Structural Patterns in Dickens's Great Expectations

STRUCTURAL PATTERNS IN DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS By JOHN HI. HAGAN, JR.

 It is evident at first glance that Great Expectations falls into the familiar genre of the Bildungsroman, the novel dealing with a protagonist's initiation into life and the changes it effects in his personality and character. But after the picaresque fiction of the eighteenth century made that theme a part of the novel's earliest traditions, the nineteenth introduced a variety of refinements, in the pattern of which change Great Expectations' significance as a transitional work has still to be noted. Dickens's treatment of his hero lacks the full complexity and subtlety we have since come to expect in modern works of this genre, but it marks a distinct advance beyond the loose, episodic manner of, say, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. The central plot is still a variation on an old picaresque motif -just as Tom Jones, for example, discovers the worthiness of his origins and thereby wins the lovely Sophia, so Pip discovers the ignominious origins of his wealth and loses the lovely Estella-but the artistry with which Dickens constructs his story and clearly and consistently, with full truth to life, marks out every stage of his hero's development, completely raises Great Expectations into a new class. The most conspicuous feature of this artistry is the way in which the story has been organized into three large sections of virtually equal length which Dickens calls " Stages " in the progress of Pip's expectations. Not until Hard Times did Dickens so explicitly divide his novels into parts, the division becoming a sign of the greater care and planning he expended on his later work. In Great Expectations the divisions corre- spond exactly to the three principal phases of Pip's life. In moral or temporal terms these phases are Boyhood, Youth, and Maturity. In the first of them Pip is an innocent child, content with his modest lot in life and full of love and affection for his protectors, Joe and Biddy. But the various forces that are to change him are already at work, and in Stage Two they have 54
JOHN H. HAGAN, JR. 55 their disastrous effect: Pip becomes a youthful spendthrift, and, totally absorbed in selfish pursuits, neglects all in his past life that is worthy of his remembrance and gratitude. Finally, in the third Stage, through a knowledge of suffering and in- justice won by his own disappointments and his acquaintance with Magwitch, he rises above self and achieves in loving devotion to another his regeneration. Each of these Stages has its various subdivisions, no less evident because they go without explicit mention. Stage One has four subparts, Stage Two three, and Stage Three four again.1 This suggests concretely the high degree of organization Dickens succeeded in imposing on his material. That Stages One and Three should both be divisible into four distinct phases points to a kind of symmetry that would be impossible to find in the earlier, haphazardly constructed novels. But what is more remarkable than this superficial numerical symmetry is the symmetrical balance between the actual contents of these respective subdivisions. Without overstating the case, it is per- fectly fair to say that Dickens, consciously or unconsciously, rounded off his book not only by resolving problems with which it began, but by arranging his resolutions in the same sequence as that in which the problems were first presented. If this seems forced, one should reserve his judgment until presently we explore Dickens's careful and elaborate use of repetition in the novel. In the meanwhile, the evidence cannot be ignored. In the first section of Stage One (Chapters 1-6) Dickens deals with Pip's first meeting with the stranger Magwitch; in the first section of Stage Three (Chapters 40- 46) he deals with the second meeting of these characters, and provides us with the hitherto undisclosed details of Magwitch's history. In Chapters 7-11 he introduces Pip to Miss Havisham and Estella, showing us the former's perverted desires, but keeping the nature of Estella's relationship to her a secret; in 1 These subparts are as follows: in One, Chapters 1-6, 7-11, 12-17, 18-19; in Two, 20-27, 28-35, 36-39; and in Three, 40-46, 47-51, 52-56, 57-59. The criteria for determining the subdivisions of Stages One and Three are made clear in the above discussion. With regard to Stage Two, Chapters 20-27 form a distinct unit by virtue of the fact that they center entirely about London and Pip's initiation into the life of that city. With the return to the village in 28 it is clear that a new unit begins which is neatly rounded off when Pip returns a second time. Chapter 36, by marking Pip's coming of age, plainly begins a third section.
