Klarinet Archive - Posting 000459.txt from 2000/01

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] best efforts, great rewards
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 03:01:30 -0500

On Fri, 14 Jan 2000 19:35:49 -0800, wde1@-----.com said:

> Dan Leeson wrote:
>
> "I once was in England and a town band in the midlands
> was playing the Mozart overture to Marriage of Figaro.
> At first I was shocked, but then everyone was so
> enoying the music that I realized that they were doing
> the rightest possible thing for what they had and for
> the audience that made the effort to come and listen.
> Any other attitude carries with it an elitist view
> that doesn't belong in music. "
>
> A 20th century British composer - I believe it was either Britten or
> Vaughn Williams - once commented on an amateur group's efforts at
> music that some might have thought was above their capacity by saying
> "If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." And he meant
> it in the most positive, approving way, of course. Can anyone clear
> up for me who it was who said this?

It was G.K.Chesterton, in "What's Wrong with the World" (1910).

In

http://www.chesterton.org/qmeister/doingbadly.htm

it says in part:

> Chesterton consistly defended the amateur against the professional, or
> the "generalist" against the specialist, especially when it came to
> "the things worth doing." There are things like playing the organ or
> discovering the North Pole, or being Astronomer Royal, which we do not
> want a person to do at all unless he does them well. But those are not
> the most important things in life. When it comes to writing one's own
> love letters and blowing one's own nose, "these things we want a man
> to do for himself, even if he does them badly." This, argues
> Chesterton (in Orthodoxy) is "the democratic faith: that the most
> terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves -
> the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the
> state."

But the actual paragraph in which the quote appears, under the heading,
"Folly and Female education", reads:

> There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to
> God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of
> a flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority
> and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or
> features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the
> whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the
> child comes the woman--she understands. To say what she understands is
> beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a
> towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as
> we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon
> paint as run. To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in
> the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up
> the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference
> which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up
> forever. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the
> elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it
> and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She
> was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the
> most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable.
> She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother:
> that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

It's possible to read this as offensive to women, but you have to see it
in context; so to correct that, it's worth looking at the whole book at:

http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs0mpw/gkc/books/whats_wrong.html

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

... Do pediatricians play miniature golf on Wednesdays?

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