INCOMPLETENESS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1369, 7 March 1865, Page 2

INCOMPLETENESS.

(From the Saturday Review.)

We suppose that no man engaged in anywork not merely mechanical—in any work requiring thought, skill, and care —ever left off wholly satisfied with, his performance, or ever turned from it without some misgiving, some sense of self-reproach that he was resigning it to its destination because he was weary of it or fearful of doing mischief by some reckless touches, not because he honestly believed he had done all there was to be done. He ends his effort with a sense of its incompleteness; he wishes that a more strenuous gathering of his powers could give the fiuish and perfecting that it wants. Whether it be a poem, a treatise, or a picture, whether brain or hand has been at work,, he knows that something more has to be done by the best part of himself; only he shrinks, or believes himself to shrink, from the energy of concentration which would enable him to embody hia ideal. Supposing the celebrated critic whose strictures all rested on this assumption to be attended by. the

artists whose paintings were under re view, would not the conscience of every on " of them respond, with an obedient twi nKe e that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains? Yet broadly speaking, the whole is a f a i] aov ' resting on the preference men invariably show to acknowledge incompleteness in their works rather than in themselves, in tI K; VCr structure of their minds. People talk glibC of their ideal, and believe in ho talking that their minds can sketch out a bold rouei, draft of perfection; but the ideal of most people is the dimmest of shadows—a in the distance, which they hope to overtake pen in hand. •< Such is the echo's fainter sound, Such is the light when the sun's drown M ; So did the fancy look upon The work before it was begun." Incompleteness is a law that no pains ran really stand against. Pains after a while defeat themselves, being pursued on a fal.-o assumption. We are obliged to dismiss our work incomplete, not satisfying even ourselves, and fain to shut our eyes on rawness and defects that we cannot cover or remedy. If we will not submit to failure, and disc re . pancy of parts, we must give up head-work altogether. This is a theory, subject we are fully aware, to any amount of abuse; i JU t the counter-principle which seems to aifect a higher standard of duty and effort i H answerable for failure on a far larger scale. We have observed that persons who cannot acquiesce in incompleteness do nothing, or next to nothing. They either suffer their powers to lie idle, or they grow finical and unnatural, and can say nothing in a plain way. To minds of this class, a work of anv magnitude is a mountain that grows higher with every attempt to scale it. They undertake things and do not go through with them, and their task is either left undone or transferred to robuster or, as they feel, less discriminating hands. For this niceness does not induce humility. The man who leaves others to do the work which lie believes he could do better, who regards his own light as hid under a bushel, is apt to make a critic, fastidious even to sourness. That sigh of mingled relief and disgust with which the writer lays down his pen— t; It must do!" "It may as well go!" humbles while the impression of it lasts. Such men are made vain, not by their own approval, but by success, if they attain it. "When popularity comes, and the world runs after them, they are excusably willing to adopt the world's estimate. There are no doubt constitutional differences. Some persons leave off with a glow of elation which is uppermost for awhile; but this is a very unhealthy condition of intellect to last, and there is no state so nearly verging on loss of reason as the conviction of having attained absolute completeness, which, in other words, is perfection. But for the saving touch of perverseness in choosing to resist the world's verdict —which makes the arrogance less real—we should say that Southey's mind all but toppled to its fall when he pronounced of his Madoc, which nobody ever read through—" Unquestionably the poem will stand and flourish. I am perfectly satisfied with the execution—now eight months after its publication—in my cool judgment I shall get by it less money than fame, less fame than envy; but the envy will be only life-long." And Southey's excessive industry, which never wearied of work of any sort, " polishing and polishing, adding and adding," as he says, enabled him to bestow those finishing touches to the minutest nicety which other men recoil from after a time, and yet believe so telling and glorifying if they could only bestow them. However, few persons are I industrious in this degree, certainly very few . successful writers; and one reason for the impression' of incompleteness is, that people • do their work at all except under the i pressure of a certain amount of hurry. The worker must feel himself at bay, driven to a corner; or, if circumstances do not supply this stimulus, he has to invent a necessity, ,£o 'fix periods for himself, to run races with time.Stringent necessity of some sort is ,the ordinary task-master. " What must be done, sir, will be done," said Dr. Johnson. inay write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it." A man in this frame can't help believing he would do better with more time; but, whatever defects, we find in Johnson's style, we who read Mm do not regret that he had not more time for retouching. We do not, of course, suppose that tne complef&st achievements of men are performed Vender ■ such conditions. If a man knows how to use leisure, if he has powers oi protracted concentration in proportion to his other powgra, his work will be complete m a fuller sense* than the hurried procrastinating man can possibly attain to, though still not complete enough to satisfy himself. But m all such caaegt completeness is ingrained, not imparted, by subsequent touches. - S| ° one is completer in his way than our poet Gray, for. nobody took more time about Ins work ; but it was time in the process oi composition.; his celebrated adjectives and epithets w&je part ■ and parcel of his verse*, which came from his head, as his friend #:uu, armed cap-a-pie, Yet he said of himself " Extreme conciseness of expression, yet Inconspicuous, and musical, is one of the jzraiu beauties of lyric poetry ; this I have aKvay > aimed at, never attained." He aimed at it line by line, and warns the prolific against his way of casting down iiis first ide.i> carelessly and at large, and then clipp l ' l '- them here and there, and shaping them a leisure. The poor jaded author who he had time and patience to reduce his i'• fuseness to conciser limits, should change vain longings into a lesson for the futurenever to let his pen run on in the hopf ° being able to clip and pare and touch in 0 terseness and strength as a subsequent And if correction has so narrow a fie' it can repair, but never reform, even while t subject is still fresh and malleable m 1 writer's mind—its wort is still more I''"' when the heat of composition is past. - 1 ul performance is weak and poor indeed can be mended materially after years past. If bad, it may, of course, be rendei harmless, but it will be at the expense ot i individuality; it will have no distinct mai of the head and hand that struck it on, of the influences which gave birth to it. - old poet doctoring his early verses had be _ be knitting or knotting, or basking m sun, as all the readers of Wordsworth feel who have the misfortune to possess_ edition with his latest emendations. l . miss favourite lines, which havei finished, and corrected, and trimmeu -j . have lost half their meaning, and all . feeling and ry thm; and this, too, after a » hunted up and down for them in the order or arrangement through which t e i has endeavoured to prove to himselt ant world that his works are a complete wo

