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Updated: May 3, 2025
"MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love. "I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her his very own woman now? You you don't seem to understand ANYTHING. She's nobody's woman for ever. That that might-have-been has gone for ever.... It's nerves a passion of the nerves. There's a cruelty in life and She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me...."
The beautiful picture which these words conjured up filled Archie with that yearning for the might-have-been which is always so painful. He was finding his position physically as well as mentally distressing. It was cramped under the bed, and the boards were harder than anything he had ever encountered.
Resign myself as I would to the bitter reality, the ghost of the might-have-been haunted me night and day, so that I spent my leisure wandering abstractedly about the streets, always trying to banish thought and never for an instant succeeding. A great unrest was upon me; and when I received a letter from Dick Barnard announcing his arrival at Madeira, homeward bound, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Two were they surely, and two might stay, But she turned him into the better way; His thoughts were purified even when He chafed and raged at the might-have-been; He learned that living is not a whim, For the soul in her entered into him. He fights, as others, to win or fall, And the spell of the Woman is over all. Bravely they battle in their degree, For "The woman I love shall be proud of me!"
The contrast of the actual with the might-have-been is the secret of our confidence. Imagine, had these brave lads entrusted to us by the Commonwealth and Dominion now been crowding on the beaches crowding into their boats whilst some desperate rearguard was trying to hold off the onrush of the triumphant Turks. Here come the Turks!
Perhaps not; for as she spoke the last word, she drew from her bosom, where it hung round her neck by a chain, a broken talisman, exactly similar to the one which she coveted so fiercely, and looked at it long and lovingly kissed it wept over it spoke to it fondled it in her arms as a mother would a child murmured over it snatches of lullabies; and her grim, withered features grew softer, purer, grander; and rose ennobled, for a moment, to their long-lost might-have-been, to that personal ideal which every soul brings with it into the world, which shines, dim and potential, in the face of every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted, and encrusted in the long tragedy of life.
But she did none of these things, and her only epitaph is that dreary might-have-been. Nay, not the only one, for one visible record of her, at least, the soil of France cherishes among its chiefest treasures.
Hence he is often wrong, and more often incomplete, from sheer lack of information. Secondly, much of his work is mere jotting, never in the very least degree intended for publication, and sometimes explicitly corrected or retracted by later jottings of the same kind. In such a case we can rather augur of the might-have-been than pronounce on the actual.
Resignation had not been so difficult in the spiritual moment of realization and resolve, but to be presented with one concrete and stunning actuality after another, each with its mocking might-have-been, had grown to be a terrible ordeal. Lane looked for faces he knew. On each side of the pillar where he and Blair stood the stream of color and gayety flowed.
He has proved that he actually has that over-pressure of pure creativeness which we see in nature itself, "that of a hundred seeds, she often brings but one to bear." Dickens had to be Malthusian about his spiritual children. Critics have called Keats and others who died young "the great Might-have-beens of literary history." Dickens certainly was not merely a great Might-have-been.
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