Behind the sentimental there is always a moral reality. It may not be all the sentimentalists believe it; they may mistake appearance of the thing for the thing itself; but there is a reality. To preside over a man’s tea-cups is symbolic; to be his wife is more than symbolic, for a symbol may be a sacrament--and that is a reality. The wedding-ring is a sacrament for those who seek fulfilment of their being. To those who seek distraction of it, it simply puts a point to their need. To the seekers of distraction there is neither end, nor symbol, nor sacrament. Mr. Hardy once wrote a parable upon the theme--the Pursuit of the Well-Beloved it was called; and after his manner he gave a mocking twist to it. In it a nympholept, a sort of Louis XV, pursued successively a woman, her daughter and her grand-daughter, and having caught them one after another, found that there was nothing in it. Last of all, the man died also, but not without feeling pretty sure that if he could have waited for the great-grand-daughter all would have been well with him. Such shadows we are, pursuing shadows. But women are realists. They can see detail and fulfil themselves with that, failing the great thing. That is a strength which is also a weakness, fatal to them in many cases. Only, even so, it is not always easy to decide which it is. Was it strength or weakness in Romney’s wife? She nursed him through a fever, herself then a young girl, and he married her for her pains. He lived with her for five years, gave her a family, and left her. He hardly saw her again for forty years, when he returned, broken and old, to Kendal, where he had left her, to be nursed once more out of illness. So far as we know, she had no reproaches for him. He died in her arms. What reality she may have found to support her constancy one can hardly say; but at least she had more than the nympholept had ever found in his forty years in the wilderness. Enough indeed to give her fulfilment at the last.
I have touched a thing there, or I am the more deceived, which Mr. Lucas has entirely overlooked in a recent book of his. By so doing he has turned what might have been a touching piece of sentiment into something which, luckily for us, exists mainly in club arm-chairs. We have had _Science from an Easy-Chair_, and none the worse for being so delivered. But arm-chair ethics is another matter. In Mr. Lucas’s _Rose and Rose_ a doctor, with a good cook (an important factor) and an Epicurean friend, who has the knack of making cynicisms sound true, by using a genial manner, becomes guardian of a child, who grows up into a nice girl, and in due course falls in love. She chooses a man whom the doctor dislikes, whom she, however, prefers to several other candidates, against whom there are really only nods and winks from the doctor and the Epicurean on the sofa. She marries, and isn’t happy. Her husband, without being a prig--he had not enough colour for that--was a precisian, careful of his money, who did his own housekeeping. He had not such a good cook as the doctor had, and may have felt that Rose’s education in housewifery had been neglected. Probably it had. A good cook will coddle her clients, but not impart her mystery. I daresay the husband was trying; but he seems to have been good-tempered and honourable; he paid his way, and he gave Rose I a Rose II. That at least should have been an asset on his side of the account. But not at all. After a time, not clearly illuminated, in which nothing particular seems to have happened--except one thing--Rose I ups and elopes with the one thing, leaving her husband and Rose II in the lurch. She had known her lover before marriage. He had very white teeth, and she had nursed him through an illness. Well, when she found him again, his teeth were still quite white, and he had another illness. So there you were. She went off with him, I think to Singapore, and did not reappear until the last chapter, by which time her ailing lover had cleaned his teeth for the last time. The doctor, who still had the good cook, and had adopted and brought up Rose II to the marriage-point, then received back with a beating heart his Rose I.