1
/
of
1
OGB
The Testing of Diana Mallory
The Testing of Diana Mallory
Regular price
$0.99 USD
Regular price
Sale price
$0.99 USD
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Quantity
Couldn't load pickup availability
From "The Bookman," Volume 28:
Whatever attenuation of substance one may be conscious of in Mrs. Ward's later work has been very nearly—perhaps quite—offset by an increase of the sensitiveness, the mobile play of feeling, which has always given her stories their real charm. We have borne with the religion and the politics of her Elsmeres and her Tressadys because they were, after all, human enough to be in love and to suffer, because, above all, of the warm feminine presences which, in one capacity or another, attend them on their way. And we have been always held by the flow of her narrative. There is no beating about or harking back. She will, to be sure, have her passages of religious or political byplay, but it is easy to skip them as interpolations—stepping-stones across the stream of which we do not care to make use. The current moves on unimpeded, with a quiet celerity, and carries us with it. These stories are of a kind which one is disposed to make an end of at a sitting, however long—a fact which, by one of the paradoxes which seem to determine the character of popular periodicals, no doubt gives them their serial value.
The Testing of Diana Mallory is not a great novel; it is a moving tale. Diana herself is a figure of appealing grace, who at last wins to the dubious joy of union with the weakling to whom she has given her heart. It is not, one perceives, a question of great or single-mindedness, but of the love of woman. What does she love?
The plot is on the face of it old-fashioned to the point of quaintness. It is Framley Parsonage over again, only the heroine's disqualification in the maternal mind is somewhat more serious than in the case of Lucy Robarts. The Lady Lucy Markham of this tale is that established dea ex machina of the English novel, the dowager who holds the family purse, thinks only of the family name, and is able and willing to cut off the grown-up son with a shilling if he marries without her consent. Oliver Markham is a man of ambition and ability, and, with the aid of his mother's great wealth, is placed in his late thirties well beyond the rank and file of his fellow-radicals. He is already among the prominent figures of his party, and seems to be in line for the highest honours. Thus late comes to him his first serious test of character. Diana Mallory is the daughter of an Englishman of means and refinement. The mother has died a few years after her marriage, and the father has expatriated himself, bringing up his daughter in a retired villa of the Riviera, and never returning to England. His death releases the girl—now indeed fairly a woman—from what she has always felt to be exile. She flies "home" to England, and takes an old house in the country, almost at random. The neighbourhood chances to be that of Markham, who has visited the Mallorys in Italy. She is taken up by his mother, and actually recommended by her to Markham as a possible wife. In no long time he proposes marriage and is accepted. Then the bolt falls; the terrible reason of her father's exile is divulged to her and to Markham. The haughty Lady Lucy, of course, forbids the match, with the usual threats of disinheritance, and the usual letter to the hapless Diana, representing it as her duty to her lover and to society to release him from his promise of marriage. And now Markham promptly shows himself the poltroon who, if we are to credit the repeated asseverations of the British novelist, is the familiar product of British convention. He has only a paltry thousand a year himself, and Diana has but a few more, while the price of filial obedience will be, in time, a round twenty thousand. He is a radical in theory, with a leaning toward socialism, but in practice he is the pampered and dependent offspring of great wealth. While he is telling himself that money is necessary to his political career, he is perfectly aware that it is also necessary for his horses, his Scotch moors, the thousand luxuries which make up his life. There is, in fact, nothing that he is willing to sacrifice for the woman who has just given herself to him with such touching abandon. In America, one reflects—but perhaps not in "the best society"—a person of this kind would be disposed of as a cad, a good-for-nothing, a negligible quantity. We are, Heaven knows, a race of money-grubbers and spendthrifts, but it does not occur to us to admire the man who refuses to sell his sweetheart for a few millions. But it is clear that Mrs. Ward is prepared to admire her Markham if he pass that arduous test, and so, of course, is her Diana. And when Markham perfunctorily and insultingly proposes to stick to his word because he has given it, we are expected to regard him with disappointment, with sorrow, with some tincture of anger even, but not with contempt.
