Mistakes, Right and Wrong
Sir Hubert Parry explained to students at the Royal College of Music that some mistakes are creative whereas others are destructive.
1920
King George V 1910-1936
Sir Hubert Parry explained to students at the Royal College of Music that some mistakes are creative whereas others are destructive.
1920
King George V 1910-1936
Addressing students at the Royal College of Music in January 1918, Sir Hubert Parry distinguished two kinds of mistake, the mistakes we make when we seize our responsibilities as free men and women a little clumsily, and the mistakes we make when we lazily follow whatever the fashionable thinking may be.
abridged
MOST of us are capable of being idiots at times. You will remember the familiar saying that “people who do not make mistakes do not make anything.” You cannot have personal initiative without risk of making mistakes and you cannot get things done without personal initiative. One has to put up with the liability of personal initiative to induce a man to behave like an idiot, because one cannot get on without it. One forgives the mistakes for the sake of the keenness and pluck and independence which are such valuable qualities.
But then again, on the other hand, there are a terrible lot of mistakes which are not the result of initiative or independence but very much the reverse. They are rather the effect of lack of it, and of that unfortunate herding instinct of the race which makes people take their cues from one another, and lean up against one another, and do stupid things because so many other stupid people do them.
abridged
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.