Diana of the Crossways, Complete

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DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS

By George Meredith

1897

CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I. OF DIARIES AND DIARISTS TOUCHING THE HEROINE
II. AN IRISH BALL
III. THE INTERIOR OF MR. REDWORTH AND THE EXTERIOR OF MR. SULLIVAN
SMITH
IV. CONTAINING HINTS OF DIANA'S EXPERIENCES AND OF WHAT THEY LED TO
V. CONCERNING THE SCRUPULOUS GENTLEMAN WHO CAME TOO LATE
VI. THE COUPLE
VII. THE CRISIS
VIII. IN WHICH IS EXHIBITED HOW A PRACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN
LEARN TO RESPECT ONE ANOTHER

BOOK 2.
IX. SHOWS HOW A POSITION OF DELICACY FOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS
MET IN SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HURT TO EITHER.
X. THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT
XI. RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF
DIALOGUE, AND A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD
XII. BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA
XIII. TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION
XIV. GIVING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDER HER CLOUD BEFORE THE WORLD AND
OF HER FURTHER APPRENTICESHIP
XV. INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER
XVI. TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING
XVII. THE PRINCESS EGERIA

BOOK 3.
XVIII. THE AUTHORESS
XIX. A DRIVE IN SUNLIGHT AND A DRIVE IN MOONLIGHT
XX. DIANA'S NIGHT-WATCH IN THE CHAMBER OF DEATH
XXI. THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE
XXII. BETWEEN DIANA AND DACIER : THE WIND EAST OVER BLEAK LAND
XXIII. RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN
XXIV. INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION
XXV. ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OF TURNINGS
XXVI. IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OF LESSONS

BOOK 5.
XXXVI. IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEARTLESSNESS OF WOMEN WITH BRAINS
XXXVII. AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY
XXXVIII. CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT
XXXIX. OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT
EXCURSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX
XL. IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A
THRICE WHIMSICAL
XLI. CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA
XLII. THE PENULTIMATE : SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND RUN
INTO HARNESS
XLIII. NUPTIAL CHAPTER: AND OF HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS LED TO
BLOOM WITH NUPTIAL SENTIMENT

A lady of high distinction for wit and beauty,
the daughter of an illustrious Irish House,
came under the shadow of a calumny. It has
latterly been examined and exposed as baseless.
The story of Diana of the Crossways is to be read
as fiction.

CHAPTER I

OF DIARIES AND DIARISTS TOUCHING THE HEROINE

Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there
is frequent mention of a lady then becoming famous for her beauty and her
wit: 'an unusual combination,' in the deliberate syllables of one of the
writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of
her. It is otherwise in his case and a general fling at the sex we may
deem pardonable, for doing as little harm to womankind as the stone of an
urchin cast upon the bosom of mother Earth; though men must look some day
to have it returned to them, which is a certainty; and indeed full surely
will our idle-handed youngster too, in his riper season; be heard
complaining of a strange assault of wanton missiles, coming on him he
knows not whence; for we are all of us distinctly marked to get back what
we give, even from the thing named inanimate nature.

