Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Joyous Wayfarer
Captain Massingdale knew that his son had a fondness for what, in the family, was termed drawing; proofs of this inclination to the arts had, during ten years and more, reached him in all quarters of the globe, and many of those childish drawings are still preserved. He knew, moreover, that the boy was in many ways different to his contemporaries in England; that here was a painter in the making, had, however, never occurred to him. Like many laymen, Captain Massingdale had always imagined that talent in the artist must strike the public from the outset, that in his first sketch, his first poem, or his first story, the beginner, who should afterwards succeed, would make plain the stuff of which he was made; whereas, I have noticed for myself, and have taken pride at my perspicacity therein, and I have also been assured by the initiated, that the gold is most commonly more than half concealed beneath the dross of want of training, and that in the first stages the public is more than likely to miss the good and praise the bad. Such easy mastery of technicalities as leads to the immature production of pretentious work is, they tell me, the worst danger in the path of the apprentice.
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