by Ouida
In one of the Prince Consort’s letters to his eldest daughter, then Crown Princess of Prussia, he tells her to set aside a portion of her money every year to meet the inevitable blackmail which will certainly be levied upon her. This blackmail is levied on every kind of success as well as on royalty. What is to be done? To submit to it, is repugnant to all one’s sense of justice; to rebel against it, however such resistance be justified, is often ruinous.
The true remedy would lie in a finer, juster, higher kind of public feeling; but where is there any likelihood of this arising in the world as it is?
My own feeling is very strongly always against the anonymity of the Press. Everyone surely should have the candour and courage to put his signature after his opinions. But, unfortunately, the Press gains so much importance (fictitious importance) from its anonymity that it is hopeless to ask for an unwritten or a written law on this subject. The arrogant ‘we’ would soon fall to zero in its influence on the public if it were signed by a Tom, Dick, or Harry, who, as Matthew Arnold used to say, forms his opinions from what he overhears on the knifeboard of a city or suburban omnibus. It is, perhaps, worthy of a nation which treats duelling as a penal offence to countenance anonymous assertions, anonymous opinions, anonymous bravado, and anonymous insults; but the result cannot be beneficial to the national character.
For many months in this past year, and in the year before that, hundreds of anonymous correspondents and leader-writers of the English Press have been doing their utmost by violence of language to drive to war the nations of England and of France. Is it not probable, even certain, that if all these writers had been obliged to sign their names to these furious articles, they would have paused before making themselves responsible for such language? I am often accused of using too strong language; but at all events I sign whatever I say, and I should be ashamed to do otherwise. An anonymous Press possesses dangerous privileges; such privileges as the mask gives a masquerade; it also, as I have said, acquires a dignity and an importance which are not its own; it is unfair and harmful; it protects exaggeration, hyperbole, flattery, and calumny, but it is too useful to too many not to be sustained; it can always serve the Bourses much better than a signed Press could do, and obey much more efficiently the nods and signs and cypher dispatches of the great financiers; but it is cowardly, and can easily, if it chooses, be dishonest.
It will, perhaps, be objected that the anonymity of the Press is more apparent than real; that the greater writers of the London Press at least are all recognised by their style, or well known by the initiated; but this knowledge is limited to a few hundred persons, and can never be shared by the general public, and it is on the general public that anonymous journalism has its chief influence.
To whom or what can we look for the pressure of an influence which would enforce honesty in literature? To public opinion? Undoubtedly we might, and we should, if public opinion were what it should be. But it is not, and, most probably, never will be. Breeding and manners grow worse every day; and it is they alone which could enforce that unwritten code which is so sorely needed. It is, after all, the absence of moral and honourable feeling in the world in general which makes the violation of these not only condoned by others but frequently profitable to the sinners. Take two instances of this: The sale of private letters both of the living and of the dead; and the seizure of the plots and characters of romances by people who are themselves dramatic adapters. The latter is the more trivial offence of the two; but it is as impudent as it is dishonest. It is injurious in a great degree, and extremely annoying to the original author, whose name is bawled and placarded about in connection with that of his robber, with no consent of his own, and usually to his extreme irritation, whilst his ideas are borrowed, and his characters travestied, and his entire creation belittled and vulgarised. Would the stalls be filled nightly to witness pieces stolen in this manner were the public governed by any unwritten law of respect for meum and tuum?
The other offence of selling letters is still more heinous; it is difficult to conceal the piracy of a romance for theatrical purposes, but it is perfectly easy to conceal the sale of letters; head it the sale of autographs, and it passes with entire impunity. There is, I believe, a law (a written law) that letters are the property of the writer of them; but it is absolutely a dead law; as dead as many of those of the Tudors or Stuarts. I think that letters ought to be the property of the recipient, but it should be an inalienable property which he should be no more able to sell than he is able to sell entailed property. To write a letter, even a brief one, is, in a sense, an act of confidence. In writing it we assume that its contents will not be used against us, either for injury or ridicule. If a conversation be considered confidential, how much more should a correspondence be so! A letter, in any degree intimate, is a hostage given into the hands of its recipient. We are justified in expecting that any sentiments, views, or opinions it may contain shall not go beyond the reader for whom they have been penned. This is so much to be desired in the interests of all letter-writers that no one, I think, can dispute its justice. What, then, are we to say of the constant appearance in catalogues of sales of letters of living, and of lately dead, persons?
If it be, as I understand, illegal, why is it permitted publicly? If it be not thus illegal, why does not general indignation render it impossible? I have more than once seen, in the autograph-albums of men and women of the world, letters of the most intimate character by distinguished writers; letters which have been evidently written in the careless, open-heartedness of a warm friendship, and which were lying on a drawing-room or library table, open to the sneer, the jest, or the wonder of everyone who turned over the pages of the book.
