SUCCESS IN FAILURE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20970, 5 September 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

SUCCESS IN FAILURE.

BY MATANGA.

UNFINISHED SYMPHONIES.

The last three years of Hall Caine's life were shadowed for him by his failure to complete a " Life of Christ," a task on which he had set his heart. His rueful regard of the unfinished task is not hard to understand. Others may not mourn the failure as acutely as he did. One more attempt to expand and expound the vivid story so well told ages ago byhearts touched to loving marvel, another bit of blood-letting with a probe though used with all reverence—that were all, perhaps. Most such can be spared without regret, and noma be deemed essential. But for the saddened author himself the grief was natural. ' " So little jdone, so much to do! " was heard from the whitening lips of Cecil Rhodes as the last enemy came crawling round the corner to lay him low and put an end to all his hope of seeing great dreams come true. Every man worth his salt has felt the same, however much he has achieved. Life is like that —a pathway littered with unaccomplished enterprises. You see them everywhere. Unfinished symphonies; fragments unpieced; books half-written; sketch-books of bare outlines never put on canvas; bits of things wrought well as far as they have gone but snatched by ruthless death out of the failing fingers: these lie all about, and men ponder deeply for a moment as they see them—then turn bravely to get their own work done ere nightfall come. Of old a great leader of his people carried them through weary years of wilderness toward a land of desire and promise, only to glimpse it himself from a hilltop afar. Another laid down His life " without a city wall " ere even those nearest to His thought had surely caught His plan and purpose. Sublime failures,

Moses and Christ; no more than that, when these crises of defeat alone are judged. In the frustration, the incompleteness, the anti-clima.x of these fascinating failures is a type of all great endeavour. Denied Success. Standing there, seeing no farther than the awful moment of a task's compulsory relinquishing, we are horror-struck at their fate. All's wrong with the world. Of late, our hearts have rebelled as a heroic effort of rescue on a forbidding mountainslope has been sadly baffled and there grew the fear that the long list of young, bright lives brought to untimely end would have addition. In many a God's acre we set up the symbol of the broken column, a shaft shattered before its apex is reached and crowned. Were the memorials in these dwellings of the dead always expressive of our sorrowing thought such symbols would be more general than they are. History, let alone the pages of our private record, is full of instances of careers ended in full flight. Thackeray and Dickens alike cut down with books half written; Chinese Gordon overwhelmed when an enterprise of hope was but begun; Patteson gono only a little way beyond the threshold of his lifework to meet swift death. The list is achingly long. Pathetic? Of course, for there is little in the world as noble as a brave man's love of his day's work, and for the last darkness to close in on it and him before the final fond tap is given is to have a solemn sadness befall. It belongs to the tears of things, as human life is fashioned for us all. But is this view oi: it either true or good ? Disappointment in Completeness.

A calmer survey of inevitable facts leads away from the pathos. And as for that feeling of regret, there is another as poignant.' It is the pang that follows when " the end " is written at the close of a book into which an author has put what he deems his best, the sense of bereavement when the characters with whom he has lived intimately through many days and nights go out never to come back alive and companionable. The real student feels it when he puts back finally on their shelves the text-books that have cone long with hiim on the hard road of his quest for knowledge. _ Never was a fine artificer who did not view his completed structure, be it as splendid as his earliest vision conceived it, with a tinge of melancholy in his satisfaction; never an artist who did not turn from the triumph on his easel a little sore at heart to the bare canvas, as yet innocent of line and colour, on which his next and better picture may get visible being, to console him for this loss. " Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose," to be sure; but life was not given for sleep, save it be the recurrent' prelude of enduring effort and, " onward through life he goes." is the happy lot of every true craftsman, whatever the medium of his creative spirit. Unless there be new worlds to conquer, even an Alexander must needs give way to tears. Gibbon, finishing his "Decline and Fall," confessed to a few moments of joy; then came a 'sober melancholy " as he parted with his absorbing task. " What! cried a joung fellow in consternation as he came to the last of all Carlyle's books, " is there no more Carlyle ? Am I left to the daily papers ?" In his way, never mind the difference, he shared Gibbon s grief. There is something infinitely worse than the sorrow of things undone, bad as thai is. Tt> is the sorrow of things done. For the done is the dead. Nob for nothing Joes our tongue unite the words "I'm done!" is a gasp of more than passive confession of defeat; it breathes a sorrow that the fight is over, that the flag must be pulled down —but other hands must do that, for the vanquished who struggle to the utmost die rather than buy life with dishonour. " Begin y Your Folio."

And is this not better than victory won finally, than life spun out to rounded achievement? For the race can travel onlv across the road made by the fallen as they have pushed it on toward the bounds of the waste. It is given to no man to win earth s last fight, to put the cope-stone on the. edifice of better things, to drive the final tlirust through ignorance to the full light of knowledge,. Nor can the single life, however well poised and flung, strike the golden centre of its utmost target. So, to quote R.L.S. : By all means begin your folio; even if tho doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the trndition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language. th#y should be at once tripped up and silencedis there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not ,life go down with a better' grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? Cherish dreams, though fulfilment tarry. Bear the torch a little further through the darkness, looking to others to catch it as it must at last be flung away. " Success :is naught; endeavour's all," and enough the glory of going on.