“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: