For many years, the novels of Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé, 1839–1908Footnote ¹), were rejected as offering nothing but commercially valuable “voluptuous daydreams” (Leavis 164) that catered to “the degenerate taste of the new reading public of the commercial middle class” (Elwin 282). Since the late 1980s, however, they have been read with renewed interest. Ouida has come to be recognised as a “forgotten mother” of the 1890s aesthetic movement (Schaffer, Female Aesthetes and “Origins”); as a significant player on the anti–feminist side in the New Woman debates of the 1890s (Gilbert); and, with seeming paradox, as a writer keen to explore sexual transgression (Jordan “Writings” and “Enigma”; Schroeder “Feminine”). While there has been a recent monograph on Ouida's fiction (Schroeder and Holt), her journalism remains largely ignored. In 1882, Ouida began to write literary criticism together with analyses and commentaries on the politics of the state and the organisation of society for several journals, including the Gentleman's Magazine, the Fortnightly Review, the Westminster Review, the North American Review and the Italian Nuova Antologia. This article examines Ouida's late journalism, with some adversion to her late fiction, in an attempt to establish her core set of political values at this time.

There are various potential hazards with such an undertaking. First, Ouida herself resisted political systematization, as the epigraph suggests. Then again, an attempt to recreate a politically unified vision risks eliding the very considerable differences between individual pieces she published in diverse periodicals, as well as differences between her journalism and her novels. Her non–fiction journalism was subject to constraints other than those of her fiction such as a need for topicality, editorial preference for the confirmation of the periodical's “character” by recycling or referring to previous issues, the necessity of writing specific numbers of words and the consequent use of padding, and so on. In her articles for the Fortnightly Review, for example, Ouida was clearly writing for a Fortnightly reader who debated topical issues and was aware of previous pieces in the periodical to which she made explicit reference. She seems conscious of the periodical's practices and their modification by successive editors, and writes accordingly. Contentious and argumentative, she was never unacceptably so, unlike Charles Malato whose 1894 article in praise of anarchists had incensed the owners of the Fortnightly so much they forced the editor to resign. Ouida always directed her ire in the Fortnightly against safe, even conventional subjects, enabling readers and her editors to enjoy her fury in the knowledge that it was only an extreme version of what they already felt and knew. A comparison with what Ouida wrote in other journals shows how she varied her topics and emphases according to the periodical she was writing for. It was in the North American Review, for example, that she was most strident in her views on state interference (“The State as an Immoral Teacher”) and the New Woman (presented as mainly an English phenomenon). It was there too that she was most critical of the “Vulgarity” of modern England and the failure of Christianity. She was also more restrained in her criticism of the United States there than in her work published in Europe. On the other hand, in the Nuova Antologia, an Italian periodical that she probably did not expect her American or British audience to read, she savaged the United States as a capitalist carrier of corrupt modernity even worse than Britain: “La sete d'oro divora la nazione” (“The thirst for gold devours the nation,” “Sulla Decadenza” 199). The violence of “[S]ky scrapers, raschiatrici del cielo!”Footnote ² against nature is symptomatic of the American “passione per ogni cosa che sia enorme, costosa, eccentrica” and “smania della grandezza” (“passion for everything enormous, costly, eccentric” and “obsession with size”). Above all, she castigated American religious and moral Puritanism (“Sulla Decadenza” 199–200). In the Nuova Antologia, also, she made her most vicious attack on Joseph Chamberlain. When she came to translate the piece for a British audience in her 1900 collection Critical Studies, she considerably toned it down, rendering it more elegant and much less physically graphic.Footnote ³ Although she had problems with her publishers from time to time, her fiction was not subject to any of these conditions.

Nonetheless, despite these differences and Ouida's claims to be “impartial” in party politics, I shall argue that it is possible to identify a coherent political standpoint from which she wrote. This was a variant of “Individualism.” As work by Edward Bristow and M. W. Taylor has shown, Individualism was in many ways an extreme fin–de–siècle version of laissez faire. Much discussed between about 1880 and 1910, it can be regarded as a version of philosophical radicalism originating in the 1840s and '50s turned from liberal ideals to conservative ends; indeed, in the 1920s, Beatrice Webb called Individualists “the outraged survivors of philosophic Radicalism” who “became the pets of Conservative drawing rooms” (186). Individualists sometimes claimed to be the true heirs of a Liberalism that had been hijacked and corrupted by an unhealthy emphasis on state intervention under Gladstone's second ministry (1880–85) and this historical transformation fits in remarkably well with Ouida's own biography: her childhood diary shows her and her mother to be ardent Liberals in 1852 (Huntingdon 255–57), and “liberal” was a term Ouida continued to use with approbation throughout her writing, decrying only its hypocritical descendant, the “pseudo–liberalism of the age” which “has become only the tyranny of narrow minds vested under high–sounding phrases” (Village Commune 317).

