the billows! With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea! I
cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with
so much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last
recesses of the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have
it known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William
Shakespeare. If there were more people of his honesty, this would be
about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste that is plentiful,
but courage that is rare. And what have we in place? How many, who think
no otherwise than the young painter, have we not heard disbursing
second-hand hyperboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of
critics! when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned on you
before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm about art is become a function of
the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort
of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine.
Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is carried away in the torrent, bandies
adjectives with the best, and out-Herods Herod for some shameful
moments. When you remember that, you will be tempted to put things
strongly, and say you will marry no one who is not like George the
Second, and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting.

The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits
and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans
and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the
word "facts" in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get
no nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to them
seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to
what was, or what was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we
pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the sky-line
and different constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy in
the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which
discoloured all experience to its own shade. How would you have people
agree, when one is deaf and the other blind? Now this is where there
should be community between man and wife. They should be agreed on their
catchword in "_facts of religion_," or "_facts of science_," or
"_society, my dear_"; for without such an agreement all intercourse is a
painful strain upon the mind.