Chapter 9

To make this resource available something more than the will to do it is necessary. Take any nice young girl, who is reasonably educated, afloat in your canoe with you, and ask her what she sees. As a rule she has a general sense that yonder yellow bank, tree-crowned above the rippled water, is pleasant. The sky is blue, the sun falling behind you. She says it is beautiful and has a vague sense of enjoyment, and will carry away with her little more than this. Point out to her that the trees above are some of them deciduous poplars, or maples, and others sombre groups of pines and silky tamarack with a wonder of delicate tracery. Show her that the sun against the sloped yellow bank has covered the water with a shining changeful orange light, through which gleam the mottled stones below, and that the concave curve of every wave which faces us concentrates for the eye an unearthly sapphire the reflex of the darkening blue above us. Or a storm is on us at the same place. She is fearless as to the ducking from which even her waterproof will hardly protect. The clouds gather, the mists trail on the hills, ragged mosses on the trees hang in wet festoons of gray, and look in the misty distance like numberless cascades. It rains at last, a solid down-pour; certain tree-trunks grow black, and the shining beech and birch and poplar get a more vivid silver on their wet boles. The water is black like ink. It is no longer even translucent, and overhead the red scourges of the lightning fly, and the great thunder-roar of smitten clouds rolls over us from hill to hill.

All these details you teach her and more, and paddle home with a mental cargo of fresh joys and delicious memories. My young friend is intelligent and clever, but she has never learned to observe. If she wants to know how, there is a book will help her. Let her take with her Ruskin's "Modern Painters." It will teach her much, not all. Nor do I know of any other volume which will tell her more.[13] Despite its faults, it has so many lessons in the modes of minute study of outside nature that it becomes a valuable friend. Although ostensibly written to aid artistic criticism, it does far more than this and yet not all. Other books which might seem desirable are less so because they are still more distinctly meant to teach or assist artists or amateurs. What is yet wanted is a little treatise on the methods of observing exterior nature. Above all it should be adapted to our own woods, skies, and waters. What to look for as a matter of pleasure, and how to see and record it, is a thing apart from such observation as leads to classification, and is scientific in its aims. It is somewhat remote also from the artist's study, which is a more complex business, and tends to learn what can be rendered by pencil or brush and what cannot. Its object at first is merely to give intelligent joy to the senses, to cultivate them into acuteness, and to impress on the mind such records as they ought to give us at their best.

[Footnote 13: "Frondes Agrestes," Ruskin, is a more handy book than "Modern Painters," but is only selections from the greater volumes recommended. "Deucalion" is yet harder reading, but will repay the careful reader.]

Presuming the pupil to be like myself, powerless to use the pencil, she is to learn how to put on paper in words what she sees. The result will be what I may call _word-sketches_. Observe these are not to be for other eyes. They make her diary of things seen and worthy of note. Neither are they to be efforts to give elaborate descriptions. In the hands of a master, such use of words makes a picture in which often he sacrifices something, as the artist does, to get something else, and strives chiefly to leave on the mind one dominant emotion just as did the scene thus portrayed. A few words may do this or it may be an elaborate work. The gift is a rare and great one. The word-paintings of Ruskin hang forever in one's mental gallery, strong, true, poetical, and capable of stirring you as the scenes described would have done, nay, even more, for a great word-master has stood interpretative between you and nature.

Miss Brontë was mistress of this art. Blackmore has it also. In some writers it is so lightly managed as to approach the sketch, and is more suggestive than fully descriptive. To see what I mean read the first few chapters of "Miss Angel," by Anna Thackeray. But a sketch by a trained and poetical observer is one thing; a sketch by a less gifted person is quite another. My pupil must be content with the simplest, most honest, unadorned record of things seen. Her training must look to this only.

What she should first seek to do is to be methodical and accurate and by and by fuller. If wise she will first limit herself to small scenes, and try to get notes of them somewhat in this fashion. She is, we suppose, on the bank of a stream. Her notes run as follows:

Date, time of day, place. Hills to either side and their character; a guess at their height; a river below, swift, broken, or placid; the place of the sun, behind, in front, or overhead. Then the nature of the trees and how the light falls on them or in them, according to their kind. Next come color of wave and bank and sky, with questions as to water-tints and their causes. Last of all, and here she must be simple and natural, what mood of mind does it all bring to her, for every landscape has its capacity to leave you with some general sense of its awe, its beauty, its sadness, or its joyfulness.

