The heroine sinks into the miserable squalor of a
dipsomaniac and dies from a drunkard's disease, but her end is shown as
the ineluctable consequence of her life, its early greyness and
monotony, the sudden shock of a new and strange environment and the
resultant weakness of will which a morbid excitability inevitably
brought about. The novel, that is to say, deals with a "rhythmical
series of events and follows them to their conclusion"; it gets at the
roots of things; it tells us of something which we know to be true in
life whether we care to read it in fiction or not. There is nothing in
it of sordidness for sordidness' sake nor have the realists any
philosophy of an unhappy ending. In this case the ending is unhappy
because the sequence of events admitted of no other solution; in others
the ending is happy or merely neutral as the preceding story decides. If
what one may call neutral endings predominate, it is because they
also--notoriously--predominate in life. But the question of unhappiness
or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with the larger matter of
beauty; it is the triumph of the realists that at their best they
discovered a new beauty in things, the loveliness that lies in obscure
places, the splendour of sordidness, humility, and pain.
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