‘HAPPY EVER AFTER.’
By firelight, the children had heard a traveller’s tale about the mirage of the desert—the distant vision of tufted palms and green herbage, the promise of water, and shade, and rest. They had heard how the delusion flies, baffling pursuit, always seeming to stand at an attainable distance across the hot sands, always infinitely far, till it fades, because on their path it has no tangible existence. It is the delusive image of something existing elsewhere, and elsewhere perhaps unasked and uncared for by others, who reckon the oasis worth but little when their ambition is restless for the object of their journey.
‘That story won’t do!’ piped a little voice from the hearthrug, where golden hair was glistening full in the light like a heavenly aureola about an earthly dissatisfied face.
From within a cluster of boys and girls clinging to the armchair, the victim had of course to tell a fairy tale instead, down to the inevitable ending, ‘And they were happy ever after.’
‘Perkly happy?’ asked the small voice from the hearthrug.
‘Perfectly happy.’
‘Was there never a wet day?’
‘No; there was never a wet day in their part of the world.’
(Immediate flank attack and strategic surprise:) ‘Then their seeds wouldn’t come up. How did they manage?’
‘They were perfectly happy all the same.’
‘Maybe they didn’t care much for their seeds and things,’ said the golden-haired mortal of the real world, pensively. ‘One can’t care much for one’s “Tom Thumbs,” and be perkly happy when the “Tom Thumbs” don’t come up after setting ’em.’
There was a whole philosophy in these hearthrug speeches. Six years old in the cosy homelight, and the world was already incomplete! Even fairyland did not bear close inspection. If one asked questions about it, one found out that it had its drawbacks. Of course, fairy princes and princesses were perfectly happy, but only under conditions of existence that put them out of our sympathy. Carrying one’s human heart along with one, Fairyland wouldn’t do. This, in much simpler words, and no words at all, was the course of the firelight reflections on the rug. The victim, who had succumbed, followed out in another way his own idea of the problem of happiness in this complex world.
In disguise, most of the stories told to the world’s grown-up children have the same ending as the nursery tales—happy ever after. One wonders whether the ending is imaginable, or would it fall to pieces in detail; one wonders, too, whether this is an unfair delusion, saddening real mortals, suggesting impossible hopes and contrasts that have no lawful standing, because one side is only the ‘baseless fabric of a vision.’ Lastly, one wonders if the modern stories that insinuate happiness ever after, suggest that their hero and heroine are no longer meant for human sympathy, because they belong henceforth to fairy nature—or, shall we say, to the mangold-wurzel tribe?—and are not, like us, small creatures of hope and love, who ‘care much for our seeds and things.’
If we have skimmed many times the course of love that refuses to run smooth till it has got through three volumes, we have foreseen the marriage, and pinned our faith to what would come out at the end of volume three. Our confidence was unshaken, though occasionally it suffered twinges. The future bridegroom was reported dead abroad: instinctively our hope strengthened. He was said to be drowned at sea: our mind was easy—the marriage was as good as promised. Even when the bride was engaged to somebody else, it did not make the least difference in her feelings or ours. Of course that marriage was to be; it would leave us content, and the hero and heroine happy. For Bella Millefleurs and that distinguished Italian, the Count del Cucchiajo, there was certainly a future like the melodist’s Vale of Avoca, where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease, and their hearts, like its waters, be mingled in peace. Their life before had been shifting, rugged, uncertain; they attain their life’s object early, and there they rest.
Most of the after-marriage novels are histories of lives that go down a few steps or altogether into a upas valley. In healthy air, we are given to understand that the most natural end of the story is the marriage-day. We must not ask to follow through the golden gates; beyond these is a bright level of peace—that region where, as we have been reading, the Count del Cucchiajo and Bella—who had the violet eyes, you remember—are gone. They have found the summum bonum; their marriage has made them perfectly happy; and so the story ends.
Happy ever after! As much delusion implied at the end of three volumes, as told in words at the end of a nursery tale. Given the conditions of our life, it is impossible. Not that a happy marriage is impossible—the Fates forbid we should teach such heresy! But the happiest marriage is not a rounded sphere of contentment; it is not ‘one entire and perfect chrysolite.’ Experience answers for itself that the sweetest wife and the most devoted husband are not always in the same position which—as the book and our own minds told us—the Count del Cucchiajo and his violet-eyed bride had secured, when they drove away from the imaginary St George’s, Hanover Square, a while ago; or from the country church, whose imaginary gateway we saw so plainly at the imaginary roadside, among the golden-green branches of that spring-time that never was.
‘Ah! well,’ says some one wiser than the rest, piling up the three volumes, and thinking about an afternoon reviver of tea as a stimulant to the dreary return to this unsatisfactory sort of a world, ‘you can’t expect a story to go on into all about everything. One reads for pleasure; it should end happily. We don’t want a fourth volume about lawsuits and income tax, bursting water-pipes, or kitchen chimney on fire on the day of the dinner-party. We don’t want to read on to the measles and the boy’s tin trumpet, and the lady’s first gray hairs, and perhaps the Count crusty with the gout—his family’s fault, and not his. You must flavour with all those minor matters according to taste.’