56 DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS Chapters 47-51 he resolves these issues by bringing about Miss Havisham's regeneration and disclosing the truth of Estella's parentage. Chapters 12-17 deal with the formation of Pip's selfish ambitions; Chapters 52-56, with his regeneration through selfless devotion to another. And finally, as Chapters 18-19 concern Pip's first hopeful departure from the old forge, so Chapters 57-59 show him returning to the forge after his ordeal, no longer the slave of illusions, but a mature man experienced in life. Such carefully balanced contrasts as these are im- mensely fruitful in a novel whose subject is that of personal development. The full significance of each successive stage of a character's history can be appreciated best when one stage is placed, by either comparison or contrast, in relation to the others that precede or follow it. We shall return to this point when we discuss the device of repetition. From the overall point of view, then, Dickens defined his intention delicately yet firmly by the grouping of material into explicit divisions and by the artifice of patterned contrast. This success is no less evident in the smaller sections of the book. In Stage One, for example, almost every event that occurs prepares the reader and Pip himself for the future course his career is to take. Careful tracing of the evolution of a state of mind or situation in its causal, step-by-step progression from one phase to another is a technique usually associated with George Eliot and Meredith. But in handling it in Great Expectations Dickens proves himself no less an adept. Pip's very first deviation from a normal way of life-his pilfering of the food and the file for Magwitch-not only serves the obvious plot function of bringing the boy and the convict together, but it also foreshadows what are to be the baleful consequences of their relationship; it prepares Pip for future deviations from virtue and, at the same time, presents the pangs of conscience he is later to suffer as a consequence. In the meanwhile, his first offence leads naturally to a second: concealment of his guilt from Joe. Before Pip and the reader are scarcely aware of it, the former is forging around himself an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. From theft follows concealment, and from concealment the transition is easy to more audacious evil in the form of lies. The first great change in Pip's character comes when Estella ridicules him and he
JOHN H. HAGAN, JR. 57 grows ashamed of both himself and Joe, with the result that he tells fantastic lies about the crucial interview. The next step is from negative discontent, shame, to positive discontent, the decision to change his condition. And when, at the begin- ning of Chapter 10, Pip decides to make something " un- common " of himself, he is already on the way to the even more specific and higher aspiration to possess Estella in marriage. At the end of Chapter 11, therefore, he kisses the girl's cheek and reflects upon how much he would have sacrificed, if it had been necessary, to do so. In the same chapter he meets Herbert Pocket whose " gentlemanliness " tortures him after their fight and helps establish the gentlemanly ideal in his mind. With the seeds of discontent, deceit, and future ideals thus sown in Chapters 1-11, the momentum of Pip's development steadily increases in the next section, Chapters 12-17. (All this while, of course, the injustice of Mrs. Gargery and Pumble- chook, and, their insistence upon the idea that Miss Havisham. will be his benefactress, are also shaping Pip's destiny.) When in Chapter 12 he wishes to tell Joe about his fight with Herbert, he finds that he cannot, for just as concealment originally led to lies, so, on a new occasion, in order to be believed, he must resort to concealment again. Thus the subtle rift opened between Pip and his old life at the very beginning of the novel has imperceptibly widened. When, at the termination of his service with Miss Havisham, in Chapter 13, Joe appears with him at the old lady's house in the presence of Estella, the rift grows wider still, for this is the first time the two worlds are brought into sharp juxtaposition for him. On the same occasion Miss Havisham's generous gift (the first of many Pip is to receive annually) helps to fix in his mind the idea of her as his benefactress. By Chapter 14 Pip's unrest, heightened by a year of hopeless apprenticeship, has grown steadily worse, and it takes the form in Chapter 15 of a vain wish to educate Joe. At last, in Chapter 16, the assault upon Mrs. Gargery raises a crucial moral problem. Unintentionally, Pip provided the weapon (a sawed-off manacle) for the brutal crime when he stole the file years before. He must decide now whether or not to confess the truth of that old episode to Joe. But so much time has elapsed that the entire situation has grown much more complicated than it was in the beginning. The secret
58 DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS has not only so grown into Pip that he cannot tear it away, but the assault, the latest outcome of the original incident, is more likely than ever to alienate Joe from him-even assuming that after the lies he told him about Miss Havisham Joe believes the story at all. Thus Pip has by degrees become the victim of his original deceit and the successive deceptions that grew out of it, and his secrets now alienate him from all the people around him. The motif is one frequently used by Hawthorne and George Eliot: a crime or sinful act never remains simple; as time goes on difficulties accrete about it until the possibility of atonement grows less and less. Pip, against his will and knowledge, has committed himself to an irresistable course of action. He cannot escape his acts; they bring with them their inevitable consequences. Finally, in Chapter 17, all of Pip's suppressed desires receive their most explicit expression in a passionate outburst before Biddy. For the first time he gives a positive statement of his desire to become a " gentleman " (the seeds of which desire were im- planted at the time of the fight with Herbert), and expresses in its fullest intensity his irrational passion for