G. D. H. Cole on why you may have so many things to do you do them badly
Getting it all done may be more important than doing any one thing supremely well
One of the leading thinkers in the English Labour Party, and the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, G. D. H. Cole was a writer with many interests, most about what ought to be done in the world and how to do it. With his wife Margaret, he also wrote 34 mystery novels. This is taken from “William Morris and the Modern World” in Person and Periods.
When a man does many things, there is always a risk that he will do none of them superlatively well. There are indeed two risks — that he may fall short in craftsmanship, and that he may put too little of the substance of his mind and spirit into any one thing.
[William] Morris ran both these risks. As a craftsman he had, in almost any art that he chose to practise, a quite astonishing skill. The crafts came easily to him, including the craft of poetry; and now and then they came too easily.
But it was not as a craftsman that Morris often fell short, but rather by resting content with craftsmanship. The second risk found him out, above all else as a writer. He found writing so easy that often he was content merely to write with less than half his mind, making his poetry a by-product of more exacting labours.
Of the best of his poetry this is not true at all — above all it is not true of Sigurd the Volsung or of the best of his shorter poems. But a good deal of his poetry falls short of greatness, because he did not try to make it great, but only pretty and pleasant and workmanlike.
Yet, though a man’s work may fall short of greatness if he attempt too many things, it does not at all follow that he would have done better to attempt less. For the truth may be that he wants to do and say so much that he is more concerned to get it done and said than to do one thing, or a few things, supremely well.
He may have the power of expressing himself, and of serving his fellow men, rather in many things than in a few; and though no one thing mark him out as master, his mastery may appear none the less plainly in them all.
This, I think, is true of William Morris. He is greater as a man and as an influence and in his work as a whole than in any one part of what he wrote or made.
The clue to the understanding both of Morris as a man and of his accomplishment is to realise that he was above all else a workman who enjoyed his work. He enjoyed it so much that he wanted to be always working; and he could imagine nothing that would have made him more miserable than having nothing to do.
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