As a work of art, it is, indeed, the most complete and perfect thing that Meredith has done—a flawless masterpiece without any of the writer’s eccentric deviations and mannerisms. Perhaps oppressively witty, though much less so than ‘Diana,’ striking none but the delicately comic chord, and turning to pathos upon the point of a smiling curl of the lip, it carries us through a few weeks’ comedy at a pleasant canter to the accompaniment of fanciful humour and polished irony. If we come upon an occasional odd effect—a queer simile, a bit of isolated poetry lapsed into prose, a bar of pure melody dropped into speech—we recognise with pleasure and delight the author of ‘Richard Feverel,’ and we greet him with a cordial smile. This other writer is new to us, but not the less welcome—less serious, more polished and more fanciful; and while less of a poet, he is more of an artist—less philosophic, he is much more scientific. The play of wit is less sparkling and more penetrative. It shines, a soft luminous light, with undiminished radiance throughout the book, lending itself less easily to quotation, baffling even the memory by the quality of the flying phrases. Upon all subjects of daily life has he something original to say, and he can even be poetical and fresh, and compel our senses to delighted thrills upon the worn-out theme of woman’s dress—a theme that wrecks other writers and leaves them dismayed by the dulness and insipidity of their own description. Read those lines in ‘The Egoist,’ upon Clara’s dress in a breeze.
The characters, as I have said, are few. Clara, the heroine, described by Vernon Whitford, that scholar and student of equable temper, as ‘a mountain echo’—an idea that still lingers with us when we have closed the book as the sum of her sweetness, wholesomeness and natural charm—and by Mrs. Mountstuart less felicitously as ‘a dainty rogue in porcelain.’ Here we gather an added something of her exterior, and look at a mountain echo with the eyes of fashion, just as we see through the same sharp and unimaginative eyes ‘the sunken brilliancy of the lean long-walker and scholar in a Phœbus-Apollo turned fasting friar,’ and the poetess, Lætitia Dale, upon her vivid stroke, ‘coming with a romantic tale upon her eyelashes.’ This is one of Meredith’s tricks—the uttering of pointed phrases by the tongues of sharp, clever women. Sometimes they are far-fetched; always are they too carefully trimmed and edged, as hasty phrases have not often the felicity of being edged. In general it is the fault of his characters to talk too brilliantly, and he forgets that men and women in their commonplace moods are not habitually metaphorical and literary.
As the essence of self-made man, it may be thought that Sir Willoughby is meant to represent an unpleasant and an unusual type. Not so at all. If it had not been for Meredith, he might have gone tranquilly down to the grave, and not even his worst enemy would have had very obvious cause to scent the wolf within him. We meet him first upon his majority—a very fascinating and fastidious young Englishman whom we gradually understand is the letter ‘I’ vivified and made human, mentally as well as physically straightened to its erectness, and as uncompromisingly personal. We heedlessly learn of his dallying with Lætitia Dale, of the silent and unexacting worship of this soft rhyming representative of ‘starving women’ who endure their hunger uncomplainingly, and are too proud to offer themselves for the sensational pity of a world ever in demand of dramatic situations. We enjoy a secret satisfaction in his discomfiture when Constantia Durham leaves him in the lurch and runs off with the more cheerful military figure, and yet we still hardly realize what manner of man he is when he in turn plants Lætitia and seeks distraction in three years’ travel. Meredith makes us understand that he is a youth of spurious niceness, who objected to his betrothed talking freely about male cousins and friends, and considered the pursuit of competing admirers a stain upon her. Cloistral purity was his demand in the market; woman emerging from an eggshell, ‘somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken ... and seeing him, with her sex’s eyes, first of all men.’
How much we thank Meredith for showing us the ‘infinite grossness’ of this demand! And how we relish his quiet laughter at Sir Willoughby’s loathing of the ‘dust of the world’ touching the privileged object of his choice. We conclude that Miss Durham was a young person of spirit and sense when she ran off with Captain Oxford, and heartily wish her good luck upon her wedding-tour, while Sir Willoughby abroad is holding an ‘English review of his Maker’s grotesques.’ What a delightful stroke that is against the British tourist! Thackeray never matched it. If you would measure it fully, you have but to stand apart and watch the faces and listen to the criticisms of our fellow-countrymen abroad. Everything that is not British is grotesque.
