Diana of the Crossways | Page 6

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.'
You are entreated to repress alarm. She was by preference light-handed;
and her saying of oratory, that 'It is always the more impressive