Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida | Page 2

should be,
only, alas, the devil put it into the mind of man to build cities! A good
life for the soul and the body: and from it this sea-born Joy came to
seek the Ghetto!
* * *
With a visible and physical ill one can deal; one can thrust a knife into
a man at need, one can give a woman money for bread or masses, one
can run for medicine or a priest. But for a creature with a face like
Ariadnê's, who had believed in the old gods and found them fables,
who had sought for the old altars and found them ruins, who had
dreamed of Imperial Rome and found the Ghetto--for such a sorrow as
this, what could one do?
* * *
Some said I might have been a learned man, had I taken more pains.
But I think it was only their kindness. I have that twist in my brain,
which is the curse of my countrymen--a sort of devilish quickness at
doing well, that prevents us ever doing best; just the same sort of thing
that makes our goatherds rhyme perfect sonnets, and keeps them
dunces before the alphabet.
* * *

If our beloved Leopardi, instead of bemoaning his fate in his despair
and sickening of his narrow home, had tried to see how many fair
strange things there lay at his house door, had tried to care for the
troubles of the men that hung the nets on the trees, and the innocent
woes of the girl that carried the grass to the cow, and the obscure
martyrdom of maternity and widowhood that the old woman had gone
through who sat spinning on the top of the stairs, he would have found
that his little borgo that he hated so for its dulness had all the comedies
and tragedies of life lying under the sound of its tolling bells. He would
not have been less sorrowful, for the greater the soul the sadder it is for
the unutterable waste, the unending pain of life. But he would never
have been dull: he would never have despised, and despising missed,
the stories and the poems that were round him in the millet fields and
the olive orchards. There is only one lamp which we can carry in our
hand, and which will burn through the darkest night, and make the light
of a home for us in a desert place: it is sympathy with everything that
breathes.
* * *
Into other lands I wandered, then, and sought full half the world. When
one wants but little, and has a useful tongue, and knows how to be
merry with the young folk, and sorrowful with the old, and can take the
fair weather with the foul, and wear one's philosophy like an easy boot,
treading with it on no man's toe, and no dog's tail; why, if one be of this
sort, I say, one is, in a great manner, independent of fortune; and the
very little that one needs one can usually obtain. Many years I strayed
about, seeing many cities and many minds, like Odysseus; being no
saint, but, at the same time, being no thief and no liar.
* * *
Art was dear to me. Wandering through many lands, I had come to
know the charm of quiet cloisters; the delight of a strange, rare volume;
the interest of a quaint bit of pottery; the unutterable loveliness of some
perfect painter's vision, making a glory in some dusky, world-forgotten
church: and so my life was full of gladness here in Rome, where the
ass's hoof ringing on a stone may show you that Vitruvius was right,

where you had doubted him; or the sun shining down upon a cabbage
garden, or a coppersmith's shreds of metal, may gleam on a signet ring
of the Flavian women, or a broken vase that may have served vile
Tullia for drink.
* * *
Art is, after nature, the only consolation that one has at all for living.
* * *
I have been all my life blown on by all sorts of weather, and I know
there is nothing so good as the sun and the wind for driving ill-nature
and selfishness out of one.
* * *
Anything in the open air is always well; it is because men now-a-days
shut themselves up so much in rooms and pen themselves in stifling
styes, where never the wind comes or the clouds are looked at, that
puling discontent and plague-struck envy are the note of all modern
politics and philosophies. The open air breeds Leonidas, the factory
room Felix Pyat.
* * *
I lit my pipe. A pipe is a pocket philosopher, a truer one than Socrates.
For it