As the Creator is just as responsible for foreign countries and foreign races as for Great Britain, these criticisms, as Meredith wittily points out, comprise a review of His grotesques. It is in such light and inimitable pen-strokes, to be found on every page, that he shows us the man made bare to the very heart. All his social virtues are ruthlessly traced to the meanest source: his wish for cloistral purity in woman, his regarding the presence of competing admiration as a soil, to its true Oriental origin, the monster egoism of his prayer that even beyond death his bride should be his alone, and of his desire to shape her character to the feminine of his own, without any consideration for her natural and healthy preference to be herself. All young men who think it part of the poetry of love to wish to see the unhappy maiden of their choice reduced to ashes or incense, and transmuted by love until they literally become ‘the man they are to marry,’ cannot do better than study the Egoist, and see for themselves the manner of man they are. The study will fill them with a sense of horror of themselves and of the accepted notion of the infinity of love which Clara, listening gravely, conceived as ‘a narrow dwelling where a voice droned and ceased not.’ In her sharp apprenticeship as the betrothed of this amiable young squire she learned to become an attentive listener. Little else was expected of her. But it was the destiny of this intelligent and impulsive girl to give Sir Willoughby many a rude lesson in the sex she represented, that left Constantia’s elopement and free talk of male cousins and friends in the shade as minor offences against taste and cloistral reserve. After the preliminary descriptive pages, the book is completely given up to Clara’s struggle for freedom and her lover’s desperate efforts to retain her, fearful of ridicule and the ignominy of a second jilting. She rashly compromises herself with a brilliant Irishman, while unconsciously her heart is given to the Phœbus-Apollo turned fasting friar to whom Sir Willoughby, meditating revenge, intends to hand her over upon granting her the freedom she claims, rejoicing privately in the fact that his own choice had irredeemably spotted her for another. There is something pathetic in the poor Egoist’s delusion, and while we heartily despise him, we are against our judgment forced to pity him when in the strife his true character is exposed even to his life-long silent worshipper, Lætitia, and we see the unhappy gentleman upon his knees to that discarded devotee imploring her to marry him, so that the county should not say that he had been despised and rejected by three women, one of them poor and his inferior. His misfortune and abasement are contemptible in their cause, and contemptibly borne, nevertheless the something in us which responds to this terrible monster within him begets the pity of brotherhood. Degraded, shrunken, stripped of the glory of success, we see in him a monstrous image of ourselves, of all mankind, so that we are afraid to turn from him and wring hands with the wretch in a kind of shamed sympathy. We readily admit the pure comedy of this sublime absurdity in human form reduced to such shabby dimensions and exposed for the ridicule of posterity, but we cannot laugh very joyously at the exposure. There is too much truth in it for the comic muse, and the pathos is too apparent.
As Sir Willoughby is Meredith’s typical analysis of the male’s character, so is Diana Warwick his chief type of woman, and just so ruthlessly as he is drawn is she drawn mercifully—too mercifully, perhaps, for she is painted in all the glowing colours of love. Mr. Meredith is not the analyzer of Diana; he is her ardent lover. He adores her unscrutinizingly, as it behoves the true lover to adore his lady. He paints her very faults upon worshipping knees, and does not think it necessary to apologize for her or urge one word of excuse or deprecation when, following fact, she stoops to a shabby breach of confidence worthy the lowest new journalist. She is Diana to him in all her moods, a bewildering and adorable creature, and as such he expects the reader to swallow her thankfully, rejoicing in her as he does, wondering at the stupidity and evilness of the world that condemns her, censuring the meanness of the recreant lover who deserts her upon discovery of her unexplainable betrayal of his confidences. If his lady chooses to start out at midnight, fresh from a love-scene in which she has learnt from her lover a great political secret, to sell it for a very substantial sum to a London editor, Mr. Meredith simply follows her as an admiring recorder, and finds it sufficient explanation to tell us pityingly that she was a child in this world’s affairs, that she was as ignorant as a child in business matters, and had no idea of the gravity of her action. This last plea we accept willingly, for impulsive women like Diana rarely have any notion of the weight of actions, and never can measure their consequences; but for a simpleton in worldly affairs she showed a pretty accurate knowledge of the value of her secret and of its market price, and for a lady to sell secret information learnt in a love-scene seems to us an unmistakable fall which, however much we may deplore, we hold ourselves exempt from admiring, or even condoning, as Diana’s apologist desires us to do.