Whatever attenuation of substance one may be conscious of in Mrs. Ward's later work has been very nearly—perhaps quite—offset by an increase of the sensitiveness, the mobile play of feeling, which has always given her stories their real charm. We have borne with the religion and the politics of her Elsmeres and her Tressadys because they were, after all, human enough to be in love and to suffer, because, above all, of the warm feminine presences which, in one capacity or another, attend them on their way. And we have been always held by the flow of her narrative. There is no beating about or harking back. She will, to be sure, have her passages of religious or political byplay, but it is easy to skip them as interpolations—stepping-stones across the stream of which we do not care to make use. The current moves on unimpeded, with a quiet celerity, and carries us with it. These stories are of a kind which one is disposed to make an end of at a sitting, however long—a fact which, by one of the paradoxes which seem to determine the character of popular periodicals, no doubt gives them their serial value.
The Testing of Diana Mallory is not a great novel; it is a moving tale. Diana herself is a figure of appealing grace, who at last wins to the dubious joy of union with the weakling to whom she has given her heart. It is not, one perceives, a question of great or single-mindedness, but of the love of woman. What does she love?
The plot is on the face of it old-fashioned to the point of quaintness. It is Framley Parsonage over again, only the heroine's disqualification in the maternal mind is somewhat more serious than in the case of Lucy Robarts. The Lady Lucy Markham of this tale is that established dea ex machina of the English novel, the dowager who holds the family purse, thinks only of the family name, and is able and willing to cut off the grown-up son with a shilling if he marries without her consent. Oliver Markham is a man of ambition and ability, and, with the aid of his mother's great wealth, is placed in his late thirties well beyond the rank and file of his fellow-radicals. He is already among the prominent figures of his party, and seems to be in line for the highest honours. Thus late comes to him his first serious test of character. Diana Mallory is the daughter of an Englishman of means and refinement. The mother has died a few years after her marriage, and the father has expatriated himself, bringing up his daughter in a retired villa of the Riviera, and never returning to England. His death releases the girl—now indeed fairly a woman—from what she has always felt to be exile. She flies "home" to England, and takes an old house in the country, almost at random. The neighbourhood chances to be that of Markham, who has visited the Mallorys in Italy. She is taken up by his mother, and actually recommended by her to Markham as a possible wife. In no long time he proposes marriage and is accepted. Then the bolt falls; the terrible reason of her father's exile is divulged to her and to Markham. The haughty Lady Lucy, of course, forbids the match, with the usual threats of disinheritance, and the usual letter to the hapless Diana, representing it as her duty to her lover and to society to release him from his promise of marriage. And now Markham promptly shows himself the poltroon who, if we are to credit the repeated asseverations of the British novelist, is the familiar product of British convention. He has only a paltry thousand a year himself, and Diana has but a few more, while the price of filial obedience will be, in time, a round twenty thousand. He is a radical in theory, with a leaning toward socialism, but in practice he is the pampered and dependent offspring of great wealth. While he is telling himself that money is necessary to his political career, he is perfectly aware that it is also necessary for his horses, his Scotch moors, the thousand luxuries which make up his life. There is, in fact, nothing that he is willing to sacrifice for the woman who has just given herself to him with such touching abandon. In America, one reflects—but perhaps not in "the best society"—a person of this kind would be disposed of as a cad, a good-for-nothing, a negligible quantity. We are, Heaven knows, a race of money-grubbers and spendthrifts, but it does not occur to us to admire the man who refuses to sell his sweetheart for a few millions. But it is clear that Mrs. Ward is prepared to admire her Markham if he pass that arduous test, and so, of course, is her Diana. And when Markham perfunctorily and insultingly proposes to stick to his word because he has given it, we are expected to regard him with disappointment, with sorrow, with some tincture of anger even, but not with contempt.
Share
