Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS” by George Meredith
(first published in 1885)
As
I’ve stated before on this blog, there was a time when for some reason I read
my way through all the novels of George Meredith (1828-1909). At first I was
puzzled. Why was he once esteemed as one of the greatest Victorian novelists?
And why has he subsequently dropped out of the canon, to the point where he now
tends to be read only by specialists and thesis-writers? There are periodic
attempts by enthusiasts to bring him back into popularity, but they are always
unsuccessful.
It
didn’t take me long to understand why this eclipse happened. With some
honourable exceptions, Meredith’s novels are too self-consciously intellectual in
a way that has dated badly. Meredith often deals with issues that would once
have seemed innovative and daring, but that no longer hold the interest. Worse,
he tends to confine himself to a very limited social milieu (basically
upper-class intellectuals) and to write in a convoluted prose style, too
addicted to sentences running on in complex and impenetrable subordinate
clauses.
And
yet I greatly admire and enjoy his first real novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (see post thereupon), written before
his worst mannerisms set in; and his incisive political novel Beauchamp’s Career (ditto); and there
are things to be said for his poetry (see posting George Meredith as Poet); although I have already chastised what
was once seen as one of his two greatest novels The Egoist.
Diana of the Crossways was once his other
most esteemed novel, and I am now going to chastise it by first giving you
one of my dreaded synopses and them donning my black cap to pass judgment.
Short
synopsis: A talented and beautiful young woman, separated from her jealous
husband, fails to find happiness with a rising politician, but is eventually
won by a plodding, faithful admirer.
Real
synopsis: The daughter of the late Dan Merion, Diana Antonia Merion is an
adornment of the Anglo-Irish social scene. This is established in the early
chapters in which, aged only 19, she is the cynosure of a ball in Dublin,
vocally admired by the old soldier Lord Larrian and the Irishman Sullivan
Smith. Crossing back to England, young Diana wishes to regain possession of the
family seat, the Crossways, which is tenanted by the Warwicks. Is it the
stately house or the man which leads her to become betrothed, and then married,
to 34-year-old Augustus Warwick?
Whatever
the case, the marriage is not a success. Augustus Warwick becomes ridiculously
jealous and possessive, and the marriage breaks down when he absurdly accuses
her of infidelity on the basis of her platonic friendship with the aged Lord
Dannisborough.
All
this is sympathetically observed by Thomas Redworth and by Diana’s best friend
Emma Dunstane, who lives at her own mansion, Copley, with her husband Captain
Sir Lukin Dunstane. [The good captain is once so overcome with Diana’s beauty
that he can’t forebear to kiss her!]
Now
separated from her husband, and having to make her own way in the world, Diana
travels to Italy and begins to make a living in journalism and as the writer of
popular novels.
She returns to
London. She is in the unusual situation of being married-but-single; not
available for the marriage market, and not fully respectable either. Says
Meredith: “The men and women of her
circle derisively, unanimously, disbelieved in an innocence that forfeited
reputation.” (Chapter 29) However, she becomes friendly with a number of
young men, and is still admired, especially by the Honourable Percy Dacier, a
young relative of old Lord Dannisborough. Percy is a rising politician –
apparently a Liberal. [In the background, very dimly recorded by Meredith,
there seem to be Liberal manoeuvres to outbid the Irish Land league in the
Liberals’ Irish policy – and it is here that Meredith uses some rather twee and
patronising imagery to suggest Diana’s impulsive Irishness and Percy Dacier’s
rational Englishness.] The friendship between Diana and Percy develops apace,
as does Diana’s writing. But the relationship eventually shipwrecks when Diana
hears some confidential political information from Percy, and passes it on to
the editor of the Times, who splashes
it through his paper. Although by this stage Diana’s husband has died
(conveniently offstage) and Diana is free to marry, Percy now turns his back on
her and marries a socialite.
Diana
has failed with two men. She retreats into herself, protected in part by her
maid Danvers. But finally she returns to the world and accepts as her husband
the faithful Tom Redworth, who has admired her throughout the course of the
action.
(In making this
synopsis, by the way, I have deliberately left out other admirers of Diana such
as one Arthur Rhodes and the diarist Henry Wilmers, who is the narrative voice
of the novel’s pompous opening chapter.)
What are we, as
early 21st century readers, meant to make of this?