Estella. Thus, even before he learns of his " great expectations," the stage for Pip's eager reception of them has been thoroughly set and the whole moral issue of his career clearly defined. Dickens has so beautifully ordered his material that Chapter 17 depends for its existence upon all that has previously happened to his hero; it brings to a perfect culmination the whole chain of events set in motion in Chapter 1. With Chapter 18, therefore, Dickens is able to move on to the advent of the "great expectations" themselves.2 Such scrupulous ordering of successive stages of development is evident as well in the third great part of the novel. Here Dickens's problem is the very reverse of what it was in Stage One: instead of building up Pip's hopes and ideals, he must now break them down. He does so by taking Pip one step after another down the ladder of disillusionment. At the begin- 2 Other smaller hints of Pip's destiny are also given in the early chapters. Miss Havisham's two gifts of money to him foreshadow the " great expectations " themselves. A song Biddy sings in Chapter 15 points forward to his experiences in London. And Pip's own references to the tragedy of George Barnwell foreshadow his coming defection from Joe, for Barnwell, like Pip, is a man of common life who sacrifices his all for an illusory reward.
JOHN H. HAGAN, JR. 59 ning of Stage Three, in Chapter 40, Pip receives the first great shock of his career: he learns that the source of his wealth is Magwitch, not Miss Havisham, with the result that both his social and romantic aspirations receive a severe set-back. But he does not yet totally give up the idea that Estella might marry him. Accordingly, he returns to the village in Chapter 43 with the intention of proposing to her. Stopping at the Blue Boar inn, he encounters his old enemy Bentley Drummle from whom he receives oblique hints as to a recent change in Estella's plans-hints that are painfully clarified in Chapter 44 when he learns from the girl's own lips that she and Drummle are engaged. Thereupon Pip's hopes drop another rung. But they are not yet at the bottom; with almost ruthless con- sistency Dickens pushes his hero's disappointments to their utmost. Therefore, in Chapter 48 Pip has to discover that the beautiful girl he has worshipped so long, whom he has wished to shelter from all that is sordid and low in life, and for whom he has sacrificed all that is good in his own character, is the daughter of a murderess. In Chapter 50 he suffers the further bitter revelation that her father is Magwitch. Still not at the bottom, however, Pip has next to lose all his money when the fortune saved for him by the captured convict is forfeited to the Crown. By Chapter 54, therefore, his " great expectations," considered from both the monetary and the romantic points of view, have completely evaporated. His desolation is accentu- ated by a total alienation from the people who were formerly closest to him: Wemmick marries and settles away from him with his wife; Herbert, too, marries and goes to the East on business; Magwitch dies; and Joe and Biddy, whom he has so grievously injured, are still far away. But one hope still remains to him. In 58 he returns to -the old village with the intention of proposing to Biddy-only to discover, however, that she has already become the wife of Joe. This, at last, is the bottom of the ladder. But the descent is in terms of Pip's hopes alone. Just as in Stage One there was a rise in hope coincident with a fall in moral character, so in the last Stage, counter to declining hope, there runs a rising spiritual movement-a growth of love for the suffering lMagwitch whom Pip first regarded with un- qualified disgust and horror. Thus on one more level the novel
60 DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS attains an overall symmetry. As for the stages themselves of the growth, the reader will observe them for himself, and will note that they are delineated with the same precision as those we have just examined. Meanwhile, we must turn to the other striking feature of the novel we have already mentioned: its highly skilful use of repetition. To such a high level is the art of tasteful and subtle repetition carried in Great Expectations that the novel remains distinctive in the Dickens canon for a unique kind of beauty and intensity. Repetition can take place, of course, on at least three levels: the level of words or phrases, the level of charac- ters, and the level of incidents. Dickens's achievements on the first of these levels (Micawber's " something will turn up," and so forth) are such conspicuous and famous features of his art that they require no discussion here. But the skill he was able to attain on the other two levels is patent in Great Expectations where it becomes one of the chief factors in the novel's success. On the level of characters one may see repetition operating most clearly. Not only has Dickens, contrary to his usual cus- tom, greatly curtailed the mere number of characters in the story, but he has contrived it so that nearly every one who ap- pears sheds light in one way or another on the concerns of the central figure. Rarely before Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities are the materials of a Dickens novel thus properly proportioned and subordinated. This is not to say that in Great Expectations success in this particular is complete; Dickens's artistic conscience was never to attain the purity and rigor of certain modern masters, and it would be a distortion of his claim to greatness to rest it upon such criteria.3 But to appreciate how closely Dickens could approximate the modern ideal one has only to consider the way in which the motif of "great expectations" is constantly held before the reader's eyes in the persons of a number of different characters. 'Pip furnishes what we may call, in musical terminology, the prin- cipal theme; about him are grouped several characters whose ' The characters of Mr. Barley and the " aged P.," for example, are carry-overs from Dickens's earlier, more unrestrainedly inventive period. But even they are relevant in so far as they help provide an agreeable domestic background against which Pip's frustrations can be set in contrast.
