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.