stood alone both in his art and his artifice. Poets less serious than
he, poets like Boccaccio and Chaucer, had other cares. As they drew
near the end of their occasionally very light-hearted poems, they began
to think about their own end as well as that of their poesy. Fears of
the Archdeacon and his “Somonour,” fears of a summons still more dread
beset them. The more they had written about pagan antiquity as if
they believed in it, the more necessary it became to make their peace
with Heaven before they had done. _The Canterbury Tales_ were never
finished, so one cannot say whether Chaucer’s wholesale recantation of
the “worldly vanitees” of them, of _Troilus_, and of practically all
that has made him immortal was really designed to fit on to the end of
them or not. It certainly looks as if it was; and one can believe that
The Wife of Bath, mine Host and others of the joyful company may have
required some extenuation before the Recording Angel. So perhaps did
_Troilus and Cresseide_, for which he provides a careful and solemn
ending, following Boccaccio there as elsewhere. He shades off Troilus’
death very artfully by the translation of his “light gooste” to the
eighth sphere of Heaven, from which elevation he was able to look down
at the mourners bewailing his decease. And then the poet is elevated in
his turn and, dropping all his debonair detachment, himself translated,
becomes a pulpiteer of the best. “Such fyn,” he cries:
“Such fyn hath then this Troilus for love!
Such fyn hath all his greté worthinesse!”
It is fierce and powerful pulpit eloquence, mounting up and up until he
reaches a height of scorning what he had previously loved, from which
invective may be poured out like lava from Vesuvius:
“Lo here, of payen’s curséd oldé rights!
Lo here, what all their Goddés may availe!”
which, considering he began his poem by invoking the help of those same
gods, seems ungrateful, not to say ungracious. The last stanza is quite
simply a doxology:
“Thou one, and two, and three, eterne in life,
That reignest aye in three, and two, and one,”
just such an accomplished and charming doxology as might be expected
from Chaucer--but, all the same, a doxology. To such strange uses did
poets lend their muse when they loved paynimry and were horribly afraid
of it too.
Freed from the overshadowing of a wrath to come, Milton was able to
concentrate upon poetic excellence, as indeed he did. You will look far
before you find so serene and beautiful a close to a long poem as that
of _Paradise Lost._ Pity and terror contend in the last paragraph. When
the Archangel with his burning brand, and the attendant Cherubim, faces
in the fire, descend and take possession of Eden, terror holds us; but
then, pity:
“They, looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
Of Paradise so late their happy seat....”
They were mortal, that pair. Mortals have short memories, but long
hopes. So--
“Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.”
The dream was over. Life began its “search for rest.” Beautiful indeed,
and exactly observed.
I must here leave the Muse with barely a glance at the Victorians,
which suffices nevertheless to reveal that they adopted the rhetorical
device of the peroration. Tennyson uses it in _In Memoriam_ and _Maud_,
Browning in _The Ring and the Book_, Swinburne, very finely, in
_Tristram of Lyonesse_, and very characteristically too with his usual
catchword. I don’t know how many considerable poems there may be of
Swinburne’s which do not end with the word “sea,” but believe that the
fingers of one hand would be too many for them. In _Sordello_ Browning
chose the mediæval colophon, the _Ci falt la geste_, when he shut down
his long enigma with
“Who would has heard Sordello’s story told,”
and laid himself open to the easy retort that it was not at all true.
But the grandest finale of our times remains to be told: Tennyson’s
closing lines of _Idylls of the King_. I do not refer to the Envoy,
which is only a postscript to the Dedication. I mean rather the end of
“The Passing of Arthur”: Sir Bedivere on the shore, “straining his eyes
beneath an arch of hand” to see the barge out of sight, “down that long
water opening on the deep”; to see it go,
“From less to less and vanish into light--”
Then one more line, one more picture:
“And the new sun rose bringing the new year.”
Superb! Nothing in the _Idylls_ became Tennyson like the leaving them.
They do not form an epic; but the end is epical.
And now for prose.
II
You cannot end a book of prose as you can a poem, for the simple reason
that prose does not appeal to the emotions directly, as poetry does,
but by way of the reason. By emotion you can carry off anything that
you may have had the passion to begin and continue; but the reason asks
another satisfaction. You may win emotional assent to a proposition
that two and two make three, or five. In the heat of the moment it
will pass. Reason won’t take it in on the mere statement. If some such
result is to be the outcome of your book--and it is that of many and
many a novel--you must be careful how you conclude; and it will be
seen, I think, that so the novelists have been.