JOHN H. HAGAN, JR. 61 primary function is to play a series of variations on that thenie. At one end of the scale we have, of course, Joe and Biddy who have no " great expectations " at all and whose acceptance of a humble lot in life furnishes the sharpest possible contrast to Pip's selfishness. At the other end we have the characters of Pumblechook, Wopsle, Sarah Pocket and Camilla, MaIrs. Matthew Pocket, and Herbert Pocket, who all in different ways also have " great expectations " of their own. Pumblechook would like to come in for a share of Pip's new fortune; Wopsle hopes to revive the declining drama; Sarah Pocket and Camilla expect to be named in 'Miss Havisham's will; Mrs. Matthew Pocket looks forward to the day when she will receive the defer- ence due the daughter of a baronet; and her son Herbert dreams of becoming a great capitalist. Even Wemmick with his concern for the " portable property " he receives from condemned criminals is not without his affinity to Pip, for the latter's property also has its source in the underworld. Furthermore, all of these characters react to their various expectations in different ways. Pip reveals ingratitude; Pumblechook descends to grovelling servility; Wopsle makes a fool of himself on the stage; Sarah Pocket and Camilla are torn by jealousy; Mrs. Pocket abstracts herself from everyday reality; and Herbert develops into an amiable optimist. Thus, in an ingenious way, Dickens manages to display a whole range of the different effects " great expectations " can have upon the human spirit. But in addition to those who have no expectations and those who have exorbitant ones, still a third group is introduced comprising those who may once have had high hopes but who are now disillusioned. Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Matthew Pocket, and Jaggers belong in this category. Magwitch trusted the slick Compeyson as an ally in crime, and Miss Havisham trusted him as a suitor; Matthew Pocket distinguished himself at the university but ruined his prospects when he married; Jaggers simply saw too much of life. In each of these cases, as in the others, the effect of each experience has been different: Magwitch seeks to return to society vicariously through an- other; Miss Havisham sinks into a cruel misanthropy; Matthew Pocket lives in a state of perpetual bewilderment and sup- pressed exasperation; Jaggers cultivates a callous " profes- sional" character. When Pip himself comes to suffer still
62 DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS another kind of disillusionment he will strike a balance between the reactions of Magwitch and Miss Havisham: he will rise above the latter's sour defeatism and hostility to love as intense as Magwitch's but devoid of its possessiveness. Thus, through a series of skilfully varied repetitions of character response to a presiding idea, Dickens is able to achieve a maximum of economy while at the same time illumi- nating Pip's situation from a number of different sides. At the same time he achieves more striking effects by brilliantly hand- ling repetition on the level of incident. Chapter 31, for example, is entirely taken up with an episode that has absolutely nothing to do with the plot: Pip and Herbert go to a theatre where Wopsle, playing the lead in Hamlet, gives a ridiculous per- formance and is jeered unmercifully by the audience. At first the incident seems to be no more than a humorous interlude, comic relief to offset the more serious action. But the moment one remembers that in the immediately preceding chapter Pip had his memorable encounter with Trabb's boy the episode takes on an entirely new dimension. Wopsle and his fellow actors are trying, like Pip, to play roles for which they are not fitted; they are a parody of Pip himself whose pretensions far outreach his natural habits and instincts. And the jeers they receive from the gallery are delivered in the same spirit as those which Pip received from Trabb's boy. Pip himself has become a ham actor like the detestable Wopsle; unconsciously, in his egotism, he has become more and more like the very type of man he hated in his boyhood. His only saving grace is that, unlike Wopsle who remains stupidly indifferent to the audience's reception of him, he is not invulnerable: the mockery of Trabb's boy hits the mark. But at the time of his first visit to the theatre Pip is still relatively high on the crest of his wave and Wopsle's obviously fantastic aspiration to revive single-handedly the drama is a ludicrous variation on his own ambitions. He is due, however, for defeat, and when at last in Chapter 47 he has come to know suffering and disillusion- ment, he runs across Wopsle once more in entirely different circumstances and the parallel is drawn unmistakably: I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather partaken of its decline.
