Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/260

Rh painter to produce on canvas a really worthy copy of a great master.

And yet a good many beginners in writing persist in believing that there is a market for their amateur translations. They do not seem to realise that for several reasons there is much more hope for their crude original work than for their equally crude distortions of the work of someone else. Early work usually shows a certain amount of proportion between subject and execution. The great majority of short stories that may honestly be called "not half bad" in workmanship are also "not half bad" in theme. But when a beginner attempts to translate one of the world's classics, or even the latest volume of some widely read modern novelist, he is clothing big thoughts in unworthy phrases and his deficiencies of style are doubly glaring by contrast.

Nevertheless, the practice of  Rh