Diana of the Crossways, v1

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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.'

You are entreated to repress alarm. She was by preference light-handed;
and her saying of oratory, that 'It is always the more impressive for the
spice of temper which renders it untrustworthy,' is light enough.
On Politics she is rhetorical and swings: she wrote to spur a junior
politician: 'It is the first business of men, the school to mediocrity,
to the covetously ambitious a sty, to the dullard his amphitheatre, arms
of Titans to the desperately enterprising, Olympus to the genius.'
What a woman thinks of women, is the test of her nature. She saw their
existing posture clearly, yet believed, as men disincline to do, that
they grow. She says, that 'In their judgements upon women men are
females, voices of the present (sexual) dilemma.' They desire to have
'a still woman; who can make a constant society of her pins and needles.'
They create by stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness.
'We live alone, and do not much feel it till we are visited.' Love is
presumably the visitor. Of the greater loneliness of women, she says:
'It is due to the prescribed circumscription of their minds, of which
they become aware in agitation. Were the walls about them beaten down,
they would understand that solitariness is a common human fate and the
one chance of growth, like space for timber.' As to the sensations of
women after the beating down of the walls, she owns that the multitude of
the timorous would yearn in shivering affright for the old prison-nest,
according to the sage prognostic of men; but the flying of a valiant few
would form a vanguard. And we are informed that the beginning of a
motive life with women must be in the head, equally with men (by no means
a truism when she wrote). Also that 'men do not so much fear to lose the
hearts of thoughtful women as their strict attention to their graces.'
The present market is what men are for preserving: an observation of
still reverberating force. Generally in her character of the feminine
combatant there is a turn of phrase, like a dimple near the lips showing
her knowledge that she was uttering but a tart measure of the truth. She
had always too much lambent humour to be the dupe of the passion
wherewith, as she says, 'we lash ourselves into the persuasive speech
distinguishing us from the animals.'

The instances of her drollery are rather hinted by the Diarists for the
benefit of those who had met her and could inhale the atmosphere at a
word. Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of roast
meats, past with the picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital
breath. They have it rarely, or it eludes the chronicler. To say of the
great erratic and forsaken Lady A****, after she had accepted the
consolations of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in
asterisks 'as she was now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God,'
sounds to us a roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere. Sitting
at the roast we might have thought differently. Perry Wilkinson is not
happier in citing her reply to his compliment on the reviewers' unanimous
eulogy of her humour and pathos:--the 'merry clown and poor pantaloon
demanded of us in every work of fiction,' she says, lamenting the
writer's compulsion to go on producing them for applause until it is
extremest age that knocks their knees. We are informed by Lady Pennon of
'the most amusing description of the first impressions of a pretty
English simpleton in Paris'; and here is an opportunity for ludicrous
contrast of the French and English styles of pushing flatteries--'piping
to the charmed animal,' as Mrs. Warwick terms it in another place: but
Lady Pennon was acquainted with the silly woman of the piece, and found
her amusement in the 'wonderful truth' of that representation.

Diarists of amusing passages are under an obligation to paint us a
realistic revival of the time, or we miss the relish. The odour of the
roast, and more, a slice of it is required, unless the humorous thing be
preternaturally spirited to walk the earth as one immortal among a number
less numerous than the mythic Gods. 'He gives good dinners,' a candid
old critic said, when asked how it was that he could praise a certain
poet. In an island of chills and fogs, coelum crebris imbribus ac
nebulis foedum, the comic and other perceptions are dependent on the
stirring of the gastric juices. And such a revival by any of us would be
impolitic, were it a possible attempt, before our systems shall have been
fortified by philosophy. Then may it be allowed to the Diarist simply to
relate, and we can copy from him.

