Look At My Friend Jones, Who Has Several
Illustrations In This Book.
The first year he went abroad with me
he could hardly draw at all.
He was no year away from England more
than three weeks. How did he learn? On the old principle, if I am
not mistaken. The old principle was for a man to be doing
something which he was pretty strongly bent on doing, and to get a
much younger one to help him. The younger paid nothing for
instruction, but the elder took the work, as long as the relation
of master and pupil existed between them. I, then, was making
illustrations for this book, and got Jones to help me. I let him
see what I was doing, and derive an idea of the sort of thing I
wanted, and then left him alone - beyond giving him the same kind of
small criticism that I expected from himself - but I appropriated
his work. That is the way to teach, and the result was that in an
incredibly short time Jones could draw. The taking the work is a
sine qua non. If I had not been going to have his work, Jones, in
spite of all his quickness, would probably have been rather slower
in learning to draw. Being paid in money is nothing like so good.
This is the system of apprenticeship versus the academic system.
The academic system consists in giving people the rules for doing
things. The apprenticeship system consists in letting them do it,
with just a trifle of supervision.
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