The remainder of this article is organised in three main parts. Starting from a consideration of Ouida's political influences, the first will outline the ways she may be defined as an Individualist, while the second and third parts will investigate to what extent she deviated from Individualism to create her own particular variant.

Ouida as Individualist

If Individualism is known at all today, it is though Oscar Wilde's “The Soul of Man under Socialism” which had been published originally in the Fortnightly of February 1891. Individualism in general was strongly opposed to Socialism, but, as Josephine Guy has shown (see esp. 79), Wilde had suggested the conceit, outrageously amusing for the time, that, if taken to logical extremes, Socialism and Individualism were actually the same. It is possible that Ouida was inspired by Wilde's essay to write “The State as an Immoral Teacher” in the North American Review, the piece which most clearly showcases her enthusiasm for Individualism and which followed the Wilde essay by six months. But it is not necessary to posit a single origin for her interest. Media interest in Individualism goes back at least as far as March 1871 when a meeting in Manchester was held “to consider the possibility of forming a National League or Association for watching, restraining, and influencing legislation, especially in matters affecting the interests of women, and the personal rights and liberties of the people” (1913 Annual Report). In November that year the Vigilance Association was founded, having already been discussed in a leader in the London Times (30 August 1871: 7). The Times piece was quickly translated into Italian and published in the Florentine newspaper La Nazione just a few months before Ouida arrived in Tuscany in the autumn of 1871 (9 September 1871: 2). Its commentary presented Individualism as a major step forward in political thought.

Even from this very brief account of the dissemination of Individualism, one can appreciate that Ouida, though resident in Italy from 1871 until her death in 1908, could have followed its development in England without difficulty either in the Italian press or the British, the latter being easily available either by subscription, by purchase from Edward Goodban the English bookseller in Florence, or through borrowing from or reading at the Vieusseux library there (Cook, Baedeker). Ouida seems to have had two main contacts amongst Individualists, both of whom she may have encountered through their connection with the Fortnightly Review. One was W. H. Mallock, the dedicatee of her first collection of essays, Views and Opinions in 1895.Footnote ⁴ He and Ouida often shared print space in the Fortnightly; an episode of his serial A Human Document, for example, formed the last item of the Fortnightly issue of January 1892, in which Ouida first appeared in the periodical with her piece on “The Blind Guides of Italy.” While Mallock was a conservative apologist and opponent of socialism, he mixed this with certain elements of Individualism (Kirk 396–410; Barker 73–75). The other key contact for Ouida was Auberon Herbert, one of the most vocal apostles of an extreme form of Individualism called “Voluntaryism.” A frequent contributor to the American journal Liberty, Herbert's most remarkable platform was resistance to all compulsory taxation upon which many of his arguments were ultimately based (Watner). In a review of his poetry she published in the Nineteenth Century in 1896 and republished in Critical Studies four years later, Ouida called Herbert “a daring and original thinker, a sociologist who lives three centuries before his time, a fearless preacher of new liberties and ideal creeds” (“Noticeable Books” 760). She had, however, publically allied herself with him several years before, with praise for his essay “Under the Yoke of Butterflies” right at the start of her fourth essay for the Fortnightly (“Sins”). Herbert's essay had appeared in the periodical in two parts in October 1891 and January 1892, the last being the very issue in which Ouida's first piece for the Fortnightly was published.

It was not in the Fortnightly, however, but in the North American Review in 1891 that Ouida was most explicit in her advocacy of Individualism. There, following a well–tried rhetorical strategy of highlighting a problem before recommending a solution, she outlined a series of assaults by the state on individual liberty. Finally, she introduced and defined the antidote for these social ills: Individualism, “[t]he only sect which has any conception of liberty” (“State” 202).

