Moths by Ouida — page 307: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MOTHS. | 303 out reason at a mere whisper, and he knew that there were many who would rejoice to see the pure, cold, snow-white purity of Vere’s name fall into the mud of calumny—rejoice out of sheer wantonness, mere purposeless malice, mere love of a new sensa- tion. ‘‘ Blessed are the pure in heart,” says the Evan gelist; but society says it not with him. iie loved her; but it was an emotion no more akin to the noble, tender, and self-denying love of other days than to the shallow sensualities of his own. : Fie had been satiated with intrigue, surfeited with passion, underlying the capriciousness of a popular idol and the ardor of an amorous temper there were the patience and the loyalty of the mountaineer’s heart in him. Whosoever has truly. loved the Alpine heights in early youth keeps something of their force and something of their freshness and their chastity in his soul al- ways. Correze was an artist and aman of the world; but he bad been first and was still, under ail else, a child of nature; and he would utterly deny that nature was the foul thing that it is now painted by those who call themselves realists. He denied sabia a drunkard and a prostitute are all who are real in the world. ‘* When the soldier dies at his post, unhonored and unpitied, and out of sheer duty, is that unreal because it is noble?” he said, one night, to his companions. ‘** When the Sister of : Charity hides her youth and her sex under a gray shroud, and gives up her whole life to woe and solitude, to sickness and pain, is that unreal because it is wonderful? A man paints a splutter- ing ¢andle, a greasy cloth, a moldy cheese, a pewter can: * how real’ they cry. If he paint the spirituality of dawn, the light of the summer sea, the flame of Arctic nights, of tropic woods, they are called unreal, though they exist no less than the candle and the cloth, the cheese and the can. Ruy Blas is now con- demned as unreal because the lovers kill themselves: the realists forget that there are lovers still to whom that death would be possible, would be preferable to low intrigue and yet more lower- ing falsehood. They can only see the moldy cheese; they can: not see the sunrise glory. All that is heroic, all that is subsume, impersonal, or glorious, is derided as unreal. lt ts a dreary creed, Tt will make a dreary world. Is not my Venetian giass, with ita iridescent hues of opal, as real every whit as your pot of pewter Yet the time is coming when every one, moraliy and mentally at least, will be allowed no other than a pewter pot to drink out of, under pain of being ‘ writ down an ass ’—or worse. it isa dreary prospect.” And he would not be content with it. There were the Ruy Blas and the Romeo in*him, as there are in all men who aie at once imaginative and ardent. He had the lover in him of South. ern lands, of older days. He would watchin jong hours of cold midnight merely to see her image go by him; he would go down to the cliffon the Northern coast only to gather a spray of sweet- brier on the spot where he had seen her first; be would row in rough seas at dark under her villa wall in the South for the sake of waiching the light in her casement; his iove for ner Was @ see | a aa , . at - “4 KS ¢ = \E ==> \y »¢comicboo! ? : 7 a ii re W i » " : : ay't ; iy , i 7 #t