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Tuesday 2 December 2008

A subject in need of a writer

Allan Massie celebrates Ouida

She passed the second half of her life in Italy. Her popularity faded, as popularity usually does. She died in Viareggio, miserably poor, surrounded by her pet dogs, few of them house-trained. She remained ladylike to the last.

The romantic novels are, I suppose, curiosities, little more. But in 1897 she published one remarkable novel, The Massarenes. Its theme is the same as Trollope’s The Way We Live Now: the corruption of society by the power of money. It is indeed comparable to Trollope and as good, with an epigrammatic force that he only rarely achieved, and a generous indignation of which he was scarcely capable.

‘Never pay for anything,’ said Cocky, solemnly and truthfully. And it was probably the only truthful word that he had spoken for many years.

Or this:

Herbert Spencer has said that kindness and courtesy are indispensable to success. William Massarene knew better than that philosopher. He had lived amongst men, and not amongst books …. He was dreaded, obeyed, hated; that was all the feeling he cared to excite.

Or this, which is modern enough, confoundedly so:

‘Women be hanged’, said Brancepeth, with a sigh, his eyes still closed. ‘It’s the cocaine; cures a fellow, you know, but kills him. That’s what all the new medicines do.’

Ouida’s lucid, intelligent and often indignant essays are another matter altogether. She had no time for Tolstoy’s morality; it was ‘against nature and common sense’. He was dangerous because he was ‘an educated Christ’. She would have had equal scorn for America’s religious Right and for Muslim fundamentalists — both ‘against nature and common sense’.

And what of this?

Italian legislation confounds perpetually regulations with laws; is fidgeting, irritating, inquisitorial, insolent, harassing; its tyranny spoils the life of the populace; by means of its agents it penetrates into all the privacies of family life.

Isn’t this an exact description of how we are compelled to live today in New Labour’s New Britain? And what about this footnote?:

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