The simplest way of ending a story, you might think, would be to say
That’s all, and get off your tub. It was the way, we saw, of the
rough-and-ready intelligence which carved the _Song of Roland_ out of
some huge rhymed chronicle: _Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet_.
It is the way of the colophon. But even the colophon must be meditated
and prepared for; so it is not the real end but only part of it. Sir
Thomas Malory had a long colophon to the _Mort d’Arthur_, including a
bidding prayer on his own account; and then Caxton his printer puts in
a word for himself; but it is led up to by a page which sees Lancelot
and Guinevere dead and buried, the realm of England disposed of, and
the later fortunes of the few knights left alive. It is a deliberate,
not a summary end to a great book--the end “in calm of mind, all
passion spent,” which such a book should have. It is, again, the way
chosen by Gibbon for _The Decline and Fall_. You have a dignified
and sufficient summary of the whole work in a sentence of twelve
co-ordinate clauses, set stately apart by their semicolons. Then comes
a brief reflection of the author’s--“It was among the ruins of the
Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which....” And then,
after that momentary tribute to his personal share in it, he makes a
formal submission of it “to the curiosity and candour of the public.”
Mannerly and contained to the last, the good Gibbon. Nobody ever came
down from a tub with more self-respect; yet Boswell came down pretty
well too:
“Such,” he concludes, “was Samuel Johnson, a man whose talents,
acquirements and virtues were so extraordinary, that the more his
character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present
age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence.” He was, at
least, sufficiently moved to forget himself altogether--which is very
much to his credit. Yet he does not satisfy like Gibbon.
Carlyle was tired with _Frederick_, and, may be, out of conceit with
it. His conclusion is short, and his colophon barbarous. “Adieu,
good readers; bad also, adieu,” is rather bravado than bravery. More
courteous, more inclusive, serener and braver is the conclusion of
_The French Revolution_. One sniff there is, at the “Citizen King,
frequently shot at, not yet shot,” recollection of a Teufelsdröckian
prophecy, neither here nor there; and then a paragraph of valediction.
“Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence; but it is
done.... Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely; thine also it
was to hear truly. Farewell.” A beautiful colophon.
Carlyle was a scolding philosopher; Montaigne had been a shrugging one.
His last essai, _De l’Expérience_, is very long, but appropriately the
conclusion of a ripe and profitable book. The end of the matter deals
with what, according to him, is the end of life itself, “de scavoir
jouyr loyallement de son estre.” “So much art thou God,” he continues,
“as thou knowest thyself for man.” His bidding prayer is on behalf
of old age, addressed to the God of Health and Wisdom--“mais gaye et
sociale.” It is very French to lay down in terms at once the nature of
your God and your need of him. Compare with it old Burton’s “corollary
and conclusion” of the _Anatomy_:
“Be not alone, be not idle”:
then, as he must always be quoting,
“Hope on, ye wretched,
Beware, ye fortunate”--
encouragement and warning in one.
The novelist, whose aim has been your entertainment, and who has never
lost the habit of the market-place in which he certainly began, had
his own peculiar cares as the time approached for his last words. If
he had earned applause and assent to heights and moments of his tale,
could he make sure of them by a quiet end? Or must he earn them by a
final shock? Should he burst into a bouquet of stars in the upper air,
like a rocket, or come down like its stick? Each way has been chosen.
_The Mill on the Floss_ ends sublimely in the air, or, strictly, the
water; so in its own way--not at all sublimely--does _Tristram Shandy_;
but the majority of novelists have favoured the gentle decline of the
narrative to the marriage or death-bed, and generally speaking, the
longer the novel the quieter the end. Efforts to endear, however, can
always be discerned. The earliest novel of all shows us an expedient
in practice which has remained in use down to the Victorian age, and
only been discarded by the ultra-moderns even now. Daphnis and Chloe in
Longus’s old tale are married at the end of the book. The last picture
in it shows the lovers in each other’s arms; and the last words of it
are these:
“And Daphnis now profited by Lykainion’s lesson; and Chloe then first
knew that those things that were done in the wood were only the sweet
sports of children.”
