The End of the Story

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

Last words are always of interest, be they spoken or written. It is the laughing farewell as the train pulls out, or the hurried whisper from the steamer’s gangplank, that we remember in the after days. Orators save their most convincing argument for the end of the speech, and although the finest lines of a play do not always ring the curtain down, the strongest scenes are crowded into the last act.

How is it with the story-tellers ? Some say it is not the end of the novel, but the climax of the plot, which fixes the attention and memory. The hold which the end of the story takes upon the average reader needs no proof when we recall the experience of Dickens, who, when the Old Curiosity Shop was being given to the world in monthly parts, was overwhelmed with petitions “not to let Little Nell die.” Smile as we may at these troubled souls, and those others who must read the last chapter first to see if it all “ends right,” there is a sound reason under their impulse,— as there usually is under every widespread feeling of “the world ’s common folk.” It is the closing chapter which makes or mars a book. It is the last thought that lingers with us when we finish the story, and lay the book aside. It is that which makes Sentimental Tommy so unsatisfying. We watch him, as he trudges heart-hungry out of Thrums, with a strange yearning in our own hearts. If Barrie had only let him die, or married him, or in some way surely and finally disposed of him, we would acquiesce. But to send him off alone “to a far country is to make of him an uneasy spirit, a ghost that will not be laid. And so the reading world eagerly longed for and warmly welcomed Tommy and Grizel; only to lay it down, too, indignant at the absurd anti-climax which leaves Tommy (this time instead of the reader) in suspense. It is hard to forgive Barrie for the bathos of that closing scene.

Kingsley, on the other hand, sums up the whole moral of Hypatia in the closing paragraph: —

“And now, readers, farewell. I have shown you New Foes under an Old Face. Your own likeness in toga and tunic, instead of coat and bonnet. One word before we part. The same Devil who tempted these old Egyptians tempts you. The same God who would have saved these old Egyptians if they had willed, will save you, if you will. Their sins are yours, their errors yours, their doom yours, their deliverance yours. There is nothing new under the sun. The thing which has been, it is that which shall be. Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone, whether at Hypatia or Pelagia, Miriam or Raphael, Cyril or Philammon.”

I have always felt that George Eliot planned the end of the Mill on the Floss, and worked back from that point; for, undoubtedly, Maggie’s love for Tom is the one master passion of her life. She cared both for Stephen Guest and for Philip, but she loved Tom with a love which possessed her whole being; the roots of that love reached down to the old childish days, and it had grown with her growth. So, while George Eliot tells us that “the other was always solitary, his companionship was among the trees of the Red Deeps, where the buried joy seemed still to hover — like a revisiting spirit,” still her last thought is with the brother and sister: “The tomb bore the names of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, and below the names it was written ‘In their death they were not divided.’”

In view of events in Africa, the Philippines, and “far China’s land,” the closing words of Victor Hugo’s History of a Crime are peculiarly significant. He says:

“One day before long the seven nations which combine in themselves the whole of humanity will join together and amalgamate like the seven colors of the prism in a radiant celestial arch; the marvels of peace will appear eternal and visible above civilization; and the world, dazzled, will contemplate the immense rainbow of the united peoples of Europe.”

Goldsmith, in closing his Citizen of the World, brushes aside, as lightly as Emerson would, the modern bugbear of consistency. The words are these: “ ‘ They must often change,’ says Confucius, ‘ who would be constant in happiness and wisdom.' ”

Charles Reade ends It’s Never Too Late to Mend with the comfortable thought, “These average women are not the spice of fiction, but they are the salt of real life.”

In Griffith Gaunt he gives us a glimpse of his conception of the life that stretches beyond. The thought is both bright and broad:—

“So, then, though they could not eat nor dance together in earthly mansions, they could do good together — and methinks, in the eternal world where years of social intercourse will prove less than cobwebs, these, their joint acts of mercy, will be links of a bright, strong chain, to bind their souls in everlasting amity.”

The ending of Dickens’s Hard Times suggests the end of Middlemarch, — the thought is essentially the same. Dickens is speaking of Louisa; he says she has grown learned in childish lore, that she is trying hard to know her fellow creatures, and to beautify with imaginative graces the hard reality of their “lives of machinery.” He concludes with,—

“She holds this course as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair, but simply as a duty to be done. Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, and see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold.”

Compare this with the end of Middlemarch : —

“Dorothea’s full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The last sentences of Vanity Fair and the Book of Snobs may very fairly stand as types of Thackeray’s two great points of view. Vanity Fair is dismissed with the cynical,—

“ Ah, Vanitas, Vanitatum; which of us is happy in this world ? Which of us has his desire, or having it is satisfied ? Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.”

We close the Book of Snobs with a better inspiration: —

“May he laugh honestly, hit no foul blow, and tell the truth when at his very broadest grin, never forgetting that if Fun is good, Truth is still better, and Love best of all.”

Carlyle fully understood the lasting force of a final thought. He closes his French Revolution with, —

“While the voice of man speaks with man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacredness sprang, and will yet spring ? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as ‘an incarnated word.’ Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely; thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.”

From within the walls of the Tower come the mournfully prophetic words of an earlier historian. ’T is Raleigh, soldier, courtier, discoverer, man of the world, and man of letters, penning the last words of his History of the World:—

“O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none has dared, thou hast done; whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with those two narrow words, Hic facet.”

Lowell’s last lines of the Biglow Papers come to me as a solemn warning: —

Against all “problem stories” I wish to register a grudge. If a writer cannot make up his own mind, why should I divide the silent watches of the night between punching my pillow and crying “Anathema!” while I try to do it for him? Of these haunting human question marks, perhaps the worst is Frank Stockton’s barbaric princess, so coolly balancing in her hand the fates of the Lady and the Tiger all these years, while we and the whole arena wait. Out upon her, and the long line of peace-troublers of which she stands as the type.