tl,o small®' most insignificant poem as the ;" Blone in a noble edifice of exact """natural proportions. This, we take it, ebZn on a large scale against the law which attaches to man as man. t

To those who keenly feel this law acting on themselves, and yet work on, the world •„ ,err ready to suggest that the self- immoStion* is voluntary, and obliges nobody. There are plenty of people to cry ont for fewer boots, and better—that is, completer Lones But these people rarely indeed act nnon their own suggestion; they leave the rompletest books in undisturbed rows on. their shelves, and read what is written in inevitable haste and compulsion. And, in fact, much of our most charming literature la diurnal literature ; and the work of the day that no morrow cau revise must inflict regrets of the sort we mean on its writers, and that in proportion, we fully believe, to the amount of thought employed. There is a cheap completeness attainable, a uniformity of effort, perhaps at no great expense, but where there is real thought it will now and then flag. As Charles Lamb says (after fishing up his absent friend out of the river), "Great previous exertions—mine had not been inconsiderable—are commonly followed by debility of purpose." The author is conscious of this debility of reaction. Nobody wishes Addison to have taken more time, or to have revised his Spectator-, yet we know that he wrote many of his papers very fast, and sent them to the press as soon as they were written, and he now and then shows himself very sensible of defects which he thinks time would have remedied. Thus he defines some of bis best essays as loose thoughts set down without order or method; admitting that there is always obscurity in confusion, and that the same sentence that would have enlightened the reader in one part of the discouise perplexes him in another. That is, he felt himself incomplete, and regretted to leave his work unmethodised —a regret his readers do not share, being aware that, if he had attempted to reduce his sentences into order after they were once set in their places, much grace and felicity of language must be sacrificed to something of much less consequence. In fact, the more hold a man has on his subject, the more lie is penetrated with it, the more difficult he finds it to satisfy himself in his method of putting it before others, so as to show it fairly.

We are not writing for a certain class who abandon themselves to an impetus which seems never to encounter misgiving at any period of its flow. These writers' sense of incompleteness resides solely in want of space. They must leave off while there is still much more to say; their regrets are a quarrel with time, and with the limited patience of other men, not with their own handling of their theme. This spurious completeness, as far as it goes, is wholly incompatible with severe thorough apprehension. Thus the misgiving we mean is least found in self-educated or imperfectly educated writers —whether they are ignorant of other men's thoughts, and thus of the commonplaces as well as the complexities of their subject, or are simply followers without knowing it in another man's wake, thinkers at second-hand, taking a line for granted, and bestowing all their labour on oratorical ornamental modes of setting it off. A good deal of clever persuasive writing is to be met with everywhere, and abounds in America— expressed with a warmth, a zest, a confidence amounting to eloquence, which forbids the idea of self-mistrust at any period at or after its composition. We see that the writer not only is satisfied and complacent, but will always remain so. But the impression upon the attentive reader, as much from this complacency as anything else, is that the writer has never fairly faced his subject on his own independent account; and that real independent hard-working thought, taken up at separate intervals, and looking at facts on their different sides, is •not in this way. If a man's mind and intellect have their gaps, and breaks, and defects in machinery and working power, nothing is gained to him in the long run by the delusive notion that he is clear and coniistent, that he either sees things or expresses them with a fuller command than he really holds. The assumption acted upon necessarily induces insincerity, and that loose way of bridging over or ignoring difficulties which we see in some popular writers, without being able to determine how far they know what they are doing, or are led by the instinct of keeping up appearances.

Men must reconcile themselves to a faulty vein and a continual falling short of expectation. When they fail, they are wiser and even happier in the long run for knowing it, and working on in spite of the discouragement. But not the less are completeness and truth to conception the only qualities to make a work live. These are what induce posterity to take it into charge and keeping. While men still live and write and act, their efforts are judged by another rule, or at least by a variety of tests. A man of prolific active powers, whose name is perpetually before the world —who is always doing, saying, writing—must occupy a higher standing than the man of one good thing. But in a future age one good thing of four lines, if it happens to be better than any of the many thousands of his more versatile and widely intelligent contemporary, will outlive them all. The man happy in an inimitable lovesong is remembered; the man of a thousand admired efforts is forgotten. There is a great deal to be said for the man of many parts ; his was a noble course. You cannot condense the action and virtue of a life into a triplet. But there are so few perfect things in this world that completeness is, from its very rarity, the fittest metal for fame's currency.