The 'LEAVES FROM THE DIARY OF HENRY WILMERS' are studded with examples of
the dinner-table wit of the time, not always worth quotation twice; for
smart remarks have their measured distances, many requiring to be a brule
pourpoint, or within throw of the pistol, to make it hit; in other words,
the majority of them are addressed directly to our muscular system, and
they have no effect when we stand beyond the range. On the contrary, they
reflect sombrely on the springs of hilarity in the generation preceding
us; with due reserve of credit, of course, to an animal vivaciousness
that seems to have wanted so small an incitement. Our old yeomanry
farmers--returning to their beds over ferny commons under bright
moonlight from a neighbour's harvest-home, eased their bubbling breasts
with a ready roar not unakin to it. Still the promptness to laugh is an
excellent progenitorial foundation for the wit to come in a people; and
undoubtedly the diarial record of an imputed piece of wit is witness to
the spouting of laughter. This should comfort us while we skim the
sparkling passages of the 'Leaves.' When a nation has acknowledged that
it is as yet but in the fisticuff stage of the art of condensing our
purest sense to golden sentences, a readier appreciation will be extended
to the gift: which is to strike not the dazzled eyes, the unanticipating
nose, the ribs, the sides, and stun us, twirl us, hoodwink, mystify,
tickle and twitch, by dexterities of lingual sparring and shuffling, but
to strike roots in the mind, the Hesperides of good things. We shall then
set a price on the 'unusual combination.' A witty woman is a treasure; a
witty Beauty is a power. Has she actual beauty, actual wit?--not simply a
tidal material beauty that passes current any pretty flippancy or
staggering pretentiousness? Grant the combination, she will appear a
veritable queen of her period, fit for homage; at least meriting a
disposition to believe the best of her, in the teeth of foul rumour;
because the well of true wit is truth itself, the gathering of the
precious drops of right reason, wisdom's lightning; and no soul
possessing and dispensing it can justly be a target for the world,
however well armed the world confronting her. Our temporary world, that
Old Credulity and stone-hurling urchin in one, supposes it possible for a
woman to be mentally active up to the point of spiritual clarity and also
fleshly vile; a guide to life and a biter at the fruits of death; both
open mind and hypocrite. It has not yet been taught to appreciate a
quality certifying to sound citizenship as authoritatively as acres of
land in fee simple, or coffers of bonds, shares and stocks, and a more
imperishable guarantee. The multitudes of evil reports which it takes for
proof, are marshalled against her without question of the nature of the
victim, her temptress beauty being a sufficiently presumptive delinquent.
It does not pretend to know the whole, or naked body of the facts; it
knows enough for its furry dubiousness; and excepting the sentimental of
men, a rocket-headed horde, ever at the heels of fair faces for ignition,
and up starring away at a hint of tearfulness; excepting further by
chance a solid champion man, or some generous woman capable of faith in
the pelted solitary of her sex, our temporary world blows direct East on
her shivering person. The scandal is warrant for that; the circumstances
of the scandal emphasize the warrant. And how clever she is! Cleverness
is an attribute of the selecter missionary lieutenants of Satan. We pray
to be defended from her cleverness: she flashes bits of speech that catch
men in their unguarded corner. The wary stuff their ears, the stolid bid
her best sayings rebound on her reputation. Nevertheless the world, as
Christian, remembers its professions, and a portion of it joins the burly
in morals by extending to her a rough old charitable mercifulness; better
than sentimental ointment, but the heaviest blow she has to bear, to a
character swimming for life.

That the lady in question was much quoted, the Diaries and Memoirs
testify. Hearsay as well as hearing was at work to produce the abundance;
and it was a novelty in England, where (in company) the men are the
pointed talkers, and the women conversationally fair Circassians. They
are, or they know that they should be; it comes to the same. Happily our
civilization has not prescribed the veil to them. The mutes have here and
there a sketch or label attached to their names: they are 'strikingly
handsome'; they are 'very good-looking'; occasionally they are noted as
'extremely entertaining': in what manner, is inquired by a curious
posterity, that in so many matters is left unendingly to jump the empty
and gaping figure of interrogation over its own full stop. Great ladies
must they be, at the web of politics, for us to hear them cited
discoursing. Henry Wilmers is not content to quote the beautiful Mrs.
Warwick, he attempts a portrait. Mrs. Warwick is 'quite Grecian.' She
might 'pose for a statue.' He presents her in carpenter's lines, with a
dab of school-box colours, effective to those whom the Keepsake fashion
can stir. She has a straight nose, red lips, raven hair, black eyes, rich
complexion, a remarkably fine bust, and she walks well, and has an
agreeable voice; likewise 'delicate extremities.' The writer was created
for popularity, had he chosen to bring his art into our literary market.

Perry Wilkinson is not so elaborate: he describes her in his
'Recollections' as a splendid brune, eclipsing all the blondes coming
near her: and 'what is more, the beautiful creature can talk.' He
wondered, for she was young, new to society. Subsequently he is rather
ashamed of his wonderment, and accounts for it by 'not having known she
was Irish.' She 'turns out to be Dan Merion's daughter.'

We may assume that he would have heard if she had any whiff of a brogue.
Her sounding of the letter R a trifle scrupulously is noticed by Lady
Pennon: 'And last, not least, the lovely Mrs. Warwick, twenty minutes
behind the dinner-hour, and r-r-really fearing she was late.'

