic religion, a fact that 
 had always troubled her relatives. Discussing the 
 belief in the divinity of Christ with Mr. Cockerell, 
 she asked what remained if that faith was no longer 
 held, and herself replied to the question in words 
 that serve to show her own point of view in these 
 important matters. 
 
 " What of course was always there, a poor man of 
 
 201 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 fine instincts sore troubled by the suffering and the 
 injustice which torment Tolstoy to-day. Christ drew 
 the poor after him, naturally, by his assurances that 
 the future would compensate them for their painful 
 labour. But I have never been able to understand 
 how theories so crude, so illogical, so uneducated and 
 unsupported, could ever attract or satisfy intellectual 
 minds. ' One must believe something ' I am told. 
 Why ? Why should one need a belief ? The whole 
 of existence is a mystery ; and science does not explain 
 it more than ignorance. Tolstoy must know as well as 
 I do that numbers of people are born hopelessly vile 
 or bad ; was Whittaker Wright tempted by poverty ? 
 The mere sentimental ' do unto others,' etc., etc., 
 cannot restrain the passions, or rein in the appetites, 
 or solve the problems of life. Tolstoy is dangerous 
 because he is misleading. He is an educated Christ. 
 If he had been born in France he would have been 
 a great man, but the frightful life of Russia has 
 disturbed his brain." 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 [ViAREGGio, February 2, 1904.] 
 
 " What annoys me in Tolstoy is his ' cocksure- 
 ness,' to use a vulgar but expressive term. He is 
 so sadly far off from the wise ' Que scais-je ? ' of 
 Montaigne. I should like to converse with him, but 
 that will never be." 
 
 202 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 The progress of the Grosfils case may be learned 
 best from Ouida's letters to Sarmento. 
 
 Ouida to Sarmento. 
 
 [February zo, 1904.J 
 
 " Happily I do not want Conti ; ' Aurelio * has 
 bestirred himself and the acte d'accusaiion is gone to 
 the Tribunal. I will send you a copy if you will 
 please return it. 
 
 " F. M.3 writes that he will do what I asked. He 
 seems very pleasant. 
 
 " Thanks for name of British Ambassador. 
 
 "Do you know Bertie personally? 
 
 " I can never understand how Crawford turns 
 out books in the number he does. If he had written 
 one-sixth the number he might have been a great 
 novelist or at least a good one. But the public does 
 not know mediocrity from excellence, or trumpery 
 from beautyu 
 
 " PS. — Tell me all the people you see." 
 
 [April 15, 1904.] 
 
 " Thanks ; I have no idea where to go, but certainly 
 
 je serai a votre portee. If possible I shall go to 
 
 England, and I hope certainly to go to Brussels, as 
 
 the Minister A.E. (affaires etrangeres) there desires 
 
 ' A lawyer whom Sarmento had recommended. 
 '^ Her own lawyer. 
 3 Sir Frederick Macmillan. 
 203 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 to see me, and he will, I have no doubt, dismiss Grosfils. 
 Their conduct has been too brutal and disgusts even 
 their friends. It was only done in the hope of steal- 
 ing the few objects I still possess. They have already 
 stripped the place of timber and evergreens. It i is 
 no longer worth anything. I intensely regret not 
 having seen the Devonshires. I hope he will make 
 a Ministry of his own. She is very nice to me and 
 a woman of great talent. 
 
 " I wish you were here ; we could have long talks 
 on the sands. I walk up to the Fosso del Abate, 
 about three miles off ; that is my limit. Cannot you 
 come now.'' Rome must be very hot." 
 
 Now that the Boer War was a thing of the past, 
 Ouida interested herself in the war between Russia 
 and Japan, and her comments on it fill many pages 
 of her letters at this period. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 [May 24, 1904.] 
 " If Russia and Japan could eat up each other like 
 the Kilkenny cats it would be well for the world. 
 They are both cruel savages with a veneer of civili- 
 zation. I remember my father saying when I was 
 a child that the yellow races would overrun the 
 European countries. Japan had unique, exquisite, and 
 charming arts, costumes, and crafts of its own ; and 
 
 ^ Villa Massoni. 
 304 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 it can do nothing better than imitate like an ape 
 the hideous and ludicrous modes of Europe and 
 America with all their brutalities and vulgarities." 
 
 At the beginning of June Ouida left Viareggio for 
 Bagni di Lucca and remained there for several months. 
 She greatly disliked the place, and only chose it as 
 a convenient residence during the litigation in which 
 she was engaged. She found it damp, and the whole 
 time she remained there suffered from cold and cough. 
 Notwithstanding her many preoccupations, she found 
 time and energy to carry on a large correspondence. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerel!. 
 
 [Bagni di Lucca, June z, 1904.] 
 
 " Dear Enthusiast, — 
 
 " Let us await the end of the war ; it is easier 
 to begin a war than to limit it. Both these nations 
 are hideously tyrannical and cruel, and these two 
 crimes are surely the greatest of all on earth. ' On 
 aime toujours contre q'q'un ' ; in this instance your 
 Japanese love grows out of your Russian hate ; I 
 do not mean yovirs individually, but nationally." 
 
 [Bagni di Lucca, June $, 1904.J 
 " Intellectually the Japanese may be all you think, 
 but the influence of their physique will be deplor- 
 able if the Europeans unite with them in physical 
 union. . . • 
 
 205 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " Novels become so ridiculous in their numbers 
 nowadays ; they disgust me with the art of fiction." 
 
 [Bagni di Lucca, June 7, 1904.] 
 
 " I see nothing in that nation ^ to be desired as a 
 future influence. Their stupid superstitions, their 
 grovelling Emperor-worship, their rejection of love 
 to the lowest place, their savage murders and suicides, 
 seem to me to embody all which we most desire to 
 eliminate from our own lives. Men who suffer so 
 little physically as the yellow races must be cruel. 
 They go to slaughter like a horde of ants ; and their 
 war-craze is not heroism but a repetition of their 
 suicidal mania. Patriotism is not what we want in 
 Europe and America. It is a much wider, finer, more 
 impersonal feeling. Some years ago men seemed to 
 be approaching this ideal, but ever since the Franco- 
 German War they have deteriorated in everything 
 except mechanics ; and the bicycle and autocar are 
 ruining them physically. You call this view pessi- 
 mism ; it seems to me common sense." 
 
 [Bagni di Lucca, June 26, 1904.J 
 
 " Europe and the U.S.A. are horribly vulgar in 
 all their ways and thoughts and actions ; how much 
 gentler, calmer, more graceful, and more courteous 
 were the people of my childhood ! " 
 
 ' Japan. 
 206 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 " La Villa, Bagni di Lucca, 
 
 [7a/jy 7, 1904]. 
 
 "I am this time wholly in accord with Tolstoy. ' 
 But it is a pity he brings in Deity in various forms, 
 because the continuance of war through thousands 
 of years is inconsistent with the direction of a bene- 
 ficent and omnipotent God, I think, as I have always 
 done, that Tolstoy is a great genius but not a great 
 intellect. The two are distinct. 
 
 " It is so true that the intellect is powerless against 
 the passion for bloodshed." 
 
 ijuly 8, 1904.] 
 
 " What is the use of art or literature ? The world 
 is choked with over-production and the earth is 
 soaked with blood. I think it must have been better 
 in Etruscan times. They were so fond of their dogs ! 
 So were the Romans. And they were honest about 
 their human slaves." 
 
 [Bagni di Lucca] 
 
 ^^ August 25 [1904]. 
 
 "It is this tendency, 2 so very retrograde and be- 
 littling, which I find so bad in the Japanese. Their 
 intelligence in a certain sense is, doubtless, great, but 
 in a moral sense it is snobbish and silly, and their 
 nature is cold and unlovely. If, as seems likely, 
 
 ' See Tolstoy's statement on war in the Times, June 27, 1904. 
 ' Belief in the monarchy. 
 
 207 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 they will come to dominate Europe, what have we 
 gained, since we shall remain crawling before reigning 
 Houses ? Their physical influence will be certainly 
 not desirable either." 
 
 "December 1 2 [1904]. 
 
 " Your favourites ' are winning all along the line. 
 I do not know whether, eventually, it may be good 
 for the human race. . . . 
 
 " Fisher Unwin sent me The Vineyard of Mrs. Craigie, 
 so I read it. I should imagine her comedies are better 
 than her books, for her dialogues are good, but her 
 action is trivial, and her force all goes away after the 
 start. Her descriptions of nature are poetic." 
 
 The case against the Grosfils was heard at the 
 ordinary court of Lucca on December 19, 1904, and 
 the verdict was in Ouida's favour, the two sons of 
 Mme. Grosfils being sentenced to ten months' im- 
 prisonment and to pay all costs. 
 
 Ouida to Sarmento.^ 
 
 "December 20, 1904. 
 " The two 3 decamped before the sentence was passed. 
 If they had not they would have had a bad reception 
 
 ' The Japanese. 
 
 " In a letter to him dated December 4th, she wrote : " It is very 
 melancholy here [Bagni di Lucca], and all that is worth anything 
 in life has gone away from me, and it is not likely I shall ever 
 recover it." 
 
 3 The two sons of Mme. Grosfils. 
 
 20S 
 
[Photo by Emery Walker. 
 OUIDA IN 1904. 
 From a chalk drawing by Sarmento in the National Portrait Gallery, London. 
 
 To face p. 208. 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 from the public. The judge treated them with con- 
 tumely. ' Stand down,' he said to Henri G. ; ' every 
 word you utter is a lie. Che vergogna ! (Shame 
 upon you !) ' 
 
 "The Procuratore del Re asked for a year's im- 
 prisonment. Certainly they will go to prison ; all the 
 Appello (Court of Appeal) is likely to do is to cut ofF 
 a month or so ; but the sentence is not as long as it 
 should be, even now. 
 
 " They are shut up at the villa with the rest of 
 the family, except their parents, who are believed to 
 have gone to Brussels. I telegraphed the sentence 
 to the Belgian Foreign Minister, and wrote to him ; 
 I conclude he will oblige the Grosfils to resign the 
 Consulate. 
 
 *' The people of Lucca are delighted. 
 
 " They say I spoke very well ; and I curtseyed 
 to the judge, which nobody else did. Gori (my 
 maid) gave her evidence splendidly ; so clearly and 
 lucidly, it was really she who smashed them. Two 
 of their witnesses gave false evidence and the judge 
 detected it." ' 
 
 • The widow of an English diplomatist who was present at the 
 trial sent Sarmento the following details : " Ouida looked quite 
 regal in a long black dress and ditto cloak, lined with grey plush, 
 and a black hat with ostrich plumes. The only tiresome thing 
 about her was that she would keep on interrupting when evidence 
 was given against her, in a shrill, high voice : ' Ma ch.h ! ma che ! 
 ha ! ha ! ha ! ch^ buggia (What a lie !),' etc., etc. Counsel 
 
 209 O 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 The Grosfils, however, determined to appeal against 
 the sentence, and took the case up to the Court of 
 Appeal at Lucca, which, however, saw no reason to 
 reverse the decision of the ordinary court. But they 
 were not yet satisfied, and took it still further, to 
 the Court of Cassation at Rome. Meantime, of 
 course, no costs or damages were paid by the 
 culprits, and Ouida was in the usual straits for 
 money. She assured Tauchnitz in April, 1905 : " The 
 costs in this process will all be ultimately paid back 
 to me with damages, but meantime they leave me 
 penniless." 
 
 Now before March, 1903, Ouida had signed 
 an agreement with Messrs. Macmillan on generous 
 terms for her novel of Helianthus. By April, 1905, 
 she had sent them only a kw chapters of the manu- 
 script, and those in a very confused state, but had 
 received from them a large sum of money, representing, 
 indeed, the greater part of the amount agreed on for 
 advance royalties. The firm, however, continued to 
 advance her money, and even at her request to pay 
 small bills for her and do commissions for her. She 
 told Mr. Carmichael that the Macmillans behaved 
 " like angels " to her over the book, which was issued 
 incomplete after her death. 
 
 She was living now under most wretched con- 
 ditions. 
 
 appealed to one who was sitting behind Ouida, pathetically, say- 
 ing in Italian : ' Please do all you can to keep her juiet, as if she 
 goes on like that it will be bad for the case.' " 
 
 210 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 [VlAREGGIo] 
 
 "February lo [1905]. 
 " The cold of this winter has entered into me, and 
 I cannot get rid of its results. I am unwell ; and 
 Helianthus lies disregarded. The frightful state of 
 Russia is sickening. The Tsar and his five uncles 
 should all be sent to Siberia." 
 
 Ouida to Baron Tauchnitz. 
 
 [May or June, 1905.] 
 
 " Unfortunately there is a third court, called Cassa- 
 zione, designed in the rare event of any justice being 
 done to undo it. They are going to appeal there. 
 It is in Rome." 
 
 " PoNTE SeRRAGLIO, 
 
 " Bagni di Lucca, 
 
 "Jaw 27 [1905]. 
 
 " You will be glad to hear that my enemies having 
 carried the case to the Court of Cassation in Rome, 
 that Court promptly decided against them. There 
 is now no Court left to which they can appeal, so to 
 prison they go. My lawyers will now levy the costs 
 and indemnity on their property. The case has lasted 
 nineteen months ! They were utter idiots to attempt 
 any defence. . . . 
 
 " It is very beautiful here, on the river Lima, which 
 Shelley loved." 
 
 211 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 "August \ [1905]. 
 
 "You were quite right that it was a terrible risk to 
 run, to embark on this litigation ; but I had no choice. 
 I was forced either to prosecute or meekly to have 
 my throat cut. As yet I have not been reimbursed a 
 farthing, although they are legally condemned to pay 
 all costs and damages." 
 
 By a Royal act of clemency which roused all Ouida's 
 fury, the sentence was commuted to a fine and the 
 culprits allowed to leave the country. The civil action 
 for damages and recovery of her property was going 
 on during the rest of Ouida's life, and is still unheard ; 
 the matter is now in the hands of the curator of her 
 estate. 
 
 Ouida never recovered the personal effects that had 
 been carried oflr by the Grosfils ; they declared they 
 kept the property to indemnify themselves for the 
 damage Ouida had done to the house, in spite of her 
 declaration that she had spent large sums of money 
 in improving the place. 
 
 But her sense of her own importance remained as 
 strong as ever. It was about this time that Mrs. 
 Conway Thornton first saw Ouida, and on her return 
 to her hotel after the meeting received the following 
 note : — 
 
 "Dear Mrs. Thornton, — As you were so kind as 
 not to ask for an autograph, I send you mine. — Ouida." 
 
 212 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 Ouida now made a new friend, by correspondence, 
 so to speak, for she never met him in the flesh. For 
 years she had taken great interest in the family who 
 owned Hardwick House, Bury St. Edmunds, in the 
 grounds of which she had been accustomed to walk 
 as a girl. She expressed a wish to mutual friends to 
 know Mr. G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum,i the present 
 owner, who succeeded to the estate of Hardwick in 
 1878, and wrote to him, proposing an interview, 
 which, however, never took place. But a pleasant 
 intimate correspondence was instituted that lasted till 
 a month before her death. When Mr. Cullum could 
 have gone to visit her, she was too ill to see any one. 
 In telling him that she had won her case against the 
 Grosfils she wrote : " But in law, as in war, the next 
 costliest thing to defeat is victory." 
 
 Ouida to G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum. 
 
 [Bagni di Lucca] 
 
 ^^March 29 [I905]. 
 
 " Thanks for all you so kindly say of me. It 
 would be better for me if I had never seen Italy. 
 I wish, indeed, that I had known your gifted mother ; 2 
 
 I Son of the Right Hon. Thomas Milner-Gibson, M.P., and 
 his wife Susanna Arethusa, only child of Sir Thomas Gery 
 Cullum, Bart. He added his maternal family name to the others 
 in 1878. 
 
 = Mrs. Milner-Gibson was the friend of Dickens and Thackeray, 
 and her salon in London was famous from 1840 to 1870, and 
 afterwards in Paris til! her death in 1885. She opened her doors 
 
 213 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 but she never approached me, though we were near 
 many times. If I had Hardwick I would live in a 
 corner of it and never leave it. You moderns waste 
 all your time and your substance in movement." 
 
 In November, 1905, Ouida left Bagni di Lucca 
 for Viareggio. 
 
 Ouida to G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum. 
 
 " I shall not be in the Bagni di Lucca ever again, 
 for I hate the place. The sun rises at 10, and goes 
 over the hills at 4, in summer ! They have beauti- 
 ful trees, but they are always chopping and lopping 
 them for firewood. I stayed there to be near Lucca 
 for a lawsuit which I won in Lucca, and finally in 
 Rome, Court of Cassazione. ' Spese ' and ' danni ' 
 were ordered to be paid to me, but it is not likely 
 that I shall ever see a farthing of them." 
 
 She occupied herself in reading, in writing quantities 
 of letters, and in looking after her numerous dogs. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 [Viareggio] 
 
 " August 31 [1905]. 
 
 " I saw the eclipse magnificently yesterday ; some 
 dun and gold clouds overhung a great wooded hill 
 
 to all exiled patriots. She had a genuine instinct of hospitality, 
 and made it her aim to give pleasure to others and to see those 
 around her happy. Cf. Edmund Yates, Recollections, i. 252-3. 
 
 214 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 and in a clear space in their centre hung the sun, 
 four-fifths black with shadow. It was a beautiful and 
 mysterious sight. Very few people saw it. 
 
 " Of all the imbecile and wicked manias the craze 
 of sport seems to be the most odious. The Marquis 
 Simari, a famous sportsman, is just dead ; he shot for 
 a wager i,ooo swallows and killed every one ! " 
 
 "December 31 [1905]. 
 
 " It is a strong Ministry, with its weak point at 
 its apex. I do not envy John Burns his task of 
 reconciling the irreconcilable. Do you think it will 
 last, and win the elections ? I confess I cannot 
 understand the policy of Chamberlain. He seems to 
 me to have given himself away in the most idiotic 
 manner. The alliance between him and the Tories 
 was always unholy and grotesque. I hope my friend 
 Curzon will ' sit tight ' and spare not. If his health 
 spares him he will have a great future." 
 
 [ViAREGGio, yanuary 11, 1906.] 
 
 " I wish you would remind people that twenty years 
 ago, when society was beginning to adore Joe' and 
 see in him the Messiah, I was six months in London, 
 and I told several of the leaders, male and female, of 
 the Tory party what a curse and ruin he would 
 prove to them. They jeered at me and persisted in 
 
 ' I.e., Chamberlain. 
 2IS 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 seeing in the greatest foe they possessed an angelic 
 messenger. It was incomprehensible to me, and is 
 so still. The D. of Devonshire was not a bit wiser 
 than the others." 
 
 Ouida to G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum. 
 
 [VlAREGGIO,] 
 
 •■'May 8 [1906?]. 
 
 " If we live, we certainly shall meet before long, as 
 if I do not go to Ardenza (Leghorn) I shall go to a 
 villa a few miles from here, where you can easily come 
 for a day,i and see d' Annunzio as well. I am not 
 well, and cough enough to carry a strong man to his 
 tomb. I hope, however, it will not take me to mine, 
 for the dogs' sake. How you must long for the 
 Hardwick hawthorns ! " 
 
 Ouida to Sarmento. 
 
 " VlAREGGIO, 
 
 '■'■'November 5, 1906. 
 
 " As regards my not writing books, I do not care 
 for it. I do not feel any inclination or what people 
 call inspiration. I have never written except when the 
 spirit moves [me]. I see that the state of the world is 
 infinitely worse than twenty years ago and one cannot 
 alter its tendencies." 
 
 ' Cullum was staying at Salsomaggiore. 
 216 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 [Novemier 8, 1906.] 
 
 " I am much distressed to see this a.m. the death 
 of Auberon Herbert.' He was a great friend and 
 constant correspondent of mine for many years. It 
 was a pity his eccentricities obscured the real bril- 
 liancy and admirable intuitions of his mind. Most 
 people saw the absurdities of the surface, and did not 
 see the mine of wisdom beneath." 
 
 [February 16, 1907.] 
 
 " I should have liked to see Asquith when in 
 
 Rome, but could not afford to go there. Americans 
 
 make the prices exorbitant. I wish the great city 
 
 had a better use than being a hostelry for Yankees." 
 
 Ouida to Sarmento. 
 
 "February 18, 1907. 
 
 " I am glad you have a fine view ; it is a great con- 
 solation. 
 
 " I have been very ill and miserable ; now I am some- 
 what better and stronger. The weather is superb, but 
 I am not able to walk much . . . 
 
 ' Cf. the article on Auberon Herbert in Critical Studies (1900), 
 where she says : " Auberon Herbert is known to the world as a 
 daring and original thinker, a sociologist who lives three centuries 
 before his time, a fearless preacher of new liberties and ideal 
 creeds," 
 
 217 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " I told you of my dear, dear Lello'si death ; he is an 
 unutterable loss to me ; and for thirty hours he suffered 
 very greatly. . . . 
 
 " If I had not the dogs I think I would go and end 
 my days in England. Italy has been a great ingrate 
 to me." 
 
 Ouida to G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum. 
 
 [ViAREGGio, April, 1907.] 
 
 " I have never muzzled a dog in my life. Here 
 it is the law for July and August, so for those 
 months I must be elsewhere ; besides, it is too hot 
 here for me after May 15 th. Yes, the demolition 
 of beautiful old buildings is an agony to all those who 
 have eyes to see and souls to feel ; but these are few 
 in the actual days." 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 "May 13 [1907]. 
 
 " People change as life goes on ; /do not. I think 
 I am exactly what I was when very young, in opinions 
 and character." 
 
 In 1907 there was a grand historical pageant in 
 the Abbey Gardens at Bury St. Edmunds, and Mr. 
 Cullum seems to have suggested that Ouida should 
 come over for it. In her letters to him occur passages 
 
 ' One of her favourite dogs. 
 218 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 that show, ill and lonely and poor as she now was, 
 she still retained her inordinate vanity. 
 
 Ouida to G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum. 
 
 [1907.] 
 
 " What a curse it is to have anything which dis- 
 tinguishes one from the happy unknown multitude ! 
 
 " If I came to Bury I should come incognita as 
 Contessa di Sant' Alessio ; poor Mr. Oakes offered 
 me all sorts of honours, but I told him nothing could 
 be more odious to me." 
 
 And again — 
 
 [VlAREGOIO, April, 1907.] 
 
 " It would divert me greatly to come in July and 
 be presented by you as a Florentine or Roman 
 lady who was very kind to you when you were ill 
 with enteric fever ! — then we would talk of Ouida and 
 abuse her." 
 
 " VlAREGGIO, 
 
 " May 24 [1907]. 
 " Pray remember to keep me au courant with the 
 incidents of the festival. Keep my name out of it 
 as much as you can." 
 
 In April, 1907, Ouida was approached through 
 Mr. Carmichael, the British Consul at Leghorn, by 
 an English publisher with regard to bringing out 
 her autobiography or memoirs. Ouida declared that 
 she never intended to write any memoirs. 
 