Sticking out
like a bloody spear is the novel’s symbolism. Diana is the goddess who hunts –
an exquisite ideal for the men who pursue. From the diminutive of her middle
name Antonia, she is known as “Tony” by her best friend Emma Dunstane, and the
novel calls her “Tony” whenever she expresses her sensual side. So modern women, says the late Victorian
novelist, are both practical idealists and have sensual needs. Ah yes, dear
Victorian readers, but modern women are different from their mothers and
grandmothers. Which direction will this modern woman take? Please note that she
lives at the Crossways…
Meredith puts
into Lukin Dunstane’s mouth praise for Diana which shows the combination of
brains and sex that attracts men: “A
woman like Diana Warwick might keep a fellow straight, because she’s all round
you; she’s man and woman in brains; and legged like a deer, and breasted like a
swan, and a regular sheaf of arrows in her eyes.” (Chapter 26)
Symbolism and
the intentions of the nomenclature are overt in this novel. Consciously and
deliberately, Meredith is writing about the “problem” of the single and
divorced woman. Such a daring thing to do in 1885. Of course he, as a
sympathetic male liberal, identifies with Diana and her plight. Indeed he seems
to identify with her to the point of telling us that she writes novels very
similar to the ones he writes. We are told that Diana’s first novel was a
fantasy called The Princess Egeia
(Meredith’s first novel was a fantasy, The
Shaving of Shagpat). Diana writes a political novel The Young Minister of State (i.e. Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career). She writes a novel about a singer The Cantatrice (Meredith wrote two
novels about a singer Sandra Belloni
and Vittoria). Diana writes a novel
about an indecisive man The Man of Two
Minds (i.e. Meredith’s The Egoist).
This is a case of “Madame Bovary, c’est
moi!” pushed to absurd extremes and it is hard to see the point of it,
except to create a big in-joke.
Those elements
that might once have made the book seem “modern” are now particularly faded.
Here is a novel which glances at politics, yet does so in a comforting and
complacent way as it puts those restless and irrational Irish at a distance.
Its advocacy of divorce is tepid to say the least. But the chief problem in
Diana herself. We are frequently told she is witty, but rarely hear
her being witty. She is observed from a distance. After the tedious opening
chapter in which the diarist Henry Wilmers gives his impressions of her, we
only hear about her first marriage and its failure as it is reported to
Emma Dunstane and her husband. This seems to be a “set-up” on Meredith’s part.
It is necessary to his plot that Diana be estranged from her first husband, but
Meredith doesn’t want to take on the hard work of showing how her marriage
broke down by making it psychologically credible.
Why was this
novel Meredith’s first big popular success? I suspect because it gave an
idealised image of a “pure” woman unsullied by sex, and it has a happy ending
in which the plodder Tom Redworth (with whom most male readers could identify)
wins out. (“I taught this old watch-dog
of a heart to keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him”, says faithful
Fido Tom Redworth in the last chapter.) And yet it seems to deal with
serious and grown-ups issues of the day which are now of only historical
interest to us – the Irish Question; highbrow Victorian novels; the “problem”
of divorce and the role of the “single-married” woman; a woman having a career;
“Whither the destiny of Woman?” etc. etc. [These latter issues are enough to
have had it re-published as a Virago Modern Classic.] Though I certainly think
Meredith has more going for him, I can’t help comparing this novel with a
forgotten bestseller I once analysed on this blog – Stephen McKenna’s Sonia (1917), which gave its readers
the illusion that they were dealing with serious, grown-up themes while in fact
doing very little to challenge their prejudices.
As a subjective
reaction, I found Diana of the Crossways
a tedious piece of work. Does the term “vapid” apply? Or maybe “tepid”? Among
Meredith’s novels I would rank it alongside Rhoda
Fleming and The Egoist for
dullness in the way it overanalyses events rather than providing a robust
narrative. I found myself frequently losing interest and had to force myself to
read it to the end. Only two sections caught my fancy – one being Tom
Redworth’s ride to the Crossways in an early chapter, an episode which takes on
an appropriately eerie quality; and the other being some of the political
machinations in the plot concerning Percy Dacier. Otherwise I found both
characters and situations thin, contrived and unconvincing. And is it
prejudiced of me to be always suspicious of books which rhapsodise over country
homes (Crossways, Copley etc.)?
Eccentric footnote: There
is an interesting metaphor used in Chapter 5 where Diana is lamenting the way
the new-fangled railways are carving up and defacing rural England. She says: “This mania for cutting up the land does
really cause me to pity those who are to follow us. They will not see the
England we have seen. It will be patched and scored, disfigured… a sort of
barbarous Maori visage – England in a New Zealand mask. You may call it the
sentimental view. In this case, I am decidedly sentimental: I love my country.
I do love quiet, rural England.”
No comments:
Post a Comment