After alluding to the soft influence of her beauty and ingenuousness on
the vexed hostess, the kindly old marchioness adds, that it was no wonder
she was late, 'for just before starting from home she had broken loose
from her husband for good, and she entered the room absolutely
houseless!' She was not the less 'astonishingly brilliant.' Her
observations were often 'so unexpectedly droll I laughed till I cried.'
Lady Pennon became in consequence one of the stanch supporters of Mrs.
Warwick.

Others were not so easily won. Perry Wilkinson holds a balance when it
goes beyond a question of her wit and beauty. Henry Wilmers puts the case
aside, and takes her as he finds her. His cousin, the clever and cynical
Dorset Wilmers, whose method of conveying his opinions without stating
them was famous, repeats on two occasions when her name appears in his
pages, 'handsome, lively, witty'; and the stressed repetition of
calculated brevity while a fiery scandal was abroad concerning the lady,
implies weighty substance--the reservation of a constable's truncheon,
that could legally have knocked her character down to the pavement. We
have not to ask what he judged. But Dorset Wilmers was a political
opponent of the eminent Peer who yields the second name to the scandal,
and politics in his day flushed the conceptions of men. His short
references to 'that Warwick-Dannisburgh affair' are not verbally
malicious. He gets wind of the terms of Lord Dannisburgh's will and
testament, noting them without comment. The oddness of the instrument in
one respect may have served his turn; we have no grounds for thinking him
malignant. The death of his enemy closes his allusions to Mrs. Warwick.
He was growing ancient, and gout narrowed the circle he whirled in. Had
he known this 'handsome, lively, witty' apparition as a woman having
political and social views of her own, he would not, one fancies, have
been so stingless. Our England exposes a sorry figure in his
Reminiscences. He struck heavily, round and about him, wherever he moved;
he had by nature a tarnishing eye that cast discolouration. His unadorned
harsh substantive statements, excluding the adjectives, give his Memoirs
the appearance of a body of facts, attractive to the historic Muse, which
has learnt to esteem those brawny sturdy giants marching club on
shoulder, independent of henchman, in preference to your panoplied
knights with their puffy squires, once her favourites, and wind-filling
to her columns, ultimately found indigestible.

His exhibition of his enemy Lord Dannisburgh, is of the class of noble
portraits we see swinging over inn-portals, grossly unlike in likeness.
The possibility of the man's doing or saying this and that adumbrates the
improbability: he had something of the character capable of it, too much
good sense for the performance. We would think so, and still the shadow
is round our thoughts. Lord Dannisburgh was a man of ministerial tact,
official ability, Pagan morality; an excellent general manager, if no
genius in statecraft. But he was careless of social opinion, unbuttoned,
and a laugher. We know that he could be chivalrous toward women,
notwithstanding the perplexities he brought on them, and this the
Dorset-Diary does not show.

His chronicle is less mischievous as regards Mrs. Warwick than the
paragraphs of Perry Wilkinson, a gossip presenting an image of perpetual
chatter, like the waxen-faced street advertizements of light and easy
dentistry. He has no belief, no disbelief; names the pro-party and the
con; recites the case, and discreetly, over-discreetly; and pictures the
trial, tells the list of witnesses, records the verdict: so the case
went, and some thought one thing, some another thing: only it is reported
for positive that a miniature of the incriminated lady was cleverly
smuggled over to the jury, and juries sitting upon these eases, ever
since their bedazzlement by Phryne, as you know . . . . And then he
relates an anecdote of the husband, said to have been not a bad fellow
before he married his Diana; and the naming of the Goddess reminds him
that the second person in the indictment is now everywhere called 'The
elderly shepherd';--but immediately after the bridal bells this husband
became sour and insupportable, and either she had the trick of putting
him publicly in the wrong, or he lost all shame in playing the churlish
domestic tyrant. The instances are incredible of a gentleman. Perry
Wilkinson gives us two or three; one on the authority of a personal
friend who witnessed the scene; at the Warwick whist-table, where the
fair Diana would let loose her silvery laugh in the intervals. She was
hardly out of her teens, and should have been dancing instead of fastened
to a table. A difference of fifteen years in the ages of the wedded pair
accounts poorly for the husband's conduct, however solemn a business the
game of whist. We read that he burst out at last, with bitter mimicry,
'yang--yang--yang!' and killed the bright laugh, shot it dead. She had
outraged the decorum of the square-table only while the cards were
making. Perhaps her too-dead ensuing silence, as of one striving to bring
back the throbs to a slain bird in her bosom, allowed the gap between the
wedded pair to be visible, for it was dated back to prophecy as soon as
the trumpet proclaimed it.

