cxlv 



CHAPTER VII. 



1876-1886. 



Mrs. Jenkin's Illness Captain Jenkin The Golden Wedding Death of Uncle 

 John Death of Mr. and Mrs. Austin Illness and Death of the Captain 

 Death of Mrs. Jenkin Effect on Fleeming Telpherage The End. 



AND now I must resume my narrative for that melancholy 

 business that concludes all human histories. In January of the 

 year 1875, while Fleeming's sky was still unclouded, he was 

 reading Smiles. I read my engineers' lives steadily,' he writes, 

 * but find biographies depressing. I suspect one reason to be 

 that misfortunes and trials can be graphically described, but 

 happiness and the causes of happiness either cannot be or are 

 not. A grand new branch of literature opens to my view : a 

 drama in which people begin in a poor way and end, after 

 getting gradually happier, in an ecstasy of enjoyment. The 

 common novel is not the thing at all. It gives struggle followed 

 by relief. I want each act to close on a new and triumphant 

 happiness, which has been steadily growing all the while. This 

 is the real antithesis of tragedy, where things get blacker and 

 blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not grasped rny 

 grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by a little 

 respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new 

 idea was not true to nature. I'm sick of this old-fashioned 

 notion of art. Hold a mirror up, indeed ! Let's paint a picture 

 of how things ought to be and hold that up to nature, and 

 perhaps the poor old woman may repent and mend her ways.' 

 The ' grand idea ' might be possible in art ; not even the in- 

 genuity of nature could so round in the actual life of any man. 

 And yet it might almost seem to fancy that she had read the 

 letter and taken the hint ; for to Fleeming the cruelties of fate 