Despite Ouida's definition of Individualism as a “sect” and despite bodies such as the Liberty and Property Defence League, the Vigilance Association (later the Personal Rights Association) with its Journal of the Vigilance Association for the Defense of Personal Rights, several other periodical organs and large numbers of books and pamphlets that defined and promoted it, Individualism was never a coherent body of thought. It was, indeed, rife with internal division and disagreement. Wordsworth Donisthorne, one of the leaders of what M. W. Taylor has termed the “academic school” of Individualism, dismissed Auberon Herbert as the “reductio ad absurdum of ‘let be'” in an article in the Westminster Review. Ouida herself, who corresponded with Herbert for many years, admitted in a letter on his death in 1906 that “his eccentricities obscured the real brilliancy and admirable intuitions of his mind. Most people saw the absurdities of the surface, and did not see the mine of wisdom beneath” (Ouida to Sydney Cockerell, November 8, 1906). Women's rights campaigners were prominent in the Vigilance Association, Josephine Butler being one of its founding members and its Journal even being edited by a woman (Bland 37–38). The anti–feminist Ouida would not have approved, just as she was sceptical of the value of the idea of “progress” that most Individualists promoted (one notes in the above quotation from “The State as an Immoral Teacher” the parenthetical doubt that the world can be saved). Such disagreement was consonant with Individualist beliefs about the value of everyone's ability to think for themselves. The core value that Individualists shared, indeed, was a belief in the value of each person's liberty to think and to act for themselves. As a result, they opposed state intervention in all its forms. It is her consistent commitment to individual liberty, her opposition to the state, and her rigorous working through of the implications of both that constitute Ouida's strongest links to Individualism.

Individualists defined liberty as the absence of constraint and control, a notion of negative liberty they took from Herbert Spencer, especially his 1884 The Man versus the State. Ouida several times praised Spencer's writings, singling him out as “il grande pensatore inglese” in an article in the Nuova Antologia. There she nicely summed up the defining Individualist “creed”: “‘governatemi il meno che voi potete’ – cioè lasciatemi in libertà di regolare la mia vita come meglio mi pare” (“‘govern me as little as possible’ – that is, let me be free to rule my life as seems best to me”; “Decadenza” 197). Elsewhere she wrote, “True liberty surely consists in not interfering with or constraining any one in any way who is not guilty of absolute crime” (Village Commune 317) and “Liberty and government are dog and cat; there can be no amity or affinity between them” (“Legislation of Fear” 560). Sometimes her thinking on these matters took convoluted, even ingenious, forms. In “Italy I,” an essay in the Fortnightly in 1896, she wrote of Italian peasants who longed for anarchy, “side by side with the rooted bigotry of church superstition” because of the artificial constraints, physical, mental and financial, laid on them by what she regarded as the colonial Piedmontese state and by the church (356). In the towns, provoked by the same state apparatus, people longed for socialism. Meanwhile the majority of the monied and landed classes had become conservatives of the “snobbish, stupid intensely silly type” to whom “[t]he dread of Socialism gives a strength which [they] would otherwise not possess” (356). In other words, even those who seem to derive most advantage from the state, the conservative wealthy, are in the final analysis the state's mere products and unthinking slaves, albeit at one remove (356).

Ouida concurred with Mallock and Herbert in many implications of their commitment to personal liberty. In common with Mallock (e.g. his “Marriage and Free Thought” which, reflecting on the Parnell scandal, explores the limits of what is publishable about marriage), Ouida opposed all censorship on both moral and political grounds. Not only did it constitute state interference in private life when the private by definition was a matter for the individual – “I would leave to society a very large liberty in the matter of its morality or immorality” (“Sins of Society” 781) – but also she regarded it as impossible “to create morality by Act of Parliament” (“Conscription” 213). Ouida's comment on Wilde's prosecution in 1895, for example, was that she did “not think the law should meddle with these offences” (Letter to Mrs. Huntingdon quoted in Lee 157–58). She many times complained about the oppressive press laws in Italy and England. In an article on “Georges Darien” from 1897, she rhetorically compared France, the land “in which it is possible to tell the most truth,” with England and the situation of the “unhappy and martyrised Vizetelly” who had been imprisoned for publishing translations of Zola (341). In “The Legislation of Fear” from 1894, she asserted the necessity for “the absolute freedom” of the printing press in the interests of political stability (559). She repeated this belief in a variety of contexts in her private letters, detailing the various ways she observed the Italian state preventing freedom of speech, from checking telegrams to blocking the publication of certain views. In a letter to Sydney Cockerell, she expresses her fear of publishing “even in London the truth as it stands [for] they [the Italian state] would probably send me out of this country, at a moment's notice, between two gendarmes” (25 August [1900]).

