It must be remembered that no work is required to be more
than right as far as it goes; the greatest work cannot get beyond
this and the least comes strangely near the greatest if this can be
said of it.
The more I see of academicism the more I distrust it. If I had
approached painting as I have approached bookwriting and music, that
is to say by beginning at once to do what I wanted, or as near as I
could to what I could find out of this, and taking pains not by way
of solving academic difficulties, in order to provide against
practical ones, but by waiting till a difficulty arose in practice
and then tackling it, thus making the arising of each difficulty be
the occasion for learning what had to be learnt about it--if I had
approached painting in this way I should have been all right. As it
is I have been all wrong, and it was South Kensington and
Heatherley's that set me wrong. I listened to the nonsense about how
I ought to study before beginning to paint, and about never painting
without nature, and the result was that I learned to study but not to
paint. Now I have got too much to do and am too old to do what I
might easily have done, and should have done, if I had found out
earlier what writing Life and Habit was the chief thing to teach me.
So I painted study after study, as a priest reads his breviary, and
at the end of ten years knew no more what the face of nature was
like, unless I had it immediately before me, than I did at the
beginning.
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