But a multiplication of similar instances, which can serve no other
purpose than that of an apology, is a miserable vindication of innocence.
The more we have of them the darker the inference. In delicate situations
the chatterer is noxious. Mrs. Warwick had numerous apologists. Those
trusting to her perfect rectitude were rarer. The liberty she allowed
herself in speech and action must have been trying to her defenders in a
land like ours; for here, and able to throw its shadow on our giddy
upper-circle, the rigour of the game of life, relaxed though it may
sometimes appear, would satisfy the staidest whist-player. She did not
wish it the reverse, even when claiming a space for laughter: 'the breath
of her soul,' as she called it, and as it may be felt in the early youth
of a lively nature. She, especially, with her multitude of quick
perceptions and imaginative avenues, her rapid summaries, her sense of
the comic, demanded this aerial freedom.

We have it from Perry Wilkinson that the union of the divergent couple
was likened to another union always in a Court of Law. There was a
distinction; most analogies will furnish one; and here we see England and
Ireland changeing their parts, until later, after the breach, when the
Englishman and Irishwoman resumed a certain resemblance to the yoked
Islands.

Henry Wilmers, I have said, deals exclusively with the wit and charm of
the woman. He treats the scandal as we might do in like manner if her
story had not to be told. But these are not reporting columns; very
little of it shall trouble them. The position is faced, and that is all.
The position is one of the battles incident to women, their hardest. It
asks for more than justice from men, for generosity, our civilization not
being yet of the purest. That cry of hounds at her disrobing by Law is
instinctive. She runs, and they give tongue; she is a creature of the
chase. Let her escape unmangled, it will pass in the record that she did
once publicly run, and some old dogs will persist in thinking her
cunninger than the virtuous, which never put themselves in such
positions, but ply the distaff at home. Never should reputation of woman
trail a scent! How true! and true also that the women of waxwork never
do; and that the women of happy marriages do not; nor the women of holy
nunneries; nor the women lucky in their arts. It is a test of the
civilized to see and hear, and add no yapping to the spectacle.

Thousands have reflected on a Diarist's power to cancel our Burial
Service. Not alone the cleric's good work is upset by him; but the
sexton's as well. He howks the grave, and transforms the quiet worms,
busy on a single poor peaceable body, into winged serpents that disorder
sky and earth with a deadly flight of zig-zags, like military rockets,
among the living. And if these are given to cry too much, to have their
tender sentiments considered, it cannot be said that History requires the
flaying of them. A gouty Diarist, a sheer gossip Diarist, may thus, in
the bequest of a trail of reminiscences, explode our temples (for our
very temples have powder in store), our treasuries, our homesteads, alive
with dynamitic stuff; nay, disconcert our inherited veneration, dislocate
the intimate connexion between the tugged flaxen forelock and a title.

No similar blame is incurred by Henry Wilmers. No blame whatever, one
would say, if he had been less, copious, or not so subservient, in
recording the lady's utterances; for though the wit of a woman may be
terse, quite spontaneous, as this lady's assuredly was here and there,
she is apt to spin it out of a museful mind, at her toilette, or by the
lonely fire, and sometimes it is imitative; admirers should beware of
holding it up to the withering glare of print: she herself, quoting an
obscure maximmonger, says of these lapidary sentences, that they have
merely 'the value of chalk-eggs, which lure the thinker to sit,' and
tempt the vacuous to strain for the like, one might add; besides
flattering the world to imagine itself richer than it is in eggs that are
golden. Henry Wilmers notes a multitude of them. 'The talk fell upon our
being creatures of habit, and how far it was good: She said:--It is there
that we see ourselves crutched between love grown old and indifference
ageing to love.' Critic ears not present at the conversation catch an
echo of maxims and aphorisms overchannel, notwithstanding a feminine
thrill in the irony of 'ageing to love.' The quotation ranks rather among
the testimonies to her charm.

She is fresher when speaking of the war of the sexes. For one sentence
out of many, though we find it to be but the clever literary clothing of
a common accusation: 'Men may have rounded Seraglio Point: they have not
yet doubled Cape Turk.'

It is war, and on the male side, Ottoman war: her experience reduced her
to think so positively. Her main personal experience was in the social
class which is primitively venatorial still, canine under its polish.