But nobody flavours, nobody mars the feast with prosaic troubles. And precisely there the mischief lies. The impression given by the climax of the story, and the idea left in the reader’s mind, is life’s object attained, and perfect happiness henceforth. The characters that point the moral and adorn the tale do not pass away from it into the married life of this commonplace world. Like the Prince and the awakened Beauty of the Laureate’s verses, they go forth independent of occupation, and where the Directory-makers cease from troubling. Their future is exquisitely beautiful, vague as a dream; we only know that
Across the hills and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
And deep into the dying day,
The happy Princess followed him.
Now, what is the effect of this custom of ending the story with the old clap-trap ‘happy ever after?’ Poor Polly Brown, who has had the three soiled loose-leaved volumes from the village library, looks out at our poor familiar world in fading wintry light, and decides that the one prize worth winning is her wedding-day. The world’s winters, the wild black boughs and barren fields, will then be seen no more; it will be a romantic existence, with no dull relations to be civil to, no tiresome household work, no dusting of that shut-up drawing-room with its faint smell of carpet and fire-grate and musty roses. She has dreamed her dream; all her efforts are turned towards attaining it. In a certain sense, she is selfish already. Poor Polly, impatient to escape from the homely parlour and the sanctum of dried roses! Bella Millefleurs, who never lived, will yet cause her real pain in the days of disillusion. She will shed real tears, not as heroines do, but with the prosaic human sorrow of red eyes.
Somebody else, two seasons ago, held the same book with dainty white hand, when, from a great London lending library it came in its first freshness, with stainless cover, and pages smelling deliciously of ‘new book.’ This pretty girl had danced till three that morning, and had a new ring on her finger, which she kissed when she was sure nobody would see her. Of course she was only resting in curtained firelight in a gem of a boudoir; it would be cruel to expect so graceful and fragile a creature to do anything after such a night; and idle to expect her to do more than skim and skip the chapters, when her own real tale was so much sweeter. She had dreamed her dream from fifty other stories of the same ending. She had attained her life’s object in securing a lover with a coronet; and the happy marriage is the coming rest without sorrow or change. If poor Polly Brown could have seen her, she would have been ready to cry for envy; and yet two seasons after, when we saw the homely girl devouring that same story from the same pages, perhaps my lady with the coronet was beginning to feel the heartbreak of disillusion, the unfitness for a life that was misunderstood.
Smith, Brown, and Jones, who are good fellows in their way, and untroubled by romance, are not likely to have new opinions formed by a tired hour of fiction with an after-dinner cigar. But Mrs Smith, Mrs Brown, and Mrs Jones are not so lucky. They may yet have their moments of mental pain, their hidden anguish about imaginary contrasts, their secret storms in a teacup. Their marriage, with its thousand cares, did not raise them to transcendent bliss, as it seems other people’s marriages do. Smith, or Brown, or Jones, has not been to them what that man with a soul, the Count del Cucchiajo, was to his wife. Inferred regretful verdict on Jones who is innocently puffing, and reading through the second volume! The love and good-fortune of the violet-eyed heroine would not by itself have left this sad impression; it has come from the insinuation of happy ever after, which the history of heroines with eyes of all colours has gradually completed. It has given a false impression of life, leading through the magic of the happy marriage into a state of complete contentment and rest, a satisfaction of the insatiable power of loving, a rest from the almost infinite capacity for suffering. All this the real life has not found. Nor could it have been found, for it belongs to another world. Had that felicity been reached, it would have proved, in such a world as this, a heart neither capable of much love nor of much suffering, and therefore ignoble, because unfeeling. We can fancy a mangold-wurzel with such an experience, but not a human being.
Closely associated with the false view of life is that mirage of the heart—the complete happiness that seems attainable if only life had advanced to some change of circumstance. This vision leads on many a one in the straining of hope from the cradle to the grave. We know that others have precisely what we want; it exists somewhere, and they hardly care for it. The shadow only is ours. We forget that another and a greater mirage has risen before them farther on; and that if we stood where they stand, we too would be straining onward. Only, let not the mirage of nine-tenths of the novels delude us. The hero and the heroine have reached no land of perfect happiness, if they are still in this world of patience and of effort. If we believe they have found an El Dorado, we shall follow with selfish steps, with a false ideal of the winning of the prize, and with a morrow of disillusion yet to come. By all means let them show us the bravery and the mutual faith that make at last of love the crown of life; but let them not tell us that it is ever in this world a tearless diadem. Nor can it be likened to a secure rest, an imperishable home; it is rather the tent on the battle-plain, and the dwellers there have not the prospect of court and feast, but the joy of brave natures, blithe as soldier-comrades in the strength of union.
And now, after finding, like the child on the hearthrug, that ‘happy ever after’ is an untrue ending, what are we to do with our human thirst for rest? Where are we to look, if the vision of happiness farther on is only a mirage? And a mirage it is in many cases. There is but one true answer. This is not the world of perfect happiness.
Our plans for abiding happiness in the future must be laid, in a far different sense from the fairy poem, beyond the world’s ‘utmost purple rim, and deep into the dying day.’ Meanwhile, the best thing we can do for our contentment is to seize upon the golden Present. Oh, that golden Present! how despised it is; yet there is no El Dorado of this world’s future that can compare with it. Mingled with the wear and tear of every day, it is perhaps this day and hour the time that we shall look back to in future years as a bright vanished dream. We shall be at too great a distance then to see its small anxieties, its commonplace imperfections; why should we see them now? Again, the golden Present is the time full of the affections that may be cut off before the future has become a sadder present. Let us take the every-day love that we already have, though it be gold roughly wrought. Our treasures may pass away, while we are weaving dreams and following shadows.