Fenwick's Career by Mrs. Humphry Ward
page 26 of 391 (06%)
page 26 of 391 (06%)
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childhood in the little Kendal shop--the bookseller's shop which had
been the source and means of his truest education. Not that he had been a neglected child. Far from it. He remembered his gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to boyhood to keep the peace between him and his irritable old father. He remembered her death--and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted room--effects of light and shadow--of flowers--of the grey head uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at night, in his own room, with chalk and paper--and then his passion with himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were, another self saw and approved. Then came school-days. His father had sent him to an old endowed school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under discipline. There he had received a plain commercial education, together with some Latin and Greek. His quick, restless mind had soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he well knew, he had done nothing supremely well. But Homer and Virgil had been unlocked for him; and in the school library he found Shakespeare and Chaucer, 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'Don Quixote,' fresh and endless material for his drawing, which never stopped. Drawing everywhere--on his books and slates, on doors and gate-posts, or on the whitewashed wall of the old Tudor school-room, where a hunt, drawn with a burned stick, and gloriously dominating the whole room, had provoked the indulgence, even the praise, of the headmaster. And the old drawing-master!--a German--half blind, though he would never confess it--who dabbled in oil-painting, and let the boy watch |
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