NOVELS WITH "BAD ENDINGS."
TT is not easy at first to understand the annoyance which a
novel with a " bad ending "gives to the novel-readingpublic. That it does annoy them is certain, in spite of the tolerance of professional critics, both from the spoken criticisms of Mudie's customers and the reluctance of publishers to purchase a story likely to be so condemned, but the reason for the prejudice is not upon the surface. The story may be just as interesting, just as natural, and even, as in the case of the " Mill on the Floss," just as full of humour. A bad ending involves no defect in art, for all the circumstances may lead up to a catastrophe, and none in the naturalness of the plot, for in real life the bad endings are at least as frequent as the good. The bridegroom dies in actual life three days before the wedding, happy homes are ruined every day by acoident, and every week the newspapers record suicides among the happy. The little joke played off some years since by Blackwood—we think—upon its readers, in the shape of a most interesting story which suddenly terminated because all the per- sonages were killed in a railway collision, did not, unhappily, err in naturalness, even if Railway Directors thought so ; and in- stances are well known of a whole family, with all its histories, grave and amusing, having been drowned together. " The best- laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley," and death, in poli- tical history at all events, usually strikes the wrong man. Love-stories do not all end well, and fortunes go, as a rule, to those whose riches do not increase the happiness of surrounding and young mankind. Nor is the reading public much afraid of having its sympathies too much moved. On the contrary, if .a novelist can call forth tears or produce a delicious melancholy, he is a successful novelist and popular, and his work is praised for " its charming delineation of human nature in its more pathetic moods." It may be doubted whether all the hostile criticisms ever poured upon it have decreased one whit the public appre- ciation of Charles Dickens's " pathos," or whether the excision of the deaths of Little Nell and Paul Dombey from the " Old Curiosity Shop " and " Dombey and Son " would not extinguish the sale of those two books. " I like a good cry," is still the feeling of a large section of novel-readers. Nor is the cause to be sought in any dislike of the horrible or the heart-rending. The horrible is the source of fasci- nation in many popular novels, and there is no perceptible increase of the dislike to tragedy. People throng to see Hamlet or Othello, if a presumably good actor offers to interpret either part, though Hamlet ends in a shambles and Othello in a murder on the stage ; nor is the sustained painfulness of King Lear any drawback to its enduring popularity. "The Bride of Lammer- moor," a genuine tragedy, and with a certain repulsiveness in it, too, is as much read as any of Scott's novels ; and the curious folk who write the librettos of operas never shrink from bad endings. Indeed it is not yet proved that the popular taste for blood and murder which was once supposed to dominate middle-class audiences is extinct, or that very unhappy dramas, if carefully got up, would not succeed, and succeed greatly, with very ordinary English audiences. The very same persons, how- ever, will not read novels with bad endings, and more especially love-stories in which everything goes finally wrong. The best story, in our judgment, that that very garrulous novelist Captain Marryat ever wrote, " The King's Own," was ruined by tho unhappy termination of its rather pretty love-story ; and we believe the regular novel-reader still shrinks from the highest outcome of Miss Bronte's genius, " Villette," because the authoress has exhausted her skill on painting characters, whose careers she, an instinctive pessimist, felt sure would at the last moment snap. We very much doubt whether the separate flavour of " George Fleming's " new novel " Mirage,"* a flavour as of rich but bitter wine, will secure it popularity. The book is thoroughly original, full of charming description, and full, too, of restrained power—witness a scene in which the heroine and her lover defy a Syrian mob, a scene in which the reader is twice as much carried away as the writer—and yet we are con- scious as we close it of a pain which has in it little of the pleasure art should yield. The full draught of happiness is so near, and is so spitefully dashed down. There is nothing melodramatic in " Mirage,"—no murder, no death, no accident. Nothing happens but what happens every day,—a couple of loving hearts mis- understanding one another, and that, too, in a moat natural and forgivable way. Neither has any tragic fate,—the artist wander- ing away to a successful life of art ; the lady, an original creation, which only falls short of first-class work, marrying a man quite worthy of her and of his fate in all but intellectual depth ; and yet the painful pity of it all is too much for the reader's enjey- ment, and the book once closed, will never be reopened. We suppose that word " enjoyment" is, after all, the explanation of the fact. The object of art is pleasure to the spectator, and except in work of the very first order—work in which the intellect feels a sense of being lapped in luxury, or in which the whole nature is gratified by a revelation of itself to itself, dark qualities and all—readers seek in fiction almost entirely for enjoyment, for relief from themselves in a world in which events are guided with a more exclusive eye to the happi- ness of those they affect than they are in this one. They never like to know that the happy lover has tooth-ache on his wedding- day. The desire is to obtain from fiction the pleasure that fact does not give, to have everything come right at last, in defiance of ordinary experience, and to see poetic justice done as it is not done on this earth. In real life, we know that Paul Emanuel would probably die abroad or be drowned coming home, and in fiction we want to be assured that this has not been the case, that the happiness he has deserved and never obtained has been at last secured him. The naturalness of the event is not felt by the public, any more than by Miss Bronte's father, as any compensation for the pain it nevertheless inflicts. For we take it, the reader never quite forgets that pain inflicted in fiction is at once additional and unnecessary pain,—additional, because it is superadded to the pain inflicted by real life, —unnecessary, because the pleasant ending seems as well within the writer's power as the unpleasant. He may plead the necessity of his art, but the instinctive answer is that in that case the art must justify its demand on haman en- durance by its own excellence. If it does, cadit quastio, for the capacity for admiring tragedy has not disappeared ; but if it does not, then the pain is pure mortification, and creates resentment, not submission. " Villette " is, perhaps, the most perfect, as it is certainly the best-known instance of a book in which the power visible to ordinary readers is just short of the power necessary to make tragedy endurable, and it is also the book in which good critics condone, while the public blames, the melancholy end that the authoress, though her pen stopped at the last moment in an emotion of mercy, which we now know to have been un- real, visibly anticipated. In the case of any inferior book, the verdict would be more summary and more final.
We wonder if this tendency to dislike bad endings increases. We think it does, though the number of novelists who seek originality by that method may not fall off. Men, and still more women, grow daily more instructed, more sensitive to the tragedies round them, more anxious for relief rather than excite- ment, and seek in books even more than of old respite from the harsh reality. Thinking fate harsh—and pessimism increases faster than almost any visible mood—they want fate, as it were, to be conciliated in advance, and turn from its unhappy operation in fiction with weariness, as well as disgust. They are tired of the remorselessness of things, and long for a lighter sky ; and they will tire more and more—until the actual sky lightens, until, that
• London ; Macmillan and Co,
is the day comes, if it ever does come, when human misery, judged by a more highly developed intelligence, is not appreciated so entirely as if it were pure loss.
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