Consonant with the long passage quoted previously from “The State as an Immoral Teacher,” most Individualists resisted “the dicta of priests.” Ouida indeed regarded religion in general as a mere “myth” that was socially and morally damaging. In her essay “Has Christianity Failed?” she described Christianity as “the dream of a poor man” which “by its teaching that the body should be despised . . . has brought on all the unnameable filth which was made a virtue in the monastic orders” (216, 218). Again, she carried this conviction through in her private correspondence. In a letter to the theologian Professor Henry Drummond which she wrote after reading his 1883 Natural Law in the Spiritual World, she dismissed “Christian religion as a mere phase of credulity . . . a wholly un–intellectual faith.” “[M]inisters of education” got equally short shrift because “[t]here is already far too much academic training, creating what Guglielmo Ferrero (himself a most brilliant scholar) calls the ‘intellectual proletariate’ [sic]; a multitude of youths trained to nothing except mental exercises, and looking forward to being maintained by the State” (“Italy I” 353). In a distant echo of Dickens's denunciation of Gradgrindian rote learning, she claimed that “natural intelligence” was destroyed by state education, and instead “ordered to give place to the parrot–phrase and automaton–learning of the school–crammed puppet” (Village Commune 324). She reiterated often that if people wanted to be educated, then they should teach themselves. While perhaps a derivative of a Smilesian commonplace from three decades earlier, she was also agreeing with Auberon Herbert who campaigned vigorously against state education (see e.g., Herbert's Right and Wrong). Since state–funded education was dependent, Herbert argued, on the “forced contribution” of the rich, the rich sought to maintain control of it. They thus deprived ordinary people of the power to think with real independence. “It is plain,” wrote Herbert, “that the most healthy state of education will exist when the workmen, dividing themselves into natural groups according to their own tastes and feelings, organize the education of their children without help, or need of help, from outside” (Rights 25).

If many of Ouida's views match those of Herbert, what particularly associates her thinking with Mallock is her definition of the term “Genius.” Genius must be free from all constraint, she affirmed, for “Genius does not easily obey” and therefore “to the young man of genius or of merely great talent,” conscription, like state education, would be injurious (“Conscription” 212). But Genius is also a guiding light to society: “The influence of some great gentleman might do much to purge the coarseness and commonness of society out of it” (“Sins” 789). For Ouida, socialism was especially damaging to Genius since it could not tolerate the exceptional: “The whole tendency of Socialism, from its first tentatives in the present trades unions, is to iron down humanity into one dreary level, tedious and featureless as the desert” (“Sins” 797). Mallock's concept of the “man of Ability” was similarly key for his political argument. In his typically elegant essay “Fabian Economics” of 1894, he noted that “The fundamental error in the socialistic analysis” comprised an elision of the difference between “Labour” and “Ability” – a mistake inherited from the classical economists on whom socialist thought ultimately depended (168).Footnote ⁵ “Labour” Mallock defined as “a kind of industrial exertion which begins and ends with the particular task or material on which each labourer is engaged – whether it is carrying a sack of coals, fixing a brick into its place, riveting the plates of a ship, or scraping a true surface for the slide–valve of a steam–engine” (169). “Ability,” on the other hand, referred to “the exertions of the inventing, the discovering, and managing class whose interests are represented [by socialists] as being not only different from, but opposed to, those of the labouring class” (168). Claiming that socialists recognised this difference in “unconscious admissions” (171) and tried to reconcile the two terms without success, Mallock went so far as to claim that “[t]he entire growth of the modern world is an increment which has been added by Ability to the old product of Labour” (170). Not only that, but men of Ability were inherently superior because “though the average Labourer is not a potential man of Ability, the man of Ability is a potential Labourer; therefore men of Ability could always produce more, per head, than average Labourers, even though these last gave them no assistance whatsoever” (171). Mallock's definition is thus similar to the thinking behind Ouida's assertion that the “man of genius” is “many–sided; nature has given him the power to be so; but the mass of men do not and cannot obtain this Protean power; to do one thing well is the utmost that the vast majority can well hope to do” (“Fallacies” 142).

It must not be thought, however, that Ouida was a slavish adherent to the Individualist beliefs of Mallock or Herbert. Her attitude to conservatism is a case in point. Since Individualists opposed any social reform that would involve action by the state, their policies were open to the charge of being ultra–conservative, devoted to the preservation of wealth and power in the hands of those who already had it.Footnote ⁶ Though this was often the case in intention, it was denied even by openly conservative supporters such as Mallock. He was to write in 1914, for example, that the Individualist protested “only against change in the organic structure of society” (Social Reform 375–76). His use of the term “organic” was key, for the Individualist argument, again derived from Herbert Spencer's The Man versus the State, was that the very existence of present institutions meant that they had evolved “naturally” thus.