 219 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Ouida to Montgomery Carmichael. 
 
 " May 2 [1907]. 
 
 " I think memoirs, even those delicious memoirs 
 of France, are base betrayals of others, and show 
 great vanity in the writers. To possess any interest 
 they must be treacheries — in general to the dead, 
 who cannot defend themselves. The inquisitive 
 temper which makes such revelations sought by the 
 public is surely an appetite to be discouraged." 
 
 Ouida desired it to be made clear to all whom 
 it concerned that in her view memoirs could "only 
 be made agreeable to the public by base treasons 
 to others, and want of dignity in oneself," ' She 
 referred to the subject again in August : — 
 
 " Please don't ever speak of an autobiography, 
 or we shall quarrel. I despise and hate all such 
 things ; what vanity must beget it ! " 2 
 
 That her feeling in the matter was sincere there 
 can be no manner of doubt, for the publisher in 
 question was willing to pay Ouida well for such 
 a volume, and she was suffering at this time from 
 want of money. The Grosfils had paid her nothing. 
 She was spending the summer months in small lodg- 
 ings at Mazzarosa, a little place near Viareggio, 
 where she was " perfectly wretched." She feared 
 
 ' Letter to Montgomery Carmichael, May 9, 1 907. 
 ^ Ibid., August I, I9P7. 
 
 220 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 if she left Tuscany altogether the Grosfils would 
 triumph, and as she put the comfort of her dogs 
 before her own, and the muzzling order prevailed, 
 she found it difficult to remain there. Indeed, she 
 wrote to Mr. Carmichael, " I know not where to 
 go to live." I 
 
 In July, 1907, a report was spread by the English 
 Press that Ouida was in want and great distress. 
 Although there was much truth in the statement, 
 it was some exaggeration of the actual state of 
 affairs. In any case, it seems to have been almost 
 impossible to help Ouida, for she had no idea how to 
 economize or how to regulate the expenditure of a 
 small income, and to the very last preferred to feed 
 her own and any stray dogs rather than to feed herself. 
 One of her friends who read this report sent her 
 a cheque, which she accepted after some demur in a 
 letter dated July 21, saying, " Matters are not so bad 
 as they are represented. I have been seven months 
 at the Hotel Grand Bretagne, so could not have died 
 of hunger." 
 
 A sister novelist wrote a sympathetic letter to 
 the editor of the Daily Mail, suggesting that a 
 fund should be started to relieve Ouida's distress, 
 and enclosing a cheque for £2^ as a first contribu- 
 tion. Ouida was terribly angry when she read 
 this, and sent the editor a telegram absolutely 
 forbidding him to make any mention of her in his 
 ' May, 1907. 
 
 221 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 paper. Others tried to help her, but their efforts were 
 equally in vain. Vernon Lee, for instance, saw the 
 published accounts of Ouida's distress. She asked 
 a friend, an English trained nurse who was just 
 then at Bagni di Lucca, to go to Mazzarosa, and 
 find out what could be done for her, and to do it. 
 The lady found the little house in which Ouida was 
 lodging and was told that she did not wish to receive 
 anybody. She had been ill, but was now recovering, 
 was up, and able to spend some time each day in the 
 garden with her dogs. She had really been turned 
 out of the hotel on account of her dogs and of unpaid 
 bills, and had taken refuge in the house of some 
 humble people who knew her. The landlady said that 
 many visitors called, but that Ouida would see none 
 of them except the secretary of the Prefect of Lucca 
 and Mr. Carmichael. 
 
 Ouida to Montgomery Carmichael. 
 
 [July, 1907]. 
 
 " I receive scores of letters, ' anguish,' ' unspeak- 
 able sympathy,' etc. Of course my intimate friends 
 have not believed it. What am I to do to wash 
 this mud off my name ? " 
 
 Ouida consulted with her friends as to whether 
 she could take action against the paper that had 
 published these exaggerated reports of her condition. 
 
 222 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 Ouida to Montgomery Carmichael. 
 
 [July, 1907.J 
 
 " Meanwhile it is enormously painful and injurious 
 to me. For the saying of Voltaire is so true : 
 ' Calumniez, calumniez, calumniez ! toujours quelque- 
 chose restera.' There will always be many who 
 will believe I was starving on the seashore, though 
 I was seven months at the Hotel Gran Bretagna and 
 left there ten days ago ; they are not people to have 
 let me depart had I not paid them the uttermost 
 farthing. . . . 
 
 " I do not know where to go. I should like to 
 go out of Italy forever and forever." 
 
 Some of Ouida's influential friends, recognizing the 
 difficulty of relieving her distress privately, had, 
 however, before this suggested a public subscription. 
 When the plan came to Ouida's ears she was most 
 indignant, and declared that she wanted for nothing. 
 Then they approached the Prime Minister, Mr. 
 Campbell-Bannerman, and succeeded in procuring 
 for her a Civil List pension of j^ 150 a year for life. 
 This, too, she declined, remarking to a friend, " What 
 right have they to ofFer me a pension only fit for 
 superannuated butlers? " ' Ultimately she was prevailed 
 on to accept it, and she did so in a letter dated July 
 
 I There seems to have been some misapprehension at first in 
 regard to the amount. 
 
 223 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 1 6, 1906. It was granted to her in the August of 
 that year, to date from April i, 1906. It seems that 
 Ouida was very touchy about the publicity and what 
 she considered the humiliation of a pension, and so 
 the co-operation of her old friend, Winifred, Lady 
 Howard of Glossop, who by 1906 had rather drifted 
 apart from her, but who knew Ouida's moods, was 
 invited, and it was chiefly due to her that Ouida's 
 scruples were finally overcome. But, unhappily, when 
 the cheques came in, they went immediately to pay 
 pressing creditors. 
 
 Towards the close of 1906 Ouida had lost the 
 sight of the right eye. Writing to Mr. Cockerell 
 in February, 1 907, she told him, " It is no dis- 
 figurement, but the sight is gone. And my sight 
 has been so wonderful. Last autumn I could see 
 the satellites of Jove without a glass." In men- 
 tioning the matter to Tauchnitz in April she 
 wrote : — 
 
 " It is a great sorrow, as my eyes have been a source 
 of infinite joy to me and were as clear and strong of 
 vision as in youth ! 
 
 " Helianthus stands unfinished still, and the kindness 
 of the Macmillans has been most constant and beyond 
 all praise." 
 
 The injury to the eye was really the result of 
 exposure, and the following letter tells the cause 
 and manner. 
 
 224 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 Ouida to Sarmento. 
 
 "March iz, 1907. 
 
 " It would take folios to tell you all that has befallen 
 me ; nearly all painful. I left Camaiore in September, 
 in haste, on account of the muzzling order and drove 
 with the four dogs one evening into Viareggio, never 
 doubting to be received at the (hotel) Russie. 
 
 " Instead, it and all V. were overcrowded. I could not 
 get a room anywhere nor even a sitting-room to stay in 
 for the night. It grew late ; I was obliged to hire the 
 fiacre for the night, and the man took out his horse 
 and went away ; I was left with my dogs in the Station 
 Piazza ; happily it was a full moon, for the cab lamp 
 went out in an hour. I had no extra covering, and it 
 was very damp. 
 
 "The next day my eye was very inflamed, and it 
 became the affection known as glaucoma. In a month 
 I was blind in that eye. In the external appearance of 
 the eye there is no change, but the blindness is incur- 
 able. It is not at all a rare thing, though I never heard 
 of it, did you ? 
 
 "I think it was odious of S., where I and the dogs had 
 been seven winter months, as you will remember, not 
 to take me at least under his roof.' It was very 
 dangerous for a lady to be absolutely alone throughout 
 a long night, and I had a black valise which looked 
 valuable. I had sent my maid to sleep at her mother's 
 
 ' Hotel de Russie. 
 
 225 P 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 early in the afternoon and I forgot her address. In the 
 morning she found me. It was very disagreeable. 
 The Viareggini are great brutes. 
 
 " I mourn infinitely the loss of my right eye. One 
 can never tell that the other may not be affected by 
 sympathy. How could I bear my life if I were sight- 
 less ? 
 
 " My sight has always been so strong and clear, and 
 as far-reaching as when I was ten years old. 
 
 " Alas ! The left eye is, as I say, all right, but how 
 long may it be so ? There is great sympathy between 
 the eyes. 
 
 " No one cares. It does not matter to anybody." 
 
 About this time Ouida wrote to Sir Rennell Rodd 
 that the end of her life " was destined to be like 
 that of an old horse, all misery." 
 
 Her troubles with the journalists were not yet 
 at an end. The Daily Mirror published what pur- 
 ported to be a portrait of Ouida : it was really that 
 of an old peasant woman sitting in a field, reading. 
 Her vanity was hurt beyond repair. 
 
 Ouida to T. Fisher Unwin. 
 
 [Mazzarosa I 
 
 " August I, 1907. 
 
 "You do not mention the singular libel and calumny 
 of the Daily Mail and other papers upon me. It is 
 all a lie, and a very strange one. A young corre- 
 
 226 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 spondent of the D. M. called and wanted to see 
 me ; I did not receive him ; this was his vengeance. 
 The ' portrait ' so called by the Daily Mirror is an 
 invention." 
 
 Ouida to G. Milner-Gibson-Cullum. 
 
 [Juguit, 1907.] 
 " You will have seen the villainy of the Daily Mail 
 and Daily Mirror. I believe it will cost them dear." 
 
 \_September, 1907.3 
 " I cannot tell you the fury those vile issues of 
 the D. M. excited in me ; and that abominable por- 
 trait of the old woman has gone all over the world 
 as myself ! " 
 
 Ouida wrote to Mr. Carmichael that she thought 
 an imaginary portrait the worst libel of all. *' Could 
 they not let me die in peace ? " 
 
 There is little more to record. Ouida's health 
 became worse and worse, and she grew more and 
 more eccentric and unreasonable. She spent most ot 
 her money on her dogs, and would even bring into 
 the house mongrels from the street. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 " Mazzarosa presso Viareggio, 
 "Jugiut 28 [1907]. 
 
 " I have been very unwell ever since I wrote' with 
 a dreadful cough and a sense of utter exhaustion and 
 
 ■ July 30. 
 227 
 
Ouida : a Memior 
 
 weariness, physical and mental. The heat has been 
 great even here, which is densely wooded and so has 
 deep shadow. I have suffered much in many ways, 
 but I hope the worst is past." 
 
 She returned to Viareggio in September. An attack 
 of influenza was followed by inflammation of the lungs, 
 and from this illness she never rallied. 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerel!. 
 
 [Viareggio] 
 ^^ November % [1907]. 
 
 " You have not heard from me on account of a long 
 illness from inflammation of the lungs which has kept 
 me prostrate here (Viareggio) since the middle of 
 September. I am convalescent, but still confined to my 
 chamber." 
 
 On the 26th, in a pathetic letter to Mrs. Hunting- 
 ton, ^ she asks her not to tell people she found her 
 looking ill,2 says she has had fourteen years of almost 
 continual trouble, and that perhaps she had made a 
 mistake in going to Sant' Alessio, as it isolated 
 her from society. 
 
 She continued to write letters to friends till a week 
 before her death. 
 
 ' Printed in H. C. Huntington's Places, Memories, 191 1. 
 ^ "I hear you would not have known me, I am so changed." 
 
 228 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 Ouida to Sydney C. Cockerell. 
 
 " Wednesday^ January 8 [1908]. 
 " It is horrible weather here, raining and blowing 
 and very cold. I cannot leave my room and I do not 
 think I shall live long. . . . Do not say this about 
 me, please." 
 
 {January 17, 1908.] 
 
 " I have been very ill all these days, and my maid 
 
 is of opinion that I shall never get well. The weather 
 
 is intensely cold ; and at St. Remo it is so so warm and 
 
 brilliant ; it is odd there should be so great a difference. 
 
 Excuse this rough word ; I am ill and cannot write 
 
 well, 
 
 " Ever yours, 
 
 "O." 
 
 Her greatest grief at the idea of death was that she 
 must leave her "dear dogs." "Their lives," she wrote 
 to Sir Squire Bancroft, " are too short in comparison 
 with their devotion." 
 
 Ouida died of the effects of pneumonia at 70, Via 
 Zanardelli, Viareggio, early on the morning of Saturday, 
 January 25, 1908. 
 
 She had always used quill pens, and on a writing- 
 table at the foot of the bed where her dead body lay 
 were found, reverently arranged by her servant, two 
 large quills in saltire. 
 
 Ouida was buried in the English cemetery at Bagni 
 di Lucca. A lady who desires to remain anonymous — 
 
 229 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 Ouida reveals her character so clearly in the letters 
 contained in the foregoing pages that any special 
 summation of it seems superfluous. Many will endorse 
 Mr. Henry James's verdict, expressed to the writer 
 of this memoir : " She was curious, in a common, little 
 way ... of a most uppish or dauntless little spirit 
 of arrogance and independence ... a little terrible 
 and finally pathetic grotesque." But even he, as we 
 shall see later, admired her perception of the beauty 
 of Italy. Students of psychology, and those who have 
 sympathy with human weakness and human failings, 
 will recognize the pathetic side of such self-revelation 
 as is to be found in this record of Ouida's career. 
 
 She saw everything through the magnifying glass 
 of her own vanity. She exaggerated everything, both 
 within and without herself : her talents, her own feelings 
 and actions, and the actions and feelings of others 
 towards herself. In judging Ouida, despite even the 
 sadness of her last days, I scarcely think we should 
 pity her overmuch, or conclude that because her life 
 seems unhappy to the onlooker it was necessarily 
 unhappy to herself. Inordinately vain persons are 
 seldom unhappy ; they suffice unto themselves. As 
 George Eliot put it, " they carry their comfort about 
 with them." They are wholly wrapped up in their 
 own affairs, and their illusion as to their own impor- 
 tance and influence hides from them, as by a thick 
 curtain, the estimation in which they are held by 
 others. Such self-absorption characterized Ouida 
 
 231 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 from childhood : the habit grew on her until it became 
 ingrained, and she came to regard herself rather as 
 a heroine of one of her own books than as an ordinary 
 woman living in an ordinary world. 
 
 It is, however, quite certain that Ouida possessed 
 considerable powers of attraction. She numbered 
 among her friends and acquaintances throughout her 
 life some of the most interesting and famous men of 
 the time. When some who knew her declare that she 
 had no conversational talent, that she kept all her 
 cleverness for her books, it may be that she did not 
 always think it worth while to put forth her powers. 
 Men will go to see a woman who is reputed to be 
 clever or eccentric, or in some way distinguished from 
 the multitude, once, or even twice, but they will not 
 go often, or carry on with her a frequent corre- 
 spondence extending over years, unless they derive 
 from such intercourse pleasure and satisfaction. The 
 few women, too, to whom she extended her friendship 
 had afFection for her and were staunch to the end. 
 And it should never be forgotten that her friends 
 from her earliest youth were in the habit of constantly 
 stimulating her vanity. 
 
 In many ways, indeed, Ouida was no one's enemy 
 but her own. Her curious lack of conscience about 
 money was perhaps rather non-moral than immoral, 
 and such an attitude with persons of Ouida's tempera- 
 ment is more common than is generally supposed. 
 It is less easy to find excuse for the spirit of 
 
 232 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 revenge that made her pillory in Friendship 
 those who were, so she chose to imagine, instrumental 
 in preventing her marriage with Stufa. Looked at 
 dispassionately, such a spirit merely proves her 
 incapable of the love that gives all and demands 
 nothing, the kind of love she is always preaching to 
 the injured wife in Guilder oy, and the kind of love, 
 strangely enough, with which she endowed her many 
 heroines who are deserted by their lovers. The bitter- 
 ness that enters her novels after the end of the seventies 
 is due to the same revengeful spirit, which is one of 
 Ouida's ugliest qualities, and led her only too often 
 to misjudge the characters of the persons, and 
 especially of the women, with whom she came in 
 contact. 
 
 We either smile at or deplore the extravagant 
 affection Ouida lavished on dumb animals, but beneath 
 the exaggeration we should perhaps see the very human 
 need, stronger in women than in men, for something 
 to love and take care of. Dumb animals are less 
 exacting than human beings, less likely to be faithless, 
 and to a woman of Ouida's temperament probably 
 more satisfactory objects of love. For it cannot be 
 denied that in her intercourse with human beings 
 Ouida gave little and demanded much in return. 
 
 Leaving aside the exaggeration, it must be admitted 
 that Ouida was not alone in her love of animals. 
 Both Mary Russell Mitford and Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning in their letters express their affection for 
 
 233 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 their dogs in what to some might seem extravagant 
 terms. When Flush, the dog that Miss Mitford 
 had given Miss Barrett, was lost, its owner declared 
 that she could "neither sleep, nor eat, nor do any- 
 thing more rational than cry." Miss Mitford, in 
 deploring the death of a favourite dog, wrote : " He 
 loved me so entirely, and I, as entirely as is compatible 
 with our far more selfish human nature, loved him," 
 and went on to praise " his sweetness, his gentleness, 
 his affection, his over-estimate of kindness, his forget- 
 fulness of wrong, his recollection of old friends." 
 But neither Miss Mitford nor Mrs. Browning com- 
 mitted the extravagance of treating dumb animals 
 as if they were on a level with or above human 
 beings. 
 
 Ouida said of Cecil Rhodes that he had a soul 
 somewhere, and so it was with Ouida herself. She 
 sympathized deeply with all who were suffering or 
 oppressed ; she loved beauty in every form. In the 
 letter from Mr. Henry James already referred to, he 
 writes : " The best and most sincere thing about 
 her I seemed to make out was — or had been — her 
 original genuine perception of the beauty, the dis- 
 tinction and quality of Italy : this almost inspired 
 her." She was generous to those in need, as many 
 a poor Italian peasant could have testified ; she showed 
 much kindness to, and took much interest in, young 
 writers. She had high ideals which made her dis- 
 contented with everyday life, but she blvmdered after 
 
 234 
 
z 
 
 < 
 
 B 
 
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 BJ 
 S 
 O. 
 
 Z" 
 
 o 
 
 < 
 
 D 
 
 P 
 O 
 
 «■ 
 O 
 2' 
 
 X 
 
 n. 
 
Last Years and Death 
 
 them in a semi-passionate and clumsy fashion, and 
 never understood that — 
 
 "The common problem, yours, mine, every one's, 
 Is — not to fancy what were fair in life. 
 Provided it could be — but, finding first 
 What may be, then find how to make it fair 
 Up to our means." 
 
 Let us then remember that her vehement expressions 
 and unconsidered acts were blind strivings after the 
 amelioration of the lot of the suffering and oppressed. 
 
 Notwithstanding the high estimate she held of her 
 position as a writer, she had a strong objection to 
 certain sorts of publicity. She was never interviewed 
 by the Press. She disliked to be, as she phrased it, 
 " made a show of," yet, as has been stated, she equally 
 disliked to be caught by visitors " en deshabille." 
 She objected to the publication of letters, and in fear of 
 this enjoined on many of her friends the destruction of 
 those she had written to them. She considered that 
 the public had no possible title to enter into the pale 
 of an artist's private life. But she summed up this 
 feeling in words which show that modesty was 
 scarcely its motive power : — 
 
 " The great man and the great woman should say to 
 the world : ' Think of me what you choose. It is 
 indifferent to me. You are not my master ; and I 
 shall never accept you as a judge.' This should be the 
 attitude of all royalty, whether that of King, the hero, 
 or the genius." i 
 
 ■ Cf. "Vulgarity," in yiews and Opinions (1895). 
 23s 
 
VII 
 
 OUIDA AS 
 NOVELIST 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 OUIDA AS NOVELIST • 
 
 IN a letter to The Times,^ reprinted in Frescoes, 
 entitled " Romance and Realism," Ouida makes 
 what may be regarded as an apologia for her 
 particular form of fiction. She says : " I have, 
 I believe, been accused of writing ' fairy-stories ' ; 
 but is not life itself very often a fairy-story, 
 if too often, alas ! one in which the evil genius 
 preponderates and the wishing-cap is foolishly used 
 by the unwise ? . . . To many of us — to myself, I 
 confess, among the number — the world seems a mar- 
 vellous union of tragedy and comedy, which run side 
 by side like twin children : like a ' web of Tyrian 
 looms ' with the gold threads crossing and recrossing 
 on the dusky purple of its intricate meshes. ... I do 
 not object to realism in fiction ; what I object to 
 is the limitation of realism in fiction to what is 
 commonplace, tedious, and bald — is the habit, in a 
 word, of insisting that the potato is real and that the 
 passion-flower is not. ... I cannot suppose that my 
 » October 12, 1883. 
 239 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 own experiences can be wholly exceptional ones, yet I 
 have known very handsome people, I have known very 
 fine characters, I have also known some very wicked 
 ones, and I have also known many circumstances so 
 romantic that were they described in fiction they 
 would be ridiculed as exaggerated and impossible. 
 
 "A lecturer in the North of England, lecturing on my 
 novels, remarked with ndiveti and incredulity on the 
 number of residences assigned in Moths to Prince 
 ZourofF. Now, had the lecturer taken the trouble to 
 inquire of any one conversant with the world, he would 
 have learned that most great persons of all nationalities 
 have three or four different residences at the least, and 
 that a Russian noble is invariably extravagant in these 
 matters. . . . Would it not be well if lecturers or 
 reviewers, before calling everything which seems 
 strange to themselves unreal or unnatural, were 
 visited with a wholesome doubt as to whether it might 
 not be their own experiences which were limited ? " 
 
 No one would be inclined to dispute the fact that 
 Ouida sedulously avoided the cultivation of the potato 
 and devoted herself exclusively to that of the passion- 
 flower. It is only the greatest artists in fiction who 
 see life steadily and see it whole. When we leave 
 the heights, we must perforce be content with a more 
 circumscribed view of things. A great novelist, too, 
 may take a circumscribed area for his field of action ; 
 Jane Austen succeeded perfectly in the very restricted 
 limits of life that came within her ken, partly because 
 
 240 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 she possessed the gift of humour, in which Ouida 
 was wholly deficient, and partly because her insight 
 enabled her to see human beings as they really were, 
 are, and ever will be. It never seems to have occurred 
 to Ouida that it takes all sorts of people to make 
 up the world, and that the lives of all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men and women afford material for the 
 artist whose command of his art enables him so to 
 present them that they are convincing and interesting 
 to the reader. Some marriages are happy, others are 
 not. Some women console themselves with a lover 
 when the husband is not satisfactory, others do not. 
 Some men are faithless to their wives, others are 
 faithful to them. Some people are extravagant and 
 self-indulgent, others are thrifty and self-denying, 
 and so the world wags. Ouida never saw human 
 beings of any kind as they really are, but always 
 as she imagined them to be. Most of her men 
 and women, regarded as such, too much resemble the 
 childish daubs that form the paintings on which she so 
 vastly prided herself. Some of her Italian and French 
 peasants, however, are exceptions. 
 