As an Irishwoman I cannot but be grateful to this big Saxon giant for his generous advocacy of a famous country-woman whom posterity persists in holding spotted. He has taken her up in the teeth of British opinion, and being deeply enamoured of the splendid creature, he is not satisfied in proceeding to whitewash her, which would have been a simple enough task, but he has clothed her in soft cloud and fine radiance, he has all but sketched her wings, and shown her standing tip-toe on hard, solid earth with glance strained ethereally upward. Not by any means an angel, but a young goddess, half woman, a creature of exquisite freshness, originality, bewildering wit and soaring intellect, as lovely as Aurora, and as cold, purer still, and more remote from the contamination of gross masculine admiration, than Diana. Her mind flies upon barbed phrases. Her commonest words take the shape of pointed, illuminated arrows. She is the beautiful Egeria of a young minister of state, the immaterial soul of a polished old statesman, by whom she almost loses her social head, and is only saved from the block by the stout defence of her devoted friends. She is sunshine in a delicate and not happy lady’s life, carrying a whiff of Irish mirth and wit with her delightful presence into the stately and decorous gloom of English town and country existence, a mental draught of champagne wherever she goes, all impulse and brightness and warmth of heart. And how this masterful knight of hers, turned biographer, lashes those who were stupid and wicked enough to misjudge her! For every tear, every painful contraction of brow, they forced her to in life, are they punished by his unsparing pen. He uses it in her defence like a true crusader’s sword. He reviews her enemies in an almost passionate anger, names them, notes every conventional trick and fault, lays bare the tiniest spot upon which to point his dreadful lamp of ridicule, and then proceeds to shiver their self-respect to atoms, to disperse their highly-prized, respectable prejudices, and leaves them divested of all but heavy British stupidity, that prevents them from seizing the charm and comprehending the personality of this brilliant young star shot from the Sister Isle into their astonished midst. Her freshness is the eternally vernal freshness of the shamrock, her faults and impulses the voice of a generous race seeking expression through her ardent soul. He makes her enemies his enemies. He wears her colours nobly, gallantly, as behoves a gentleman in whom the mediæval strain still runs. He carries her gloriously through the divorce courts, leaving her wooden Saxon husband, of narrow, official soul, utterly abased and shrunken, instead of triumphant in her fall. We behold her after this crucial ordeal clearer, whiter, more radiant than ever; nearer to the immortal Diana she images by reason of her new freedom; clear-eyed as a maiden returned to the forest-mists of unsullied imagination; and behind her in the mire lies the crushed marital form, unutterably mean and shabby and foolish with his absurd ‘Yah, yah,’ on his lips.
In the case of her English husband and her recreant English lover, her defender has no worse fault to urge against them than the stiff-necked prejudices of race. Both we see like respectable carriage-horses in harnessed strife with a young war-steed ready for dangerous speed and nerve-upsetting tricks—a potent, self-willed young creature, sniffing menacingly at conventionality, audacious from excess of purity, perilously poised upon every incalculable impulse, and in spite of a powerful intellect, scatter-brained upon all the ugly brinks in her career. No wonder the unhappy Saxon gentlemen allied to this wild and too lovely Hibernian lost their heads and turned tail when it came to a choice of swallowing her whole and entire and following meekly in her wake, the obedient satellites Mr. Meredith thinks they ought to have been, with heart filled with gratitude, and eyes full of love and admiration.