Then, ah! then, moreover, will the novelist's Art, now neither blushless
infant nor executive man, have attained its majority. We can then be
veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive. Rose-pink and dirty drab
will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the foe of both, and their
silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a shuffle of extremes,
as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns, will no longer baffle
the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no longer the soul issuing
out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to see that we are not
so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that instead
of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is
wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight. Do but perceive
that we are coming to philosophy, the stride toward it will be a giant's
--a century a day. And imagine the celestial refreshment of having a
pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-
beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction then appear; honourable,
a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood. Why, when you
behold it you love it--and you will not encourage it?--or only when
presented by dead hands? Worse than that alternative dirty drab, your
recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous revelations of the filthy foul;
for nature will force her way, and if you try to stifle her by drowning,
she comes up, not the fairest part of her uppermost! Peruse your
Realists--really your castigators for not having yet embraced Philosophy.
As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended, nature is
unimpeachable, flower-eke, yet not too decoratively a flower; you must
have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat bedding of
roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus does she
flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner as well
as exhibiting the outer.

And how may you know that you have reached to Philosophy? You touch her
skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of
sentimentalism. You are one with her when--but I would not have you a
thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental
route:--that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to
the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another
whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at
all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the
former, merely and badly aping the latter,--fine flower, or pinnacle
flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other? and
accompanying the former it traverses tracts of desert here and there
couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at
colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite, sustained
by sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have
these gratifications at all costs. Should none be discoverable, at once
you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funereal orb of Glaucoma, in
the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat, rope-dependant figures,
placarded across the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus.
That is the sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not
light it; evanescent dreams: are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in
the socket.

A thousand years! You may count full many a thousand by this route
before you are one with divine Philosophy. Whereas a single flight of
brains will reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the
right use of the senses, Reality's infinite sweetness; for these things
are in philosophy; and the fiction which is the summary of actual Life,
the within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring,
philosophy's elect handmaiden. To such an end let us bend our aim to
work, knowing that every form of labour, even this flimsiest, as you
esteem it, should minister to growth. If in any branch of us we fail in
growth, there is, you are aware, an unfailing aboriginal democratic old
monster that waits to pull us down; certainly the branch, possibly the
tree; and for the welfare of Life we fall. You are acutely conscious of
yonder old monster when he is mouthing at you in politics. Be wary of
him in the heart; especially be wary of the disrelish of brainstuff. You
must feed on something. Matter that is not nourishing to brains can help
to constitute nothing but the bodies which are pitched on rubbish heaps.
Brainstuff is not lean stuff;--the brainstuff of fiction is internal
history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors; how deep,
you will understand when I tell you that it is the very football of the
holiday-afternoon imps below. They kick it for pastime; they are
intelligences perverted. The comic of it, the adventurous, the tragic,
they make devilish, to kindle their Ogygian hilarity. But--sharply
comic, adventurous, instructively tragic, it is in the interwinding with
human affairs, to give a flavour of the modern day reviving that of our
Poet, between whom and us yawn Time's most hollow jaws. Surely we owe a
little to Time, to cheer his progress; a little to posterity, and to our
country. Dozens of writers will be in at yonder yawning breach, if only
perusers will rally to the philosophic standard. They are sick of the
woodeny puppetry they dispense, as on a race-course to the roaring
frivolous. Well, if not dozens, half-dozens; gallant pens are alive;
one can speak of them in the plural. I venture to say that they would
be satisfied with a dozen for audience, for a commencement. They would
perish of inanition, unfed, unapplauded, amenable to the laws perchance
for an assault on their last remaining pair of ears or heels, to hold
them fast. But the example is the thing; sacrifices must be expected.
The example might, one hopes, create a taste. A great modern writer, of
clearest eye and head, now departed, capable in activity of presenting
thoughtful women, thinking men, groaned over his puppetry, that he dared
not animate them, flesh though they were, with the fires of positive
brainstuff. He could have done it, and he is of the departed! Had he
dared, he would (for he was Titan enough) have raised the Art in dignity
on a level with History; to an interest surpassing the narrative of
public deeds as vividly as man's heart and brain in their union excel his
plain lines of action to eruption. The everlasting pantomime, suggested
by Mrs. Warwick in her exclamation to Perry Wilkinson, is derided, not
unrighteously, by our graver seniors. They name this Art the pasture of
idiots, a method for idiotizing the entire population which has taken to
reading; and which soon discovers that it can write likewise, that sort
of stuff at least. The forecast may be hazarded, that if we do not
speedily embrace Philosophy in fiction, the Art is doomed to extinction,
under the shining multitude of its professors. They are fast capping the
candle. Instead, therefore, of objurgating the timid intrusions of
Philosophy, invoke her presence, I pray you. History without her is the
skeleton map of events: Fiction a picture of figures modelled on no
skeleton-anatomy. But each, with Philosophy in aid, blooms, and is
humanly shapely. To demand of us truth to nature, excluding Philosophy,
is really to bid a pumpkin caper. As much as legs are wanted for the
dance, Philosophy is required to make our human nature credible and
acceptable. Fiction implores you to heave a bigger breast and take her
in with this heavenly preservative helpmate, her inspiration and her
essence. You have to teach your imagination of the feminine image you
have set up to bend your civilized knees to, that it must temper its
fastidiousness, shun the grossness of the over-dainty. Or, to speak in
the philosophic tongue, you must turn on yourself, resolutely track and
seize that burrower, and scrub and cleanse him; by which process, during
the course of it, you will arrive at the conception of the right heroical
woman for you to worship: and if you prove to be of some spiritual
stature, you may reach to an ideal of the heroical feminine type for the
worship of mankind, an image as yet in poetic outline only, on our upper
skies.

