CONCLUSION
"So passes, all confusedly
As lights that hurry, shapes that flee
About some brink we dimly see,
The trivial, great,
Squalid, majestic tragedy
Of human fate."—William Watson
I wish life were more like the stories one reads, the beautiful stories, which, whether they are grave or gay, still have picturesque endings. The hero marries the heroine, after insuperable difficulties, which in real life he would never have overcome: or the heroine creeps down into a romantic grave, watered by our scalding tears. At any rate, the story is gracefully wound up. There is an ornamental conclusion to it. But life, for some inexplicable reason, does not lend itself with docility to the requirements of the lending libraries, and only too frequently fails to grasp the dramatic moment for an impressive close. None of us reach middle age without having watched several violent melodramas, whose main interest lies further apart from their moral than we were led, in our tender youth, to anticipate. We have seen better plays off the stage than even Shakespeare ever put on. But Shakespeare finished his, and pulled down the curtain on them; while, with those we watch in life, we have time to grow grey between the acts; and we only know the end has come, when at last it does come, because the lights have been going out all the time, one by one, and we find ourselves at last alone in the dark.
Janet's sweet melancholy face rises up before me as I think of these things, and I could almost feel impatient with her, when I remember how the one dramatic incident in her uneventful life never seemed to get itself wound up. The consequences went on, and on, and on, till all novelty and interest dropped inevitably from them and from her.
Some of us come to turning-points in life, and don't turn. We become warped instead. It was so with Janet.
Is there any turning-point in life like our first real encounter with anguish, loneliness, despair?
I do not pity those who meet open-eyed these stern angels of God, and wrestle with them through the night, until the day breaks, extorting from them the blessings that they waylaid us to bestow. But is it possible to withhold awed compassion for those who, like Janet, go down blind into Hades, and struggle impotently with God's angels as with enemies? Janet endured with dumb, uncomplaining dignity she knew not what, she knew not why; and came up out of her agony, as she had gone down into it—with clenched empty hands. The greater hope, the deeper love, the wider faith, the tenderer sympathy—these she brought not back with her. She returned gradually to her normal life with her conventional ideas crystallised, her small crude beliefs in love and her fellow-creatures withered.
That was all George did for her.
The virtues of narrow natures such as George's seem of no use to anyone except possibly to their owner. They are as great a stumbling-block to their weaker brethren, they cause as much pain, they choke the spiritual life as mercilessly, they engender as much scepticism in unreasoning minds, as certain gross vices. If we are unjust, it matters little to our victim what makes us so, or whether we have prayed to see aright, if for long years we have closed our eyes to unpalatable truths.