She makes the final sacrifice to her husband's happiness, and leaves
him. But in so doing she pays a last tribute to the omnipotence of love.
She knows there is nothing in her that will claim a place in his
remembrance. She knows also that if he had loved her, it might be
otherwise. Love could have transformed her in his sight as it has
transfigured him in hers. Their positions might even have been
reversed. If one touch of such a love as hers could ever come to her in
a thought of his, he might turn into a being as ill-favoured as herself.
She would neither know nor care, since joy would have killed her.
We learn from the two last monologues, especially the last, that James
Lee's wife was a plain woman. This may throw some light on the
situation.
"THE WORST OF IT" is the cry of anguish of a man whose wife has been
false to him, and who sees in her transgression only the injury she has
inflicted on herself, and his own indirect part in its infliction. The
strain of suppressed personal suffering betrays itself in his very
endeavour to prove that he has not been wronged: that it was his fault,
not hers, if his love maddened her, and the vows by which he had bound
her were such as she could not keep. But the burden of his lament--"the
worst of it" all--is, that her purity was once his salvation, her past
kindness has for ever glorified his life; that she is dishonoured, and
through him, and that no gratitude of his, no power of his, can rescue
her from that dishonour. In his passionate tenderness he strives to
pacify her conscience, and again, as earnestly to arouse it. "Her
account is not with him who absolves her, but with the world which does
not; with her endangered womanhood, her jeopardized hope of Heaven." He
implores her for her own sake to return to virtue though not to him. For
himself he renounces her even in Paradise. He "will pass nor turn" his
"face" if they meet there.
The pathos of "TOO LATE" is all conveyed in its title. The loved woman
is dead. She was the wife of another man than he who mourns for her. But
so long as there was life there was hope. The lover might, he feels,
have learned to compromise with the obstacles to his happiness. Some
shock of circumstance might have rolled them away. If the loved one
spurned him once, he had of late been earning her friendship. She might
in time have discovered that the so-called poet whom she had preferred
to him was a mere lay-figure whom her fancy had draped. But all this is
at an end. Hope and opportunity are alike gone. He remains to condemn
his own quiescence in what was perhaps not inevitable; in what proved no
more for her happiness than for his. The husband is probably writing her
epitaph.
"Too Late" expresses an attachment as individual as it is complete.
"Edith" was not considered a beauty. She was not one even in her lover's
eyes. This fact, and the manner in which he shows it, give a
characteristic force to the situation.