The shift is very plain. It is to recall to the memory the most moving
or provocative episodes in your tale, in the hope that the thrill they
afforded him once will revive in the reader and lift you over the
end. It is a sound rhetorical device by no means disdained by high
practitioners in the art. Sir Walter used it in _Waverley_, when, on
the last page, he recovered the _poculum potatorium_ for the Baron of
Bradwardine. He had an affection for the Baron, it is obvious; but
he rightly felt him to have been his strongest card, and relied on
him to win him the last trick. Often the novelist may be mistaken and
table the wrong card, as Dickens certainly was when he ended _Nicholas
Nickleby_ with tears upon Smike’s grave, believing that shadow to have
been a trump. He should have led Mrs. Nickleby. How wisely Jane Austen
played out her hand in _Emma_, whose last paragraph is enjewelled with
reflections of Mrs. Elton’s:
“Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!
Selina would stare when she heard of it!”
Jane Austen was incomparable alike in beginnings and endings.
Instead of recalling with insistence your strongest points, you may
make a last effort to carry off what you doubt have been your weakest.
There is much of that in both Dickens and Thackeray. In _Dombey and
Son_, for example, it is evident that Dickens desired to extenuate what
he felt had been an excess of starch in Mr. Dombey. The last page and a
half of the book deglutinates him with a vengeance. The man of buckram
ends up as a weeping goose. Agnes Wickfield in _Copperfield_ had never
been convincing, nor had Estella in _Great Expectations_. The last
pages of those novels are devoted to the service of the pair of ladies;
but the effort is too plain, and the reader withholds assent. So with
Thackeray, who spends his last drop of ink in _Pendennis_ on Laura,
and in _Esmond_ to pulling off the amazing marriage of a man and his
grandmother. In vain! The end of _Vanity Fair_ is tame, because Dobbin
is tame; the true end of _The Newcomes_ is the _Adsum_ of Colonel
Newcome: very beautiful and not to be bettered. The epilogue, with its
trite exhibition of strings and wires, had been better omitted. It is
on all fours with _Don Quixote_, which really ends with the epitaph of
Samson Carrasco upon the Ingenious Gentleman. The ensuing reflections
of Cid Hamet Benengeli are not to the purpose, but, in fact, counter to
it.
I have left almost to the last that conventional ending to novels
best described as the Wedding Bells ending, or, in the consecrated
fairy-tale phrase, “And they lived happily ever after.” I wonder what
is the attitude of the ordinary novelist to that? Fielding, now. Did
he write the end of _Tom Jones_ and _Amelia_ with a shrug, or did
he really believe that all was going to be for the best for the two
charming women married to a couple of scamps? Moralist and satirist
as he was to the roots, are those cynical endings? I cannot help
suspecting it. No such doubt afflicts you with Anthony Trollope, who
nearly always tied all his knots at the close. But Trollope worked
in sober tones. His heroes and heroines had few rapturous moments,
but loved temperately, hoped moderately, and if they longed, said
little about it. His fondness for carrying over shows us some of his
young people sedately and reasonably jogging along: Mr. and Mrs.
Frank Gresham, Lord and Lady Lufton, Dr. Thorne and his Dunstable. We
see them seated in the mean, contented if not happy. On the whole, I
commend the cradle rather than the altar as a more hopeful ending. It
is charmingly used by M. Anatole France in the most charming of all his
books. M. France does not often incline to the idyll. The French do
not. Consider the last words of Stendhal’s _Chartreuse de Parme_:
“Les prisons de Parme étaient vides, le comte immensément riche, Ernest
V. adoré de ses sujets, qui comparaient son gouvernement à celui des
grands-ducs de Toscane.”
Well may he have added to that the final address, To the happy few! I
should do him wrong if I did not remark that it is on the last page of
the novel that Stendhal mentions, for the first and only time in it,
the Chartreuse de Parme itself.
The French novelists favour irony at the close. It may be that they owe
it to Voltaire:
“Pangloss used to say sometimes to Candide: All the things that happen
to us are linked one to another in this best of all possible worlds;
for indeed if you had not been driven out of a fine castle by kicks
behind for Cunégonde’s sake, if you had not endured the Inquisition,
traversed America on your two feet, driven your sword through the
Baron’s body, lost all your fine sheep of Eldorado, you would not at
this moment be eating lemon preserve and pistachio nuts. It is well
said, replied Candide; but we must go on digging our garden.”
Flaubert adopted that sort of thing for _l’Education Sentimentale_,
whose last is its best page. It is good to have arrived there, anyhow;
and pleasant to depart on a happy thought.