Ouida's relationship to conservatism was more ingenuously ambiguous than Mallock's rhetorical sleight of hand. In a letter to Lady Dorothy Neville about the difficulties of publishing one of her own novels (presumably Guilderoy) she defined the work as “a very harmless novel, very Conservative, and containing a eulogy of Lord Salisbury” (Neville 205). Yet in “Imperialismo inglese” (738), Ouida considers Disraeli (Lord Salisbury) one of the most corrupting forces on the English character –and it is the “second,” conservative–imperialist, Disraeli (not the younger supporter of the Whigs) to whom she refers. In The Massarenes, Ouida's last completed novel, the conservative party is consistently presented as corrupt, and perfectly happy to sell honours for money (though no other party is portrayed as behaving any better). This is a vision quite in harmony with her comments elsewhere on conservatives “of the intensely silly type” (“Italy I” 356). While Ouida had correspondents who were members of the Conservative party (and none regular from other parties), she could be critical of them. George, Baron Curzon, Viceroy of India, she describes as “artificial & conventional, and may I add superficial” (Letter to Blunt).

Much less ambiguous is Ouida's commitment to another aspect of the concept of the “conservative,” which today has metamorphosed into conservationism: the concern to preserve ancient buildings and nature from the vandalism of capitalism. As my epigraph shows, she loved conservatism “when it means the preservation of beautiful things.” “I am but one among a multitude of alas! impotent artists and scholars who, day after day, see monuments effaced that nothing can restore, and landmarks levelled that the archaeologist of the future will mourn for in vain,” she lamented in one of her earliest political interventions, a letter to the London Times in 1879.Footnote ⁷ Elsewhere, she was much exercised by capitalism's despoliation of nature. “A Chat about Gardens” and “The Passing of Philomel” (an essay in Views and Opinions) are entirely concerned with this; A Village Commune has numerous denunciations of the damaging effects of chopping down trees and a lust for the new simply because it is profitable. The consonance of private and public politics here is much clearer than in her relation to the Conservative party. In another letter to Sydney Cockerell (19 December 1900), she praised the very same Curzon whose artificiality she criticised for trying to save indigenous Indian architecture with the same passion that she tried to save Italian.

Ouida was, in short, less allied to party politics than to an ideology. This is what constitutes what she called her “impartiality” (cf. epigraph above). While her commitment to saving nature linked her to Auberon Herbert who strongly disapproved of deforestation and the plunder of nature in general (see e.g., “Slow Destruction”; letter to the London Times, 31 March 1894), this was not in fact a usual concern of Individualists. They mostly used ideas of “nature” and the “natural” for quite other ends.

Ouida as Altruist

Many Individualists invoked the “natural” through competitive Social Darwinism to justify their beliefs. As M. D. O'Brien put it, “In this great battle of life, somebody must lose; somebody must go to the wall” (quoted in Taylor 89). Spenser never went this far despite his coinage of the phrase “survival of the fittest.” For him, altruism was an innate, natural, part of human character. Indeed, his notion “was not a society of self–interested individuals, but one in which people voluntarily formed organisations for mutual assistance” (Taylor 94). Both Auberon Herbert and W. H. Mallock deployed the idea of innate altruism to counter the argument that Individualism only favoured the few (while making sure that, in effect, it did). But Ouida emphasised altruism to the point where it became central to her political beliefs. Its place in her politics constitutes one of her most significant differences from other versions of Individualism.

For Ouida, a necessary precondition for altruistic action was the feeling of sympathy. While sympathy in itself is politically neutral – as Adam Smith had pointed out, it need not lead to action in the real world (185–86) – Ouida renders it political by constantly linking it to everyday acts, evoking a sympathy for helpless living beings, both animal and human, with the explicit intention of making them as free as possible. She inveighed against science, unlike most Individualists, precisely because she saw its aim to be selfish control and enslavement. It was the modern substitute for religion, a vicious “New Priesthood” with a “brutalising disregard of the mystery of life and its pitiless cruelty to helpless creatures [which] can never be united to any but the most soulless and egotistic form of philosophy” (Letter to Drummond). Science certainly did not constitute progress. She might praise the “The Genius of Gabriele D'Annunzio” because “[h]e has kept a complete mental liberty; free from the superstitions of religion, which, in this day, it is easy to be; but also free from the superstition of science, which is far harder, and incurs far great obloquy and opposition” (370). But later in the same article she criticises him for an “entire lack . . . of all altruism” (372). Mental liberty and genius are important, but without sympathy and selfless action they are worthless.

Altruism did not concern only relations between people for Ouida, but also between people and animals, especially, but not only, dogs. She wrote in a pamphlet that “I should give as the chief rule of all: interfere with your dog as little as possible” and “[f]reedom is the first necessity of life to a dog” (Dogs 22, 100). Anecdotes of encounters with her and her own dogs consistently tell of her refusal to restrain, or even housetrain, them. During one meeting with Lady Paget, the formidable wife of the ambassador to Italy, “[e]ight dogs kept up an infernal noise, and went on mistaking the lace frill of [Ouida's] nightdress for a lamppost. She never attempted to put a stop to either of these habits” (Paget 1: 16).Footnote ⁸ It may be shocking to allow dogs to treat one's nightdress as a lamppost, but it does indicate a rigorous consistency of thought that is alert to the hypocrisy of a proclaimed social politics not carried through into the domestic and personal. Ouida was willing to pay the price of arguing that dogs had as much right to individual liberty as people.

