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Lawrence and "Ouida" have brought to their work a literary power which has given them considerable notoriety; and has placed them at the head of their particular school; but it is a school whose distinctive characteristics consist in extravagance, unhealthiness of tone, and falseness to nature.
She yawned again, and gazing round the room for fresh food for talk, caught Miss Zielinski with her eye. "Hullo, Ziely, what are you deep in?" She put her arm round the other's neck, and unceremoniously laid hold of her book. "You naughty girl, you're at Ouida again! Always got your nose stuck in some trashy novel."
This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at first sight imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing descriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a faint attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical time the glaring anachronisms perpetually committed as regards the vast lapse of geological chronology even by well-informed and intelligent people.
He began to stay out late at night, at this time, and she would hear him occasionally in the small hours of the early morning returning from a bachelor dinner party, or a big guest-night at mess, reeking, doubtless, of tobacco and stimulants. Verily, Ouida knows what she is writing about when she invariably adds "essences" to the toilet of her dissipated men.
We have a library at business, and I've gone through that. Most Besant I've read, and a lot of Mrs. Braddon's and Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli and, well a Ouida or so. They're good stories, of course, and first-class writers, but they didn't seem to have much to do with me. But there's heaps of books one hears talked about, I HAVEN'T read." "Don't you read any other books but novels?"
There recurs to me a sentence in a printed letter written by a celebrated novelist of the artificial school, a sentence I wish I could forget, describing Ouida as "a little terrible and finally pathetic grotesque." Does not a phrase like this reveal, even better than his own romances, the essentially non-human fibre of the writer's mind?
There are five novels in this little collection, and a play, and a pamphlet of poems, and a bundle of love-letters, all signed upon their title-pages by the Ouida of the period, the great Eliza Haywood.
"What are you doing not in your Scout uniform, Lance? We were just saying that it was too dreadful to think that our summer camping days in Beechwood Forest would soon be a thing of the past. Nevertheless, I will be kind of glad to return to my own family. Tory and Ouida and I have been making all sorts of plans for the winter. You must help us with some of them, Lance, you and Don."
By "Ouida," author of "Tricotrin," "Folle-Farine," "Under Two Flags," etc. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. The genius of "Ouida" is sui generis, and must in part create the standards by which it is to be judged. Her works are so different from the common type of modern novels that they demand to be looked at from a different point of view.
As for the sun-frog, we may hope that he has sunk for ever beneath the western wave. A modern novelist has boasted that her books are read 'from Tobolsk to Tangiers. This is a wide circulation, but the widest circulation in the world has probably been achieved by a story whose author, unlike Ouida, will never be known to fame.
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