Professional Men Should Be Excluded, If For No Other Reason Yet For
This, That They Know Too Much For The Beginner To Be En Rapport
With Them.
It is the beginner who can help the beginner, as it is
the child who is the most instructive companion for another child.
The beginner can understand the beginner, but the cross between him
and the proficient performer is too wide for fertility.
It savours
of impatience, and is in flat contradiction to the first principles
of biology. It does a beginner positive harm to look at the
masterpieces of the great executionists, such as Rembrandt or
Turner.
If one is climbing a very high mountain which will tax all one's
strength, nothing fatigues so much as casting upward glances to the
top, nothing encourages so much as casting downward glances. The
top seems never to draw nearer; the parts that we have passed
retreat rapidly. Let a water-colour student go and see the drawing
by Turner, in the basement of our National Gallery, dated 1787.
This is the sort of thing for him, not to copy, but to look at for
a minute or two now and again. It will show him nothing about
painting, but it may serve to teach him not to overtax his
strength, and will prove to him that the greatest masters in
painting, as in everything else, begin by doing work which is no
way superior to that of their neighbours. A collection of the
earliest known works of the greatest men would be much more useful
to the student than any number of their maturer works, for it would
show him that he need not worry himself because his work does not
look clever, or as silly people say, "show power."
The secrets of success are affection for the pursuit chosen, a flat
refusal to be hurried or to pass anything as understood which is
not understood, and an obstinacy of character which shall make the
student's friends find it less trouble to let him have his own way
than to bend him into theirs.
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