'So well do we know ourselves, that we one and all determine to know a
purer,' says the heroine of my columns. Philosophy in fiction tells,
among various other matters, of the perils of this intimate acquaintance
with a flattering familiar in the 'purer'--a person who more than ceases
to be of else to us after his ideal shall have led up men from their
flint and arrowhead caverns to intercommunicative daylight. For when the
fictitious creature has performed that service of helping to civilize the
world, it becomes the most dangerous of delusions, causing first the
individual to despise the mass, and then to join the mass in crushing the
individual. Wherewith let us to our story, the froth being out of the
bottle.

CHAPTER II

AN IRISH BALL

In the Assembly Rooms of the capital city of the Sister Island there was
a public Ball, to celebrate the return to Erin of a British hero of Irish
blood, after his victorious Indian campaign; a mighty struggle splendidly
ended; and truly could it be said that all Erin danced to meet him; but
this was the pick of the dancing, past dispute the pick of the supping.
Outside those halls the supping was done in Lazarus fashion, mainly
through an excessive straining of the organs of hearing and vision, which
imparted the readiness for more, declared by physicians to be the state
inducing to sound digestion. Some one spied the figure of the hero at
the window and was fed; some only to hear the tale chewed the cud of it;
some told of having seen him mount the steps; and sure it was that at an
hour of the night, no matter when, and never mind a drop or two of cloud,
he would come down them again, and have an Irish cheer to freshen his
pillow. For 'tis Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too.
Farther away, over field and bogland, the whiskies did their excellent
ancient service of watering the dry and drying the damp, to the toast of
'Lord Larrian, God bless him! he's an honour to the old country!' and a
bit of a sigh to follow, hints of a story, and loud laughter, a drink, a
deeper sigh, settling into conversation upon the brave Lord Larrian's
deeds, and an Irish regiment he favoured--had no taste for the enemy
without the backing of his 'boys.' Not he. Why, he'd never march to
battle and they not handy; because when he struck he struck hard, he
said. And he has a wound on the right hip and two fingers off his left
hand; has bled for England, to show her what Irishmen are when they're
well treated.

The fine old warrior standing at the upper end of the long saloon, tall,
straight, grey-haired, martial in his aspect and decorations, was worthy
to be the flag-pole for enthusiasm. His large grey eyes lightened from
time to time as he ranged them over the floating couples, and dropped a
word of inquiry to his aide, Captain Sir Lukin Dunstane, a good model of
a cavalry officer, though somewhat a giant, equally happy with his chief
in passing the troops of animated ladies under review. He named as many
as were known to him. Reviewing women exquisitely attired for
inspection, all variously and charmingly smiling, is a relief after the
monotonous regiments of men. Ireland had done her best to present the
hero of her blood an agreeable change; and he too expressed a patriotic
satisfaction on hearing that the faces most admired by him were of the
native isle. He looked upon one that came whirling up to him on a young
officer's arm and swept off into the crowd of tops, for a considerable
while before he put his customary question. She was returning on the
spin when he said,

'Who is she?'