 Nevertheless, she had her own high conception of 
 the true artist, and often gives expression to it. In an 
 essay entitled "The Penalties of a Well-known Name" i 
 she writes : — 
 
 " The supreme gift of the true artist is a rapidity of 
 perception and comprehension which is totally unlike 
 ' Cf. Fieuis and Opinions (1895). 
 
 241 Q 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 the slow piecemeal observations of others. As the 
 musician reads the page of a score at a glance, as 
 the author comprehends the essence of a book by a 
 flash of intelligence, as the painter sees at a glance 
 the points and lines and hues of a landscape, whilst 
 the ordinary man plods through the musical composi- 
 tion note by note, the book page by page, the land- 
 scape detail by detail, so the true artist, whether poet, 
 painter, or dramatist, sees human nature, penetrating 
 its disguises and embracing all its force and weakness 
 by that insight which is within him. . . . 
 
 " When the true poet or artist takes up in his 
 hand a single garden pear or russet apple, he will 
 behold, through its suggestions, as in a sorcerer's 
 mirror, a whole smiling land of orchard and of 
 meadow ; he will smell the sweet scent of ripe fruit 
 and wet leaves ; he will tread a thousand grassy 
 ways and wade in a thousand rippling streams ; he 
 will hear the matin's bell and the evensong, the lowing 
 kine and the bleating flocks ; he will think in a 
 second of time of the trees which were in blossom 
 when Drake and Raleigh sailed, and the fields which 
 were green when the Tudor and Valois met, and 
 the sunsets of long, long ago when Picardy was in 
 the flames of war and all over the Norman lands the 
 bowmen tramped and the fair knights rode. 
 
 " The phrasing of modern metaphysic calls 
 this faculty assimilation ; in other days it has been 
 called imagination : be its name what it will, it is the 
 
 242 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 one essential and especial possession of the poetic 
 mind, which makes it travel over space and annihilate 
 time, and behold the endless life of innumerable 
 forests as suggested to it by a single green leaf." 
 
 And in "Le Secret du Precepteur''^ she sums up 
 the '' divers and numerous qualities " which must in 
 her view be possessed by the creator of a fine novel : 
 " Not only imagination but wit, not only wit but 
 scholarship, not only scholarship but fancy, not only 
 fancy [but discrimination, observation, knowledge of 
 the passions, sympathy with the most opposite 
 temperaments, the power to call up character from 
 the void, as the sculptor creates figures from the clay, 
 and for amalgamating, condensing, and vivifying all 
 these talents, the mastery of an exquisite subtlety, 
 force, and eloquence in language." In continuation 
 she implies that the reader who would properly 
 appreciate the productions of such a novelist must 
 possess almost similar qualities. It is difficult not to 
 believe that Ouida was thinking of herself as the 
 perfect novelist ; the power to call up character from 
 the void she certainly possessed, and she would never 
 have realized that such a power could not produce a 
 great novelist. 
 
 Love and intrigue are her sole themes. Her char- 
 acters exist only to make love and be made love to. 
 Even if they have tangible work to do in the world, 
 if they are painters or sculptors or musicians, directly 
 » Cf. Critical Studies (1900). 
 243 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 love touches them their work goes to the wall. Only 
 millionaires who have risen from the people seem able 
 to carry on their love affairs and their business at 
 the same time. She has scant faith in marriage, 
 because she thinks it absurd to expect a man worth 
 anything to be what she called " a hearth-bound 
 monogamist." Her women in love are either "splen- 
 didly " vicious or models of virtue, sacrificing every- 
 thing for the sake of their usually worthless lovers 
 and dying when abandoned by them. 
 
 Of plot, in the artistic sense of the term, Ouida 
 was guiltless. She began by writing down everything 
 that came into her mind, descriptions, observations, 
 reflections, and then, when she had matter enough to 
 fill the book, ran a thread of story through it. In 
 most of her novels this method is easily traced ; in one 
 or two cases, however, she has paid more attention 
 to construction, but unfortunately, with the exception 
 of In Maremma, one of the best of the Italian 
 group of novels, this has generally happened 
 in her less attractive books, notably in Moths 
 and in The Massarenes, both lurid pictures of 
 nouveaux riches and the fast section of aristocratic 
 society. 
 
 In portrayal of character Ouida is generally deficient. 
 As a rule she draws a sort of flat design of the person 
 and fills it in with her own invention : we seldom 
 learn to know a character through his action. Among 
 her women characters, however, there are two excep- 
 
 244 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 tions : Cigarette ' in Under Two Flags and Musa in 
 In Maremma. They are consistent, and we do come 
 to know them through what they do and say. Her 
 men characters are not very attractive, although Ouida 
 certainly intended them to be so. Wanderers like 
 Tricotrin and Pascarel, sculptors like Marys in 
 Ariadne, or the old shoemaker who tells the story 
 in that novel, have much to recommend them, and 
 it is through such characters that we can trace Ouida's 
 philosophy of life. The heroes of her earlier novels 
 were the resplendent guardsmen so laughed at by 
 later generations of novel-readers. Mr. G. S. Street 
 characterizes the type as — 
 
 " A man of strong passions and a zeal for life. 
 He grasps at the pleasures of life, and is eager for all 
 its activities ; he will endure privations in the cause 
 of sport, and discomforts in the cause of friendship, 
 and risks in the cause of love ... he is ready to 
 fight and he does not swagger. His one affectation 
 is, that if by chance he has done something great in 
 the way of sport or war, he looks as if nothing had 
 happened. There are things in life he puts before 
 the main chance." 2 
 
 That kind of man doubtless exists, though he is 
 
 ' I was present last year at a performance of a dramatized version 
 of Under Two Flags at the Lyceum Theatre, London, and, in 
 accordance with my expectations, and in spite of the staginess and 
 general melodramatic effects, the character of Cigarette stood out 
 full of poetry, imagination, and tragedy. 
 
 » Cf. The Yellow Book, vol. vi. 
 
 245 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 rare, and it may be that some persons like to be 
 reminded of him by the novelist, and are led thus to 
 think better of life. Such heroes are to be found, 
 not only in Ouida's novels, but in others equally 
 popular as hers in their day and equally dead now, in 
 Guy Livingstone and other of George Lawrence's 
 novels, which undoubtedly greatly influenced Ouida's 
 works, and in the soldiers and sportsmen who are 
 the heroes of Whyte Melville's novels. Taste changes, 
 ideals change, and such heroes were to novel-readers 
 of the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century 
 what the heroes who renounce rank and pleasure and 
 personal comfort to work among the poor and fallen 
 in the slums of great cities are to the novel-readers of 
 to-day. There is, perhaps, as little reality in the one 
 type as portrayed in novels as in the other. Ouida's 
 popularity in her time may be in some measure accounted 
 for by the fact that there were and still are persons who 
 have enough of the real in their workaday lives, and in 
 their novels call for something outside and beyond it ; 
 who, indeed, like their novels to savour of the fairy-tale. 
 But there is perhaps another reason. We must remem- 
 ber, as has been observed in a previous chapter, that the 
 line of demarcation between classes was much stronger 
 at the time of Ouida's great vogue ; there was much 
 more exclusiveness in high places than is the case 
 now. Persons who were poor were looked down on 
 by those who were rich. The middle class knew litde 
 except by hearsay of the doings and manner of life 
 
 246 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 of the upper class. An Oxford professor would not 
 in those degenerate days have been asked by the 
 Prime Minister to meet the Sovereign at dinner, unless, 
 perhaps, he had been a person of noble birth. 
 Hence Ouida's portrayal of great folk and their ways 
 would not have seemed absurd to the larger number 
 of her readers. It would all have been unknown 
 territory to them. They would have received it 
 as gospel truth and have felt perfectly sure that they 
 were being initiated into the mysteries of high life. 
 
 But many of Ouida's books possess qualities that 
 make them attractive in spite of their many absurdities 
 and inaccuracies. Whatever in them is meretricious 
 and exaggerated, her love of beauty, whether it is to 
 be found in nature or in art, her hatred of oppression 
 and injustice, whether practised against man or beast, 
 her sympathy with suffering in all forms, was genuine 
 and sincere, however extravagant the terms in which 
 she too often voiced her feelings. 
 
 Her best work is to be found in her Italian novels 
 — I call them so because they are concerned with 
 Italy — Pascarel (1873), Signa (1875), Ariadne (1877), 
 and In Maremma (1882). Other of her novels, as 
 we shall see, deal with Italy, and contain much that 
 is interesting and fine, but they fall below the level of 
 these four. 
 
 In these novels Ouida has dealt almost exclusively 
 with the Italian peasantry or the lower class of town- 
 dwellers. As an example of her method let us briefly 
 
 247 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 sketch the novel Signa. The scene is the district of 
 Signa, near Florence, and the hero, the illegitimate son 
 of a village girl and a French artist who later became 
 famous, is called Signa after the place. So the name 
 bears in the title a two-fold signification, Signa, the 
 place, is worthy of knowledge ; Ouida knew it well, 
 for the Villa Farinola was situated in that district. 
 
 " The years of its glory are done. It is a grey 
 quiet place which now strays down by the water and 
 now climbs high on the hill, and faces the full dawn 
 of the day and sees the sunset reflected in the mirror 
 of the river, and is starry with fire-flies in midsummer 
 and 2,t noon looks drowsy in the heat and seems to dream 
 — being so very old. The buttressed walls are ruins. 
 The mass-bell swings over the tower roofs. The 
 fortresses are changed to farms. The vines climb 
 where the culverins blazed. White bullocks and 
 belled mules tread to and fro the tracks which the 
 freelances made ; and the peasants sing at their ploughs 
 where the hosts of the invaders once thundered. 
 
 " Its ways are narrow, its stones are crooked, its 
 summer dust is dense, its winter mire is heavy, its 
 hovels are many, its people are poor. Here where 
 the ancient walls of its citadel rise hoary and broken 
 against the blueness of the sky ; there where the arches 
 of the bridges span the river, and the sand and the 
 shallows and the straw that is drying in summer shine 
 together yellow in the sun ; here, where under the 
 sombre painted archways the little children play, their 
 
 248 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 faces like the cherubs and the cupids of the Renais- 
 sance; there where the cobblers and coopers and the 
 plaiting maidens and the makers of the yellow rush 
 brooms all work away under the lintels, and corbels, 
 and carved beam timbers, four hundred years old if 
 one ; here where through the gateways with their 
 portcullises woven over by the spiders there only 
 pass the patient mules with sacks of flour, or the hay 
 carts dropping grasses, or the waggons of new wine ; 
 there where the villas that were all fortresses in the 
 fierce fighting times of old gleam white in the light 
 upon their crests of hills, with their cypresses like 
 sentinels around them, and breadths of corn and 
 vineyards traversed by green grassy paths that lead 
 upward to where the stone-pine and the myrtle make 
 sweet the air together. In all these Signa is beautiful ; 
 most of all, of course, in the long light, radiant summer, 
 when the nightingales are singing everywhere, noon 
 as well as night ; the summer which seems to last 
 almost all the year, for you can only tell how it comes 
 and goes by the coming and going of the flowers ; 
 the long-lived summer that is ushered in by the daffo- 
 dils, those golden chamberlains of the court of flowers, 
 and dies, as a king should, on a purple bed of ane- 
 mones, when the bells of the feast of the saints sound 
 its requiem from hill to hill. And Signa revels in 
 all the brightness of the Tuscan weather, and all about 
 her seems singing, from the cicala piping away all day 
 long, through the hottest heat, to the mandolines 
 
 249 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 that thrill through the leaves at night as the peasants 
 go by strumming the chords of their love-songs. 
 Summer and song and sunshine ; — Signa lies amidst 
 them like some war-bruised shield of a knight that 
 has fallen amongst the roses and holds the nest of 
 a lark." 
 
 It was Corpus Christi Day, and the people were 
 chanting the Laus Deo, and above the voices rose 
 one sweetest and clearest of all, that of a little ten- 
 year-old boy, poorer than the rest, who lived with 
 people who thrashed him oftener than they fed him. 
 But music was In his head and in his heart. He 
 had a little lute of his own, and he played and sang 
 as he went along in the dusk of the dawn to his 
 work. The child's music was wonderful in its way, 
 but in Signa there was so much music everywhere 
 that nobody noticed much. 
 
 " As the wine-waggon creaks down the hill, the 
 waggoner will chaunt to the corn that grows upon 
 either side of him. As the miller's mules cross the 
 bridge, the lad as he cracks his whip will hum to 
 the blowing alders. In the red clover, the labourers 
 will whet their scythes and sickles to a trick of melody. 
 In the quiet evenings a Kyrie Eleison will rise from 
 the thick leaves that hide a village chapel. On the 
 hills the goatherd, high in air amongst the arbutus 
 branches, will scatter on the lonely mountain-side 
 stanzas of purest rhythm. By the sea-shore, where 
 Shelley died, the fisherman, rough and salt and 
 
 250 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 weatherworn, will string notes of sweetest measure 
 under the tamarisk-tree on his mandoline. But the 
 poetry and the music float on the air like the leaves 
 of roses that blossom in a solitude and drift away 
 to die upon the breeze : there is no one to notice 
 the fragrance, there is no one to gather the leaves." 
 
 The boy was the child of Pippa, the peasant girl 
 who had run away with a French painter, Istriel. He 
 deserted her, and returning to Signa at a time of flood, 
 in a miserable condition, Pippa fell down a precipice 
 and was killed, but the child, falling on her, was saved, 
 and he and the woman's body were found by her 
 brothers, Lippo and Bruno. Lippo had a wife and 
 family, and he therefore agreed to take charge of 
 the boy, while Bruno, who was unmarried, undertook 
 to pay for the child's keep. The boy grew up and 
 spent a good deal of time with Bruno, who came to 
 love him and was almost jealous of the child's lute 
 and of his love for Gemma, the gardener's daughter, 
 a little girl of his own age. One day Bruno gave 
 him some currants, and instead of eating them, in the 
 evening he took them to Gemma. She had a sister 
 a year older, named Palma. She was dark, and 
 Gemma was fair. The children were already asleep 
 on their bed of hay. 
 
 " ' I have brought you some fruit. Gemma,' he said, 
 and tried to kiss her. 
 
 " * Give me ! give me quick ! ' cried the little child. 
 She pushed away his lips ; she wanted the fruit. 
 
 251 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " ' If I do not eat it quick, Palma will wake,' she 
 whispered, and began to crunch them in her tiny teeth 
 as the kid did its grasses. The dark child did wake, 
 and lifted herself on her elbow. 
 
 " ' It is Signa ! ' she cried, with a little coo of delight 
 like a wood-pigeon's. 
 
 " ' I kept you no currants, Palma ! ' said Signa, with 
 a sudden pang of self-reproach. He knew that he 
 had done unkindly. 
 
 " Palma looked a little sorrowful. They were very 
 poor, and never hardly tasted anything except the 
 black bread like the dogs. 
 
 " ' Never mind ; come and kiss me,' she said, with 
 a little sigh. 
 
 " Signa went round and kissed her. But he went 
 back to Gemma again. 
 
 " ' Good night,' he said to the pretty white child 
 sitting up in the hay ; and he kissed her once more. So 
 Gemma was kissed twice, and had the currants as well. 
 " Palma was used to that. 
 
 "Signa ran out with a hardened conscience. He 
 knew he had been unjust ; but then if he had given 
 any of the currants to Palma, Gemma never would 
 have kissed him at all. 
 
 " They were both his play-fellows, but Palma he 
 did not care about, and about Gemma he did. For 
 Gemma was a thousand times the prettier, and Palma 
 loved him always, that he knew ; but of Gemma he 
 never was so sure." 
 
 252 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 I quote this passage at length because it strikes the 
 keynote of Ouida's attitude to women and shows her 
 fixed idea, one that prevails throughout her work, that 
 the selfish, unscrupulous women are those whom men 
 love best. 
 
 Signa grew up, loving and making music as he 
 could. The organist of the little church taught him 
 much. Signa loved all beautiful things, too, and one 
 day Bruno took him to the Certosa to see the " marble 
 men and painted angels." There he met a stranger, 
 a French painter, who, hearing him sing, was so 
 delighted with his voice and his beauty that he painted 
 his head and made him a present of 40 francs, with 
 which Signa bought an old violin he had longed for 
 for ages. Lippo, who persistently ill-treated the boy, 
 was furiously angry that the money had not been 
 given to him, and Signa determined to run away and 
 persuaded Gemma to go with him. Signa played his 
 violin and sang and Gemma danced. The leader of 
 a travelling mountebank show happened to witness 
 their performance and enticed the children to 
 accompany him to Leghorn, intending to take ship 
 there. But before they got off^, Bruno found them. 
 Gemma, however, vanished while Signa and Bruno 
 left her to rest at an inn under the care of the 
 landlady. 
 
 Then Signa went to live with Bruno, and Bruno 
 worked and saved for him, and Signa was happy in 
 the purely agricultural life he led. 
 
 253 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral 
 still. A certain peace and light lie on the people at 
 their toil. The reaper with his hook, the plougher 
 with his oxen, the girl who gleans amongst the trailing 
 vines, the child that sees the flowers tossing with the 
 corn, the men that sing to get a blessing on the grapes 
 — they have all a certain grace and dignity of the 
 old classic ways left with them." 
 
 It was a peaceful, wholesome life, full of labour 
 it is true, but labour out in the open fields under blue 
 skies ; and Signa found time, too, in which, under 
 the old organist, he could pursue his music. He 
 grew into a handsome youth. And the time came 
 when Bruno explained to him that the result of his 
 toil was that Signa would have a good deal of land 
 all his own, and in due time — he was now seventeen — 
 could marry and become a rich contadino. But Signa 
 cared for none of these things. He wanted to go 
 to Florence and study music, and Bruno in his disap- 
 pointment broke the youth's violin. 
 
 " ' I hate him,' said Signa. ' Palma, see here. He 
 pretends to love me, and he breaks my Rusignuola, 
 and he breaks my heart with it, and he thinks he loves 
 me, both body and soul, because he buys a bit of land 
 and bids me live on it all the days of my life, and 
 dig, and sow, and plough, and hew, and draw water, 
 and lead a life like the oxen's — no better : he calls 
 that love.' " 
 
 Palma took a different view. 
 
 254 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 " ' Bruno has been so good, and given up so much 
 and hoped so much : is it not just a Uttle hard that 
 you should be so longing to leave him ? Perhaps he 
 does love you selfishly. But is not your want to get 
 away selfish too ? He has been cruel. Oh, yes ! that 
 is certain. But then no doubt he was in pain : he 
 hardly knew what he did.' " 
 
 Bruno repented, and sent Signa to Bologna to study 
 music. And later sold the land, the very land he had 
 bought for Signa, so that he might have the 3,000 
 francs required to have the opera Actaa that he had 
 composed produced in Venice. It was a great 
 success ; Signa awoke and found himself famous. And 
 then he met again the Gemma of his childhood, now 
 a beautiful wicked woman, a shameless wanton, living 
 under the protection of Istriel, the painter, who was 
 of course Signa's father. And she ensnares Signa 
 and then deceives him, and so brings him to his death. 
 The character of Bruno is finely and consistently 
 drawn ; he gives up everything for his beloved nephew, 
 even his life, for it was he who killed Gemma, though 
 all too late, since Signa had discovered her faithlessness 
 and had slain himself. As Bruno went to the scaffold, 
 he said in his heart, " I did what I could. But it was 
 all of no use — of no use ! " There is real tragedy in 
 the climax, and it is well led up to. 
 
 Rome is really the subject of Ariadne. True, there 
 is the usual thread of story, which portrays the suffer- 
 ings of an innocent loving girl caused by the cruel 
 
 25 S 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 treatment of a worldly, egotistical lover. But we 
 read the book for its delightful Roman setting. 
 
 Here is one picture : — 
 
 " Water is the living joy of Rome. 
 
 " I wonder to hear them say that Rome is sad, 
 with all that mirth and music of its water 
 laughing through all its streets, till the steepest and 
 stoniest ways are murmurous with it as any brook-fed 
 forest depths. Here water is Protean ; sovereign and 
 slave, sorcerer and servant, slaking the mule's thirst 
 and shining in porphyry on the prince's terrace, 
 filling the well in the cabbage-garden and leaping 
 aloft against the Pope's palace ; first called to fill the 
 baths of the Agrippines and serve the Naumachia of 
 Augustus, it bubbles from a griffin's jaws or a wolf's 
 teeth, or any other of the thousand quaint things set 
 in the masonry at street corners, and washes the 
 people's herbs and carrots, and is Japped by the 
 tongues of dogs, and thrashed by the bare brown arms 
 of washing women ; first brought from the hills to 
 flood the green Numidian marble of the thermae, 
 and lave the limbs of the patricians between the 
 cool mosaic walls of the tepidarium, it contentedly 
 becomes a household thing, twinkling like a star at 
 the bottom of deep old wells in dusky courts, its rest 
 broken a dozen times a day by the clash of the chain 
 on the copper pail, above it the carnations of the 
 kitchen balcony and the caged blackbird of the cook. 
 " One grows to love the Roman fountains as sea- 
 
 256 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 born men love the sea. Go where you will there is 
 water ; whether it foams by Trevi, where the green 
 moss grows in it like ocean weed about the feet of the 
 ocean-god, or whether it rushes reddened by the 
 evening light from the mouth of an old lion that 
 once saw Cleopatra ; whether it leaps high in air trying 
 to reach the gold cross oh St. Peter's, or pours its 
 triple qascade over the Pauline granite ; whether it 
 spouts out of a great barrel in a wall in old Trastevere, 
 or throws up into the air a gossamer as fine as 
 Arachne's web in a green garden way where the 
 lizards run, or in a crowded corner where the fruit- 
 sellers sit against the wall — in all its shapes one grows 
 to love the water that fills Rome with an unchanging 
 melody all through the year." 
 