Whether altruism was an innate “natural” drive for Ouida is not clear. What is certain is that it was a duty for the Genius who should lead society. This is the light in which we should view Ouida's opposition to state education: the possibility of her profiting from the potential increase in her consumer base through a state driven rise in literacy levels was less important than what she regarded as the constraining uniformity that compulsory state education imposed.

The duty of Genius is the explicit subject of an amusing story that adopts the style of a Wildean comedy. Published in 1897, the same year as The Massarenes with which it shares certain themes, Ouida's An Altruist has as protagonist Wilfred Bertram, an intelligent member of the “quality.” Although therefore predisposed to be a leader, he does not believe in class distinctions or private property and describes himself as a “Socialist.” To assuage his conscience he decides to marry a working–class girl, Annie, whom he has rescued from falling under an omnibus. Bertram, however, is really attracted to the witty society beauty Cicely Seymour who reciprocates his feelings. In the end, Annie decides she cannot go through with the marriage as she knows Bertram does not love her. Cicely and Bertram become engaged and Bertram inherits a castle in Italy which he decides to manage for the good of its peasants in a rural paternalist idyll – rather like the life Auberon Herbert led in the bohemian Old House in the New Forest, “far away from all human intercourse” as Beatrice Webb put it (189). Much amusement is derived in Ouida's story from the clash of cultures between Bertram and Annie's mother, a powerful, articulate and competent washer–woman who is quite happy in her social position. There are damning portraits of minor characters: examples of upper–class conservatives of the “snobbish, stupid intensely silly type” (“Italy I” 356), Bertram's thieving and hypocritical servant, and a recidivist working–class drunkard whom Bertram has tried to convert to socialist ways. Interestingly, Bertram does not come to change his socialist views through isolated abstract reasoning: it is only after listening sympathetically to Annie, to her mother and to the confessions of his servant that he realises where his real duty lies. Cicely speaks the moral at the end: “Oh Lord Southwold, conscience is so rare in our days, it seems almost dead; you should not laugh at those who through all mockery try to keep alive its sacred flame!” (151) It is as if Ouida had taken seriously Wilde's “Soul of Man” essay and used his style to reply to it in coded form without ever mentioning him directly (which might have alienated her audience after his 1895 trial). Throughout her late work, Ouida consistently agreed with Wilde's point that “sympathy is naturally rare” under “the modern stress of competition” (Wilde 301), but she also argued that Individualism and sympathy were impossible under Socialism. They could thrive only through benevolent aristocratic paternalism.

If Socialism could not breed sympathetic altruism, then neither could capitalism, a point on which almost all Individualists would have disagreed with Ouida. As in An Altruist, The Massarenes and many (if not most) of her essays, Ouida did not hesitate to lash capitalist “plutocracy” as well as an irresponsible aristocracy for their many violations of animal and human liberty. She condemned alike the use of exotic feathers in hats by the wealthy, their sport of shooting game and their exploitation of factory workers and peasants. She saw the market as a restraint on liberty, a colonial imposition on the natural individual. That she felt the market for print as constraining is perhaps one reason why she withdrew from publication almost entirely after 1899, confining her writing almost entirely to private letters. Certainly, her disapproval of capitalism underlies her denunciation of the literary marketplace in “Unwritten Literary Laws.” It was the greed of capitalism, furthermore, that created the corrupt Italian Prime Minister Crispi (“L'Uomo fatale”), demolished historic town centres, and ravaged natural landscapes. It generated militarism (“the negation of individuality, of originality, and of true liberty” “Conscription” 215), colonialism, war in general, and the Boer War in particular. Her most unrelenting attack on British imperialism occurred in the Nuova Antologia where she condemned as poisonous and hysterical the jingoism of a nation goaded by journalists who were themselves compelled to broadcast such opinions by the way the press was entirely geared to generate profit. “La guerra consiste tutta nelle cifre” (“The war consists entirely of figures [in an account book]”) she concluded. It was nothing but “una speculazione mercantile” (“a mercantile speculation”) and should be condemned on that account (“Imperialismo” 741, 736).Footnote ⁹

