Howard Pyle, a chronicle by Charles D. Abbott, with an introduction by N. C. Wyeth and many illustrations from Howard Pyle's works.

HOWARD PYLE: A CHRONICLE
of you all I was after the morning'ls class. It was not that
I was discouraged with your work at all, but that in seeing
the futile attempts with which some of you began I realized
how much the responsibility of your success or failure
weighed upon myself. I felt your discouragement as keenly
as though it had been my own, but you must have courage to
learn and to persist in your endeavor or else the burden of
your discouragement will lay upon me also.
"In such moments of discouragement as I felt yesterday
I always feel within myself that after all we are only here
to learn in this life that which we shall carry forward in
the life to come. In that life the flower of perfection will
not spring from the things in which we have succeeded, but
from the things in which we have failed. Were this life all
that we had to live, such disappointments would be terrible
indeed, but as it is not the only life we have to live they are
only the seed implanted for the rich fulfillment. All this
I would have liked to have said to you instead of writing
it, and I want you to have courage to go on with your work
which is so much more beautiful and worthy than you think
it is. *.. )
As Howard Pyle developed his methods of teaching, he
conceived the idea that the truest criterion for judging the
work of pupils was the practical use of the work which they
produced. He wrote early in the fall of 18 96 to Clyde De
Land,"... You will learn more in one week of actual
work to be reproduced in public print, than 'you can learn
in two months of school study, for in actual work there is
none of the fancied excellencies which govern consideration
of school work.. There is a sort of academic trick in drawing
' Letter to Miss Jessie Dodd, October 6, 1896.
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