Part 8

These things point to a familiarity with Catholic usage, whichever way you take them, exceedingly interesting. The chief thing which they point out to me is that there was no religious sense in the peasantry at all. The names and symbols of worship were augmentives of conversation, but no more. They meant nothing, and implied nothing but use and wont. Catholicism expired and Calvinism did not thrive, for the same reason. Neither of them touched the heart of the peasantry, which remained what it had been throughout, innately pagan, follower (as I put it) of Saint Use, but of no other divinity. That is as far as one has been able to go. Certainly _Gammer Gurton_ will take us no further.

Dullness, bestiality, grossness: these stare you in the face. Between the lines of them you may discern the squalor and the penury of village life in Merrie England. Take this:

_Gammer_: “Come hether, Cocke; what, Cocke I say.

_Cocke_: Howe, Gammer?

_Gammer_: Goe hy thee soone, and grope behind the old brasse pan, Ther shalt thou fynd an old shooe, wherin if thou looke well Thou shalt fynd lyeng an inche of whyte tallow candell, Lyght it, and brynge it tite awaye.”

If that does not bring them home to us nothing will do it--except perhaps this:

“And home she went as brag, as it had ben a bodelouce.”

ENDINGS

I

Not very long ago I took occasion to inquire into the beginnings of books. I found that the rules were simple, the formulæ few, and the practice seldom varied until near our own times. If you were an Epic poet, you invoked the Muse and stated the theme in which you desired her assistance; if you wrote prose narrative, you began with “Once upon a time,” or “There was a man,” and went on from there. You began, in fact, at the beginning; but if you were romantically inclined you contrived somehow to insinuate a hint of colour and what the artists call atmosphere. Whichever you were, poet or prosateur, like a musician, you had a prelude, and gave it as much work as it was capable of bearing, and sometimes rather more than it could bear. No matter for that: everything was in your favour: hope was high in your breast, and, no doubt, in your hearer’s or reader’s. The rules were simple; you laid out the theme, and off you went.

But the _ending_ of your work is a very different thing. There are no formulæ for that. You are at the stretch of your tether, either thankfully or not; you are in your public’s discretion; however you take it, you are judged already. You may amend all by your ending, or you may make weariness more weary. In any case, you have somehow to “get off with it,” and will find that your shifts to make a good end to your adventure are not easily reduced to rule or comfortably suited by convention. We don’t hear so many sermons as we did; yet most of us know by experience that it is one thing for a clergyman to open upon his text, and quite another for him to turn to the East with credit. If he have prepared his peroration, and the way to it--what I may call his _coda_ and _finale_--well or ill, he will let it off. If he have not, then in addition to his anxious care for what he is to say, he will have another for what he must by no means say. Let him beware, for example, of using the hortatory words “And now”; for so surely as he pronounces them the congregation will rise as one man, and then nothing for it but the rest of the Ascription. I have known that happen more than once, and never faced the preacher with nerve enough to reseat the congregation for one more turn.

The writer and the orator may be compared, since literature, by origin a spoken word, has never lost the habits it then acquired--or has only just now lost them. As the ancient bard, Homer or Demodocus, as the wandering minstrel, trouvère or balladist, faced his assize, somehow or other he had to get off his platform. What was he to do? He desired a supper, perhaps a bed: one need not shirk the probability that he was to send round his hat. Could he be sure of them without some kind of a bang? Should it be a long or a short bang? Was he to sum up the whole argument of his poem in its last twenty lines, condense it all into one compendious epigrammatic sentence? As we shall see, that was the means of one of our great prose-writers. Then, otherwise, should he perorate, and, in the musician’s way, recall the theme with which he began? As poet, perhaps he should--so indeed Tennyson more than once did; but as epic poet it was not always possible. No better poet than Homer ever lived, no better ending to an epic was ever made than that to the Iliad, whose last book shows Achilles, for once, generous, and Priam, in his simplicity, noble. But the Iliad does not end upon the matter of its beginning, nor with the hero of it. On the contrary, it ends with the hero’s chief enemy; and its very last line,

“So served they the last rites of Hector, tamer of horses,”

is remarkable, because it shows that the interest of poet and hearers alike had shifted during the progress of the poem. Homer, a Greek, singing to a Greek audience, finds it necessary to close his poem with Priam and Hector of Troy!

That shows you how difficult it is to end an epic. The Odyssey shows it you from another side. Everybody now agrees that what happens in that after the return of Ulysses, his revenge upon the suitors and recognition by Penelope, is anti-climax. We are not prepared, at the end of a long poem, to descend once more into Hades and listen to the ghosts of the wooers relate their griefs to the ghosts of Agamemnon and Achilles. We are not prepared for an outbreak of retaliatory war between the Ithacans and their recovered prince. _Nor were Homer’s auditors._ Therefore Homer turned to the old stage device of the god from the machine; he brought an Athené to shut all down. No other means was open to him, and the knot was worthy.

I don’t intend to deal with the drama in this place. It has its own conventions, only occasionally of use to narrative writers. Most of them are impossible: the Chorus, for instance, which is an easy way of bringing down the curtain; or the attendants who carry off the dead bodies; or the curtain itself. The nearest approach to the curtain which a book can have is the _Explicit_, or _Colophon_; but I only know one case of its use in a great poem, and in that case it is used in a hurry, and (as I believe) certainly not by the poet. The poem I mean is the _Song of Roland_, which, as we have it now, has neither beginning nor end. Of what may have once been either there is no trace to be found. As it stands now, the last stave of it shows Charlemagne reposing after justice done upon Roland’s betrayer, and the Archangel Gabriel announcing to him the call for new enterprise. Whereupon--

“‘God!’ said the King, ‘my life is hard indeed!’ Tears filled his eyes, he tore his snowy beard”;

and then the famous colophon which nobody can translate:

“Ci falt la Geste que Turoldus declinet.”

Clearly, if Turoldus made the _Song of Roland_, he did not put his colophon just there. Mr. Chesterton, in an introduction to the very accomplished version of the song made by Captain Scott-Moncrieff, devotes some eloquent lines to its defence; but he does it at the expense of criticism. It will not do. A poet is, after all, a man singing to, or writing for men. No man in the world would end a long story by beginning another. These things are not done.

The ending of the _Divine Comedy_ is original and characteristic at once. There is deliberate art in it; there is a kind of artifice or trick in it. But the trick is justified because it is both beautiful and, philosophically, true. Each of the three canticas ends with the same word and the same thought. The aim of the pilgrim through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven is to reach the stars. From the darkness and lamentation of Hell he issues

“a riveder le stelle”;

after his painful climbing of the Mount of Purgation he finds himself

“Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle”;

the Paradise begins by describing the glory of the Prime Mover of things; and ends by discovering that this Prime Mover of the universe is Love, and that Love it is which

“muove il sole e l’altre stelle.”

As I say, there is artifice in that. After it we are not surprised to learn that the number of cantos in each cantica, the number of verses, the number of words in each was approximately planned out and very closely kept. It is much of a question what is gained by such joinery; but there is no question at all of the starry endings. Philosophically and poetically they are beautiful and right.

Dante belonged to the scholastic age, and to the Middle Age; but he 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.