More surprisingly, it was also competitive industrial capitalism that, according to Ouida's article on “The New Woman,” contributed to the manufacture of the creature. When read as an example of the logic of a peculiarly Ouidian Individualism, this notorious essay takes on a different complexion from that which it has been lent before.Footnote ¹⁰ Rather than simply a nonsensical, misogynistic, reactionary, and anti–democratic rant in response to Sarah Grand's “New Aspects of the Woman Question,” it becomes the logical application of Ouida's tenets to gender relations. What the New Woman wore (according to Ouida in her rewritten version of the essay in Views and Opinions) shows this very clearly. Describing an engraving from an illustrated journal of a meeting “whereat a woman is demanding, in the name of her sovereign sex, the right to vote at political elections,” Ouida observed that “her whole attire is elaborately constructed so as to conceal any physical graces which she might possess” (209–10). “[U]nnatural” and “disfiguring,” the attire comprises “animal skins, and slaughtered birds, and tufts torn out of the living and bleeding creature; she cannot show to any advantage the natural lines of her form, but disguises them as grotesquely as mantua–makers bid her do” (210). The New Woman's dress for Ouida was ugly insofar as it was the product of unnatural industrial capitalism. It was not a symbol of the exercise of individual choice, real liberty, and nature, but the result of the dictates of fashion houses. Similarly, if Ouida was against women's suffrage, it was because having the vote necessarily meant participation in the state, which was inevitably injurious to the true liberty of the individual. Again, her condemnation of women's education resulted from her opposition to all state education. The only benefits to boys of a “college education” that she admitted in the essay – “its friction, its preparation for the world, its rough destruction of personal conceit” – were moral and nothing to do with knowledge (213). Its only attraction was that boys might be knocked into altruism. On the other hand, education for women who do not really wish it “can only be hardening and deforming” (213). Women, we have to deduce, are more naturally altruistic and should on that account be left alone.

Much of the “New Woman” essay is spent discussing differences between men and women. These differences should be maintained on the whole, was Ouida's argument, because of the Individualist tenet that they had already been established without state meddling and were, therefore, “natural.” To forcibly reconfigure gender relations was as wrong as it was to impose conscription or education. Indeed, artificial tinkering to gender relations might not benefit women at all, she hypothesised, as it might lead to a situation where “the [homosexual and misogynistic] preferences of the Platonic Age may become acknowledged and dominant, and women may be relegated entirely to the lowest plane as a mere drudge and child–bearer” (209). But to confine Ouida's argument to that would be to traduce it. “Genius” was the exception that should not be constrained by the categorical limits of gender in the same way that it should be allowed all other liberties (provided they are altruistic): “Neither men nor women of genius are, I repeat, any criterion for the rest of the sex; nay, they belong, as Plato placed them, to a third sex which is above the laws of the multitude” (220). For Ouida, such a statement was not some transgressive adherence to Carpenter and the sexologists, but the logical outcome of her variant of Individualism, where Ability had the right to exercise its own natural individuality irrespective of what the majority did or thought.

Ouida as Sympathetic Witness

If Ouida displays marked variance from the Individualisms of Mallock and Herbert, Ouida's experience of post–unification Italy and her methods of gathering knowledge helped lead her to her particular variant. Her observation of the transition of Tuscany from a feudal rural economy to an industrial capitalist one seems to have convinced her that the feudal rural guided by a responsible, dutiful aristocracy, for all its shortcomings, was preferable. The latter was, as she makes clear again and again, the most “natural” economy. Capitalist “progress” and modernity only damaged people, animals and the environment. One of Ouida's most common stylistic traits in her late non–fiction is the grounding of her argument in the experience of others. Having come to value sympathetic altruism as the duty of the literary Genius, she seems to have concluded that one of its most important activities comprised gathering information from witnesses. This took two forms: first, listening to what she was told by people she knew or encountered; and second, reading newspapers and periodicals, where she almost always privileged plain narrative above comment.

In the Appendix to her 1882 novel about the trials of the Italian poor, A Village Commune, she justified the realism of her account by reference to the stories of the poor she had heard or read about in the local press. “You must know the language intimately,” she wrote, “and you must have the people's trust in you, before you can understand all that they endure” (357–58). Later, she quoted a shoemaker (359) and a “working man” (380), and includes anecdotes about “a respectable man,” about her gardener, and about “a poor man” which she clearly implies she heard from them directly (370–71). She quotes one nobleman but only to condemn his indifference to the poor with his own words. She was, it seems, happier and more proficient speaking peasant dialect than the high–status literary Italian she also spoke and wrote (Cooper 451). There are many other stories of the poor whose sources are not as overt, as well as narratives explicitly derived from newspapers, a pamphlet, and published letters. Even when she derives information from print sources, Ouida is anxious to bear witness to the experience of the poor, and quotes the words of participants directly where possible. In later articles, she again and again uses hearsay and newspaper reports by actual witnesses in the same fashion. As remarked above, the hero of The Altruist, comes to his senses through listening. Whether or not we accept that her arguments and indeed some novels originate in actual testimony, Ouida certainly wants us to.