 And where is the charm of a student's life in Rome 
 more romantically brought out than in this de- 
 scription ? — 
 
 "There can be hardly any life more lovely upon 
 earth than that of a young student of art in Rome. 
 With the morning, to rise to the sound of countless 
 bells and of innumerable streams, and see the silver 
 lines of the snow new fallen on the mountains against 
 the deep rose of the dawn, and the shadows of the 
 night steal away softly from off the city, releasing, one 
 by one, dome and spire, and cupola and roof, till all 
 the wide white wonder of the place reveals itself 
 under the broad brightness of fijU day ; to go down 
 into the dark cool streets, with the pigeons fluttering in 
 
 257 R 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 the fountains, and the sounds of the morning chants 
 coming from many a church door and convent 
 window, and little scholars and singing children going 
 by with white clothes on, or scarlet robes, as though 
 walking forth from the canvas of Botticelli or 
 Garofalo ; to eat frugally, sitting close by some shop 
 of flowers and birds, and watching all the while the 
 humours and the pageants of the streets by quaint 
 corners, rich with sculptures of the Renaissance, and 
 spanned by arches of architects that builded for 
 Agrippa, under grated windows with arms of 
 Frangipani or Colonna, and pillars that ApoUodorus 
 raised ; to go into the great courts of palaces, 
 murmurous with the fall of water, and fresh with 
 green leaves and golden fruit, that rob the colossal 
 statues of their gloom and gauntness, and thence into 
 the vast chambers where the greatest dreams that 
 men have ever had are written on panel and on canvas, 
 and the immensity and the silence of them all are 
 beautiful and eloquent with dead men's legacies to the 
 living, where the Hours and the Seasons frolic beside 
 the Maries at the Sepulchre, and Adonis bares his 
 lovely limbs, in nowise ashamed because St. Jerome 
 and St. Mark are there ; to study and muse, and 
 wonder and be still, and be full of the peace which 
 passes all understanding, because the earth is lovely as 
 Adonis is, and life is yet unspent ; to come out of the 
 sacred light, half golden, and half dusky, and full of 
 many blended colours, where the marbles and the 
 
 258 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 pictures live, sole dwellers in the deserted dwellings of 
 princes ; to come out where the oranges are all aglow 
 in the sunshine, and the red camellias are pushing 
 against the hoary head of the old stone Hermes, and 
 to go down the width of the mighty steps into the gay 
 piazza, alive with bells tolling, and crowds laughing, 
 and drums a-beat, and the flutter of carnival banners 
 in the wind ; and to get away from it all with a full 
 heart, and ascend to see the sun set from the terrace 
 of the Medici, or the Pamfili, or the Borghese woods, 
 and watch the flame-like clouds stream homewards 
 behind St. Peter's, and the pines of Monte Mario grow 
 black against the west, till the pale green of the even- 
 ing spreads itself above them, and the stars arise ; and 
 then, with a prayer — be your faith what it will — a 
 prayer to the Unknown God, to go down again 
 through the violet-scented air and the dreamful 
 twilight, and so, — with unspeakable thankfulness, 
 simply because you live, and this is Rome, — so home- 
 ward." 
 
 In Pascarel again the story is slight and not parti- 
 cularly interesting, but the picture it gives of Italy in 
 Garibaldian days is admirable. Pascarel himself, a 
 strolling player, is a breezy, whimsical, and very 
 attractive person. Nearly every place in Tuscany is 
 described or mentioned, and both its past and 
 present aspects touched on. Very often an illumin- 
 ating sentence, such as "Pisa, the ruined rival of 
 Florence — the old city sad and sombre with Orcagna's 
 
 2S9 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 death," occurs, and among the cities through which 
 Pascarel and his troupe pass are Cremona, Assisi, 
 Ferrara, Urbino, Pistoia, Arezzo, Genoa, Mantua, 
 Florence being his headquarters. He delights in 
 his land, and is almost a poet when he describes 
 her beauty and her charm. Here is a picture of 
 spring in Italy, the truth and beauty of which will 
 be recognised by all who have witnessed that season 
 there : — 
 
 " There is nothing upon earth, I think, like the 
 smile of Italy as she awakes when the winter has dozed 
 itself away in the odours of its oakwood fires. 
 
 " The whole land seems to laugh. 
 
 " The springtide of the north is green and beautiful, 
 but it has nothing of the radiance, the dreamfulness, 
 the ecstasy of spring in the southern countries. The 
 springtide of the north is pale with the gentle, colour- 
 less sweetness of its world of primroses ; the spring- 
 tide of Italy is rainbow-hued, like the profusion of 
 anemones that laugh with it in every hue of glory 
 under every ancient wall and beside every hill-fed 
 stream. 
 
 " Spring in the north is a child that wakes from 
 dreams of death ; spring in the south is a child that 
 wakes from dreams of love. One is rescued and wel- 
 comed from the grave ; but the other comes smiling 
 dn a sunbeam from heaven. 
 
 " Come out here in the young months of summer 
 
 260 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 and leave the highways that grim walls fence in, and 
 stray through the field-paths and the bridle-roads in the 
 steps of the contadini, and you will find this green 
 world about your feet touched with the May-day suns 
 to tenderest and most lavish wealth of nature. 
 
 "The green corn uncurling underneath the blossom- 
 ing vines. The vine foliage that tosses and climbs and 
 coils in league on league of verdure. The breast-high 
 grasses full of gold and red and purple from the 
 countless flowers growing with it. 
 
 " The millet filled with crimson gladioli and great 
 scarlet poppies. The hill-sides that look a sheet of 
 rose-colour where the lupinelli are in bloom. The tall 
 plumes of ithe canes, new-born, by the side of every 
 stream and rivulet. 
 
 " The sheaves of arum leaves that thrust themselves 
 out from every joint of masonry or spout of broken 
 fountain. The flame of roses that burns on every 
 handsbreadth of untilled ground and springs like a 
 rainbow above the cloud of every darkling roof or 
 wall. The ocean spray of arbutus and acacia shedding 
 its snow against the cypress darkness. The sea-green 
 of the young ilex leaves scattered like light over the 
 bronze and purple of the older growth. The dreamy 
 blue of the iris lilies rising underneath the olives and 
 along the edges of the fields. 
 
 " The soft, pretty, quiet pictures where mowers sweep 
 down with their scythes the reedy grasses on the river 
 banks ; where the gates of the villas stand wide open 
 
 261 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 with the sun aslant upon the grassy paths and the vines ; 
 where in the gloom of the house archways the women 
 sit plaiting their straw, the broad, shining fields before 
 them all alive with the song of the grilli ; where the 
 grey, savage walls of a fortress tower on the spur of 
 the mountains, above the delicate green of young oaks 
 and the wind-stirred fans of the fig-trees ; where the 
 frate, in broad-leaved hat of straw, brushes with bare 
 sandalled feet through the bright acanthus, beaming a 
 Rabelaisian smile on the contadina who goes by him 
 with her brown water-jar upon her head ; where deep 
 in that fresh, glad tumult of leaf and blossom and 
 bough the children and the goats lie together, while the 
 wild-thyme and the trefoil are in flower, and the little 
 dog-rose is white amongst the maize ; where the sharp 
 beak of the galley-like boat cuts dark against the yellow 
 current, and the great, filmy square nets are cast outward 
 where the poplar shadows tremble in the stream ; all 
 these, and a thousand like them, are yours in the sweet 
 May season amongst the Tuscan hills and vines." 
 
 And here is a picture of summer : — 
 
 " No northern landscape can ever have such inter- 
 change of colour as the Italian fields and hills in 
 summer. Here the fresh vine foliage, hanging, 
 curling, climbing, in all intricacies and graces that ever 
 entered the fancies of green leaves. There the tall 
 millet, towering like the plumes of warriors, whilst 
 among their stalks the golden lizard glitters. Here 
 broad swaths of new-mown hay, starred over with 
 
 262 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 butterflies of every hue. There a thread of water 
 sown thick with waving canes. Here the shadowy 
 amber of ripe wheat, rustled by wind and darkened by 
 passing clouds. There the gnarled olives silver in the 
 sun. And everywhere along the edges of the corn and 
 underneath the maples little grassy paths running, and 
 wild rose bushes growing, and acacia thickets tossing, 
 and white convolvulus glistening like snow, and across 
 all this confusion of foliage and herbage always the 
 tender, dreamy swell of the far mountains. 
 
 " Do you know the delicate delights of a summer 
 morning in Italy ? — morning, I mean, between four and 
 five of the clock. 
 
 " The nights, perfect as they are, have scarcely more 
 loveliness than the birth of light, the first rippling 
 laughter of the early day. 
 
 "The air is cool, almost cold, and clear as glass. 
 There is an endless murmur from birds' throats and 
 wings, and from far away there will ring from village 
 or city the chimes of the first mass. The deep broad 
 shadows lie so fresh, so grave, so calm, that by them 
 the very dust is stilled and spiritualized. 
 
 " Softly the sun comes, striking first the loftier trees 
 and then the blossoming magnolias, and lastly the green 
 lowliness of the gentle vines ; until all above is in a 
 glow of new-born radiance, whilst all beneath the 
 leaves still is dreamily dusk and cool. 
 
 " The sky is of a soft sea-blue ; great vapours will 
 
 263 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 float here and there, iris-coloured and snow-white. 
 The stone parapets of bridge and tower shine against 
 the purple of the mountains, which are low in tone, and 
 look like hovering storm-clouds. Across the fields dun 
 oxen pass to their labours ; through the shadows 
 peasants go their way to mass ; down the river a raft 
 drifts slowly, with the pearly waters swaying against 
 the canes ; all is clear, tranquil, fresh as roses washed 
 with rain." 
 
 A description of Florence as seen from Galileo's 
 Tower is worth quoting : — 
 
 "Very fair indeed she was, the Lily Queen, that 
 evening. 
 
 " There had been shadows all day, and in the west 
 there were masses of cloud, purple and blue-black, 
 spreading away into a million of soft scarlet cirri that 
 drifted before a low wind from the southward, tender 
 and yet rich in tone as any scattered shower of 
 carnation leaves. 
 
 " Through that vast pomp of dusky splendour and 
 that radiance of rose the sun itself still shone ; shone 
 full upon the city. 
 
 " Leaning on the broken edge of the watch-tower and 
 gazing down below, all Florence seemed like the seer's 
 dream of the New Jerusalem ; every stone of her 
 seemed transmuted ; she was as though paven and 
 built with gold ; straightway across the whole valley 
 stretched the alchemy of that wondrous fireglow, and 
 all the broad, level lands of the Valdigreve were trans- 
 
 264 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 figured likewise into one vast sheet of gold, on which 
 the silver olives and the dim white villages and villas 
 floated like frail white sails upon a sunlit sea. 
 
 " Farther — still farther yet, beyond that burnished 
 ocean — the mountains and the clouds met and mingled, 
 golden likewise, broken here and there into some 
 tenderest rose-leaf flush, miraculously lovely, as a 
 poet's dreams of nameless things of God. 
 
 " We stayed long, and watched it high above on the 
 wooden roof of the Tower ; watched it until the sun 
 had set, and the glow had died, and the stillness of 
 evening had fallen over the hills and plains, and past 
 our faces flew a little grey downy owl." 
 
 In Pascarel's disquisitions on the Italian people we 
 may not unfairly see Ouida's own estimation of them : — 
 
 " As for the people — the dear people ! — the more I 
 dwelt amongst them the more I loved them. There is 
 no other people on the face of the earth so entirely 
 lovable, even with their many faults, as the Italians. 
 But what is known of them by other nations ? — hardly 
 anything at all. 
 
 " That the Italian patrician may be little understood 
 outside the pale of his own immediate associates, it is 
 not difficult to conceive. His confidence is rarely 
 bestowed ; and the pride which fences him in is at 
 once the most delicate and the most impenetrable that 
 a man can place betwixt himself and the outer world. 
 
 " But it is passing strange that the Italian popolano, 
 open to whosoever will to study him at their leisure, the 
 
 265 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Italian of the people, as seen in his streets and fields, 
 by his hearth, and his market stall, is as little under- 
 stood and as invariably misrepresented. 
 
 " French vivacity and ease have passed into a pro- 
 verb ; yet, in reality, the French people are studied 
 and conscious compared to the Italian, who is the most 
 absolutely unstudied and unselfconscious of all God's 
 creatures. 
 
 " True, the Italian, even in the lowest strata of social 
 life, has a repose and a dignity in him which befit his 
 physiognomy and evince themselves in his calm and 
 poetical attitudes. See a stonebreaker, or a mason, or 
 a boatman asleep in the noonday sun, and you will 
 surely see attitudes which no sculptor could wish 
 bettered for his marble. 
 
 " True, too, you will do ill to make a mock of him ; 
 high or low, it is the one unpardonable sin which 
 no Italian will pardon ; he is given also to the im- 
 movable obstinacy of that animal which he will never 
 name save under the delicate euphuism of ' the little 
 black gentleman ' ; and he has a lightning-like passion 
 in him which may smite his neighbour to the earth in 
 a trice about a cherry-stone, or a broken broom, or any 
 other casus belli of the hour. 
 
 " But, then, lo ! how bright he is, how gregarious, 
 how neighbourly, how instant and graceful in courtesy, 
 how eager and kindly in willingness ; how poetic his 
 glee in song and dance, and holy day and pageant ; 
 how absolute his content upon the most meagre fare 
 
 266 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 that ever held body and sovd together ; how certain 
 his invariable selection of a pleasure for the eye and 
 the ear, rather than one for the mouth and the 
 stomach ! 
 
 " See the gay, elastic grace of him ; the mirth that 
 ripples all day long about him like the sunlight, the 
 laughter that shows his white teeth, the tumultuous 
 shouts in which his lungs delight, the cheery sociability 
 that brings him with a knot of his own kind at the 
 street corners and under the house archways to talk the 
 hours away with tireless tongue and shrewdest wit, and 
 say, is there a creature kindlier or more mirthful 
 anywhere in the width of the world ? 
 
 "And he will always have some delicate touch of 
 the artist in him, too, and always some fine instinct of 
 the gentleman — let him be poor as he will, ill-clad, half- 
 starved, and ignorant even of the letters that make his 
 name ; let him feel the summer dust with bare feet, and 
 the mountain wind through a ragged shirt, nay, let him 
 be the veriest scamp and sinner in the world — but he 
 will wear his tatters with a grace ; he will bring a 
 flower to a woman with the bow of a king ; and he 
 will resent an insolence with an air to which no purple 
 and fine linen could lend dignity." 
 
 And lastly let us hear Pascarel on his own art : — 
 
 " What is it to be a player ? It is this. A thing 
 despised and rejected on all sides ; a thing that was a 
 century since denied what they call Christian burial; a 
 thing that is still deemed for a woman disgraceful and 
 
 267 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 for a man degrading and emasculate ; a thing that is 
 mute as a dunce save when, parrot-like, it repeats by 
 rote with a mirthless grin or a tearless sob ; a wooden 
 doll, as you say, applauded as a brave puppet in its 
 prime, hissed at in its first hour of failure or decay ; a 
 thing made up of tinsel and paint, and patchwork, of 
 the tailor's shreds and the barber's curls of tow — a 
 ridiculous thing, to be sure ! That is a player. And 
 yet again — a thing without which laughter and jest 
 were dead in the sad lives of the populace ; a thing that 
 breathes the poet's words of fire so that the humblest 
 heart is set aflame ; a thing that has a magic on its 
 lips to waken smiles or weeping at its will ; a thing 
 which holds a people silent, breathless, intoxicated with 
 mirth or with awe, as it chooses ; a thing whose grace 
 kings envy, and whose wit great men will steal ; a 
 thing by whose utterance alone the poor can know the 
 fair follies of a thoughtless hour, and escape for a little 
 space from the dull prisons of their colourless lives into 
 the sunlit paradise where genius dwells ; — that is a 
 player, too ! " 
 
 There is food for thought here. The passage 
 calls to mind a fine speech in the little one-act drama 
 entitled Comedy and Tragedy^ written by W. S. Gilbert 
 for Miss Mary Anderson in 1884. 
 
 In other of Ouida's novels the scene is partly or 
 wholly laid in Italy. But where, as in In a Winter 
 City and in Friendship, the story is one of modern life 
 in a narrow aristocratic section of society, the Italian 
 
 268 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 setting is less telling, and the persons portrayed might 
 have lived their little romances or practised their 
 wickedness in London or New York or Paris, equally 
 well. But even in them descriptive pieces of igreat 
 charm are not lacking. For example : — 
 
 "The San Cipriano was to be found in a church 
 some five miles out of the city ; ' a lonely church set 
 high on a fragrant hill-side, with sheep amongst the 
 olive boughs, and the ox-plough under the vines that 
 were all about it, and high hedges of wild roses and 
 thickets pf arbutus rambling around its old walled 
 graveyard. ... It was one of those spring days which 
 often fall in February ; the ground was blue with 
 violets, and the grass golden with crocus and 
 hepatica ; there were butterflies and bees on the air ; 
 the mavis and the blackbird were singing." 2 
 » Here is a scrap of conversation that illuminates the 
 love of nature among the Southern peoples of Europe, 
 and also shows the different way in which the Northern 
 races care for external nature : — 
 
 " 'People think Horace's love of the rural life an 
 affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After the 
 strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the 
 Augustan Court, the natural existence of the country 
 must have been welcome to him. I know it is the 
 fashion to say that a love of nature belongs only to 
 the moderns, but I do not think so. Into Pindar, 
 Theocritus, Meleager, the passion for nature must have 
 
 ' Florence. " From In a Winter City. 
 
 269 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 entered very strongly ; what is modern is the more 
 subjective, the more fanciful, feeling which makes 
 nature a sounding-board to echo a.A the cries of man.' 
 
 " ' But that is always a Northern feeling ? ' 
 
 " ' Inevitably. With us nature is too riante for us 
 to grow morbid about it. The sunshine that laughs 
 around us nine months of every year, the fruits that 
 grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw 
 to the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with 
 myrtle, the very sea sand that is musical with bees in 
 the rosemary, everything we grow up amongst from 
 infancy makes our love of nature only a kind of 
 unconscious joy in it — but here even the peasant has 
 that, and the songs of the men that cannot read or 
 write are full of it. If a field labourer sing to his love 
 he will sing of the narcissus and the crocus.' " ' 
 
 Vernon Lee, who knows Italy even better than 
 Ouida knew it, has paid high tribute to Ouida's 
 descriptions of Italy, and her words may fitly conclude 
 the estimate of them I have here attempted to give : — 
 
 " Italy — perhaps every great country — has so many 
 possible appeals to the soul that a new one requires to 
 be made every generation or two, and the Treasure- 
 house to be opened by successive sayers of ' Sesame.' 
 After the Italy of Goethe, of Byron, of Alfred de 
 Musset, and George Sand (let alone Ruskin's !) ; and 
 before that of Pater ; perhaps some will add of 
 Mr. Hewlett — comes the Italy of Browning and of 
 
 ' From In a Winter City. 
 270 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 Ouida. I do not hesitate to couple these two names, 
 for I am speaking not of the work itself, which 
 in Browning's case will probably be enduring, and in 
 Ouida's is already rather obsolete, but of the effect on 
 the contemporary reader's mind. Signa, Ariadne, the 
 enchanting Pascarel, have given us not less than the 
 Ring and the Book and Men and Women an Italy which 
 was unknown before, and which, once revealed, will 
 never be lost again." 
 
 Vernon Lee also finds that Ouida's Italian novels 
 have influenced those of Mrs. Wharton, that Ouida 
 may be found in the admirable pages about Italy 
 by Maurice Barres and Mme. de Noailles, and in 
 the mediaeval fantasies of Anatole France, and she 
 vehemently declares that there is Ouida at every step 
 in the prose of D' Annunzio, and that in his work 
 there is the permeating, emotional, and imaginative 
 atmosphere, the golden dust-cloud of past greatness, 
 which makes a halo round every one of Ouida's Italian 
 personages.' 
 
 To these authors I should be inclined to add three 
 or four contemporary English novelists who consciously 
 or unconsciously owe much to Ouida. 
 
 Ouida showed much skill in the writing of short 
 stories. She possessed something of the art that 
 belongs in that genre supremely to French writers. 
 The tales that deal with Italian peasant life or with 
 dogs are admirable, and it would be worth while to 
 
 ■ Cf. JVestminster Gazette, July 27, 1907. 
 271 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 rescue a dozen of the best of them from the oblivion 
 into which they have undeservedly fallen, and print 
 them in one volume. She repeats her themes, it 
 is true, but the setting is always delightful, and, 
 compelled to work in a restricted space, she keeps 
 within bounds and evolves a more artistic whole than 
 she ever accomplishes in her longer novels. Ouida 
 herself regarded such tales as A Dog of Flanders, 
 Two Offenders, Santa Barbara, as her finest and most 
 finished work. She often said to her friend Sarmento : 
 "The short tale is to prose what the sonnet is to 
 poetry — the highest form of art." In the stories in 
 which dogs play the chief part the quality of the work 
 is indubitably very high. I have only met the same 
 sympathy with the animal's point of view in the 
 writings of Maeterlinck and those of the accomplished 
 French writer, Louis Pergaud. 
 
 Ouida's English style cannot be praised. It has 
 been well said that " she has not a command of 
 language, but language has a command of her." She 
 always writes well when she writes of Italy, and the 
 passages quoted in this chapter will serve to show 
 her style at its best. It became more restrained 
 and more simple in the later years of her life, and 
 good writing is to be found in the Critical Studies, 
 and in the letters to her friends. The grave defect 
 of the inaccuracy of her historical, literary, and geo- 
 graphical allusions, due to carelessness rather than 
 to ignorance, has already been pointed out. 
 
 ^72 
 
Ouida as Novelist 
 
 Her power of assimilation and of absorbing and 
 reproducing local colour is her chief claim to genius, 
 and, take of her work in general what view we may, 
 her Italian novels, some of her short stories and of 
 her critical essays deserve a permanent place on 
 our bookshelves among the lesser writers of the 
 Victorian era. 
 
 Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt takes a higher estimate 
 of her novels, and I print here the words he has 
 specially written for this book : — 
 
 "Though no indiscriminate admirer of Ouida's 
 novels, I had and have a high opinion of the best of 
 them as works of genius. In spite of their exaggera- 
 tions and occasional absurdities of detail, I hold them 
 to be the only English novels which can at all be 
 compared with Balzac's as giving a vivid and life-like 
 picture of the larger world of society, women as well 
 as men, they describe. Neither Thackeray, Balzac's 
 nearest English rival in fiction, nor Meredith, nor 
 any other as far as I know of our mid-Victorian 
 novelists who went to the beau monde for their models 
 succeeded as well as Ouida did in giving us the true 
 social atmosphere and in making their men, and 
 especially their women, act and live. Thackeray's 
 women were little more than lay figures, and 
 Meredith's, though interesting as studies of what 
 women might be, very seldom display them as doing 
 what women really do. Ouida's women, on the 
 contrary, even in their extreme of caricature, are all 
 
 273 s 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 true to type, and easily recognizable as existing per- 
 sonalities. They have life and reality and individual 
 interest. Her range, too, of subjects is, like Balzac's, 
 very wide, and she is still more at home in Con- 
 tinental Europe than in England. No better descrip- 
 tion of Italy in its romantic aspect of the Garibaldian 
 age exists in English literature than her novel Pascarel. 
 I remember discussing Ouida's merits on this head 
 with Auberon Herbert some twenty years ago, and 
 finding that his view of them was much the same as 
 mine. He had had the reviewing of many of her 
 novels, he told me, and had conceived for them a 
 high respect." 
 
 274 
 
VIII 
 
 OUIDA 
 AS CRITIC 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 OUIDA AS CRITIC 
 
 OUIDA was in the habit throughout her life of 
 expressing her opinions with great vehemence in 
 her books, in her letters and articles in the Press, and 
 in private letters to her friends on all matters that 
 passed before her in which she was interested. It 
 must be confessed that her principles of criticism did 
 not necessarily coincide with the principles that guided 
 her own life. But this does not prevent her from 
 being at times a very acute critic both of men and 
 matters. It is often much easier to judge correctly of 
 others than to judge wisely for ourselves. If we read 
 straight through all Ouida's essays in criticism, we shall 
 at first come to the conclusion that her opinions are 
 merely a mass of contradictions, and so of little or no 
 worth. But when we eliminate the purely personal 
 element and begin to look beneath the surface, we see 
 that her judgments are discriminating and full ot 
 good sense. Her essays have been collected in two 
 volumes: Fiews and Opinions (1895) and Critical 
 Studies (1900), of which the latter is by far the more 
 
 277 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 important. But some of her best pieces of criticism 
 are to be found in her private letters, as readers of the 
 preceding chapters will have observed. Her judgment 
 ripened in later years, and, though her utterances were 
 usually coloured by her personal prejudices, they are 
 always worth careful attention. 
 
