Diana of the Crossways | Page 5

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