My 1917 Modern Library edition of Diana of the Crossways includes an introduction by Arthur Symons, the critic who shaped readers’ understanding of Symbolist and Decadent poetry. He maintains that Meredith “breaks every rule” of novel-writing, that he is in fact “essentially a poet, not a novelist.” To Symons Meredith has written “the most intellectual” English novels as he aims at “something which is the poetry of pure idea.” He thus writes prose “as if it were poetry, with an endeavour to pack every phrase with imaginative meaning, every sentence, you realise, will be an epigram.” For him “life recorded becomes, not a new life, but literature about life.”
This tendency is
particularly pronounced in Diana of the Crossways as the title character
is well-known for her epigrams and witty conversational sallies, many reported
in the first chapter “Of Diaries and Diarists.”
In describing her, Meredith comments self-reflexively on his own use of
such material.
Drolleries,
humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of roast meats, past with the
picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital breath. They have it rarely, or it eludes the
chronicler. To say of the great erratic and forsaken Lady A****, after she had
accepted the consolations of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in
asterisks “as she was now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God,” sounds
to us a roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere. Sitting at the roast we might have thought
differently. Perry Wilkinson is not
happier in citing her reply to his compliment on the reviewers’ unanimous
eulogy of her humour and pathos:—the “merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded
of us in every work of fiction,” she says, lamenting the writer's compulsion to
go on producing them for applause until it is extremest age that knocks their
knees. We are informed by Lady Pennon of
'the most amusing description of the first impressions of a pretty English
simpleton in Paris'; and here is an opportunity for ludicrous contrast of the
French and English styles of pushing flatteries—'piping to the charmed animal,'
as Mrs. Warwick terms it in another place: but Lady Pennon was acquainted with
the silly woman of the piece, and found her amusement in the 'wonderful truth'
of that representation.
The initial figure of speech compares wit
to the scent of dinner on the fire specifically drawing attention to the
ephemeral quality of both phenomena.
Meredith then begins with a variation of the modesty topos by declaring
that, since such remarks can only be appreciated in lived experience, his
project of recording them must fail. To
test this hypothesis, he proceeds to a particular bon mot concerning “the
great erratic and forsaken Lady A****.”
The comment, as it turns out, depends for its effect, not on being
present in person, but rather on the anecdote’s written form using
asterisks. Yet this, too, though it is
worth recording apparently, he denigrates as possessing “wit somewhere and fun
nowhere.” He realizes his effect as he
at the same time denies it. The first
three sentences have required the reader first to compare an impression of
cleverness with a smell of dinner cooking, then with a breath. Wine is allusively called “Bacchus,”
asterisks are equated with stars, and drunkenness with theophany, surely a hefty
burden of figures of speech for a few lines of prose.
He promises no more
likely survival for the spirit of Diana’s next quoted witticism, that she must
act the “merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in every work of fiction.”
Here she highlights the art of her
repartee with allusions to circus and commedia dell’arte performance. She is said to find it “lamentable” that she must
produce such “drolleries” until advanced old age, itself figured concretely as
the time that “extremest age” makes the knees knock. Thus, just as she is shown to be extra clever
by her belittling her own conversational abilities, Meredith’s persona
strengthens his case for her by denying that his repeating of such lines can
have the effect they had when originally spoken. Still, the author seems to be satisfied at
the extent to which he has achieved his desired effect of convincing the reader
of Diana’s verbal skills when he mentions another of her satirical comments,
one recalled by Lady Pennon, and attests to its “wonderful” effect without even
recording what she said. Here the reader
is expected to be impressed by precisely nothing.
Though the work
scarcely shrinks from themes – it contains perhaps the most explicit feminist
thinking of any fiction of its era – Meredith’s primary appeal is in poetry:
synaesthesia, figures of speech, and fresh language. Memories are said to be like cooking odors and
asterisks like stars while old age is signified by knock knees and Diana resembles
a circus clown. Apart from the book-long
associations of Diana Warwick with the divine huntress, this brief passage
contains allusions to Dionysos, Ariadne, and Orpheus, and the theatrical figure
of Pantalone. (In the following
paragraph Tacitus is quoted in Latin.) This
dense texture, replete with tropes, foregrounds the verbal medium with less
emphasis on the semantic content.
After all, what
the passage says is that is has no possibility of success, that writing cannot
possibly reproduce the moment of lived experience, that in fact lived
experience is ineffable and the writer can never hope to convey the feeling of
narrated incidents. Given that denial of
language’s ability to mirror life, the writer entertains just as Diana did, by linguistic
fireworks and puzzles. Rhetorical
devices such as allusions are showy artifices and every metaphor is a little
riddle. Diana of the Crossways
is, as Symons says, “a poetic novel,” and its readers will enjoy the pleasures
often associated with poetry.
In fact Meredith
was surely not indifferent to tendentious elements in his tale. He is quite explicit about his analysis of
women’s causes and these were very much in the air as women had, in the
generation before the novel’s publication, gained rights to divorce, property
ownership, and education, including the medical profession. Furthermore,
the book is in part a roman à clef based on a scandal involving the
Honorable Mrs. Norton, Lord Melbourne, Sidney Herbert, John Delane, and others. Yet these elements are, on every page of the
novel, secondary to Meredith’s word-play and verbal ingenuity. If it is impossible for us to understand
Diana’s cleverness through retold anecdotes, we have before us Meredith’s wit,
and that, of course, is all we need.