 In her youth Ouida was a great reader of good 
 literature, and especially of the works of the older 
 writers, both French and English. Later on she seems 
 to have confined her reading to contemporary litera- 
 ture, chiefly to belles lettres, with a few books on 
 history and on social questions written by those with 
 whose point of view she agreed. 
 
 Critical passages of worth abound in her novels. 
 Here is an admirable comparison of Shakespeare and 
 Dante : — 
 
 " Can you read Shakespeare ^ You think Dante 
 greater ? Of course you do, being an Italian. But 
 you are wrong. Dante never got out of his own 
 narrow world. He filled the great blank of Hereafter 
 with his own spites and despites. He marred his finest 
 verse with false imagery to rail at a foe or flaunt a 
 polemic. His Eternity was only a millpond in which 
 he should be able to drown the dogs he hated. A 
 great man ! — ah, yes ! — but never by a league near 
 Shakespeare. Sympathy is the hall-mark of the poet. 
 Genius should be wide as the heavens and deep as the 
 sea in infinite comprehension. To understand intui- 
 tively — that is the breath of its life. Whose under- 
 
 278 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 standing was ever as boundless as Shakespeare's ? 
 From the woes of the mind diseased to the coy joys of 
 the yielding virgin ; from the ambitions of the king 
 and the conqueror to the clumsy glee of the clown and 
 the milkmaid ; from the highest heights of human life 
 to the lowest follies of it — he comprehended all. That 
 is the wonder of Shakespeare. No other writer was 
 ever so miraculously impersonal. . . . He had only a 
 witty smile at false dignities, and a matchless univer- 
 sality of compassion that pitied the tyrant as well as 
 the serf, and the loneliness of royalty as well as the 
 loneliness of poverty. That is where Shakespeare is 
 unapproachable. He is as absolutely impartial as a 
 Greek Chorus. ... If it were the impartiality of 
 coldness, it would be easy to imitate ; but it is the 
 impartiality of sympathy, boundless and generous as 
 the sun, which 'shines upon the meanest thing that 
 lives as liberally as on the summer rose.' That is 
 where Shakespeare is as far higher from your Dante 
 as one of Dante's angels from the earth." ' 
 
 Here again are some wise reflections on progress 
 and the difference between youth and age, put into the 
 mouth of a great and successful sculptor : — 
 
 " Surely the world, made up of human beings as it 
 is, is only like one human being in his passage through 
 life. To youth belong ineffable graces all its own, and 
 charms never to be counterfeited when youth has passed 
 away ; hope and faith and the freshness of unbroken 
 
 ' Ariadne. 
 279 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 illusions are with it ; it has the bloom as of the un- 
 touched fruit, the charm as of the half-opened flower ; 
 it is rich in the treasures of its untried years, and strong 
 in the insolence of its beauty and its strength ; it is 
 without suspicion and without fear ; but, also, it is 
 without sympathy ; it is glorious as the glory of the 
 morning, but he who seeks its pity finds it hard, from 
 pure joyousness of soul and ignorance of sorrow ; its 
 selfishness is only ignorance, but it is selfish ; it says to 
 every passing hour, ' Thou art fair,' why should it look 
 elsewhere ? When youth is gone, the character that 
 has gained from living any profit will have softened 
 and mellowed under the suns and storms of many 
 days ; with wide experience it will have wide toleration 
 and comprehension ; its sympathies will be unfailing, 
 because it will be aware that ' to understand is to 
 pardon,' since for all evil there is excuse, could all 
 influences and motives and accidents of circumstance 
 be traced ; its own past lies behind it, a land for ever 
 lost, and its onward path is dark ; it looks back so 
 often because it hath not heart to look forward, since 
 all it sees is death ; many are the graves of its desires 
 and of its friends ; it is full of pity for all things that 
 breathe, because it has learned that nearly every breath 
 is pain ; there is nothing in which it can have much 
 belief, but there is little to which it can refuse com- 
 passion, since all creation sufi^ers ; the unutterable 
 sadness and mystery of all forms of life oppress it, and 
 it hears the children and the lovers say, ' For ever,' 
 
 280 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 knowing itself too well that the mortal's ' for ever ' is 
 but the gnat's day upon a ray of sun and breath of 
 vapour. 
 
 " As thus with the individual character of man, 
 so it is with the character of the world and of 
 those arts in which the voice of the world's soul 
 speaks. 
 
 " Fearlessness, loveliness, and force characterized all 
 that it did and all that it sang of in an earlier time ; 
 tenderness and pity are the excellences of all the best 
 that it produces now. In the first ages all achievement 
 and inspiration were fresh as the dews of dawn, and he 
 who struck the lyre had no fear that his hymns were 
 but weak echoes of a stronger sound. All was new, 
 all was spontaneous. Now all this is changed. We 
 feel that our production can hardly ever be more than 
 repetition. . . . 
 
 " But if we have lost the force and the freshness of an 
 earlier day, we have gained something else not wholly 
 to be despised. 
 
 " I think that while we have, perhaps, lost dignity, 
 and certainly have lost concentration, our sight is more 
 extended, our range of feeling more varied, our 
 understanding of pain and of joy more acute. . . . 
 
 " This world of our own immediate day is weak and 
 weary, because it is no longer ^oung ; yet it possesses 
 one noble attribute — it has an acute and almost uni- 
 versal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate 
 into a false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem 
 
 281 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 an age of egotism. We have escaped both the gem- 
 like hardness of the Pagan and the narrowing selfish- 
 ness of the Christian and the Israelite. We are sick 
 for the woe of creation, and we wonder why such woe 
 is ours, and why it is entailed on the innocent dumb 
 beasts that perish in millions for us, unpitied, day and 
 night. Rome had no altar to pity : it is the one god 
 that we own. When that pity in us for all things is 
 perfected, perhaps we shall have reached a religion 
 of sympathy that will be purer than any religion the 
 world has yet seen, and more productive. 'Save my 
 country ! ' cried the Pagan to his deities. ' Save my 
 soul ! ' cries the Christian at his altars. We, who are 
 without a god, murmur to the great unknown forces of 
 Nature : ' Let me save others some little portion of 
 this pain entailed on all simple and guileless things 
 that are forced to live, without any fault of their 
 own at their birth, or any will of their own in their 
 begetting.' " i 
 
 The collection of essays entitled Views and Opinions 
 is dedicated to W. H. Mallock " as a slight token of 
 personal regard and intellectual admiration." They 
 are short pieces mostly on social subjects. Among 
 them, however, there is an excellent essay on Shelley, 
 and another on Pierre Loti's Le Livre de la Pitii et de 
 la Mou, entitled " Death and Pity." The latter con- 
 tains appreciative criticism of Loti's work, but Ouida 
 admires him chiefly for the love and understanding of 
 
 ' Ariadne. 
 282 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 animals that is shown in all his books. " He does 
 prove, and has ever proved, in his conduct as in his 
 writings, that to him nothing human can be alien. 
 But he is not hemmed in behind the narrow pale of 
 humanitarianism ; he has the vision to see, and the 
 courage to show, that the uncounted, sentient, suffering 
 children of creation for whom humanity has no mercy, 
 but merely servitude and slaughter, are as dear to him 
 as his own kind." 
 
 Several causes drew Ouida to Shelley : his love of 
 Italy, and the fine expression of it in his poems ; the 
 criticism of his way of life by what she calls English 
 middle-class opinion ; his hatred of tyranny and his 
 pity for pain. She considered him to be more truly a 
 son of Italy than any one of her own poets, and 
 declared that neither Shelley nor Byron could be well 
 comprehended by those not intimately acquainted with 
 Italian landscape. "Every line in Shelley's verse 
 which speaks of Italy is pregnant with the spirit of the 
 land. Each line is a picture ; true and perfect, 
 whether of day or night, of water or shore, of marsh 
 or garden, of silence or melody." She especially points 
 to the Venetian setting of " Julian and Maddalo," a 
 delight to all who have known Venice and loved her, 
 to the scene of the " Epipsychidion," which "though 
 called Greek, is Italian, and might be taken from the 
 woods beside the Lake of Garda, or the Serchio, which 
 he knew so well, or the forest-like parks which lie deep 
 and cool and still in the blue shadows of Apennine or 
 
 283 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Abruzzi." There is good criticism of the " Ode to 
 the West Wind," in every line of which Ouida says 
 " we feel the sweep and motion of the strong libeccio 
 coming from the grey Atlantic. When that wind 
 sweeps up the broad bed of the Arno, the yellowing 
 canebrakes bend, the rushes thrill and tremble, the 
 summer's empty nests are shaken from the ilex and 
 oak boughs, the great pines bend and tremble, the 
 river, stirred by the breath of the sea, grows yellow 
 and grey and swollen and turgid, the last swallow flies 
 southward from his home under the eaves of granary 
 or chapel, and the nightingales rise from their haunts 
 in the thickets of laurel and bay and go also where the 
 shadows of Indian temples or of Egyptian palm-trees 
 lie upon the sands of a still older world." Ouida 
 declares Shelley's supreme glory to be that beyond 
 all others he went where " no keel ever ploughed 
 before," and dwelt more completely than any other 
 has ever dwelt 
 
 " On an imagined shore 
 Where the gods spoke with him." 
 
 With Apollo in the " Prometheus Unbound " Shelley 
 might say — 
 
 "yVnd I shall gaze not on deeds which make 
 My mind obscure with sorrow, as eclipse 
 Darkens the sphere I guide ; but list, I hear 
 The small, clear, silver lute of the young Spirit 
 That sits i' the morning star." 
 284 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 And she concludes a fine essay that deserves to be 
 better known with the words : — 
 
 " If ever poet held that lute on earth, Shelley held it 
 all through his brief life ; and if ever there be im- 
 mortality for any soul, his surely is living now beside 
 that Spirit in the light of a ceaseless day. 
 
 " ' Death is the veil which those who live call life ; 
 They sleep, and it is lifted.' " 
 
 Ouida was wholly against woman suffrage and 
 against the " new woman," as the phrase went in the 
 last decade of the nineteenth century. Two essays 
 in this volume express her views, and beneath the 
 vehement language is much sound sense. She in- 
 veighed against the vulgarity of the age, and showed 
 in many essays how the materialistic spirit vulgarized 
 not only places but peoples. In an article entitled 
 " Vulgarity " occurs the following delightful descrip- 
 tion of a well-bred woman, in which Ouida is at 
 her best : — 
 
 " I once knew a perfectly well-bred person who yet 
 could neither read nor write. I can see her now in 
 her little cottage in the Derbyshire woods on the 
 brown, flashing water of the Derwent River (Darron, 
 as the people of Derbyshire call it), a fair, neat, stout 
 old woman with a round face and a clean mob-cap. 
 She had been a factory girl in her youth (indeed, all 
 her womanhood had worked at the cotton-mill on the 
 river), and now was too old to do anything except to 
 
 285 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 keep her one-roomed cottage, with its tall lancet 
 windows, its peaked red roof, and its sweet-smelling 
 garden, with its high elder hedge, as neat and fresh and 
 clean as human hands could make them. Dear old 
 Mary ! with her racy, Chaucerian English, and her 
 happy, cheerful temper, and her silver spectacles, 
 which some of the ' gentry ' had given her, and her 
 big Bible on the little round table, and the black kettle 
 boiling in the wide fireplace, and her casements wide 
 open to the nodding moss-roses and the sweetbrier 
 boughs ! Dear old Mary ! she was a bit of Shake- 
 speare's England, of Milton's England, of Spenser's 
 England, and the memory of her, and of her cottage 
 by the brown, bright river, often comes back to me 
 across the width of years. She was a perfectly well- 
 bred person ; she made one welcome to her little home 
 with simple, perfect courtesy, without flutter, or fuss, 
 or any effort of any sort ; she had neither envy nor 
 servility ; grateful for all kindness, she never either 
 abused the ' gentry ' or flattered them ; and her 
 admirable manner never varied to the peddler at her 
 door or to the squire of her village ; would never have 
 varied, I am sure, if the Queen of her country had 
 crossed her doorstep. For she had the repose of 
 contentment, of simplicity, and of that self-respect 
 which can never exist where envy and eflfort are. 
 She could neither read nor write ; she scrubbed and 
 washed and worked for herself; she had never left 
 that one little green nook of Derbyshire, or seen 
 
 286 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 other roads than the steep shady highway which 
 went up to the pinewoods behind her house ; but 
 she was a perfectly well-bred woman, born of a 
 time calmer, broader, wiser, more generous than 
 ours." 
 
 But Ouida's most mature work in criticism both 
 of books and men is to be found in the Critical 
 Studies. The literary articles contain her reasoned and 
 permanent views of the literary art, and her criticism 
 of French and Italian novelists is especially good. It 
 is curious to note how in her criticism of the work 
 of others she continually condemns the faults most 
 prominent in her own. She was the first to bring the 
 work of Gabriele d' Annunzio to the notice of the 
 English public. She clearly saw both his weakness 
 and his strength. Foreign influence, she declares, is 
 not beneficial to the Italian. He can rarely steep 
 his mind deeply in all the riches of foreign literature 
 without losing some of his Italian individuality. 
 D' Annunzio " allows himself to be absorbed and 
 assimilated by foreign influences, to be dominated 
 by them to so great an extent indeed that his style 
 is frequently bastardized by them, and many of his 
 sentences read as though they were translations from 
 foreign sources. He claims to have greatly em- 
 bellished and amplified the Italian language ; he has 
 certdnly rendered it more colloquial and more 
 copious, but he has often ; grafted foreign idioms 
 upon it, and he has perhaps robbed it of some of 
 
 287 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 its dignity and grace. He considers that the artist 
 should always remodel the instrument he uses ; but 
 the figure will not hold good in other arts, for 
 Sarasate does not carve the shell of his violin, 
 Clausen does not weave the canvas he uses, Bartolome 
 does not blast the marble out of the hill-side. The 
 writer should use the language he writes in as it 
 comes pure from its natural springs, he will but 
 contaminate it if he pour it into alien streams." 
 
 It is strange to find her complaining of the 
 absolute absence in all D' Annunzio's works of wit, 
 mirth, or humour, qualities conspicuously lacking in 
 her own work. The melancholy spirit of his books 
 she attributes to "that dull greyness of death which 
 has spread from the laboratories of science over all 
 the worlds of literature. Not only is no joyous 
 laugh ever heard, there is not even the indulgent 
 smile which relieves melancholy and bitterness in 
 many writers whose views of life are gloomy." 
 Ouida praises his women characters : " D' Annunzio 
 draws women with exquisite veracity and skill, and a 
 rare intuition into the workings of their minds and 
 the beatings of their hearts. . . . They are wondrous 
 presentments of breathing life. . . . He has incarnated 
 the incomparable charm of the Italian woman, the 
 most graceful, the most impassioned, the most 
 seductive woman on earth, although also perhaps the 
 most imperious, pitiless, and fiercely exacting in her 
 passions." She notes his sympathy with the melody 
 
 288 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 of birds, " the more singular in D' Annunzio because 
 Italians are almost invariably indifferent to such 
 melody, and snare the divine songster in the net, or 
 shoot him whilst he shouts his nuptial lo Triumphe ! 
 with the most stolid indifference." 
 
 In an essay on Georges Darien, whose novels are 
 filled with accusations against the conduct of France 
 and the French during the Franco-German War, Ouida 
 reveals her horror of war and her belief that authors 
 should tell the truth at all costs, a difficult matter, 
 so she considers, except in France. " Of all countries, 
 France remains the land in which it is possible to 
 tell the most truth. The nation of Montaigne and 
 Moliere is always the first to recognize and award 
 the title of talent to lay^ bare the shoulders of her 
 community and use the scourge upon them." She 
 gives Darien's novels of the war the highest praise. 
 " To represent war as it is done in the terrible 
 pages of La Dibdcle, or in the heartrending sketch 
 of the Attaque du Moulin, is not difficult to the 
 novelist who has power and knowledge. To repre- 
 sent the effects of war on entirely uninteresting and 
 commonplace persons, and yet keep the attention of 
 the reader riveted to what is passing in one ordinary 
 household during a frightful national ^calamity, is a 
 far more difficult feat." It is that feat which Darien 
 accomplishes. " It seems to me," Ouida writes, 
 "that in no contemporary ^fiction do we possess 
 studies of spectacles, of sentiments, of street-life in 
 
 289 T 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 a momentous hour, more accurate, more vivid, more 
 simple in diction, more touching in suggestion." 
 
 In " Unwritten Literary Laws " we have Ouida's 
 confession of literary faith. She declaims against 
 the over-production of books which are not literature : 
 " If this stream of pseudo-literature be not stopped, 
 it will carry away and swamp all true English 
 literature under it." She also points out the absur- 
 dity of insisting that a book must be of a certain 
 length if it is to be successful with the British 
 public. " The brevity or length of a literary work 
 can have nothing to do with its beauty or excellence. 
 If it be beautiful, if it be excellent, its proportions 
 will be those which naturally grew out of its 
 subject ; and the writer who is an artist will know, 
 as the painter knows, that he cannot alter the un- 
 written law which prescribes to him those propor- 
 tions." She thinks there should be some means of 
 legal protection against plagiarism, from which she 
 considered herself to have greatly suffered, but that 
 no one should sue another for any mere expression of 
 opinion, however hostile or rudely expressed, " as 
 Mr. Whistler sued Mr. Ruskin, for the liberty of 
 the Press is of more importance than the annoyance 
 of individuals." She objects to the anonymity of 
 the Press. Every one ought to have the courage to 
 sign his opinions. 
 
 Ouida devotes many articles to criticism of con- 
 temporary social conditions, and everywhere deplores 
 
 290 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 the loss of beauty to which she attributes the evils 
 of modern life. As early as 1881 she had written 
 words in which we almost seem to hear Ruskin 
 speaking : — 
 
 " Compare the mechanic of Wakefield or Black- 
 burn, with the pall of black soot hung for ever be- 
 tween him and the sun, and his superficial repetitions 
 of Darwin or Bradlaugh urged as evidence of an 
 enlightened mind ; compare his automatic hideous 
 toil, his hard hatred of all classes save his own, his 
 dwelling one amidst rows of a thousand similar, his 
 wilderness of dark, foul-scented streets, his stench of 
 smoke, his talk of agnosticism and equality narrow 
 as the routine of his life, his shallow sophisms, 
 his club, his strikes, his tommy-shop ; compare him 
 and these with the Italian labourer of the Luchese 
 hills, or the Santa Flora forests, or the Val d' Arno 
 farms, rising to see the glorious sky glow like a 
 summer rose, dwelling in his wide, stout, stone- 
 built house old as the trees around him, following 
 in their course as the seasons change his manly 
 and healthful labours, reaping and binding, sowing 
 and mowing, guiding his oxen through the vines, 
 having for ever around him the gladdest and 
 most gracious nature ; at noontide sitting down as 
 the patriarch sat amidst his family and labourers to a 
 homely plenty ; at eventide resting to see the youths 
 and maidens dance, and listen to the old pastoral 
 love songs sung to the thrum of the guitar or the 
 
 291 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 story of the Gerusalemme Liberata passed down 
 by word of mouth from sire to son." ' 
 
 Later on, in dealing with what she called the 
 ugliness of modern life, she compares present con- 
 ditions with earlier ones, and sees little gain in so- 
 called progress. 
 
 " Admit that the poorer people were ill-lodged in 
 the Middle Ages, that the houses were ill-lit, un- 
 drained, with the gutter- water splashing the thres- 
 hold, and the eaves of the opposite houses so near 
 that the sun could not penetrate into the street. 
 All this may have been so, but around two-thirds 
 of the town were gardens and fields, the neighbour- 
 ing streets were full of painted shrines, metal lamps, 
 gargoyles, pinnacles, balconies of hand-forged iron 
 or hand-carved stone, solid doors, bronzed gates, 
 richly coloured frescoes ; and the eyes and hearts 
 of the dwellers in them had wherewithal to feed on 
 with pleasure, not to speak of the constant stream 
 of many-coloured costume and of varied pageant 
 procession which was for ever passing through them. 
 Then in the niches there were figures ; at the 
 corners there were shrines ; on the rivers there 
 were beautiful carved bridges, of which examples 
 are still left to our day in the Rialto and the 
 Vecchio. There were barges with picture-illumined 
 sails, and pleasure-galleys gay to the sight, and 
 everywhere there were towers and spires, and 
 
 ' A tillage Commune. 
 292 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 crenellated walls, and the sculptured fronts of houses 
 and churches and monasteries, and close at hand was 
 the greenness of wood and meadow, the freshness of 
 the unsullied country. Think only what that meant : 
 no miles on miles of dreary suburban waste to travel ; 
 no pert aggressive modern villas to make day hate- 
 ful ; no underground railway -stations and subways ; no 
 hissing steam, no grinding and shrieking cable-trams ; 
 no hell of factory smoke and jerry-builders, lath and 
 plaster ; no glaring geometrical flower-beds ; but 
 the natural country running, like a happy child 
 laden with posies, right up to the walls of the town. 
 
 " The cobbler or craftsman who sat and worked in 
 his doorway, and saw the whole varicoloured life of a 
 mediaeval city pass by him, was a very different being 
 to the modern mechanic, a cipher amongst hundreds, 
 shut in a factory room amongst the deafening noise of 
 cogwheels and pistons. Even from a practical view of 
 his position, his guilds were a very much finer organi- 
 zation than modern trades-unions, and did far more 
 for him in his body and his mind. In the exercise 
 of his labour he could then be individual and original, 
 he is now but one-thousandth part of an inch in a 
 single tooth of a huge revolving cogwheel." 
 
 There is much truth here, but we cannot put the 
 clock back, and if we could, it is doubtful if many of 
 us would wish to do so. 
 
 Ouida's general attitude to politics is clear from her 
 letters, but the passionate expression of her views 
 
 293 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 reached its climax in the verses to Queen Victoria, 
 and in the article on Joseph Chamberlain. Let us 
 now examine the latter. 
 
 After observing that the Secretaryship of the 
 Colonies was a somewhat subordinate post, though 
 men of distinction like Lord Carnarvon and the first 
 Lord Lytton had occupied it, Ouida admitted that no 
 one ever made of the department the throne of the 
 Suprema Lex, as Mr. Chamberlain did. She then 
 proceeds to discover the reason of this ; as she puts 
 it, " the fault of whom, or the fault of what, lies at 
 the root of this successful usurpation." 
 