‘N’y touchez pas, N’y touchez pas! Je l’ai payé vingt louis!’ cried, in my hearing, a lady (a rastaquouère), who owned amongst other autographs a letter which it was especially wrong to place in such a collection, since the writer of it is great and is alive. Not for twenty louis, not for twenty thousand, should it ever have been purchasable. What traitor sold it? What servant stole it? How did it find its way into the market, that familiar and intimate thing? Through treachery, through death, through accident, through greed? We shall never know. It was certainly not through friendship.
Surely, also, some unwritten law should prescribe and limit the license of caricature. It is scarcely fair that, because a personality has interest and eminence attached to it, every draughtsman who can scrawl a line can make that personality hideous or ridiculous at pleasure.
‘You cannot like it?’ I said once to a person of considerable eminence, who was the subject that week of one of the ‘Portraits’ of a satirical and political English journal of wide circulation.
‘No, I do not!’ he answered. ‘Of course, I should not object to it if it were a pen-and-ink drawing being handed about to amuse people in my own country house; but when one knows that it will be seen by tens of thousands of people who will never see me in the flesh, the thing becomes annoying.’
His opinion must be shared by all those who are thus pilloried, even if they think it politic to laugh and seem indifferent.
It is ‘the penalty of distinction,’ the offenders reply. But why should distinction be weighted by a penalty, like the successful racer? I believe that the world in general is the loser by this kind of persecution; for dislike to the vulgar ridicule which snarls at the heels of all eminence in this day, keeps aloof from the public arena men who would do honour to it, but whose strength of intellect is accompanied by shyness, pride, and sensitive reserve. Some unwritten law should also render impossible those verbal libels which are continually published by persons cunning enough to keep to the windward side of law in the offensive matter which they write. This is again another penalty-weight laid on the back of the racer who has won; and it is precisely this kind of penalty from which an unwritten law, in the Press, and in the world, should protect such winners of the gold cups of life.
The unwritten law of common honour sho
uld make such a book as that which was recently issued on Bismarck impossible, because those who would have the power of writing it would be above the temptation of doing so. There may be a strong temptation to say what we know better than any other of one whose name is eminent. But I doubt whether we should yield to the temptation, even if we ourselves suffer in reputation by not doing so. But the bookmakers of the world have no such excuse as this temptation offers; they are merely footmen who have listened with pricked ears whilst they waited at table on their masters, and when their master is powerless to chastise, sell what they remember or invent. Even where it is not libellous, the sickening intrusion into private life which nowadays disgraces journalism must, to any temper of any refinement and reserve, be an offence irritating beyond endurance. There are flatteries and intrusions beside which censure is sweet and obloquy would be welcome.
There is a great pathos in the fact that the greatest man of these last fifty years, the man of blood and iron, should, as soon as he lies in his coffin, be insulted by such a book as this. The hand in its steel gauntlet, which welded fragments into a nation, is powerless to defend its owner against betrayal and false witness. The vulgar, insatiable curiosity of the general world breeds such traitors as these makers of post-mortem recollections; breeds them, nourishes them, recompenses them. There would be no supply if there were no demand. The general world has a greedy appetite for diseased food; as with its jaws it devours putrid game, decayed oysters, and the swollen livers of tortured geese, so it loves to devour with its frothy brain all that belittles, ridicules, dishonours, or betrays the few amongst it — the very few! — who are above it in mind, in will, in force, in fame. ‘Come, come!’ they cry to the great man’s servants when the great man lies dead; ‘tell us, you who saw him in his hours of abandonment, tell us of all that can drag him down nearer to our level! Tell us of his varicocele, tell us of his dyspepsia, tell us of his caprices, tell us of his humours, tell us of his tears when his poisoned dog lay dying — you saw them through the keyhole — tell us of his hasty words, his pettish foibles, his human mortal waywardness — you know so much about them, you who waited behind his chair and filled his tobacco-pouch — come, come, comfort us; his great shadow seems still to lie upon the earth and make us small and crawling insects crushed by his spurred boot — come, come, comfort us! Tell us, show us, make us happy belittling him; let us, the envious, the puny, the mean, rejoice, for you who cleaned his boot and held his bare foot in your hired hand, can tell us that he, the maker of emperors and of nations, he, the Mighty, had Achilles’ heel!’ For there is an unwritten law, not of literature but of life, which decrees that the jealousy of the small soul for the great soul shall be cruel and deathless as Fate.
IX. AUBERON HERBERT
This little square book, the colour of meadow forget-me-nots, is so modest and simple that it may very easily be passed over in a period which has little sympathy with tenderness of feeling and simplicity of expression. The verses, of which this small volume is full, resemble the stornelli and rispetti of Italian songs rather than any kind of verse which has preceded them in English literature, unless it be the earliest and briefest songs of Robert Lytton, with which they have a certain kindred, both in their measure and in their themes. 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; in this tiny azure booklet he is also a poet, or, as he would rather himself say, a singer. The verse springs from the depths of his heart, and calls to those who, like himself, have loved and suffered and found nothing endure except the consolations of natural beauty.
