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.