 " In an epoch more courageous, more honest, more 
 well-bred than the present, a great party calling itself 
 Conservative would have repulsed with contempt any 
 renegade Radical, however disguised in the domino of 
 a Unionist. Instead, this party has received him with 
 open arms, nay, with prostrate self-efFacement, and 
 worshipped him with enthusiasm ; indeed, the victory 
 of the so-called Tories at the urns in 1895 would 
 not have been possible if Chamberlain had not per- 
 mitted it ; which he would not have done unless he 
 had been assured that he would enter and dominate 
 the Salisbury Cabinet. He has been equally happy 
 in the occasions which have presented themselves to 
 him, and in his own capability in using them ; in the 
 mediocrity of the men who combine with him, and of 
 the men who oppose him ; in his infinite ability in 
 influencing the first, and in intimidating the last ; he 
 
 294 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 has been fortunate also in the fact that the English 
 people are less bigoted in religion than of old ; for 
 in an earlier time they would have seen with horror 
 a Unitarian entering the Government. But his greatest 
 good fortune of all was in the rise of the Home Rule 
 Question at the very moment when he conceived the 
 project of going over to the Tory camp, which, 
 without such an opportune reasdn to give for it, would 
 have appeared mere unworthy treachery. Without the 
 platform of Home Rule from which to make his saut 
 ph-illeux, the leap would have probably broken his 
 neck ; at any rate he could not have made it with 
 the certainty of being welcomed and rewarded by his 
 new allies, and of occupying amongst them a position 
 far more conspicuous than he ever occupied with the 
 Radicals." 
 
 Ouida held Chamberlain responsible for " the 
 financiers' war in South Africa" as she termed it. 
 " He might have called it proudly ' My war^ as the 
 Empress Eugenie called the war with Germany ' Ma 
 guerre a moi.' If he had never been anything higher 
 than Mayor of Birmingham, the farmers of the 
 Transvaal would still be ploughing their lands in 
 peace." 
 
 She traces the phenomenon of Chamberlain wielding 
 such great power over Cabinet and country to the 
 lingering influence of Disraeli : — 
 
 " Disraeli and his influence have dominated and 
 penetrated English political and social atmospheres, 
 
 295 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 in their highest strata, as a contagious fever enters 
 and reigns in a district. It was a strange phenomenon, 
 the Venetian Jew leading by the leash the entire 
 English aristocracies. To trace the manifold reasons 
 which enabled a man so alien and antipathetic to the 
 British nation in blood, in manner, in appearance, in 
 opinions, to dominate that nation so completely woiild 
 require many folio volumes ; for there has never been 
 anything more singular, or more due to innumerable 
 causes, all converging to one end. 
 
 " No spectacle is more extraordinary than the power 
 which Disraeli acquired after being laughed down by 
 every one ; acquired and wields still, so many years 
 after his death. I think that his most potent philtre 
 lay in his flattery. He flattered his Sovereign, his 
 party, and the nation itself, with all the florid eloquence 
 and subtle suggestion of which he was so admirable a 
 master. His famous ' Peace with Honour ' was an 
 exact sample of his style ; the peace was brittle and 
 the honour was dubious, but his manner of presenting 
 them was so magnificent that they were received as 
 though they were gifts from heaven. . . . 
 
 "... The first step taken, the rest followed ; the 
 mania of what is considered aggrandisement has 
 acquired possession of the national life, and has made 
 of a nation, naturally noble and great, a swollen boaster, 
 bawling of its millions, its might, and its superiority, 
 although surely vanity is no more admirable in a 
 country than in an individual." 
 
 296 
 
Ouida as Critic 
 
 Chamberlain continued Disraeli's work, but by 
 vulgarizing and brutalizing it. 
 
 The article ends with some general criticism of 
 the Victorian age. 
 
 " The reign of Queen Victoria has been a long 
 succession of wars ; few, if any, were either necessary 
 or inevitable. But not one of these has been a 
 war of defence at home ; the English citizen and 
 peasant know nothing in their own land of the horrors 
 of war ; they have never seen its desolation and its 
 horrors ; they have never seen their little children 
 crushed under the hoofs and wheels of a battery^ 
 their homes set on fire by a shell, their sons starving, 
 their fields devastated, their towns beleaguered. They 
 have never seen a battle, a siege, a trench full of dead ; 
 therefore they do not know the hideous suffering 
 which they inflict when they let loose, in pride of 
 spirit and lightness of heart and triumphant vanity, 
 the fiends of war upon a distant people and a far-off 
 land. This is the excuse of a large portion of the 
 nation for the preseht war ; but it is at the same 
 time the strongest condemnation of those who preach 
 war to it as a divine creed, and appeal to its most 
 brutal instincts, and abuse its ignorance to lead it 
 into crime. The victories now gained will be dearly 
 bought, for they, and the national madness they 
 produce, will certainly set Joseph Chamberlain in 
 the seat of supreme power, and no one will have 
 the courage to restrain his hand. Bellona has served 
 
 297 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 him so well now, she will be his chosen handmaid 
 in the future." 
 
 Between Ouida's opinions and her way of life 
 there was slight accord. While herself adopting the 
 surroundings and ways of living of the rich, and 
 infinitely preferring their society, provided they were 
 also persons of rank, she constantly attacked them. 
 She declared among other things that the rich can 
 never suffer physical pain as the poor do. Admitting 
 that a rich man has means to mitigate his sufferings 
 in cases of illness — indeed, I have heard rich people 
 say that therein lies the sole advantage of wealth — a 
 stomach-ache must still cause as much pain to a rich 
 man as to a poor one. Neither did Ouida believe 
 that the rich often suffer much from what she calls 
 " sorrows of the soul," and for the reason that the 
 rich man is usually a complete egotist, whose philan- 
 thropy has a political purpose or a social ambition 
 as its mainspring. But a poor man can be as great an 
 egotist as a rich one. She ignored the fact that 
 money can be a very beautiful thing in the hands 
 of those who know how to use it, and that many 
 generous impulses die for lack of the money to carry 
 them through. Yet in spite of their vehemence, of 
 their partiality, and of some exaggeration, these critical 
 essays are worth careful study by a generation which 
 in its pride in its swiftly advancing progress seldom 
 takes time to pause and look back. 
 
 298 
 
IX 
 
 OUIDA AS 
 HUMANITARIAN 
 AND SOCIAL 
 REFORMER 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 OUIDA AS HUMANITARIAN AND SOCIAL 
 REFORMER 
 
 OUIDA'S sympathy with the suffering and op- 
 pressed, whether human beings or dumb 
 animals, is amply evident in her writings and actions. 
 
 Everywhere in her writings she expresses her 
 horror of war, but her feeling in that matter is well 
 summed up in an article in the Fortnightly Review 
 entitled, " Watchman, What of the Night ? " ' She 
 deals there with the serious import to European 
 nations of Japan's victory over Russia, and with the 
 folly of war in general. 
 
 " The immeasurable physical suffering, mental 
 torture, bereavement, destruction, and incalculable 
 ruin caused by war are ignored and not weighed 
 for a moment. It needs no professional knowledge 
 to perceive that each successive war is more murderous 
 and on a vaster scale than its immediate predecessor. 
 Every year sees the engines of slaughter increased 
 in numbers and in power. The youthful and able- 
 bodied are swept away to each campaign in greater 
 ' May, 1905. 
 301 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 numbers than in the preceding one, and the aged, 
 the maimed, the sickly are left in their homes with 
 the womenkind. To what can this tend ? It would 
 be comic, if it were not tragic, to see the boastful 
 vaunts of the scientists of all they do for the ameliora- 
 tion of human life, whilst, side by side with their 
 medical schools and laboratories, there stand the 
 cannon-foundries, the powder-magazines, the factories 
 of explosives, the docks containing the torpedoes, the 
 submarines, and all the other manufactories for whole- 
 sale human destruction." 
 
 Ouida considered that military despotism had 
 increased throughout Europe since the Franco- 
 German War of 1870—71. Such despotism, she 
 declared, brought with it " the impoverishment 
 of the people, the curse of youth and man- 
 hood, the endless strain of a fiscal burden so enor- 
 mous that every class groans under it, and the 
 perpetual and diseased anxiety in which every nation 
 lives, suspecting its neighbours, and turn by turn 
 affronting them insolently and cringing to them 
 obsequiously, according as it is made to feel the 
 power of its own strength or the weakness of its 
 own inferiority." ' 
 
 She equally disapproved of war where conscription 
 was not the rule, as may be learnt from her strictures on 
 the Boer War in both her public and private utterances. 
 
 She was a foe to oppressive taxation of the poor, 
 
 ' Cf. Critical Studies, " Georges Darien." 
 302 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 and, as we have seen, many of her novels, the scenes 
 of which are laid in Italy, deal with the effects of 
 the oppressive taxation of the people by the Italian 
 monarchical government. She exaggerated the sins 
 of the ruling and official classes, but there is much 
 truth In her statements. The Italian is, she declares, 
 governed to death, " and tied up in the stifling 
 network of an infinity of small ordinances and weari- 
 some prohibitions. . . . The rural communes of the 
 country have more than a milliard of debts, almost 
 all due to the senseless mania for demolition, for 
 novelty, for superfluous alterations and imitations, 
 works worse than useless, commended or proposed 
 by the Government, and eagerly accepted by the 
 communal and provincial councils, since each member 
 of these hoped to rub his share of gilding off the 
 gingerbread as it passed through his hands. All the 
 vast sums thus expended are taken out of the enormous 
 local and imperial taxation, are divided between con- 
 tractors, engineers, members of the town and county 
 councils, lawyers, go-betweens, and all the innumerable 
 middlemen who swarm in every community like mites 
 In cheese, at the same time that the poor peasant is 
 taxed at the gates for a half-dozen of eggs or a bundle 
 of grass, and the poor washerwoman carrying In her 
 linen has her petticoats pulled up over her head by 
 a searcher to ascertain if she have nothing saleable or 
 taxable hidden on her person." ' 
 
 ■ Cf. Critical Studies, "The Decadence of Latin Races." 
 303 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 Ouida's vehement defence of the poor Italian peasant 
 was born of a sincere desire to help him, and she 
 expended both time and money in her efforts to 
 ameliorate his lot. 
 
 But it is, above all, Ouida's efforts for the ameliora- 
 tion of the conditions under which dumb animals, 
 especially dogs, birds, and horses, live in civilized 
 communities that mark her out as a worker in the 
 humanitarian cause. 
 
 " ' God made men and women.' 
 
 " ' Yes. But I wonder if the trapped birds, and the 
 beaten dogs, and the smarting mules, and the bleeding 
 sheep think so.' 
 
 ' ' O, Signa ! ' 
 
 ' ' I think they must doubt it,' said Signa. 
 
 ' ' But the beasts are not Christians, the priests say 
 so,' said Palma, who was a very true believer. 
 
 ' ' I know. But I think they are. They forgive — 
 we never do.' " ^ 
 
 These words illustrate Ouida's attitude towards the 
 whole of the dumb creation. 
 
 The earliest reference of importance in her writings 
 that testifies to her feeling for animals occurs in 
 Puck,'^ where she puts the following observations 
 into the mouth of the dog who relates the 
 story : — 
 
 " You think you have no slaves in England ! Why, 
 half the races in creation moan, and strive, and suffer, 
 ' Signa. ' 1871. 
 
 304 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 daily and hourly, under your merciless tyrannies ! No 
 slaves ! Ask the ox, with his bloodshot, agonized eyes, 
 mutilated for the drover's gain ere he is driven to his 
 end in the slaughter-house. Ask the sheep, with their 
 timid, woe-begone faces, scourged into the place of 
 their doom, bruised and bleeding and tortured. Ask 
 the racer, spent ere he reaches his prime by unnatural 
 strains on strength and speed, that he may fill the 
 pockets of your biggest blackguards with misbegotten 
 gold ; old whilst yet he is young, poisoned in the hours 
 of his victory, caressed by princes in the moment that 
 he ministers to their greed, cast off to street hire and 
 hourly misery in the worthless years of his weary 
 age. Ask the cart-horse, doomed through a long life 
 of labour to strive and stagger under burdens, to bear 
 heat and cold, and hunger and stripes, without re- 
 sistance ; fed grudgingly, paid for willing toil by 
 merciless blows, killed by doing the work of men as 
 the Egyptian slave died in the lifting of the last stone 
 to the King's Temple, or consigned, as the only re- 
 compense for years of usefulness and patience, to the 
 brutalities of the dissecting-room or the knacker's 
 yard. Ask us ! 
 
 " What ! You tell me this is but the issue of an 
 inevitable law .? Ay, so it is ; of the law of the 
 stronger over the weaker. But whilst you thus follow 
 out that law on millions of chained and beaten and 
 tortured creatures, have conscience enough, I pray 
 you, not to brag aloud that you keep no slaves, 
 
 30S u 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 not to bawl from the housetops of your reverence 
 for freedom. 
 
 " When will you give a Ten Hours Bill for horses 
 — a Prohibitive Act against the racing of one- or two- 
 year-olds ? — a Protection Order for Cattle ? — and an 
 Emancipation Movement for chained dogs ? Nay, 
 when will you do so much as remember that the 
 coward who tortures an animal would murder a 
 human being if he were not afraid of the gallows ? 
 When will you see that to teach the hand of a child 
 to stretch out and smother the butterfly is to teach 
 that hand, when a man's, to steal out and strangle 
 an enemy ? " 
 
 A little later Puck, in describing a young girl, 
 observes in phrases that are reminiscent of Shelley's 
 " Sensitive Plant " :— 
 
 " Now and then, too, she moved aside, that her 
 foot should not crush some tiny crawling thing, 
 that had its one short hour of harmless joy amongst 
 the leaves and grasses : now and then she lifted 
 some little brown glow-worm, with its brightly 
 burning lamp, up to some place of safety, on a 
 leafy bough, or in the cup of a late lily : nay, 
 even a beetle creeping with its load home-ward, 
 or even a sand-worm crawling on the gravelled 
 way, she stepped aside from, leaving them their 
 life. 
 
 " Would that more amongst you had that tender 
 pity, had that reverence for the wonder of existence 
 
 306 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 which is as great in the tiniest fly that wings its 
 way as in the great leviathan of the sea. All things 
 must suffer and must think, since all things dread 
 and trust : can there be fear without mental torture ? 
 Can there be trust without emotional power ? Ay 
 — and thrusting a pin through the beetle's body and 
 cutting the brain from a living pigeon, in your 
 hideous dissecting-rooms, will not teach you this ; it 
 will only teach you to be blind to it." 
 
 Ouida constantly inculcated kindness to animals on 
 children of her acquaintance. A little boy ' wrote to 
 her in 1892 for her autograph. She sent it, accom- 
 panied by her volume of stories Bimbi, a book 
 that amply testifies to Ouida's extraordinarily 
 strong affection for dogs. He acknowledged it, 
 and two months later (March 10, 1893) received 
 this letter : — 
 
 " My Dear Stewart, — 
 
 " Enrol yourself in this Guild and I will send 
 you another book at Christmas. 
 
 " Ever yours, 
 
 "Ouida." 
 
 Enclosed was a prospectus of the Guild of Gentle- 
 ness, a society for promoting kindness to birds and 
 animals among young people, set on foot by the 
 Manchester Weekly Times. 
 
 ' Stewart M. Ellis. 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 To another little boy ' Ouida wrote : — 
 
 " My Dear Bertie, — 
 
 "... Don't think I do not like you because 
 I want to see you gentler to animals. You are a 
 bright and clever boy, and ought to understand that 
 animals being so entirely in our power, all unkind 
 use of our strength over them is both mean and 
 unworthy. Try and remember that. Real manli- 
 ness is always indulgent and never tyrannical. Per- 
 haps long after I am dead you will show this to 
 your children and say, This is what I was told by — 
 
 "Ouida." 
 
 Willie Strange, a small boy, son of Alderman 
 Strange, of Eastbourne, was fined by the magistrates 
 for allowing a pet dog to be at large unmuzzled. 
 The case was reported, and soon after the youthful 
 defendant received from Italy the following letter : — 
 
 '•'■January 24th [? 1907]. 
 " My Dear Boy, — 
 
 " I have seen your action, as recorded in the 
 
 papers, with much pleasure. Any devotion you pay 
 
 to your dog will be repaid to you a thousandfold by 
 
 his affection. 'Tis only men who betray those who 
 
 befriend them. The muzzling craze is a brutal folly 
 
 and a disgrace to England. 
 
 • H. Danyell-Tassinari. 
 308 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 "Accept this little half-napoleon for your savings- 
 box, and if ever I can be useful to you or your dog, 
 command me. 
 
 " I remain, 
 " Yours with much sympathy, 
 
 "Ouida." 
 
 Any one who loved dogs easily won Ouida's heart. 
 In a letter to Captain Danyell she says : — 
 
 " G. W.I wrote me when he was Governor of 
 Cyprus that he loved dogs as much as I could do, 
 and that wherever he commanded no dog should 
 ever be hurt or tormented ! How many great men 
 have loved Dogs ! I think it is the frank, free, fond 
 faith of the creature which is so welcome a con- 
 trast to them with the world of flatterers and of 
 foes ! " 
 
 She took part in resisting the Dog Act of 1870, a 
 resistance that was supported by Bulwer Lytton. 
 She constantly wrote in the public Press on behalf 
 of dogs.2 She declared that if people who kept 
 dogs would learn a little more about them they 
 would not think that so many dogs had hydro- 
 phobia. " I believe that the much-talked-of rabies 
 would never be known if dogs were rationally treated 
 and free to be happy in their own natural way." 
 
 I Garnet Wolseley. 
 
 ^ Cf., e.g., "A Plea on Behalf of Dogs," first printed (1878) in 
 the Whitehall Review, and reprinted in The Animal World (May, 
 1878) ; A Treatise mi 'Dogs, 1897. 
 
 309 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 But few persons take the trouble to study their pets 
 morally and physically. 
 
 " The study of my four-footed companions has so 
 persuaded me of their singular intelligence, their acute 
 sensibility, and their most generous temper ; their 
 playful ways have diverted for me so many an idle 
 or tedious hour ; and their loyalty, their truthfulness, 
 and their good faith have so often consoled me for the 
 rarity of these qualities in human nature, that I do 
 but pay back a debt I owe when I endeavour, by any 
 words that it is in my power to use, to plead for a 
 little justice in this world to my dear comrades — the 
 Dogs." 
 
 Ouida has much to say on the right feeding of 
 dogs. She sets out a dietary : their tastes must be 
 consulted, the food freshly cooked and plentiful. 
 People cannot expect, she declares, " to keep a dog 
 for nothing," They should have boiled liver and 
 bread at 1 1 a.m., beef and rice at 7 p.m. Big dogs 
 may have captain biscuits, little dogs sponge cakes ; 
 bones may be given them to amuse them, but must 
 never be regarded as a substitute for food. It is a 
 fallacy to think that rich foods hurt them. In telling 
 us that she gave her own dogs everything they chose 
 that she herself had — rich soups, game, sweet cakes, 
 salmis, timbales, petits pates — she incidentally lets in 
 light on her housekeeping. 
 
 She habitually watched the animals about her, 
 whether her pets or the natural inhabitants of her 
 
 310 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 garden, and whatever she notes as the result of 
 her observations is full of interest. Those observa- 
 tions are doubtless tinged with some of the imagina- 
 tion that came so readily to her call, but she 
 studied the ways and habits of horses, dogs, and 
 birds with loving care. Here are some notes on 
 her horses, with the general conclusions drawn from 
 them : — 
 
 " I am, at the present moment, driving a mare 
 who was always driven with her sister, who died 
 eighteen months ago. She does not forget her sister, 
 and the stable companion given her instead she 
 hates, and endeavours, with all her might, to kick 
 and bite across the pole and in the stalls. I owned 
 also a pony so attached to his comrade that they 
 could live in the same loose-box together, and 
 when the companion died, this pony was miser- 
 able, whinnied and neighed perpetually, lost health, 
 and in a few months died also. In life he was 
 the humble and devoted slave of his brother, would 
 fondle him, clean him, follow him about in all 
 directions, and show to him every testimony of 
 affection possible in one creature to another. Yet 
 such feelings as these, although very common in 
 animals, are never remembered or considered for an 
 instant, and animals of all kinds are sold from owner 
 to owner, and hustled from place to place, with no 
 more regard than if they were chairs and tables. 
 What they suffer from strange voices, new homes, 
 
 311 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 and unfamiliar treatment no one inquires, for no 
 one cares. Convenience and profit are all which are 
 considered. There is little or no remembrance of 
 the idiosyncrasy of each creature. The ecstatic, 
 ardent, nervous temperament of the dog ; the timid, 
 imaginative, impulsive mind of the horse ; the shrink- 
 ing shyness of the sheep, the attachment to place and 
 people of the wildest or silliest creature when once 
 kindly treated and long domesticated — all these things 
 are never recollected or considered in dealing with 
 them." I Here are two notes on the ways of birds : — 
 
 " As I write this a robin hops up the stone balus- 
 trade of the terrace ; he looks at me brightly and 
 fearlessly. There is a large bamboo in a pottery 
 vase on the top of the terrace ; he hops up to it 
 and busies himself inside its branches for awhile, 
 then looks at me again, flies away on to another 
 bamboo which grows on the lawn, and sings a song 
 of thanks. How lovely are all his movements ; 
 how beautiful is his glance ; how bright is the sheen 
 of his plumage ; how charming are his buoyancy 
 and confidence ! Kill him ! As soon would I kill a 
 child that loved me." 2 
 
 She always declared that when birds were supposed 
 to be destroying fruit, they were really eating insects 
 invisible to us. 
 
 ' Cf. Fiews and Opinions (1895), "Death and Pity." 
 = Cf. "Birds and their Persecutors" in Toxin and Other Papers, 
 1896 (Tauchnitz). 
 
 312 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 " I saw a blackbird one day occupied at a bunch 
 of ripe grapes on my wall. Poised on outstretched 
 wings, he kept incessantly darting at it, and con- 
 tinued to do so for many minutes. When he at 
 last flew away I went and looked at the bunch : he 
 had not perforated or touched a single grape ; there- 
 fore he had of course been eating the insects and 
 aphidas within the cluster." i 
 
 Ouida considered that not only is the affection of 
 animals undervalued by man, but that man greatly 
 underrates their intelligence. 
 
 " Man having but one conception of intelligence, 
 his own, does not endeavour to comprehend another 
 which is different, and differently exhibited and 
 expressed. ... If our mind exceeds the mind of 
 animals and birds in much, theirs exceeds ours at 
 least in some things, as their sight, scent, and 
 hearing far surpass ours. 
 
 " When we remember also that these other races 
 are absolutely alone, are never aided by man, are 
 only, on the contrary, hindered by him, opposed, 
 thwarted, and persecuted by him, their achievements 
 are, relatively to their opportunities, much more 
 wonderful than any of his. The elements which are 
 his great foes are likewise theirs ; they have to 
 encounter and suffer all the woes of tempest, 
 hurricane, flood, the width of barren seas, the 
 
 ' Cf. " Birds and their Persecutors " in Toxin and Other Papers^ 
 1896 (Tauchnitz). 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 hunger on solitary shores ; and they have also in his 
 ruthless and unceasing spite an enemy more cruel 
 than any with v/hich he himself has to contend. 
 If we meditate on this unquestionable fact, we shall 
 be forced to admit that Cristoforo Colombo was 
 not a greater hero than many a little swallow. . . . 
 
