life. Unlikely people die. The one certain thing, it is also the one
improbable. A dreadful paradox is perhaps wrought upon a little nature
that is incapable of death and yet is constrained to die. That is a true
destruction, and the thought of it is obscure.

Happy literature corrects all this disproportion by its immortal pause.
It does not bid us follow man or woman to an illogical conclusion. Mrs.
Micawber never does desert Mr. Micawber. Considering her mental powers,
by the way, an illogical conclusion for her would be manifestly
inappropriate. Shakespeare, indeed, having seen a life whole, sees it to
an end: sees it out, and Falstaff dies. More than Promethean was the
audacity that, having kindled, quenched that spark. But otherwise the
grotesque man in literature is immortal, and with something more
significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of
rhetoric; he is perdurable because he is not completed. His humours are
strangely matched with perpetuity. But, indeed, he is not worthy to die;
for there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be
mortal. I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world. I thank
my fellow mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that the
French so pleasantly call _une joyeusete_; these are to smile at. But
the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the man or woman in a
book, in fiction, or on the stage in a play.

That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living windows.
Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyes
that are apt to express none but common things. There are allusions
unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me and
from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain
of our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish
and the stolid--"wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?"