‘In the West is the golden glory, As the great king goes to his rest; In the East the purple staineth The hills from foot to crest.
‘And I stand and look in wonder Till my heart is cleft in twain, Half for the vision of glory, And half for the dying pain.’
Like the Italian canzone, these little lyrics, brief as a summer breeze, which momentarily sways the stalks of grass, must be heard with the ear of the heart. Coldly criticised by the mind alone, they will lie like the gathered field-poppy, inert and colourless. They are the cries of the heart, like those brief verses which the southern lover sings to the sobbing lute beneath the moon. He who has killed his heart in the pressure of the world will find nothing in them. They who are steeped in the chill indifference of mundane interests will no more heed them than such heed the skylark’s or the linnet’s song, which they resemble. They were not written in the study, or fashioned with the pruning-knife; they were born by the edge of the sea, in the woodland shade, by the clover path of the country hedge, in the falling rain of the peach and pear-blossoms, in the starlight above the olives. They are the elder children of the lonely shores and flowering pastures; they have never known the gaslight of the streets or the electric light of the drawing-room. They are as sweet and pure as violets.
To those who know, and respect as they should be respected, the virile and original philosophies of the writer, there is an added charm in these tender blossoms in the fact that they spring from the same intelligence as that which proclaims individualism in its boldest forms and attacks the tyrannies of social and political superstitions.
They are but little songs, short as a ripple of music from a woodlark’s throat, of no more account, if you will, than the blue stars of mouse-ear by the brook’s side, than the dog-rose on the bank; too simple it may be said, speaking of emotions too trite, of sorrow too common, of sights too familiar, in language that the dullest can scarce fail to understand. Yes; no doubt, they are like field-flowers, like hedge-birds; they claim to be no more than these; they were not wrestled for as Wordsworth wrestled for an ode beneath the shadow of Rydal, or as Coleridge strove with the rebellious forces of a halting sonnet when lying down face foremost amongst ‘the common grass.’ They are spontaneous utterances, as natural as the ripple of the water over the cresses in a brook’s bed beneath willow and alder. It may be easy to dismiss them with indifference, to underrate them with hypercritic sneer, and assuredly those who take pleasure in the strained archaic obscurities of much modern verse will find no more charm in them than the languid æsthete, musing over the pages of Verlaine and Mallarme, would find in a sea-wet breeze blowing across a hayfield at early morning. There is no studied mannerism, no sought-for darkness of expression, no exaggerated ecstasy or pessimism; there is such a natural feeling, of joy as of sorrow, as comes to the soul at once robust and sensitive; and these are expressed with frank, unstudied naïveté, with the candour as of a child, and the self-control of a man blent in their simplicity. ‘Look in your own heart and write,’ has been the only precept which their creator has obeyed.
The most intense attachment in them is for the sea. The sea, whether those grey sad tides which sway from the sands of Christchurch to the rocks of Freshwater, or that azure radiance which rolls from the headland of Antibes to the gardens of Porto Fino, has the same magic for Auberon Herbert that it has for Algernon Swinburne; a charm much calmer and more peaceful, but not less strong. Many of these little poems speak of the sea only; are full of that happy sense of return and recognition which so many amongst us feel when, after absence from the sea, we tread again its wet salt sands, and feel its white spray dance against our cheek. Swinburne is the great laureate of ocean, the chords of whose mighty lyre reverberate with the ocean storm and echo the thunder of breakers breaking upon iron shores, and of billows sweeping from pole to pole. The song of Auberon Herbert is the homing cry of the sea-swallows swaying on the crest of the waves.
‘Back to the Sea Mother’ he calls these yearning lines: —
‘Kindest of mothers, from whom I have strayed, Back again, tired, I come to thee, Chaunting and crooning the old wave-song; Sing it, oh! sing it again to me!
‘Weary and spent as the hour draws near, Hush me to sleep with the soft wave-song; Wash all the cares away, wash all the strifes away, All the old pains that to living belo
ng.
‘Down at thy side I place me to rest; Slowly my senses are stealing from me; Passions and pleadings have ceased in my breast, Gently my spirit floats away free.’
And yet again: —
‘Thou great strong sea, fast lock’d in dreams, Clouds journeying to and fro, Whose tender blue the stars come through, I can but love ye so!
‘Ye take possession of my heart, And all my life renew; Like grain of dust I grow a part, A small stray part of you.
‘Thy sounds, O storm, are far and faint, As thou stridest over the sea; And we need thy breath from many a taint To set us clean and free.
‘But when thou comest on mighty wings, Deal gently with forest and tree, For my heart is woe for the goodly things That to-morrow will cease to be.
‘Yes! I shall go and you will dream, And drink the pale blue sky, Beneath the hill that hugs you round As silver days go by.