 " There is no sympathy with these interesting and 
 mysterious lives led side by side with man, but 
 ignored by him entirely, except when by him 
 persecuted. The nest of the weaver- bird is to the 
 full as ingenious and as marvellous as the dome ot 
 St. Peter's or St. Paul's. The beaver State and the 
 bee State are as intricate in organization as the 
 Constitution of the French Republic and the British 
 Monarchy, and are distinctly superior in many parts 
 of their organization to either of these. The passage 
 of the white ants through a jungle and across a 
 continent is quite as admirable in unison and skill 
 and order as the human march to Chitral ; and the 
 annual flights of the storks, of the Solan geese, of 
 the wild ducks, exhibit qualities of obedience to a 
 chosen commander, of endurance, of observation, 
 and of wisdom, not exceeded by any human Arctic 
 or Australian exploring party." ^ 
 
 Ouida's efforts against any sort of cruelty practised 
 
 on animals were untiring. She took some share in 
 
 starting the Italian Society for the Prevention of 
 
 Cruelty to Animals, and was indefatigable in bringing 
 
 ^ Cf. Critical Studies, " The Quality of Mercy." 
 
 314 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 cases to its notice. She wrote many articles against 
 the destruction of birds and trees in Italy. She 
 ascribed the cruelty of earlier times to violence, that 
 of modern times to cowardice and selfishness. She 
 often complains in letters to her friends of the 
 increasing hardness and brutality of men as regards 
 animals. Motoring seemed to her one of the factors 
 in that attitude. She wrote to Mr. Henry S. Salt, 
 Honorary Secretary of the Humanitarian League, a 
 society in which she took much interest and whose 
 aims she helped with her pen, in 1901 : "Motoring, 
 too, is surely a hardening and brutalizing factor, and 
 I do not think that the keen motorist feels any 
 pang at the deaths he causes : why did the stupid 
 creature get in the way ? Human life seems to 
 me much coarser and ruder than it was even 
 twenty-five years ago." 
 
 She allowed scarcely anything connected with cruelty 
 to animals to pass without making a protest of some 
 kind. On the occasion of the " Distance Ride " from 
 Berlin to Vienna and back in 1895 by German 
 officers, she wrote the following letter, entitled 
 " Decorated Butchers," to Dr. William Evans Darby, 
 Secretary of the Peace Society : — 
 
 " Any one who has forced himself to read the 
 sickening details of the ' Distance Ride ' from Berlin 
 to Vienna, and vice versa, must be struck by the 
 frightful injury to the moral feeling of the populace 
 of both nations done by this horrible spectacle of 
 
 31S 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 legalized and honoured torture. It is absolutely 
 useless for laws to be framed, and societies to be 
 formed for the prevention of cruelty and the inculca- 
 tion of humanity, when Sovereigns, Princes and 
 ' Gentlemen ' lend themselves to commit and to admire 
 such brutality. If the riders had desired to prove their 
 own endurance, they coidd have done so equally well 
 with relays of horses ; and the disgusting agony 
 inflicted on the noble beasts which they have 
 tortured and murdered would not have been given, 
 in all its demoralizing infamy, to the public. To 
 summon and fine, or imprison, a carter, for over- 
 working his horse, whilst an officer who has ridden his 
 charger to death is feasted and decorated by Emperors 
 is one of those examples of ' one measure for the rich 
 and another for the poor ' which are the justification 
 of the Anarchist. Every one of these decorated 
 butchers who have been received and applauded by 
 the young Kaiser and the old one, at Berlin and 
 Vienna, should be degraded and imprisoned, if there 
 be any reality whatever in the laws against cruelty and 
 in the professions of civilization. It is wholly useless 
 to preach mercy to the multitudes, when, along the 
 highways, they can behold men of royal and noble 
 blood spurring their animals to death, or dragging 
 them into the goal ' dripping with blood, sweating and 
 screaming with agony, the spines twisted out of shape, 
 the hoofs dropping off from inflammation.' " 
 
 The wanton destruction of birds in Italy greatly 
 
 316 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 exercised her mind. When in 1 902 the late Mr. E. B. 
 Caulfield, then editor of the Italian Gazette, asked 
 Ouida for a contribution, she replied : " You ask me 
 for some words to inaugurate your editorship of the 
 English Florentine paper : how can I better comply 
 with your request than by asking you and your 
 subscribers and readers to do all they can to protect 
 the birds of Tuscany ? " ^ The article is an eloquent 
 plea for bird life. Here is one passage : — 
 
 " Would that any words of mine could make the 
 villa gardens, and the green woods of plain and hill 
 and riverside around Florence sanctuaries for these 
 fair creatures, whether natives of the soil or pilgrims 
 from afar, whether coming weary and exhausted over 
 deserts and seas, or nesting in leafy nooks wherever 
 their ancestors were allowed to be at peace. Nothing 
 is more touching than to watch swallows and martins 
 returning with unerring accuracy to the grey timbers 
 or the brown tiles where season after season they and 
 theirs have reared their callow broods ; nothing is more 
 lovely than to hear the nesting song of the nightingale 
 rising in the moonlight from the laurel-shaded grasses, 
 or the roots of the fragrant bay-tree where, with the 
 winds and the dews of April, year after year he sings 
 his epithalamium." 
 
 Over and over again she pointed out how the woods 
 
 ' The article is reprinted in the Italian Gazette for January z8, 
 1 91 3. Discussion on Bird Protection was being carried on in some 
 of the Italian newspapers. 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 made by nature a paradise for birds had become silent 
 and uninhabited. The Italian, she averred, classed 
 them as vermin and failed to appreciate the " exquisite 
 loveliness of movement, of form, of mode of life, 
 which makes even a songless bird a miracle of charm 
 and poetry." Birds in Italy were hunted from dawn 
 to dark, and meanwhile insect plagues increased, 
 because the larvae-eating and the insect-killing birds 
 were murdered in the very season of their usefulness. 
 " Who lets the swallows, who would rid the air of 
 winged pests in their graceful circling flight, be shot 
 down in scores as they flash in the morning sun or 
 skim the water at even-time for a bath and drink ? I 
 have known hundreds of swallows and martins come to 
 make their nests as April brought them home, and 
 I have known these innocent and useful returning 
 pilgrims destroyed almost entirely before June was 
 passed, two or three at most being left of the happy 
 bands which had come back so joyously and trustingly 
 to the roofs of men. All day long this bird in its 
 buoyant flight is ridding the air of men's worst pests." 
 How, then, can man bring himself to destroy a creature 
 of such beauty, grace, and fidelity, with his ingenuity 
 in architecture, his intelligence in travel and self- 
 guidance ? 
 
 The life of a bird, she writes, " is such a lovely 
 little life — cradled amongst the hawthorn buds, 
 searching for aphidae amongst apple blossoms, drinking 
 dew from the cup of a lily ; awake when the grey 
 
 318 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 light breaks in the east, throned on the topmost branch 
 of a tree, swinging with it in the sunshine, flying from 
 it through the air ; then the friendly quarrel with a 
 neighbour over a worm or berry ; the joy of bearing 
 grass seed to his mate where she sits down amongst the 
 docks and daisies ; the triumph of singing the praise 
 of sunshine or of moonlight ; the merry, busy, useful 
 days ; the peaceful sleep, steeped in the scent of the 
 closed flowers, with head under one wing and the 
 leaves forming a green roof above." 
 
 Ouida disliked the idea of shutting up any animals 
 in cages, and when Mr. Salt asked her to write an 
 article on the iniquity of feeding the reptiles at the 
 Zoological Gardens with live animals, she replied : — 
 
 [VlAREGGIo] 
 
 "May 23 [1907]. 
 
 " I cannot write an article on the snake feeding, for 
 I have hurt one of my eyes and must use both as little 
 as possible. But it is infamous, inconceivably so. . . . 
 No object is gained by the public spectacle of this 
 horror, and its impression on tender-hearted children 
 must be exceedingly painful and do much harm. . . . 
 I abhor all Zoological Gardens, and they are certainly 
 very bad for children." 
 
 She foresaw a time when animals and birds would 
 disappear from off the face of the earth. 
 
 " The great beauty which animal and bird life lends 
 
 319 
 
Ouida*: a Memoir 
 
 to the earth is doomed to lessen and disappear. The 
 automatic vehicle will render the horse useless ; and 
 he will be considered too costly, and too slow, to be 
 kept even as a gambling toy. The dog will have no 
 place in a world which has no gratitude for such simple 
 sincerity and faithful friendliness as he offers. When 
 wool, and horn, and leather, and meat foods have been 
 replaced by chemical inventions, cattle and sheep will 
 have no more tolerance than the wild buffalo has had in 
 the United States. What are now classed as big game 
 will be exterminated in Asia and Africa, and already in 
 Europe we are told that the pleasure it affords to people 
 to kill them is the sole reason why stags, foxes, and 
 game-birds are allowed to exist and multiply under 
 artificial protection. All the charm which the races 
 of ' fur and feather ' lend to the earth will be lost for 
 ever ; for a type destroyed can never be recalled." 
 
 Ouida loved trees and flowers almost as much as 
 she loved animals, and regarded with sorrow and 
 misgiving the destruction of trees that went on in Italy. 
 
 " There is a modern custom in Italy, which is typical 
 of the havoc made by avarice and indifference and 
 commerce running together hand in hand. It is the 
 shocking habit of stripping all evergreen trees of their 
 leaves to sell them to chemists, gilders, dyers, and the 
 managers of what in France we call pompes funebres. 
 Even magnolias are not spared. . . . The injury done 
 to the trees is, of course, immeasurable. After a few 
 seasons they become anasmic, dry up, and slowly perish, 
 
 320 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 whilst the aspect of the gardens of which the bay, 
 myrtle, box, laurel, arbutus, and magnolia were of 
 late such conspicuous ornaments is, of course, utterly 
 changed and ruined." 
 
 She also protested wherever and whenever she could 
 against the wanton rooting up of wild flowers, especially 
 in the woods and meadows round Florence. 
 
 Sport, at least all kinds of it that involved the 
 taking of animal life, was abhorrent to her and came 
 in for castigation. " When men kill in self-defence 
 it is natural ; when they kill for food it is excusable ; 
 but to kill for pleasure and for paltry pride is vile. 
 How long will such pleasure and such pride be the 
 rule of the world ? They give the strongest justifica- 
 tion that Anarchists can claim." i The practice of 
 game-preserving, of hunting the hare, fox, or stag, of 
 big-game shooting is always severely dealt with : 
 " The gun is the weapon of the gentleman, as in 
 other days was the rapier or the sword ; the gun-room 
 is his Academe." She deplores that sport has become 
 fashionable even with women, for sport, in Ouida's 
 view, inevitably creates deadness of feeling, and no one 
 could take pleasure In it who was sensitive to suffering.^ 
 "I am certain," she wrote to Mr. Salt, "that sport 
 as seen in this day in its effect on character produces a 
 sort of insanity, a kind of delirium akin to drunken- 
 ness." In private letters and in the public Press she 
 
 ^ Cf. Views and Opinions, " Death and Pity." 
 " Cf. Critical Studies, "The Quality of Mercy." 
 
 321 X 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 gave vent to her indignation against the Eton College 
 beagles. She declared that it was " a grotesque yet 
 terrible thing that the nobility and gentry, the pastors 
 and masters, of such a country as England should 
 publicly uphold an amusement for youth which consists 
 in the torture and mutilation of one of the most timid 
 and innocent of animals," and even went so far as 
 to address a strong letter of protest to the Headmaster, 
 
 She is especially severe on pigeon shooting from 
 traps, which " unhappily English example has made 
 popular and fashionable throughout Europe. Not a 
 word can be said in its favour or defence. It is mean, 
 cowardly, barbarous, and contemptible. A blue rock 
 is a clever and handsome creature. I kept some once 
 in a large enclosure to paint from, and was struck as I 
 watched them by their brightness, vivacity, and intelli- 
 gent communication with each other ; the dancing and 
 the posturing of the males in courtship are delightfully 
 droll. I have seen a male pigeon waltz round and 
 round many times, raising his crest and flapping his 
 wings, and then advance to his lady-love with mincing 
 graces in a slow gavotte, bowing low at intervals, whilst 
 she made believe not even to see him. And these 
 interesting creatures are thrown pell-mell into hampers 
 and sacks, with broken legs and wing feathers torn out, 
 and after long racking journeys, half suffocated and 
 tortured by thirst, become the targets for the crack 
 shots of an aristocratic Society ! " 
 
 In early years, however, Ouida was not of this 
 
 322 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 opinion, for she records how the one act of her life 
 for which she felt the most acute regret and remorse 
 was that she once gave a silver cigar-case to be shot for 
 at Hurlingham by the Lords and Commons. " My 
 excuse, if it can be called one, is that / did not think. . . . 
 It is an act of which I am now poignantly ashamed. 
 When, later on, a wounded bird fluttered down to die 
 beneath a cedar-tree by which I was seated, I realized 
 the full horror of that disgusting sport, and I never 
 again entered the enclosure of the club." 
 
 Ouida was, of course, an impassioned anti-vivisec- 
 tionist. She never lost an opportunity of declaring 
 her views, but her arguments may best be seen in an 
 article entitled " The New Priesthood," ' where they 
 are stated with great violence. 
 
 She defends herself against any sentiment in the 
 matter. " Every noble movement of the world has 
 been saddled with this name, from patriotism to the 
 abolition of slavery ; and every impersonal impulse 
 of the human race is necessarily one of sentiment — 
 i.e., of spiritual and generous, as opposed to gross and 
 merely egotistic, inspirations." Her great fear was 
 that the practice would be continued from animals 
 to human beings. " There is not a single argument used 
 by the advocates of vivisection which will not apply in as 
 complete an entity to human, as to animal subjects. ^^ The 
 italics are Ouida's. 
 
 She feared that vivisection would lead to the 
 ' Cf. Toxin and Other Papers (Tauchnitz, 1896). 
 323 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 " scientific torture of lunatics,"' and protested against 
 the use of lunatics for experiments in physiology or 
 surgery. She declared that it was becoming a common 
 practice, and was " the inevitable consequence of the 
 heartless indifference of the world in general to the 
 scientific torture of animals." 
 
 This is not the place to refute Ouida's arguments. 
 They are mentioned here to illustrate her love of the 
 dumb creation. But we cannot refrain from deploring 
 her attitude throughout her work, both in her novels 
 and in her essays, towards men of science in general 
 and the medical and surgical profession in particular. 
 When she dilates on the brutality of the surgeon, it 
 becomes quite clear that she had never in her own 
 person had experience of the kindness, the gentleness, 
 the consideration, in a word the humanity, of a great 
 and skilful surgeon. And even the most impartial 
 mind could have scant patience with such a passage 
 as the following : — 
 
 " If there be one thing more loathsome than the 
 carnage of war, it is the Red Cross societies following 
 in its train. But the modern world, being conscious 
 that the butchery of war ill accords with its aesthetic and 
 religious pretensions, gives a sop to its conscience by 
 sending the ambulance side by side with the gun- 
 carriage. A more robust and more honest temper did 
 not evade the truth that the least brutal war is the one 
 most immediately and conclusively destructive ; the 
 ' Cf. Humanity, November, 1897. 
 324 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 slaughter of wounded men was more truly merciful 
 than the modern system of surgery and nursing, 
 which saves shattered constitutions and ruined health 
 to drag out a miserable and artificially prolonged 
 existence ! " 
 
 In a remarkable article contributed to T!he Humane 
 Review,^ entitled " The Culture of Cowardice," Ouida 
 protests against " the concentration of the general mind 
 on the prevention of disease." She deplores the 
 " new hygiene " which teaches men and women " to 
 see possible or probable death in everything which 
 approaches them." Indeed — 
 
 " They are taught perpetually to endeavour to 
 defend themselves from the proximity of death by 
 the most minute cares and the most elaborate pre- 
 cautions ; they are to pass their whole existence in 
 a stench of disinfectants ; they are to see deadly 
 organisms in everything they touch ; they are to 
 suspect injury to themselves in every breeze which 
 blows ; they are to shrink in fear of contamination 
 from the rosy lips of a little child, and flee from the 
 good-natured gambols of a merry dog ; the pleasant 
 odour of a freshly turned furrow to them speaks of 
 poisonous exhalations and mephitic vapours ; the 
 prick of a pin may mean tetanus, and the humming 
 of a blue-bottle fly can only preface an inoculation of 
 carbon." 
 
 Ouida argues curiously enough that disease has its 
 ' July, 1900. 
 325 
 
Ouida : a Memoir 
 
 value, and is not nearly so terrible a scourge as war. 
 It is, she declares, extremely illogical to bewail the 
 death of five thousand persons by a visitation of 
 typhoid or smallpox and to applaud the death of 
 ten thousand persons in battle or in siege. War, too, 
 kills men, not women, and millions of useful animals ; 
 it kills in youth, rarely in age, in health, rarely in 
 infirmity ; for one whom it kills outright it maims and 
 invalidates ten, leaving them for the rest of their lives 
 incomplete and suffering. She continues — 
 
 "Disease, on the contrary, kills more women than 
 men, and therefore serves the world better ; kills out- 
 right one and allows hundreds to recover none the 
 worse for the attack. It is much more merciful than 
 war is, more discriminating also, for it usually only 
 takes those who are predisposed to receive it. The 
 convalescence which follows on disease may be a period 
 of peace and gratitude, bringing with it a certain sweet- 
 ness ; the recovery after wounds of shell, bullet, lance, 
 or sabre is most irritating suffering, leaving long injury 
 behind it." 
 
 The flaws in the argument are easily perceived, but 
 it serves to show an original point of view and to what 
 lengths Ouida's prejudices against the march of modern 
 science, and especially against vivisection, led her. But 
 she is not, perhaps, altogether wrong in protesting 
 against and pointing out the evils of the over-pre- 
 occupation with hygiene that prevails to-day. 
 
 Ouida had the fixed idea that commerce, militarism, 
 
 326 
 
Ouida as Humanitarian 
 
 and socialism were ruining all modern life, depriving 
 it of the heights and depths, the lights and shades, that 
 make the charm of life as of landscape. " When all ' 
 the arable earth is one huge allotment-ground, a Corot 
 will find no subject for his canvas,- not even in his 
 dreams, for his dreams will be dead of inanition." She 
 even foresees a time when " the earth, having been all 
 built over with brick, and the skies blackened with 
 furnaces, and the lands all over peopled to the very 
 edge of the farthest shores, the wretched crowds will 
 look at landscape paintings in the public galleries and 
 will say, 'Was ever the world like that? Was there 
 ever space to breathe, and green leaves ?' " 
 
 Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's estimate of Ouida's 
 public work in the cause of humanity, written on 
 purpose for this memoir, forms a fitting conclusion 
 to this c'hapter : — 
 
 "As a public letter-writer and pamphleteer, few 
 women have been ever more effective than Ouida. She 
 had a courage and a command of whirling passionate 
 words which forced themselves on public attention. 
 Her exaggerated enthusiasms made readers smile, but 
 they also made them think. It would be difficult to 
 overstate the effect of her pleading for the weak things 
 of the world, especially of the animal world, whose 
 cause she made her own." 
 
 327 
 
/'■' 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Held in Bondage. 3 vols. (Tinsley.) 1863. 
 
 Strathmore. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1865. 
 
 Chandos. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1866. 
 
 Cecil Castlemaine's Gage and Other Novelettes. Collected and revised 
 
 by the Author. (Chapman and Hall.) 1867. 
 Under Two Flags. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1867. 
 Idalia. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1867. 
 Trlcotrin.^ 2 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1869. 
 Puck. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1870. 
 Folle-Farine. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1 87 1. 
 ji Dog of Flanders and Other Stories. (Chapman and Hall.) 1872. 
 Pascarkl.'^ 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1873. 
 Two Little Wooden Shoes. (Chapman and Hall.) 1874. 
 Signa. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall.) 1875. 
 In a Winter City. (Chapman and Hall.) 1876. 
 Ariadne. 3 vols. (Chapman and Hall and Chatto and Windus.) 
 
 1877. 
 Friendship. 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) 1878. 
 Moths. 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) 1880. 
 Pipistrello and Other Stories. (Chatto and Windus.) 1880. 
 J Fillage Commune.3 2 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) 1881. 
 Bimbi : Stories for Children.* (Chatto and Windus.) 1882. 
 In Maremma. 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) i88z. 
 Wanda. 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) 1883. 
 Frescoes: Dramatic Sketches. ^ (Chatto and Windus.) 1883. 
 
 ' Danish translation, 1S73. 
 
 " French translation, 1878. 
 
 3 Italian translation, 1881, 1890. 
 
 < French translation (Bibliotheque Rose), 1884. 
 
 s Including the essay on "Romance and Realism." 
 
Bibliography 
 
 Princess Napraxine. 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) 1884. 
 
 Othmar. 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) 1885. 
 
 A Rainy JuneJ- (Maxwell.) [1885.] 
 
 Don Gesualdo. (Tillotson's Shilling Fiction, Routledge.) 1886. 
 
 A House Party. (Hurst and Blackett.) 1887. 
 
 Guilderoy. 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) 1889. 
 
 Ruffi.no and Other Stories. (Chatto and Windus.) 1890. 
 
 Syrlin. 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.) 1890. 
 
 Santa Barbara and Other Tales. (Chatto and Windus.) 1891. 
 
 the Tower of Taddeo. 3 vols. (Heinemann.) 1892. 
 
 The New Priesthood: a Protest against Vivisection.'^ 1893. 
 
 Two Offenders and Other Tales. (Chatto and Windus.) 1894. 
 
 The Silver Christ and A Lemon Tree. (Unwin.) 1894. 
 
 Toxin. (Unwin.) 1895. 
 
 Views and Opinions. (Methuen.) 1895. 
 
 Le Selve and Other Tales. (Unwin.) 1896. 
 
 The Massarenes. (Sampson Low.) 1897. 
 
 Dogs. (Simpkin, Marshall.) 1897. 
 
 An Altruist. (Unwin.) 1897. 
 
 La Strega and Other Stories. (Sampson Low.) 1899. 
 
 The Waters of Edera. (Unwin.) 1900. 
 
 Critical Studies. (Unwin.) 1900. 
 
 Street Dust and Other Stories. (White and Bell.) 1901. 
 
 Helianthus. (Macmillan.) 1908. 
 
 ' New edition, Unwin, 1901. 
 ^ A pamphlet. 
 