JOHN H. HAGAN, JR. 63 He had been ominously heard of; through the playbills, as a faith- ful Black, in connexion with a little girl of noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had seen him as a predatory Tartar of comic propensities, with face like a red brick, and an outrageous hat all over bells. Probably every reader, when he first goes through Great Expectations, brings away from the novel an unaccountable, but thoroughly satisfying, sense of its completeness, its rounded, finished quality-a feeling that is not evoked by an earlier book like Martin Chuzzlewit, for example. If he tries to discover why this is so he will find that Dickens is always playing variations like the one above-some of them even more subtle-on scenes and events he does not want the reader to forget. He is continually circling back upon old material from a new point of view. There is nothing as explicit in all of this as in Hawthorne's use of the " central scene " in The Scarlet Letter, for instance, but Dickens's approach is analo- gous. Consider the way in which the Three Jolly Bargemen inn figures in the action. In Chapter 10 Pip goes there one Saturday evening to fetch Joe whom he finds smoking his pipe by " a bright large kitchen fire . . . in company with Mr. Wopsle and a stranger." The stranger turns out to be a convict who is acting temporarily as Magwitch's agent and gives Pip a gift of two one-pound notes. Now this entire scene distinctly anticipates a much more important one that occurs in Chapter 18 in which almost every significant detail of the first scene is carefully reproduced. Once again it is a Saturday night, and again Pip visits the Jolly Bargemen where " round the fire " are assembled Joe, Wopsle, and another stranger. This stranger turns out to be Jaggers and he, also acting as an agent for Magwitch, gives Pip another gift: the gift of his " great ex- pectations." By means of such repetition Dickens is able to underscore an important fact about Pip's development. When the boy first visits the Bargemen he is still an innocent. He has already been on his first visit to Miss Havisham's and the seeds of discontent, therefore, have been planted, but they have not yet blossomed. By the time he makes the second trip to the inn, however, his discontent, under the weight of four years' burdensome apprenticeship, has reached a climax. By placing Pip at two contrasting points in his career in the
64 DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS same setting and similar circumstances Dickens is able to heighten our awareness of the momentous change that has come over him. The constancy of the background accentuates the variability of the character.4 This technique Dickens uses all through the novel for the same purpose.5 However, it should be noted that one of the most effective uses of repetition in the book involves not Pip, but Magwitch. Consider the section dealing with the convict's flight down the Thames late in Stage Three. This episode is a quiet variation on the events with which the story opened; much of its melancholy beauty resides in that fact. For we remember that Magwitch appears to us in the very first chapter near the water, fleeing from a prison-ship. Now, at the end of his career, he appears to us again on the water, this time fleeing to a ship for safety. But he never does escape and his final capture hearkens back to the end of Chapter 5 when he was once before taken prisoner and " the ends of the torches were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with him." The pathos of the later scene increases when we bring to it our memory of the earlier, and upon re-reading the earlier gains meaning for us as an anticipation of the later. Nothing as well as this circular movement could suggest the profound futility of Magwitch's destiny. But to bring this discussion to a fitting close we must turn briefly to what is perhaps the most beautiful instance of the use of repetition in the entire novel. The story ends, we recall, with Pip and Estella, after their numerous hardships, meeting 'The repetition also gives us a clue to the mystery underlying the plot. We are never told on the first occasion that the two pounds come from Magwitch, but we are led strongly to suspect it, not only because the messenger himself is a convict and questions Joe about the presence of gypsies, tramps, and other vagrants on the marshes, but also because he possesses the stolen file. When, therefore, on the second occasion at the Bargemen, another stranger turns up, also acting as an agent, and makes Pip another gift of money, Dickens is skilfully hinting at the true identity of the benefactor. 'Limitations of space forbid the full development of this thesis, but the reader can verify it for himself if he will note the following pairs of scenes: interviews between Pip and Biddy (in Chapter 17 and again after Mrs. Gargery's funeral); meetings between Joe and Pip in London (Chapters 27 and 57); Pip's visits to Wemmick's " castle " (Chapters 25 and 37); dinners at Jagger's home (Chapters 26 and 48); Pip's journeys from London to Miss Havisham's (Chapters 2,9 and 49). In each of these pairs there is a striking change in Pip's character or situation from the earlier scene to the later.
