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Updated: May 15, 2025
MYSELF: "No one denies that such a picture in the mind haunts men their whole lives through, though, after they have once experienced loss and incompletion, and especially when they have caught sight a long way off of the Barrier which ends all our experience, they recognise that picture for a cheat; and surely nothing can save it?
The traveller who had longed to see them in their finished magnificence realised the futility of this wish, but he turned away with another as vain, that he might have known them even in incompletion, when they were in the hands of the Church, when the Archbishop still ruled in his Palace, when the Canons prayed in the Cloister, and the Cathedral was still a-building.
"That is, I hoped to finish off my previous sketches, which are in a frightful state of incompletion, and spend a good deal of time on the interior of this cathedral, which is unusually beautiful." "For my part," said I, with mock humility, "I am a docile person who never has any intentions of her own, but who yields herself sweetly to the intentions of other people in her immediate vicinity."
One result of the incompletion, as Brunetiere has pointed out, is to give disproportionate treatment to certain phases of life, to the military, for instance, for which Balzac has twenty-four stories on his list, whereas only two, "The Chouans" and "A Passion in the Desert," were executed.
So, you see, I cannot promise not to be horribly let down by Tischbein's actual handiwork. I may even have to take back my promise that it shall have a place of honour. But I shall not utterly reject it unless on the plea that a collection of unfinished works should itself have some great touch of incompletion. SOMETHING DEFEASIBLE July, 1919.
The encyclopedic survey was never fully completed, but enough was done to justify all the laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation of an almost incredible amount of human data. As for finishing the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects its place in literature. In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one recognizes Hercules from the feet.
Life, we are told, is full of incompletion, of broken destinies, of failures, of romances that begin but do not end, of ambitions and purposes frustrated, of love crossed, of unhappy issues, or a resultless play of influences. Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas.
Incompletion is force fighting; completion is force quiescent, its work done. Nature's forces are patent enough in some scarred volcanic moon in which no creature can breathe; only the sage, in some soft green earth, can discover the same forces reft of fierceness and terror, and translated into sunshine, and falling dew, and the rainbow gleaming on the shower.
We are undoubtedly in an unpleasant state of incompletion as a nation to-day, but by no means in one of decadence. And if only the two great dangers do not swamp us a mawkish and hysterical humanitarianism, and the heedless pursuit of pleasure as the only end the upward tendency of progress is bound to go on.
It is as if a fatality hung over the whole place, and as if all the greatness Narbonne had conceived was predestined to destruction or incompletion. Of the three structures, the least interesting is the former Palace of the Archbishops.
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