By the following morning he had chastened his spirit, forgotten
the assurance breathed from the windy pages of the Boy Trapper Library,
and was ready to learn.
Have you ever watched a competent portraitist at work? The infinite
pains a skilled man spends on the preliminaries before he takes one
step towards a likeness nearly always wears down the patience of the
sitter. He measures with his eye, he plumbs, he sketches tentatively,
he places in here a dab, there a blotch, he puts behind him apparently
unproductive hours--and then all at once he is ready to begin something
that will not have to be done over again. An amateur, however, is
carried away by his desire for results. He dashes in a hit-or-miss
early effect, which grows into an approximate likeness almost
immediately, but which will require infinite labour, alteration, and
anxiety to beat into finished shape.
The case of the artist in making camps is exactly similar, and the
philosophical reasons for his failure are exactly the same. To the
superficial mind a camp is a shelter, a bright fire, and a smell of
cooking. So when a man is very tired he cuts across lots to those three
results. He pitches his tent, lights his fire, puts over his food--and
finds himself drowned in detail, like my friend Dick.
The following is, in brief, what during the next six weeks I told that
youth, by precept, by homily, and by making the solution so obvious
that he could work it out for himself.
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