When I expressed to Taylor my surprise that he should have seen nothing beautiful or poetic in "Ariadne," he frankly declared to me that he saw nothing commendable in any line that Ouida had written. But many of her lovely sketches had already appeared, and that exquisite idyl, "Bébée, or The Two Little Wooden Shoes," with its tearful tenderness and its fiery, gloomy, piercing finale of passion, had given proof of its author's wakening force and discipline.
Miss Preston's chief error, I should affirm, has been her somewhat careless huddling together of all Ouida's works and passing criticism upon them en bloc, without more than vague indication of the different periods in which they were produced, or the various stages of development which they exhibit. This talented lady, however she is to be praised for taking Ouida seriously (and that is a fine thing to have done at all, when it meant the flinging down of a gauntlet before disparagement no less insensate than cruel), has still failed in taking Ouida half seriously enough. I read with astonishment in the Atlantic review, for example, an extended notice of "Idalia," while such vastly better work as "Folle-Farine" or "In Maremma" was quietly ignored. Candidly, I hold that Miss Preston's entire consideration of Ouida has been as limited, unsatisfactory, and insufficient as it has been, when all circumstantial points are duly recognized, kindly, generous, and honorable.
I have already expressed it as my conviction that Ouida began very badly. She indeed began as badly as any genius did whose early and subsequent accomplishments in English letters are now known to us and may be read side by side with hers. Byron certainly showed far less power at the commencement of his career than she did at the commencement of her own; and those who possess my own deep veneration for the grandeur of Tennyson's poetry at its highest heights may have read some of the deplorable stanzas, modelled on a sort of hideous German-English plan, which have thus far, I believe, escaped the savage exposures of even his most merciless American publishers. I find myself involuntarily tracing a parallel between the young Ouida and the young poets who preceded her by a few decades more or less. But this tendency easily explains itself, since she is pre-eminently a port, notwithstanding her great gifts for romantic narration. The rhythmic faculty has been denied her, and for this reason she probably has written so much of that "poetical prose" which the average Englishman has been taught to hold in such phlegmatic contempt. If "Granville de Vigne" had appeared in rhymes as clever and as prolix as Owen Meredith's "Lucile," it would doubtless have won a place far above that bright, hybrid, pseudo-poetic popular favorite. But "Granville de Vigne"
