Читать книгу Neighbourhood: A year's life in and about an English village онлайн

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Your tale is done. You have scrawled ‘The End’ at the bottom of the sheet, and thrown it with the others. You have turned your chair to the fire, put up your slippered feet on the andiron, and have filled your most comfortable pipe. The end it is, in very truth, for all who will read the tale; but for you there will never be an end, just as there never was a beginning to it. Unbidden now, and not to be gainsaid even if you had the mind, your dream-children live on in the town or country nook you made for them; live on, increase and multiply, finish their peck of dirt, add to the world’s store either of folly or sanctity, come to their graves at last, each by his own inexorable road, and each leaving the seed of another tale behind.

To the enviable reader, when, after much water-spilling and cracking of crowns, Jack has got his Jill, and the wedding-bells are lin-lan-loning behind the dropt curtain, there is the satisfaction of certainty that so much love, and one pair of hearts at least, are safe from further chance and change in the whirligig of life. But to the teller of the tale, there is no such assurance. Just as his dream-children came out of an immortality he did not devise, so will they persist through an eternity not of his controlling; and for ever they will be subject to the same odds of bliss or disaster as any stranger that may pass his door. Yet, being only human, he will nevertheless go on with his tales in the secret hope that Jove may be caught napping, and a little heaven be brought down to earth before its allotted time. For living in a world of law and order—where even Omnipotence may not deny to every cause its outcome—is too realistically like camping under fire. The old fatalists had peace of mind because they believed it availed nothing to crouch when the bullets screamed overhead, nor even to dodge a spent shot. But to take one’s stand in the face of the myriad cross-purposes and side-issues of an orderly universe, needs a vastly different temper. Perhaps it is just the secret longing in all hearts to have at least a little make-believe of certitude—if nowhere else but in the pages of a story—by which the art of fiction so hugely thrives.