his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter
will now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that he will always
give to the inferior portions of his work only such inferior attention as they
require; and according to his greatness he becomes so accustomed to the
feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do, that in moments of lassitude
or anger with himself he will not care though the beholder be dissatisfied also.
I believe there has only been one man who would not acknowledge this neces
sity, and strove always to reach perfection, Leonardo; the end of his vain effort
being merely that he would take ten years to a picture, and leave it unfinished.
And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing
8. Different.
.
1334 / GEORGE ELIOT
their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way.9
The second reason is that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom?a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom?is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.
Thus far then of the Rudeness or Savageness, which is the first mental element of Gothic architecture. It is an element in many other healthy architectures also, as in Ryzantine and Romanesque; but true Gothic cannot exist without it.
1851-53
9. The Elgin marbles are supposed by many per-bas-reliefs of the frieze are roughly cut [Ruskin's sons to be 'perfect.' In the most important por-note]. Ruskin is referring to the collection of stattions they indeed approach perfection, but only ues and friezes brought from Athens to England by there. The draperies are unfinished, the hair and Lord Elgin, works that were considered models of wool of the animals are unfinished, and the entire perfect realism. GEORGE ELIOT
1819-1880
Like many English novelists (Charles Dickens being an exception) George Eliot came
to novel writing relatively late in life. She was forty when her first novel, Adam Bede
(1859), an immensely popular work, was published. The lives of her characters are,
therefore, viewed from the vantage point of maturity and extensive experience; and
this perspective is accentuated by her practice of setting her stories back in time to
the period of her own childhood, or even earlier. In most of her novels, she evokes a
preindustrial rural scene or the small-town life of the English Midlands, which she views with a combination of nostalgia and candid awareness of its limitations.
The place Eliot looks back on is usually the Warwickshire countryside. There, under her real name, Marian Evans, she spent her childhood at Arbury Farm, of
which her father, Robert Evans, was supervisor and land agent. The time was the
1820s and 1830s (1819, the year of her birth, was an annus mirabilis for the nine
.
GEORGE ELIOT / 1335
teenth century, for in the same year were born John Ruskin, Herman Melville, Walt
Whitman, and Queen Victoria). During these decades Evans read widely in and out
of school and was also strongly affected by Evangelicism; she even advocated, at one
point in her girlhood, giving up novelists such as Sir Walter Scott (who was later to
influence her own novel writing) on the grounds that fiction was frivolous and time
wasting. Her mother's death led to her leaving school at sixteen, and in the next four
or five years she seems to have experienced bouts of depression and self-doubt. In a