 330 
 
INDEX 
 
 A'Beckett, Arthur, 43 
 
 Adam Bede^ 40 
 
 Adventurer of a Phaeton^ The^ 73 
 
 Afghanistan, 129 
 
 Africa, 168, 174, 189 
 
 Aide, Hamilton, 43, 44 
 
 Ainsworth, Dr. W. Francis, 32 
 
 Ainsworth, W. Harrison, 32, 35, 35 
 
 note 
 Alexander, Campaigns of, 119 
 AUingham, William, 49 
 Altruist, The, 162 
 America, 36, 145, 205, 206 
 Anderson, Miss Mary, 268 
 Annunzio, Gabriele d', 160, 163, 194, 2x6, 
 
 271, 289 
 Anti- Vivisection Society, the, 74 
 Ardennes, the, 63 
 Ardenza, 216 
 Arezzo, 260 
 Ariadne, 74, 90, 91, 92, 97, 132, 245, 
 
 247 i 255-259 
 Arnold, Matthew, 135, 137, 168 
 Art of England, Ruskin*s, quoted, no 
 Aspasia, 108 
 Asquith, 182, 217 
 Assisi, 260 
 
 Austin, Alfred, 144, 148 
 Austria, 95, 143 
 
 Bagni di Lucca, 205, 214, 222, 229 
 Baldelli, Countess, 83 
 Ballantyne, Serjeant,l43 
 Balzac, 112 
 
 Bancroft, Sir Sijuire, 229 
 Barres, Maurice, 87, 271 
 Beere, Mrs. Bernard, 102 
 Belgium, 63 
 
 Bentley, George, 35, 40 
 
 Bentley's Miscellany, 32, 33, 35 
 
 Bernhardt, Sarah, 113 
 
 Bierstadt, 43 
 
 Bimhi, 114, 150, 307 
 
 Birds, destruction of, in Italy, 316, 317 
 
 Bismarck, 121 
 
 Blomfield, C. J., Bishop of London, 14 
 
 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 167, 172, 183, 
 
 191 ; on Ouida as a novelist, 273, as 
 
 a social reformer, 327 
 Boer War, the, 96, 169, 173, 177, 182, 
 
 190, 302 
 Bonaparte, Princess Letitia, 22 
 Borthwick, Algernon, 43, 131 
 Boulogne, 22 
 Bourget, Paul, 68 
 Brackenbury, Major, 43 
 Brandon, Charles, Duke of Suffolk, 14 
 Breckenridge, General, 43 
 Brescia, 177 
 
 Brooks, Mrs. Shirley, 49 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 233, 234 
 Browning, Robert, 39, 133 
 Brussels, 52, 63, 203, 209 
 Bulgarian Atrocities, the, 169 
 Buloz, 34, 93 
 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (first Lord Lytton), 
 
 37) 38, 39. 52. 58, 294, 309 
 Bunbury, H. W., 14 
 Burnand, Sir F. C, 97 
 Burnouf, EmiJe, 34 
 Burns, John, 215 
 Burton, Sir Richard and Lady, 43 
 Bury St. Edmunds, 13, 14, 15, 18, 22, 
 
 29) 33i 42 ; memorial to Ouida at, 
 
 230 ; pageant at, 2i8, 219 
 Byron, 183, 283 
 
 331 
 
Index 
 
 Callander, Mrs., of Ardinglas, 84, izz 
 
 Camaiore, 225 
 
 Cameron, Colonel Poulett, 40 
 
 Campbell-Bannerman, H., 182, 223 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 1 3, 3 9 
 
 Carmichael, Montgomery, 123, 191, 210, 
 
 219, 221, 222, 227, 230 
 Carnarvon, Lord, 294 
 Castiglione, Duchesse de, 92 
 Castle Hedingham, 189 
 Caulfield, E. B., 317 
 Cecil Castlemaine^ s Gage, 33 
 Chamberlain, Joseph, 155, 166, 167, 168, 
 
 169, 171, 174, 179, 180, 181, 188, 
 
 "S i 294-298 
 Chandoi, 34, 35, 36, 52, 54 
 Chandos Pole, Lady Anne, 85 
 Chant ecleTf 114 
 
 Chapman & Hall, Messrs., 35, 36, 92 
 Chatto & Windus, Messrs., 93, 134 
 Cberbuliez, 113 
 Chesterton, G. K., 175 
 Cleopatra, loS 
 Clophill, 36, 84 
 Cockerell, Sydney C, 167, 169, 171, 172, 
 
 i8o, 181, 183, 188, 199, 201, 224 
 Collins, Wilkie, 39 
 Colnaghi, Sir Dominic Ellis, 1 39 
 Constantinople, 129 
 Copyright Act of 189 1, 145 
 Gorsini, Princess Anna, 64 
 Crawford, Marion, 163, 164, 165, 166, 
 
 203 
 Cremona, 260 
 Crispi, 171 
 Critical Studia, 166, 167, 168, 188, 195, 
 
 272, 277, 287 
 CuUum, G. Milner-Gibson, 25, 26 note, 
 
 29,213, 2i8, 219,230 
 CuUum, Sir Thomas G., Bart., 25 
 Curzon, Earl, of Kedleeton, 122, 123, 124, 
 
 125, 182, 215, 230 
 
 Daily Mail, the, 221, 226, 227 
 Daily Mirror, the, 226, 227, 230 
 Dante, 50, 278, 279 
 
 Danyell, Mrs. Alice, 84, 95, 102, 103, 
 106, 138 
 
 Danyell, Captain Arthur, 139, 140, 309 
 
 Danyell-Tassinari, Herbert, 114, 115, 
 308 
 
 Darby, Dr. William Evans, 315 
 
 Darien, Georges, 163, 289, 290 
 
 Dash'wood's Drag, 32 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse, 113 
 
 Derbyshire, 30, 31 
 
 Dering, H., 43 
 
 Devonshire, Duke of, 216 ; and Duchess 
 of, 204 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 14 note, 39, 200 
 
 Dino, Due de, 68, 1 19 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 39, 295, 296, 297 
 
 " Distance Ride," Ouida's letter of pro- 
 test, 315 
 
 Dog of Flanden, ^, 52, 69, 93, 97, I Jo, 
 272 
 
 Dorian Grey, 157 
 
 Drane, Mr., 22, 23 
 
 Dreyfus case, Ouida and the, 166 
 
 Dublin, 132 
 
 Duff-Gordon, Sir Alexander, 43 
 
 Dufferin, Lord, 85 
 
 Du Maurier, George, 39, 158 
 
 Edmund, King of East Anglia, 14 
 
 Edward VI, 14 
 
 Edward VII, 185 
 
 Egypt, 118, 119, 169 
 
 Eliot, George, 39, 103, 104, 231 quoted 
 
 Ellis, S. M., 307 
 
 Endymion, 104 
 
 England, 30, 36, 38, 118, 123, 129, 132, 
 
 162, 168, 171, 172, 188, 189, 200, 
 
 203, 218 
 " Epipsychidion," Shelley's, 283 
 Eretvion, 187 
 Escott, R. S., 43 
 Essex, 189 
 
 Eton College Beagles, 320, 321 
 Europe, 205, 206, 208 
 Exhibition, Great, of 1851, 22 
 Fane, Violet, 133 
 
Index 
 
 Farinola, Marchese, 138, 139, 140, 141 
 Ferrara, z6o 
 First Violin, The, 95 
 
 Florence, 30, 52, 61, 62, 63, 68, 69, 72, 
 74) 83, 87, 89, 93, 94, 103, 107, 122, 
 
 132. 143. Hg* >53. 156. 172. 259. 
 
 z6o 
 FolU-Farine, 52, 56, 58 
 Fortnightly Review, the, 145, 160, 163, 
 
 179, 301 
 France, 36, 51, 93, 121, 168, 202 
 France, Anatole, 271 
 Franco-German War, 69-72 ; 163, 206, 
 
 289, 302 
 Frescoes, 122 
 Friendship, 19 ; 66 and note ; 76, 82, 86, 
 
 94, 97. 171, »68 
 Froude, 39 
 
 Gadda, Senator, 140, 141 
 
 Gambetta, 121 
 
 Garibaldi, 67 
 
 Genoa, 260 
 
 German Emperor, the, 188 
 
 Germany, 36, 37, 38, 63, 102, I2i, 
 
 129 
 Gilbert, W. S., 268 
 Gillick, Ernest J., 230 
 Gladstone, 39, 92, 119, 128 
 Goethe, 87 
 
 Gori, Ouida*8 maid, 102, 209 
 Grant, Miss Maria, 126 
 Granville de Vigne, j^ 
 Gray, the poet, quoted, 147 
 Great Britain, 129 
 Great Charter, the, 14 
 Grosfils, the, 19 1-22 1 passim 
 Guilderoy, 134, 150 
 Guy Livingstone, 43, 246 
 
 Hamilton, Henry, 102 
 Hamley, General, 43 
 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 14 
 Harding, Benjamin, 17 
 Harding, Commander Claud, 17, 23, 42, 
 76,94, 112 
 
 Harding, Mrs. (afterwards Mrs. Drane), 
 
 22, 23 
 Hardwick House, Bury St. Edmuuds, 24, 
 
 2;, 26, 213, 214, 216 
 Harris, Frank, 145 
 Harrison, Frederic, 96, 183 
 Hartington, Lord, 132 
 Hastings, 51 
 
 Haussonville, Comte d', 34 
 Held in 'bondage, 34 i 
 
 Helianthus, 185, 187, 191, 2Io, 21 1, 224 
 Henry VIII, 14 
 
 Herbert, Auberon, 178, 179, 217 
 Hoey, Cashel, 86 
 Homburg, 102, 131 
 House Party, tA, 150 
 Howard of Glossop, Winifred, Lady, 133, 
 
 224 
 Humane Review, the, 325 
 Humanitarian League, 161, 315 
 Hume, Mr. Hamilton, 40 
 Huntington, Mrs. H. C, 143, 153, 156, 
 
 228 
 
 Idalia, 34, 35, 42, 50, 51, 52, 55, 73, 
 
 149 
 Illustrated London News, the, 1 54 
 In a Winter City, 90, 97, 121, 268 
 Incontri, Marchesa, 141 
 India, 123, 161 
 In Maremma, 97, 116, 117, Il8, 149, 
 
 224, 245, 247 
 In Silk tAttire, 73 
 Ireland, state of, 108, 109 
 Italian Gazette, the, 317 
 Italian Society for the Prevention of 
 
 Cruelty to Animals, 314 
 Italy, 33, 42, 118, 130, 164, 171, 189, 
 
 218 ; King of, 119 ; Queen of, 105, 
 
 106, 119, 165 
 
 James, Henry, 74 ; quoted, 231, 234 
 
 Janet, Paul, 34 
 
 Japan, 204 
 
 John, King, 14 
 
 "Julian and Maddalo," Shelley's, 283 
 
 333 
 
Index 
 
 Kimberley, 173 
 
 Kingsley, 29 
 
 Knebworth, Ouida's visit to, 144 
 
 La Fontaine, 162 
 
 Landseer, 185 
 
 Langham Hotel, 43, 131, 133 
 
 Langton, Stephen, Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, 14 
 
 Laveleye, Emile de, 34 
 
 Lawrence, George, 43, 246 
 
 Lawson, Lionel, 43 
 
 Lee, Vernon, 68, 125, 222, 270, 271 
 
 Lee-Hamilton, Eugene, 68, 125 
 
 Leghorn, 191, 123 
 
 Leipzig, 39 
 
 Le Neve, Mrs. Louisa (»/e Thacker), 17 
 
 Lennox, Lord Henry, 43 
 
 Leopold, Prince, Duke of Albany, 67, 90 
 
 Letters from Ouida to — 
 
 W. S. Blunt, 168, 169, 172, 182, 191; 
 M. Carmichael, 220, 222, 223 ; S. C. 
 Cockerell, 148, 180-190 passim, 199- 
 229 passim ; G, Milner-Gibson-CuUum, 
 25, 26, 213-227 passim ; Earl Curzon, 
 123 ; Captain Danyell, 119, 139, 309 ; 
 Herbert Danyell, 114, 308 ; Mrs. 
 Danyell, 95, 103, 106, 107, 133 ; S. 
 M. Ellis, 307 ; Claud Harding, 42, 76, 
 106, 108, 112 ; Frederic Harrison, 96 ; 
 Mrs. Huntington, 143, 156, 157 ; 
 Marchesa Incontri, 128 ; A. M. S. 
 Methuen, 187 ; Sir J. Millais, 135 ; 
 Mme. Rame, 132 ; H. S. Salt, 161, 
 319 ; G. Sarmento, 176, 177, 194, 
 203-225 /fajKOT ; Baron Tauchnitz, 42— 
 224 passim j Mrs. Thornton, 212 ; 
 T. Fisher Unwrin, 155, 156, 178, 180, 
 182, 226 
 
 Lima, the River, 211 
 
 Lippincott, 36 
 
 Lippincott's Magazine, 69 
 
 LlandafF, Lady, 133 
 
 Lockvrood, Mrs. Maria (nf/ Maria Sutton), 
 16, 17 
 
 Lockwood, Miss Maria, 17 
 
 Lockwood, William Brown, 16 
 
 London, 29, 30, 36, 39, 51, 122, 131, 
 
 Longfellow, 43 
 Loti, Pierre, 282 
 Louis XII, King of France, 14 
 Louis Napoleon, 15, 22, 72 
 Lucca, 149, 153, 157, 209, 2IO, 214, 230 
 Lumley, Sir Augustus, 85 
 Lydgate, John, 14 
 
 Lytton, first Earl of (Owen Meredith), 
 69, 85, 122, 133, 144, 145, 150, 193 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, 53, 54 
 
 Maclean, 68 
 
 Macmillan, Messrs., 2 10, 224 
 
 Macmillan, Sir Frederick, 203 
 
 Madagascar, 168 
 
 Maeterlinck, 272 
 
 Mallock, W. H., 282 
 
 Mantua, 260 
 
 Mario, 50, 77, 102 
 
 Marsh, Mr., 34 
 
 Martians, Tie, 162 
 
 Mary Tudor, tomb of, 14 
 
 Massarenes, Tie, 158, 159, 160, 161, 178, 
 
 195, 244 
 Mazzanti, Enrico, 69 
 Mazzarosa, 220, 222 
 Melville, Whyte, 43, 58, 246 
 Meredith, George, 55, 144 
 Methuen, A. M. S., 156 
 Methuen*s Peace or War in Souti tAJrica 
 
 187 
 Milan, 67 
 
 Milan riots of 1898, Ouida on the, 163 
 Millais, Miss, 135 note 
 Millais, Sir John, 131, 135 
 Milner-Gibson, Mrs., 213, 214 note 
 Milner-Gibson, Thomas, 213 note 
 Mitford, Mary Russell, 233, 234 
 Montaigne, 202 
 Montegut, Emile, 34 
 Morning Leader, the, 169 
 Morris, William, i8i 
 Motis, 102, 149, 244 
 Moyses Hall Museum, Bury St. Edmunds, 
 
 26 note, 130 
 
 334 
 
Index 
 
 National Portrait Gallery, 131 
 Naumbnrg, 37 
 
 Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 133, 134, 150 
 New Franchise, The, 129 
 Nevt Magdalen, The, 73 
 New Monthly Magazine, The, 34, 3 5 
 New Priesthood, The, 150 
 Nineteenth Century, the, 163, 179 
 Noailles, Mme. de, 271 
 Norfini, Giuseppe, 230 
 North ^American Review, 163 
 Nuwa tAntologia, the, 163, 166, 167, i68j 
 179 
 
 Oakes, Mr., Z19 
 
 « Ode to the West Wind," Shelley's, 284 
 
 OUivier, 72 
 
 Orford, Lady, 64-67 ; 81, 84 
 
 Othmar, 128, 150 
 
 Otto, Dr. Curt, 39«oft 
 
 Ouida (Louise Rame or de la Rame), 
 birth, 15 ; childhood, 17-26 ; early 
 literary career, 29-58 ; residence in 
 Florence, 61-150 ; in Lucca, 153-195; 
 death, 229 ; character of, 231-235 ; as 
 novelist, 239-274 ; as critic, 277-298 ; 
 as humanitarian, 301-327 
 
 Paget, Walburga, Lady, 74, 84, 121 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette, the, 53 
 
 Palraerston, 92 
 
 Pascarel, 33, 55, 7^^ 75. 97. ^47 i 2S9-z6i 
 
 Peace Society, the, 315 
 
 Pelham, 38 
 
 Pemberton, Colonel, 43 
 
 Pergaud, Louis, 272 
 
 Peter Ihbetson, 158 
 
 PiccoUetti, Marchesa Isabella, 64 
 
 Pigeon shooting, 322, 323 
 
 Pipistrello, 128 
 
 Pisa, 167, 259 
 
 Pistoia, 260 
 
 Planche, J. R., 43 
 
 Princess Nafraxine, 128, 149 
 
 "Prometheus Unbound," Shelley's, 284 
 
 "Pseudonym Library," Unwin's, 155 
 
 Puck, 30, 40, 45, 51, 5*» 56, 58, 3°4 
 
 Punch, 98 
 
 Rame, Louis, Ouida's father, 15, 16, 18, 
 
 19, 20,22, 29, 51, 171 
 Ram6, Mme. {ne'e Susan Sutton), Ouida's 
 
 mother, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 29, 35, 36, 
 
 40, 41, 43, 84, 104, 105, 132 ; illness 
 
 and death of, 146, 147 
 Rame, or de la Rame, Maria Louise, see 
 
 Ouida 
 Reade, Charles, 39 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, 34, 93, 160 
 Revue de Paris, 1 60 
 Rhodes, Cecil, 174, 189 
 Riviera, the, 143 
 Robinson, Lionel, 43, 127, 128 
 Robinson, Mary, 68 
 Rodd, Sir Rennell, 122, 123, 194, 226 
 Rome, 74, 90, 91, 102, 103, 104, 105, 
 
 107, 122, 132, 177, 204, 217 ; Court 
 
 of Cassation at, 210, 211, 214 
 Rosebery, ^ord, 188 
 Rostand, 114, 177 
 Ruskin, John, no, 291 
 Russia, 129, 201, 202, 204, 211 
 Russo-Japanese War, 204, 205, 206, 301 
 
 St. Mary's Church, Bury St. Edmunds, 14 
 
 Ste-Beuve, 176 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 150, 162, 182 
 
 Salt, Henry S., 161, 315, 319, 321 
 
 Sand, George, 34, 55 
 
 Sandra Belloni, 55 
 
 San Remo, 229 
 
 Santa Barbara, 272 
 
 Sant' Alessio, 153, 167, 169, 228 
 
 Sargent, John, 68 
 
 Sarmento, Visconde George de, 130, 131, 
 
 175, 192, 203, 272 
 Savile, Lord, 85 
 Scandicci, 69, 74, in, 139 
 Schleinitz, 37 
 Scipio, 189 
 Semiramis, 108 
 Shakespeare, 278, 279 
 Shelley, 211, 282 ; 283-285 
 Shorter, Clement, 154 
 Siberia, 211 
 Sigebercht, King, 14 
 
 335 
 
Index 
 
 Sig""^ 77. 89, 97. "o; H7-255 
 
 Sil-uer Christ, The, 155 
 
 Simari, Marquis, 215 
 
 Simpleton, 73 
 
 Sketch, the, 154 
 
 Speaker, the, 181 
 
 Spedding, James, 14 
 
 Stael, Mme. de, 108 
 
 Star, the, 169 ' 
 
 Stead, W. H., 163 
 
 Strange, Willie, 308 
 
 Strangford, Lord, 52 
 
 Strapmore, 97, 98, 131 
 
 Strathmore, 34, 35, 36, 52, 54 
 
 Street, Mr. G. S., quoted, 245 
 
 Stufa, Marchese Delia, 68, 77 ; 86-89 j 
 
 103, 104, 105, 106, 122, 233 
 Suffolk, 13, 18, 29, 30, 31 
 Sutton, Mary Anne, 17 
 Sutton, Mrs., Ouida's grandmother, 15, 18, 
 
 29, 41, 42 
 
 Talleyrand, Comte de, 67, 68, 119 
 
 Tassinari, Cavaliere, 80, 81, 114, 137, 138 
 
 Tassinari, Mme., 144 
 
 Tassinari, the, 79, 103, 105, 111, 119, 142 
 
 Tauchnitz, Christian Bernhard, Freiherr 
 von, 18, 36, 37, 38, 39, 51, 63, 69, 73, 
 74. 89, 90, 101, 103, 107, ii8, 122, 
 129, 134, 142, 144, 145, 146 
 
 Tauchnitz, Christian Carl Bernhard, 
 Freiherr von, 37, 39, 153, 154, 191, 
 192, 224 
 
 Tauchnitz, Karl, 37 
 
 Taylor, Colonel Meadows, 43 
 
 TchiatchefF, Mme. de, 64, 67, 84 
 
 Teck, Duke and Duchess of, 67 
 
 Tennyson, 39 
 
 Thornton, Mrs, Conway, 212 
 
 Kmei, the, 120, 122, 135, 144, 173 
 
 Tinsley, 34 
 
 Tolstoy, 186, 199, 200, 201, 202, 207 
 
 Torquay, 52 
 
 Toxin, 155 
 
 Tricotrin, 52, 55, 56 
 
 Triiiy, 39, 158, 159 note, 160 
 
 TroUope, A., 39 
 
 Tuscany, 33, 72, 80, 89, 221, 259 
 
 Twain, Mark, 185 
 
 Two Little Wooden Shoes, 74, 97 
 
 Ttvo Offenders, 272 
 
 Tyrol, the, 63, 121 
 
 Under Tivo Flags, 34, 40, 52, 54, 96, 
 245 ; dramatized version of, 230 
 
 Unwin, T. Fisher, 155, 156, 175, 178, 
 180, 183, 208 
 
 Urbino, 260 
 
 Vegetarianism, Ouida and, 162 
 
 Venice, 143, 177 
 
 Viareggio, 193, 194, 205, 214, 220, 225, 
 
 228,^229, 230 
 Victoria, jjueen, 67, 185 ; Diamond 
 
 Jubilee of, 161, 162; Ouida's verses to, 
 
 183, 184 ; reign of, 297 
 Vieivs and Opinions, 156, 195, 277 
 Villa del Corona, Bellosguardo, 145, 146 
 Villa Farinola, 69 ; 74-80 ; 123, 125, 
 
 126, 127, 128, 130, 156 
 Villa Massoni, Sant' Alessio, 156, 191 
 Village Commune, A, 107, 109, no, ill, 
 
 149 
 Vineyard, The, by Mrs. Craigie, Ouida's 
 
 criticism of, 208 
 Vivisection, 323, 324 
 
 Waddington, M. and Mme., 84, 85 
 Walter, Mr., of The Times, 133 
 Wanda, 55, 121, 149 
 Waters of Edera, The, 175 
 Wellington, death and funeral of, 22 
 Wells's Anticipations, 1 86 
 Westminster Ga%ette, the, 169, 201 
 Wharton, Mrs., 271 
 Whitehall Revierw, the, 95 
 Wilde, Oscar, 133, 157 
 Wills, H. W., 125 
 Windsor, Lady, 84, 135, 144 
 Wolseley, Garnet, 119, 309 
 Wolverton, Lord and Lady, 85 
 Woman Suffrage, Ouida on, 285 
 Woodroffe, A. L., 125 
 Wright, Whittaker, 202 
 
 UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON 
 
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