Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/283

and believe about Ouida, and I have declared it to be "the truth" only as I see and realize truth. If it be falsehood I shall welcome with gladness any actual critic who so proves it. But to satisfy me of my own errors he must not by any means deport himself in the same arbitrary and downright fashion as I have done. He must bear in mind that if he desires to convince me of my one-sidedness he must not oppose it with dicta as unfoundedly hypothetical as my own. He must not be a man who profusely deals, as I do, in unverified declarations. He must logically elucidate to me where I am wrong and why I am right. It occurs to me, with that vanity of all essayists who temporarily have the field quite to themselves, that I am more often right than wrong. But if I am conclusively proved more often wrong than right by that system of acute investigation which only the science-bred critic understands, then I shall still feel that I have been of marked service to the writer thus empirically reviewed; for I shall at least have made myself a means of rousing careful and faithful consideration toward a series of imaginative works thus far either unreasonably contemned or irresponsibly lauded. The scientific tone and poise is so prevailing and favorite a one at the present time in works which a few years ago it rarely invaded, that I cannot help asking myself why the critics, who of all living persons are most easily accredited with the scientific tone and poise, should not more fondly and unhesitatingly employ it. They almost universally fail to employ it, however; and on this account the wandering verbiage of their estimates may be said to be as valueless as the announcements which I now pluck up boldness enough to print. But my boldness has a weak fibre or two of cowardice in it, I fear, after all. I should never have presumed to write of Ouida as I have written, had I not prized her compositions, frankly and de bon cœur, far more than I blame them. For this reason I have given my favorable views publicity. Ouida is so internationally popular that I am confident of friendly endorsements which will mitigate for me the necessary agony of being anathematized as her defender. There my cowardice stops—in a certainty of helpers and supporters. For the rest, if I am called names because I pay to a reigning genius what I hold as her rightful tribute, my stolid resignation will be equal to any martyr's. I shall endure the odium, certain of its ultimate destruction. Times change, and I think the day is not far distant when Ouida will be amazed at the sovereign fame which she herself has builded through all these years of failure and triumph, of weakness and power. But perhaps she will not be astonished at all, being dead. Or perhaps . . . But I leave that point for the religionists and the agnostics to fight out between themselves. One gets immortality of a