She held a brief for her beloved Ireland. She closes a discussion upon
Irish agitation by saying rather neatly: 'You have taught them it is
English as well as common human nature to feel an interest in the dog
that has bitten you.'

The dog periodically puts on madness to win attention; we gather then
that England, in an angry tremour, tries him with water-gruel to prove
him sane.

Of the Irish priest (and she was not of his retinue), when he was deemed
a revolutionary, Henry Wilmers notes her saying: 'Be in tune with him; he
is in the key-note for harmony. He is shepherd, doctor, nurse, comforter,
anecdotist and fun-maker to his poor flock; and you wonder they see the
burning gateway of their heaven in him? Conciliate the priest.'

It has been partly done, done late, when the poor flock have found their
doctoring and shepherding at other hands: their 'bulb-food and fiddle,'
that she petitioned for, to keep them from a complete shaving off their
patch of bog and scrub soil, without any perception of the tremulous
transatlantic magnification of the fiddle, and the splitting discord of
its latest inspiriting jig.

And she will not have the consequences of the 'weariful old Irish duel
between Honour and Hunger judged by bread and butter juries.'

She had need to be beautiful to be tolerable in days when Englishmen
stood more openly for the strong arm to maintain the Union. Her troop of
enemies was of her summoning.

Ordinarily her topics were of wider range, and those of a woman who mixed
hearing with reading, and observation with her musings. She has no
doleful ejaculatory notes, of the kind peculiar to women at war,
containing one-third of speculative substance to two of sentimental--a
feminine plea for comprehension and a squire; and it was probably the
reason (as there is no reason to suppose an emotional cause) why she
exercised her evident sway over the mind of so plain and straightforward
an Englishman as Henry Wilmers. She told him that she read rapidly, 'a
great deal at one gulp,' and thought in flashes--a way with the makers of
phrases. She wrote, she confessed, laboriously. The desire to prune,
compress, overcharge, was a torment to the nervous woman writing under a
sharp necessity for payment. Her songs were shot off on the impulsion;
prose was the heavy task. 'To be pointedly rational,' she said, 'is a
greater difficulty for me than a fine delirium.' She did not talk as if
it would have been so, he remarks. One is not astonished at her appearing
an 'actress' to the flat-minded. But the basis of her woman's nature was
pointed flame: In the fulness of her history we perceive nothing
histrionic. Capricious or enthusiastic in her youth, she never trifled
with feeling; and if she did so with some showy phrases and occasionally
proffered commonplaces in gilt, as she was much excited to do, her moods
of reflection were direct, always large and honest, universal as well as
feminine.

Her saying that 'A woman in the pillory restores the original bark of
brotherhood to mankind,' is no more than a cry of personal anguish. She
has golden apples in her apron. She says of life: 'When I fail to cherish
it in every fibre the fires within are waning,' and that drives like rain
to the roots. She says of the world, generously, if with tapering idea:
'From the point of vision of the angels, this ugly monster, only half out
of slime, must appear our one constant hero.' It can be read maliciously,
but abstain.

She says of Romance: 'The young who avoid that region escape the title of
Fool at the cost of a celestial crown.' Of Poetry: 'Those that have souls
meet their fellows there.'

But she would have us away with sentimentalism. Sentimental people, in
her phrase, 'fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism,' to the
delight of a world gaping for marvels of musical execution rather than
for music. For our world is all but a sensational world at present, in
maternal travail of a soberer, a braver, a brighter-eyed. Her reflections
are thus to be interpreted, it seems to me. She says, 'The vices of the
world's nobler half in this day are feminine.' We have to guard against
'half-conceptions of wisdom, hysterical goodness, an impatient
charity'--against the elementary state of the altruistic virtues,
distinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to cast its
first slough. Idea is there. The funny part of it is our finding it in
books of fiction composed for payment. Manifestly this lady did not
'chameleon' her pen from the colour of her audience: she was not of the
uniformed rank and file marching to drum and fife as gallant interpreters
of popular appetite, and going or gone to soundlessness and the icy
shades.

Touches inward are not absent: 'To have the sense of the eternal in life
is a short flight for the soul. To have had it, is the soul's vitality.'
And also: 'Palliation of a sin is the hunted creature's refuge and final
temptation. Our battle is ever between spirit and flesh. Spirit must
brand the flesh, that it may live.'

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