Friendship. By " Ouida." 3 vols. (Chatto and Windus.)—The story
of Friendship is striking, though it is anything rather than pleasing. Prince Ions, an Italian noble, suffers himself to become the slave of a selfish and profligate adventuress, a woman who loves him after a certain base fashion, but uses his name and his fortune without scruple to further her own pleasure and profit. While he is thus entangled, there comes across his path one Etoile (to use the name by which she was commonly known), a great artist, and a pure and noble woman. She wakes in him the better nature obscured by the sinister influence of the woman who had dominated him, and he loves her. The question he shake himself free ? And Friendship tells the story of his effort and his failure. The purpose of the tale is, therefore, a good one; we are called on to sympathise with the right, to abhor the base. No one can say that the profligate Lady Joan, or her base, complaisant husband are ever allowed to appear anything but odious. Nor is the moral sense offended bya fault of which" Ouida" cannot always be pronouncedinnocent, the glorifying of vice with the glamour of heroism,genius, or benevolence. The novel is a satire, and has something of the righteous indignation of satire. But the satirist is liable to faults which are near akin to those which he rebukes. One main object of the writer, to judge from the "a propos" which she has prefixed to her novel, is to rebuke slander, but it is not too much to say that much of what she writes is a slander against her fellow-creatures. The meannesses and falsehoods of " society " are not likely to be spared in these columns, but we cannot approve the cynical language of " Ouida" about it. If it be the base and selfish thing which she represents it as being, it must soon perish in its corruption. We cannot think that the dead-level of stupidity and meanness, relieved not by any goodness or nobility, but by immoral clevena, ss,really represents the condition to which high birth, culture, and the possession of freedom for centuries has brought Eng- lishmen. In literary merit the novel is certainly not equal to its predecessor. It has brilliant touches of description. The old skill by which " Ouida" dashes off a perfect picture in a few words has not deserted her, but the repetitions are wearisome, and the style generally below the writer's average. She falls, we may observe, into a not uncommon mistake when she supposes fern: naturce to be a nominative, meaning "wild beasts." "Exordium " is also used curiously out of its sense.
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