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.
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