Going Back of the Facts

WHEN I was about ten years old I overheard a remark of my grandmother’s, which seemed to me to knock the bottom out of things. I remember running out of the house, and, when I was sure that I was alone, lifting my eyes to the heavens to see if they were still there, and treading hard upon the earth to make sure that it was still firm under my feet. Finding everything apparently as it should be, I sat down in the shade of a retired lilac bush to ponder; and if a yellow dog had not chanced to come along just then and make irresistible overtures toward conversation, I don’t know what important conclusions as to the nature of human life I might not have reached. What my grandmother said was simply this: “But I really think I ought to have married the other man,” She spoke in her usual placid tone, not even lifting her eyes from her knitting-needles. She was an altogether satisfactory grandmother; the sort of grandmother who knows more than her daughter about housekeeping, more than her son about what is going on in the world, more than any new-fangled parson about religion, and almost more than her grandchildren about the duty of keeping the doughnut-jar in commission. And yet she was capable of an utterance so abysmally irreverent as to shock the sensibilities of the smallest of her devoted doughnut-eaters. As he has grown older, he has come to understand the feeling, but it has not grown less. It is an amusing exercise of the fancy to speculate upon what may happen, but is it either amusing or decent to go back of the facts ? Is n’t it silly, is n’t it impious, even? Is there, when one comes to think of it, any stranger trick of the human mind than that which wantonly challenges a finality ?

Why should your reminiscent private citizen and your grave official historian find it equally delightful to speculate upon what would have happened if what did happen had not happened ? Anybody, to be sure, can play this kind of solitaire; the rules are extremely flexible, and it always “ comes out.” Here is the card that was played at a certain moment in the original game; suppose that Providence had slipped it under the next, and then look you what the subsequent play would have been. If Keats had not died of consumption and Shelley by drowning, the later course of English literature would have been greatly changed. Works of such and such a nature would doubtless have been produced, and it is hardly possible to deny that So-and-so would have been moved to an utterance less — and morev—. If Neighbor Jones had n’t bought that brindle calf seven years ago, he would n’t have got into a quarrel with that tramp down at the Corners, his barn and live stock would n’t have been burned, the mortgage would n’t have been foreclosed, and (here is the fatal leap for our ex-post-facto prophet) he would now be married again and be worth, say, sixtyfour thousand dollars and thirteen cents. It remains to be said, further, that if Charlotte Brontë’s father had been Swedish instead of Irish, Rochester would have had yellow hair; and if Charlotte herself had not been a governess, Jane Eyre would have taken in sewing.

But, as we have suggested, the futility and the absurdity of this method of criticism are not its only vulnerable points. It would have been bad enough to hear my grandmother say something merely silly; what mainly appalled me was that I seemed to have heard her deliberately blaspheme. It appeared that everything was a matter of luck, and might just as well be wrong as right. My grandmother ought to have married the other man, and by that same token I ought not to exist. So easily might the universe have been deprived of its central point of interest! Incidentally, my mother ought not to have existed, nor my aunts and uncles and cousins and all their to-be-misbegotten progeny to the third and fourth generation, and so beyond to the end of the world. Nothing that was, should be, and nothing that was to be, should be about to be. It was all very confusing. Only one thing was clear: that marriage was a failure, and that I should never have allowed myself to become engaged to the yellow-haired daughter of the grocer. Also I had a feeling (though I could not then analyze it) that my grandmother had not spoken according to her faith. What were her prayer meetings, what her good works ? If she had said that in her opinion Providence would do better to mind its own damned business, I should hardly have been more confounded. Yet she ranked among mortals, and, it may be, in the eyes of the Ironic Powers, as a most pious old lady; at all events she was suffered to continue to live for many years; and to make, it must be said, the best of doughnuts.