Beginnings and Endings

Over the door of a wayside house in a country town in the North of England is this motto: Accomplish or never begin.

However it came there, it was some man’s chosen legacy for those who came after. He was concerned about the way things readily begun are often more readily abandoned.

Is it not true that too many beginnings have no ending?

Not a few lives give the impression of a series of beginnings. The road by which they have come is strewn with things begun and thrown aside. The block of marble from which Michael Angelo fashioned a famous statue is said to have been some other sculptor’s abandoned work.

In the biography of an English Quaker politician this fine thing is said of him: “What he began he finished. His life and work were distinguished by a form of completeness.” It was a rule of his life that everything had to be finished according to the best of his ability. In a world of half-finished tasks that is a noble epitaph.

Nothing, it has been said, is so fatal to character as half-finished tasks. We may think that these unfinished tasks do not matter, but they certainly do.

Those who have made good have finished what they began, or are finishing it. They had a will to accomplish. Once they had put their hand to the plough there was no looking back. With steady persistence they continued to the end of the furrow, and then started another. Having set out on some quest they persevered until they found. Before Edison switched on his first electric light he made 35,000 experiments. Before Luther Burbank got his fragrant dahlias he experimented with thousands of plants. It was only after twenty years of trying that he got a dahlia with an agreeable perfume. Fragrance he found the most subtle and elusive quality. After he had succeeded in changing the colours of the flowers, the shapes, the leaves, and petals, the perfume still eluded him for twenty years. But, having begun, he determined to accomplish his quest, and he did.

It is by endurance that men conquer. That spirit is behind all great achievements. “The fitful accomplish nothing,” said a great artist: “all I have attained is the result of strenuous and persistent effort for nearly seventy years.” It was persistence, he said, that saved him from being a nobody.

It looks as if we cannot begin too early to round off our tasks with a certain completeness. When the temptation comes to throw down some unfinished work that is the hour to take ourselves in hand, lest we be found among those who when their call comes leave behind them only unfinished things.

My Magazine, edited by Arthur Mee, Volume 23, number 209 (July), pages 588-589

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