How nearly the latter-day, strictly modern method allies the novel
to the story of Cambuscan bold, I have no space left in which to
tell the strictly modern reader--who also knows more about it than
I do. Aposiopesis has its points, one of which certainly is that as
anything you please has happened already, it can happen again, and may
as well. But it presumes too much upon the immunity afforded by the
printing-press. If the modern story-teller tried that game upon an
auditorium, and proposed to take himself off with his characters left
sitting, it is long odds that he himself would not have anything worth
talking about left to sit upon. The only requital open to the reader,
unfortunately, is to cease to be one; and that is very much what I
understand him to be doing.
BEAUMARCHAIS
I have often wondered what were the feelings of the growing boy
upon whom it slowly dawned that his sponsors had had him christened
Hyacinth, or Achilles. Was he conscious of inspiration or the reverse?
The discovery must have been frequent in France, where the reign of
Louis XV in particular was a flowering time for names. There was an
Anarcharsis Klootz, there was a Maximilien Robespierre. When to the
unremarkable patronym of Caron there were prefixed the resounding
syllables, Pierre-Augustin, to the wearer of them at least the things
became a trumpet. He shrilled himself upon them into the far corners
of Europe. The Empress Catherine chuckled over him in her Winter
Palace; her august neighbour had him read to her, evenings, in Vienna.
Horace Walpole, while declining his acquaintance, wrote of him with
astonishment to Mme. du Deffand; Voltaire at Ferney thought that there
must be something in him. And there was. First and always, impudence.
He would look anyone in the face, and never be discountenanced himself.
Next, good humour: in his worst hours he bore no grudges, and in his
best so few as make no matter. When he had his enemy face to face,
and was really at grips with him, he could always hold back from the
fray to let off a joke or turn an attack by a compliment. There was
a Madame Goëzman with whom he was badly embroiled in civil process.
When they were before the registrar, and she was asked, Did she
know the plaintiff--“I neither know nor desire ever to know him,”
said she. “Neither have I the honour of Madame’s acquaintance,” said
Pierre-Augustin in his turn; “but having seen her, I am constrained to
a desire exactly the opposite of hers.” A happy gallantry which ought
to have touched the court, but did not.
Morally, he was like an india-rubber ball: the harder you hit him the
higher he leapt. The Goëzman pair, husband and wife, in the legal
broil just referred to, thought to crush him out of hand by scorn of
his degree in the world. They more than hinted that his father had
been a watchmaker, that they themselves were “noble.” Pierre-Augustin
saw his chance and took it. He held up the Mémoire in which those
injudicious nods and winks had appeared. “You open your _chef d’œuvre_
by reproaching me with the fortunes of my ancestry. It is too true,
Madame, that the latest of them added to other branches of industry
some celebrity in the art of watchmaking. Forced as I am to suffer
judgment upon that point, I confess with sorrow that nothing can
cleanse me from your just reproach that I am the son of my father....
But there I pause, for I feel that he is behind me at this moment,
looking at what I write, and laughing while he pats my shoulder.”
“You,” he goes on, “who think to shame me through my father, have
little conception of the generosity of his heart. Truly, apart
altogether from watchmaking, I have never found another for which
I would exchange it. But I know too well the worth of time,
which he taught me how to measure, to waste it in picking up such
trifles. It is not everyone who can say with M. Goëzman:
‘Je suis le fils d’un Bailli; oui:
Je ne suis pas Caron; non.’”
And so he left it.
However high he leapt, his aims were not high. I don’t think he ever
failed of his heart’s desire. He wanted a title of nobility, and
obtained one, or indeed, some. He was “Ecuyer, Conseiller-Secrétaire
du Roi, Lieutenant Général des Chasses, Baillage et Capitainerie de la
Varenne du Louvre, Grande Vénerie et Fauconnerie de France,” which can
hardly mean more, and may mean considerably less than it sounds; and
all that, when he had earned a territorial name by marriage, enabled
him to become Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Next, he wanted
money, and had it, and lost it, many times over. Then he wanted to be
talked about; and for a long time Paris, and for some time Europe,
talked of little else. That was when he was conducting two interminable
lawsuits, one growing out of the other, and not only conducting them
with a vivacity and geniality which nothing could tire, but issuing
from the press bulletins of progress of the kind I have attempted
to sample above. It was those Mémoires which entertained equally
Petersburg and Strawberry Hill. Delightful as they must have been to
read when all the actors were alive and buzzing in the courts or on
the quays, they are difficult to follow now. The original suit, which
was to recover a debt on an estate from an executor, was made complex
by French legal process, but the second (in which the Goëzmans were
involved) was complex in itself. The exceedingly delicate point in it
was that Beaumarchais had attempted to bribe a member of the Court, and
actually got the money as far as his wife, where some of it remained,
though the bulk was restored. To recover by law what was still held it
was necessary for Beaumarchais to reject with vehemence the suggestion
that he had tried to suborn justice, while bringing home the fact that
Madame Goëzman had undoubtedly taken his money. He did not, naturally,
succeed; but he incriminated the Goëzman pair, and with them was
condemned in “infamy and civil degradation.” But in reporting his daily
engagements with them, and his verbal victories, he became simply the
hero of the hour, and ultimately carried his main action against the
Comte de la Blache with damages and costs.
