1. MY DEAR READER,--Whether this book is to be of use to you or not,
depends wholly on your reason for wishing to learn to draw. If you
desire only to possess a graceful accomplishment, to be able to converse
in a fluent manner about drawing, or to amuse yourself listlessly in
listless hours, I cannot help you: but if you wish to learn drawing that
you may be able to set down clearly, and usefully, records of such
things as cannot be described in words, either to assist your own memory
of them, or to convey distinct ideas of them to other people; if you
wish to obtain quicker perceptions of the beauty of the natural world,
and to preserve something like a true image of beautiful things that
pass away, or which you must yourself leave; if, also, you wish to
understand the minds of great painters, and to be able to appreciate
their work sincerely, seeing it for yourself, and loving it, not merely
taking up the thoughts of other people about it; then I _can_ help you,
or, which is better, show you how to help yourself.
2. Only you must understand, first of all, that these powers, which
indeed are noble and desirable, cannot be got without work. It is much
easier to learn to draw well, than it is to learn to play well on any
musical instrument; but you know that it takes three or four years of
practice, giving three or four hours a day, to acquire even ordinary
command over the keys of a piano; and you must not think that a masterly
command of your pencil, and the knowledge of what may be done with it,
can be acquired without painstaking, or in a _very_ short time. The kind
of drawing which is taught, or supposed to be taught, in our schools, in
a term or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is not
drawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (not
always even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil;
profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter of
vanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person,
after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," will
try to copy the commonest piece of real work--suppose a lithograph on
the titlepage of a new opera air, or a wood-cut in the cheapest
illustrated newspaper of the day,--they will find themselves entirely
beaten. And yet that common lithograph was drawn with coarse chalk, much
more difficult to manage than the pencil of which an accomplished young
lady is supposed to have command; and that wood-cut was drawn in urgent
haste, and half spoiled in the cutting afterwards; and both were done by
people whom nobody thinks of as artists, or praises for their power;
both were done for daily bread, with no more artist's pride than any
simple handicraftsmen feel in the work they live by.
3. Do not, therefore, think that you can learn drawing, any more than a
new language, without some hard and disagreeable labor. But do not, on
the other hand, if you are ready and willing to pay this price, fear
that you may be unable to get on for want of special talent. It is
indeed true that the persons who have peculiar talent for art, draw
instinctively, and get on almost without teaching; though never without
toil. It is true, also, that of inferior talent for drawing there are
many degrees: it will take one person a much longer time than another to
attain the same results, and the results thus painfully attained are
never quite so satisfactory as those got with greater ease when the
faculties are naturally adapted to the study. But I have never yet, in
the experiments I have made, met with a person who could not learn to
draw at all; and, in general, there is a satisfactory and available
power in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly all
persons have the power of learning French, Latin, or arithmetic, in a
decent and useful degree, if their lot in life requires them to possess
such knowledge.
4. Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains,
and to bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I
can promise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an
hour's practice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in
whatever way you find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours'
practice, will give you sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever
you want to draw, and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other
people's work: of which hours if you have one to spare at present, we
may as well begin at once.