h to say that of all
sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: He's succeeded
again. Here, too, the rhyme may be questioned, but the reason is
sound. An entirely successful man is the most pitiful object in the
universe. Not only has he nothing to look forward to, but he has
nothing to look back upon. Having no regrets, no shadows, in his life,
he has no chiaroscuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It is
painted in the flat. "Regret," says George Moore, to change the figure
a little, "is like a mountain top from which we survey our dead life,
a mountain top on which we pause and ponder." He has no point of view,
then, either. So after all the words, "It might have been," do bear a
sadness about them in his case; his life might have been a success if
it had only been a failure. "It might have been" thus becomes sad when
it reflects back upon itself, when it means there might have been a
might have been but there was only a was. So life whirls into paradox!

Let any man in honesty retire into the solitude of his soul and
reflect on his joys that might have been and those that were, and let
him then answer whether any of his realizations were the equal of his
anticipations. Therefore, if he had achieved the anticipated but lost
delights which form the burden of his "Might have been," they, too,
would have been as ashes in the mouth. The truth is that the essence
of delight is in the anticipation, the best of life is the vision, not
the reality. It is pathetic not to have entertained the vision, but
more pathetic, perhaps, to have attained it. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who
said that there is only one thing more tragic than failure--success?

Did our regretful poet dream at twenty-one of being the perfect lover?
In his dreams he was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what was
he? What was she? What was their courtship, their marriage? You,
prosy, contented, forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or shaking
down the furnace fire, while the children are being put to bed, you
dare to call "It might have been" the saddest words of tongue or pen?
Those now almost forgotten dreams of what might have been are the best
you ever were. Remember them as often as you can, as bitterly, as
happily, for your soul's salvation. Without them you are the lowest of
God's creatures, a mere married man.

Or take the case of Maud Muller herself, and her judge. We learn that
the judge--

Wedded a wife of richest dower,