That they did not do so is their lasting shame and reproach, and he reviles them as starched officials and stiff-necked Britons. Whereas another and a less partial biographer would mildly commend them to our pity, because of their undeniable sufferings at the expense of a female engine that ran them down and left them in fragments upon her path, he is only content in piecing the fragments in order the more powerfully to hold the feeble creatures up to our ridicule. If it had not been for that fatal newspaper episode, we should have been more than disposed to share his ardent sympathy, and range ourselves as warmly as he upon his heroine’s side. But the newspaper episode is an exceedingly big camel to be asked to swallow without as much as a wry face, above all to swallow and preserve intact our ideal of a persecuted, disinterested, and very noble woman. Though not the most artificial of his books, the atmosphere of ‘Diana’ carries a heavier scent of the midnight oil than even that garishly brilliant study of a pair of tragic comedians. There are dialogues in ‘Diana’ that only stop short of requiring a key—noticeably one after-supper scene when the air is charged with electricity, and wit oppressively polished flies hither and thither, broken confusedly upon rainbow sparkles of thought. Though we are sick of commonplace chatter, the intensity of self-consciousness and prolonged mental effort involved in such a game of battledore and shuttlecock, such a desperate intellectual race for the prize for barbed phrases and skilfully-managed metaphor, are surely exhausting. Diana and her numerous satellites seem never in the course of their lives to have enjoyed five minutes’ naturalness, and never to have known the luxury of mental dressing-gown and night-cap. Like the sun, their intellects never sleep, know not even the charm of drowsiness; and it is frequently a strain upon lazy, easy-going readers, used to Thackeray and Dickens, to follow the unceasing play of intellectual pyrotechnics. The most beautiful thing in this remarkable book—next to Meredith’s generous defence of his heroine,—the tenderest, most naturally, humanly painted, is the sweet and faithful friendship between two intellectual women, one a soft-hearted, delicate Englishwoman with the milder and more clinging sentiments of her race, and the other our vivid Diana, made up of Irish cloud and Irish laughter, with her robuster and more ardent temperament. This is a fresh debt that women owe their mighty champion—the recognition of their capabilities for mutual friendship, faithful love and generous admiration, which the cynical male habitually denies them. Emma Dunstane married, loves her bright Tony, as she fondly calls Diana, above all the world; and Tony, tossed upon a sea of amatory difficulties, in turn beloved, rejected, and divorced, faithfully loves her friend Emma above even her faithless and her faithful lovers, of which Heaven knows she has choice enough. One of them, Mr. Sullivan Smith, is a sensational and finely-natured Irishman, too apparently created after Lever to be of value as a serious study.
The story is well known. A beautiful, witty, young Irishwoman marries a wooden English official of docketed opinions well phrased. She is loved by many, notably one other Englishman, Redworth, a fine contrast with her husband, and Lord Dannisburgh, whose admiration excites her husband’s jealousy and leads to divorce. Her faithful friends throughout are Lady Dunstane and Redworth; afterwards Percy Dacier, at first suspecting and coldly scrutinizing, goes over to her and finally succumbs. He is a stiff and starched young Englishman, faultlessly correct and attractive after his fashion, which is the reverse of a warm one. Diana loves him, but there is a sort of Diana mist thrown over her love, which shows it as burning a cold clear light like ineffectual sunbeams upon a glacier. The young minister of state and she are engaged, and he returns late one night to breathe a state secret into her ears. This is the blot upon her character, the irretrievable blot upon her life. When he has kissed her for the first time—though no word so barbaric and indelicate as ‘kiss’ has been written in the record by the writer, fastidiously sensitive in preserving the snowy plumage of his paragon—explaining that he is but a mortal lover after all, she says the fault was hers that she was degraded. This is straining at gnats to swallow an enormous camel. She goes forth from this first embrace to sell his political news to a leading editor. Fact or fiction, we cannot get the unutterable ugliness of it out of our minds. But whether Dacier was justified in throwing her over for the action is for male judges to say. Great and passionate love, the sort of love such a woman should excite, would, I imagine, have found a ready road to pardon. Dacier is a cold-blooded politician, with whom we have not much sympathy, and are not sorry to see him degraded in his creator’s eyes, and, beside his brilliant betrayer, shrunken to shabby dimensions. He goes straight off—marries a pious and virtuous young heiress, and drops out of view. The stricken lady, reduced to a state of suicidal prostration, about whom the voices of rumour are for a second time busily and unkindly engaged, is not without her champions. Mr. Sullivan Smith and Arthur Rhodes meet on their way to propose for her, and eventually her faithful lover, Redworth, wins what he gallantly and manfully regards as a prize, and thus the end is saved from tragedy. We leave Tony too dazzled to know if her views of life are brighter, and bearing love for a dower to her husband. Only we continue to wish she had not visited that newspaper office.