That must be a parenthesis, to show how Beaumarchais climbed to his
point of desire, whatever it was at the moment, serving himself alike
of disaster and success. Many were his affairs of the kind, all pursued
with unflagging _enjouement_--as, a breach of promise in Madrid on
behalf of his sister, a row with the mad Duc de Chaulnes about an
“unfortunate female,” a more than dubious, a not at all dubious, plant
upon Maria-Teresa, underground transactions with the Chevalier d’Eon,
gun-running for the United States of America; and finally that upon
which his present fame rests--two comedies which broke all the records
of the theatre for anticipation and realisation. I would not go so far
as to say that he engineered the repeated delays in their performance
which brought expectation up to hysteria if not delirium, but have no
doubt that he courted them, and deserved, if not earned, the proud
result that more people were crushed to death crowding in to the
_Barbier de Seville_ than had ever been so crushed before, and that it
and its sequel, _Le Mariage de Figaro_, ran longer on end than any such
things had ever done. When they threatened to flag their author was the
man to revive them. He knew as much about advertising as Mr. Selfridge,
and had as little use for modesty as Mr. Bernard Shaw. Like that
salient dramatist, he published his plays, and wrote prefaces to them
which are better reading than the text. The pair still hold the stage,
as they were written, and as opera; and I should not be surprised to
hear that they and their author were as generally known as most of
Molière’s and theirs. After all, the same could be said of Sheridan,
with his pair, at the expense of Shakespeare.
Mr. John Rivers,[1] Beaumarchais’ first English biographer, I believe,
has evidently enjoyed his work, and will be read with enjoyment. He is
right in claiming the Life of his hero as a challenge to fiction. It
is first-rate picaresque, nearly as good as Gil Blas, and much better
than Casanova. But I think he rates him too highly as a dramatist. He
considers that Figaro ranks with “Falstaff or Tartufe.” If he does,
it is thanks to Rossini and Mozart: without their help the claim is
surely preposterous. Luckily, he has taken the trouble to translate
large portions of both plays, and so furnished the best corrective
to exaggerated pretensions that we could wish to have. Taken in such
liberal doses, they don’t march. In their original they are not easy
reading, for Beaumarchais, though a brisk, was not a good writer. One
does not ask for fine writing necessarily of a dramatist, but that he
shall attend to his business. Beaumarchais conceives his to be the
making of points. He is apt to be diffuse in reaching them, and to
clinch them tightly when he has them. In French he is often difficult;
in English he is both dull and difficult. It is like reading bad
handwriting on foreign letter-paper. You never seem to get on with the
thing.
The _Barbier_ is not much more than a Commedia dell’ Arte. It is a play
of manœuvring, intrigue the whole affair. Stock characters will do for
that, and you can manage without humour, if you have a sufficiency
of wit. There is perhaps more effervescence than wit, and what wit
there is not of the best kind. It is not concerned with ludicrous
appositions; rather it is paradox, verbal antithesis, the Gratiano
vein. Here is an example. Figaro is reporting to Rosine that Lindor is
her lover, and asks leave to tell her so:
“_Rosine_: Vous me faites trembler, monsieur Figaro.
“_Figaro_: Fi donc, trembler! mauvais calcul, madame. Quand on
cède à la peur du mal, on ressent déjà le mal de la peur....
“_Rosine_: S’il m’aime, il doit me le prouver en restant
absolument tranquille.
“_Figaro_: Eh! madame! amour et repos peuvent-ils habiter en meme
cœur? La pauvre jeunesse est si malheureux aujourd’hui, qu’elle
n’a que ce terrible choix: amour sans repos, ou repos sans amour.”