Diana of the Crossways | Page 9

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