JOHN H. HAGAN, JR. 65 on the former site of Miss Havisham's vanished house with the moon rising and the mist quietly settling around them. If the reader asks why he is moved by this scene he will discover that its force derives not solely from itself, but depends upon the incident being compared with earlier incidents of a similar character. For Pip and Estella together have been associated with the ruined garden before. In Chapter 8, when Pip paid his very first visit to Miss Havisham's house, he wandered into the brewery-yard, and, looking over the old garden wall, saw Estella walking among the tangled weeds; a few moments later he saw her again, balancing herself atop the old beer casks. In Chapter 11, when he returned to Miss Havisham's a second time, he strolled into the garden himself and there had his fight with Herbert. In these early chapters, then, the garden was definitely associated with the childhood of Pip and Estella and the first awakening of the former's infatuation. When next it appeared, in Chapter 29, the novel was almost at its half-way point, and many changes had come about. Pip and Estella wandered into the garden together and recalled old times: she confessed to having seen him fight with Herbert and he re- minded her of how she walked atop the casks. These incidents had now acquired considerable poignancy, for though the set- ting had remained unchanged, the principal actors were no longer what they were: Estella had grown into a beautiful young woman and Pip into a young man with a new fortune and bright romantic dreams. But both were destined for disappointment, and when, at the end of the novel, even greater changes having come about, they meet in the garden for the third time, youth and the freshness of Estella's beauty have fled, and for both who have had their share of sorrow the " poor dreams " have " all gone by . . . all gone by." Thus, through the repetition with variation of a single situation-the meeting of Pip and Estella in Miss Havisham's old ruined garden-at strategic points in the story, Dickens has been able strikingly to punctuate the three great Stages of his pro- tagonists' lives. The repetition is not obtrusive enough to appear mechanical, but it remains firm enough in the back- ground to define the significant variations.6 6 It is worth noting that mists are also an important factor in the effectiveness 5
66 DICKENS'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS Whether or not Great Expectations is Dickens's "best" novel will probably always remain an open question. The fundamentally miscellaneous character of Dickens's art makes personal preference a difficult arbiter to challenge-if it does not make preference itself somewhat impossible. Great Ex- pectations obviously lacks, or presents with far less intensity, a number of qualities that made the earlier works so memorable, but in that novel, commensurate with substantiality of charac- ter, incident, and scope of meaning, Dickens attained to a beauty of form, a shapeliness of design, that not only marks the book as somewhat unique in his own canon, but places it securely near the level of a select group of nineteenth century English novels-Wuthering Heights, Henry Esmond, and Middlemarch, to name only the first that come to mind-that for the same reason have become classic. University of Chicago of the last scene. They, as well as the garden, appear in the novel at crucial moments. At the very end of Stage One when Pip leaves the forge on his first excursion into life, he tells us that " the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to show me the world." Here the rising mists represent Pip's awakening, the bright lure and promise of new experience. But when they appear again much later in Stage Two after Mrs. Gargery's funeral-when Pip, now well along on his egotistic course, is leaving the forge for the second time-they have an entirely different message for the changed man: " Once more, the mists were rising as I walked away . . . [and] they disclosed to me . . . that I. should not come back." They unveil no attractive future now; beyond them lies the vista of coming isolation and despair. When the mists recur, therefore, at the end of the novel, they bring with them all the associations they have acquired on these two occasions-the suggestion of innocence dispelled by costly experience, youthful ardor dampened, bright hope shattered-to interweave with the garden motif and enrich immeasurably the closing scene's inherent pathos and beauty.