Sir Lukin did not know. 'She 's a new bird; she nodded to my wife;
I'll ask.'

He manoeuvred a few steps cleverly to where his wife reposed. The
information he gathered for the behoof of his chief was, that the
handsome creature answered to the name of Miss Merion; Irish; aged
somewhere between eighteen and nineteen; a dear friend of his wife's,
and he ought to have remembered her; but she was a child when he saw
her last.

'Dan Merion died, I remember, about the day of my sailing for India,'
said the General. 'She may be his daughter.'

The bright cynosure rounded up to him in the web of the waltz, with her
dark eyes for Lady Dunstane, and vanished again among the twisting
columns.

He made his way, handsomely bumped by an apologetic pair, to Lady
Dunstane, beside whom a seat was vacated for him; and he trusted she had
not over-fatigued herself.

'Confess,' she replied, 'you are perishing to know more than Lukin has
been able to tell you. Let me hear that you admire her: it pleases me;
and you shall hear what will please you as much, I promise you, General.'

'I do. Who wouldn't?' said he frankly.

'She crossed the Channel expressly to dance here tonight at the public
Ball in honour of you.'

'Where she appears, the first person falls to second rank, and accepts it
humbly.'

'That is grandly spoken.'

'She makes everything in the room dust round a blazing jewel.'

'She makes a poet of a soldier. Well, that you may understand how
pleased I am, she is my dearest friend, though she is younger than I,
as may be seen; she is the only friend I have. I nursed her when she was
an infant; my father and Mr. Dan Merion were chums. We were parted by my
marriage and the voyage to India. We have not yet exchanged a syllable:
she was snapped up, of course, the moment she entered the room. I knew
she would be a taking girl: how lovely, I did not guess. You are right,
she extinguishes the others. She used to be the sprightliest of living
creatures, and to judge by her letters, that has not faded. She 's in
the market, General.'

Lord Larrian nodded to everything he heard, concluding with a mock
doleful shake of the head. 'My poorest subaltern!' he sighed, in the
theatrical but cordially melancholy style of green age viewing Cytherea's
market.

His poorest subaltern was richer than he in the wherewithal to bid for
such prizes.

'What is her name in addition to Merion?'

'Diana Antonia Merion. Tony to me, Diana to the world.'

'She lives over there?'

'In England, or anywhere; wherever she is taken in. She will live,
I hope, chiefly with me.'

'And honest Irish?'

'Oh, she's Irish.'

'Ah!' the General was Irish to the heels that night.

Before further could be said the fair object of the dialogue came darting
on a trip of little runs, both hands out, all her face one tender sparkle
of a smile; and her cry proved the quality of her blood: 'Emmy! Emmy!
my heart!'

'My dear Tony!

I should not have come but for the hope of seeing you here.'

Lord Larrian rose and received a hurried acknowledgement of his courtesy
from the usurper of his place.

'Emmy! we might kiss and hug; we're in Ireland. I burn to! But you're
not still ill, dear? Say no! That Indian fever must have gone. You do
look a dash pale, my own; you're tired.'

'One dance has tired me. Why were you so late?'

'To give the others a chance? To produce a greater impression by
suspense? No and no. I wrote you I was with the Pettigrews. We caught
the coach, we caught the boat, we were only two hours late for the Ball;
so we did wonders. And good Mrs. Pettigrew is, pining somewhere to
complete her adornment. I was in the crush, spying for Emmy, when Mr.
Mayor informed me it was the duty of every Irishwoman to dance her toes
off, if she 'd be known for what she is. And twirl! a man had me by the
waist, and I dying to find you.'

'Who was the man?'

'Not to save these limbs from the lighted stake could I tell you!'

'You are to perform a ceremonious bow to Lord Larrian.'

'Chatter first! a little!'

The plea for chatter was disregarded. It was visible that the hero of
the night hung listening and in expectation. He and the Beauty were
named to one another, and they chatted through a quadrille. Sir Lukin
introduced a fellow-Harrovian of old days, Mr. Thomas Redworth, to his
wife.

