‘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,