Her journalistic insistence on the value of witnesses seems to have led her to conclusions that have an uncanny resonance with the political beliefs of the Italian poor that Roger Absalom describes in his history of modern Italy:

A backward–looking dream of an archaic utopia, without armies, without taxes but most definitely with the signori of Genius, an aristocracy of Ability, to guide society is what Ouida wanted. Sympathetic to Italian peasants, she was yet aware of the differing nature of her “labour of invention” from that of their “exertion which begins and ends with the particular task or material.” She felt that, as a Genius, she had a duty to translate their dream to a wider public through journalism and fiction, evoking a sympathetic response from her readers which would in turn incite them to political action.

What emerges, then, is a hybrid but quite specific Anglo–Italian politics, a salmagundi of sources, public and private, written and oral, which is nonetheless a vision of quite simple and severe logic. That such a politics does not offer an easily viable vision of the future is not always clear in Ouida's journalism where stylistic verve, the massive use of amplificatio, diatribe, entertaining examples, and a focus on specific topical problems hide the lack of an alternative longer–term practical politics. The implications of her politics do, however, emerge with great clarity in the last few chapters of The Massarenes. What is one's duty to society? How far should we be sympathetic to the privileged, even to capitalists and conservatives of the “intensely silly” type? William Massarene, the acme of the exploitative capitalist, is easy to condemn: his crimes (rape, fraud, blackmail, exploitation) are extreme. But what of those others whom Herbert called “butterflies,” the decorative products of and dependents on capitalism under whose yoke society still finds itself? If they do not commit extreme crimes, how far might they be considered victims of capitalism? Can we be sympathetic towards them? And, then, a new problem for Ouida: if even dogs are to be left at liberty, how far should an author committed to individual liberty seek to control the reactions of the reader?

Caught between a critique of capitalist modernity and a celebration of its energy and glamour, The Massarenes seems unable to envisage any realistic future outside it. The only alternative offered, as we might expect, is a benevolent paternalist rural aristocracy which involves complete isolation from the rest of society. Worn down by the weight of guilt at her capitalist father's wicked path to wealth, after his death Katherine Massarene distributes the fortune she has inherited to the poor he had exploited. After this, penniless, she faces a future as a teacher. She is saved from salaried work by an offer of marriage from a poor aristocrat who wants to manage his estate in the British countryside for the good of his tenants, much like the hero of An Altruist (or Auberon Herbert). The heroine's response to his offer (after a previous and very firm refusal) is, suddenly, unexpectedly and in very few lines, to collapse into it and to shadow her past actions with moral doubt.

Whether she later positively embraces her future in the country we do not know, for hers is a future that cannot even be described directly by the narrator. The above lines are the last we see of her directly. How far we are supposed to praise her choice or sympathise with her when her weakness is left open?

The characters that are unambiguously in charge of their future, by contrast, all exist in the ambit of the anti–heroine, the ironically named Mouse, an energetic, unscrupulous and impoverished aristocrat and literary descendant of Lady Dolly from Ouida's Moths, painted, an indifferent mother, surrounded by lovers, and, of course, “unnatural.” In her resolute pursuit of fortune, Mouse suffers various setbacks which include rape and blackmail by William Massarene. These, unsurprisingly, encourage us to be sympathetic towards her, even if the narrative allows us to judge, if we wish, that she has brought her (extensively described) torments upon herself. What is certain is that Mouse proves in the end to be a more successful survivor in the capitalist competition for resources than any banker or businessman, or indeed, dutifully altruistic heroine. We are left with the possibility of feeling sympathy for and even admiring this amoral butterfly in the face of any ethical doubts we may have about her methods of survival. As the novel's last words put it, “Why not indeed?” (583). Like the “perhaps” of Katherine Masserene's last spoken sentence in the novel, the question mark in this final query grants individual readers the liberty to make their own decision whether to condemn or condone a character's actions. Perhaps Ouida's very refusal to take an unambiguous moral position constitutes her rejection, in literary terms, of the oppressive practices of the capitalist organisation of the press, of which her novel necessarily formed a part. It is perhaps a mark of her commitment, however compromised, to a future where all individuals, even readers, are at liberty to think for themselves and make their own choices. That Ouida's journalism does not propose specific political solutions may likewise be understood as a refusal to do the thinking for us: she can point to the problems, but each of us has to work out the solutions for ourselves.