'Our weather-prophet, meteorologist,' he remarked, to set them going;
'you remember, in India, my pointing to you his name in a newspaper--
letter on the subject. He was generally safe for the cricketing days.'

Lady Dunstane kindly appeared to call it to mind, and she led upon the
them-queried at times by an abrupt 'Eh?' and 'I beg pardon,' for
manifestly his gaze and one of his ears, if not the pair, were given to
the young lady discoursing with Lord Larrian. Beauty is rare; luckily is
it rare, or, judging from its effect on men, and the very stoutest of
them, our world would be internally more distracted planet than we see,
to the perversion of business, courtesy, rights of property, and the
rest. She perceived an incipient victim, of the hundreds she
anticipated, and she very tolerantly talked on: 'The weather and women
have some resemblance they say. Is it true that he who reads the one can
read the other?'

Lord Larrian here burst into a brave old laugh, exclaiming, 'Oh! good!'

Mr. Redworth knitted his thick brows. 'I beg pardon? Ah! women!
Weather and women? No; the one point more variable in women makes all
the difference.'

'Can you tell me what the General laughed at?'

The honest Englishman entered the trap with promptitude. 'She said:--who
is she, may I ask you?'

Lady Dunstane mentioned her name.

Daughter of the famous Dan Merion? The young lady merited examination
for her father's sake. But when reminded of her laughter-moving speech,
Mr. Redworth bungled it; he owned he spoilt it, and candidly stated his
inability to see the fun. 'She said, St. George's Channel in a gale
ought to be called St. Patrick's--something--I missed some point. That
quadrille-tune, the Pastourelle, or something . . .'

'She had experience of the Channel last night,' Lady Dunstane pursued,
and they both, while in seeming converse, caught snatches from their
neighbours, during a pause of the dance.

The sparkling Diana said to Lord Larrian, 'You really decline to make any
of us proud women by dancing to-night?'

The General answered: 'I might do it on two stilts; I can't on one.' He
touched his veteran leg.

'But surely,' said she, 'there's always an inspiration coming to it from
its partner in motion, if one of them takes the step.'

He signified a woeful negative. 'My dear young lady, you say dark things
to grey hairs!'

She rejoined: 'If we were over in England, and you fixed on me the stigma
of saying dark things, I should never speak without being thought
obscure.'

'It's because you flash too brightly for them.'

'I think it is rather the reminiscence of the tooth that received a stone
when it expected candy.'

Again the General laughed; he looked pleased and warmed. 'Yes, that 's
their way, that 's their way!' and he repeated her words to himself,
diminishing their importance as he stamped them on his memory, but so
heartily admiring the lovely speaker, that he considered her wit an
honour to the old country, and told her so. Irish prevailed up to
boiling-point.

Lady Dunstane, not less gratified, glanced up at Mr. Redworth, whose
brows bore the knot of perplexity over a strong stare. He, too, stamped
the words on his memory, to see subsequently whether they had a vestige
of meaning. Terrifically precocious, he thought her. Lady Dunstane, in
her quick sympathy with her friend, read the adverse mind in his face.
And her reading of the mind was right, wrong altogether her deduction of
the corresponding sentiment.

Music was resumed to confuse the hearing of the eavesdroppers.

They beheld a quaint spectacle: a gentleman, obviously an Englishman,
approached, with the evident intention of reminding the Beauty of the
night of her engagement to him, and claiming her, as it were, in the
lion's jaws. He advanced a foot, withdrew it, advanced, withdrew; eager
for his prize, not over-enterprising; in awe of the illustrious General
she entertained--presumeably quite unaware of the pretender's presence;
whereupon a voice was heard: 'Oh! if it was minuetting you meant before
the lady, I'd never have disputed your right to perform, sir.' For it
seemed that there were two claimants in the field, an Irishman and an
Englishman; and the former, having a livelier sense of the situation,
hung aloof in waiting for her eye; the latter directed himself to strike
bluntly at his prey; and he continued minuetting, now rapidly blinking,
flushed, angry, conscious of awkwardness and a tangle, incapable of
extrication. He began to blink horribly under the raillery of his rival.
The General observed him, but as an object remote and minute, a fly or
gnat. The face of the brilliant Diana was entirely devoted to him she
amused.

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