Try this place again at some other hour, or in a storm, or under early morning light, and make like notes. If she should go on at this pleasant work, and one day return to the same spot, she will wonder how much more she has now learned to see.

Trees she will find an enchanting study. Let her take a group of them and endeavor to say on paper what makes each species so peculiar. The form, color, and expression of the boles are to be noted. A reader may smile at the phrase "expression," but look at a tattered old birch, or a silvery young beech-hole, "modest and maidenly, clean of limb," or a lightning-scarred pine. Tree-study has advantages because it is always within reach. The axe has been so ruthlessly wielded that you must go far into the woods to get the best specimens of the pine, and the forests about our Maine lakes and in the Adirondacks have been sadly despoiled of their aristocrats. To see trees at their savage best one must go South, and seek the white-oaks of Carolina, the cypress of Florida, but the parks of Philadelphia and Baltimore afford splendid studies, and so also do the mountains of Virginia. Private taste and enterprise is saving already much that will be a joy to our children. A noble instance is the great wild park with which Colonel Parsons has protected the Natural Bridge in Virginia. I saw there an arbor-vitæ said by botanists to be not less than nine hundred years old, a chestnut twenty-six feet in girth at the height of my shoulders, and oaks past praise. But trees are everywhere, and if my observant pupil likes them, let her next note the mode in which the branches spread and their proportion to the trunk. State it all in the fewest words. It is to be only a help to memory. Then she comes to the leaf forms and the mode in which they are massed, their dulness or translucency, how sunshine affects their brilliancy, as it is above or falls laterally at morn or eve. Perhaps she will note, too, on which the gray moss grows, and just in what forms, and how the mosses or lichens gather on the north side of trees and on what trees.

I may help my pupil if, like an artist teacher, I give one or two illustrations, copied _verbatim_ from my note-books. The first was written next morning, as it is a brief record of a night scene.

Time, July 21, 1887, 9 P.M. Ristigouche River, New Brunswick, Canada. Black darkness. Hill outlines nearly lost in sky. River black, with flashing bits of white rapid; banks have grayish rocks, and so seem to be nearer than the dark stream limits. Sky looks level with hill-tops. Water seems to come up close. Effect of being in a concave valley of water, and all things draw in on me. Sense of awe. Camp-fire's red glare on water. Sudden opening lift of sky. Hills recede. Water-level falls. This is a barren, unadorned sketch, but it seems to tell the thing.

Or this, for a change. Newport. A beach. Time, August 1, 1887; 4 P.M. About me cleft rocks, cleavage straight through the embedded pebbles. Tones ruddy browns and grays. Gray beach. Sea-weed in heaps, deep pinks and purples. Boisterous waves, loaded with reddish seaweed, blue, with white crests, torn off in long ribbons by wind. Curious reds and blues as waves break, carrying sea-weed. Fierce gale off land. Dense fog, sun above it and to right. Everywhere yellow light. Sea strange dingy yellow. Leaves an unnatural green. Effect weird. Sense of unusualness.

Of course, such study of nature leads the intelligent to desire to know why the cleaved rock shows its sharp divisions as if cut by a knife, why yellow light gives such strangeness of tints, and thus draws on my pupil to larger explanatory studies. So much the better.

If when she bends over a foot-square area of mouldered tree-trunk, deep in the silence of a Maine wood, she has a craving to know the names and ways of the dozen mosses she notes, of the minute palm-like growths, of the odd toadstools, it will not lessen the joy this liliputian representation of a tropical jungle gives to her. Nor will she like less the splendor of sunset tints on water to know the secrets of the pleasant tricks of refraction and reflection.

I do not want to make too much of a small matter. No doubt many people do this kind of thing, but in most volumes of travel it is easy to see that the descriptions lack method, and show such want of training in observation as would not be noticeable had their authors gone through the modest studies I am now inviting my pupil to make.

Her temptation will be to note most the large, the grotesque, or the startling aspects of nature. In time these will be desirable as studies, but at first she must try smaller and limited sketches. They are as difficult, but do not change as do the grander scenes and objects. I knew a sick girl, who, bedfast for years, used to amuse herself with what her windows and an opera-glass commanded in the way of sky and foliage. The buds in spring-time, especially the horse-chestnuts, were the subject of quite curious notes, and cloud-forms an endless source of joy and puzzle to describe. One summer a great effort was made, and she was taken to the country, and a day or two later carried down near a brook, where they swung her hammock. I found her quite busy a week later, and happy in having discovered that the wave-curves over a rock were like the curves of some shells. My pupil will soon learn, as she did, that a good opera-glass is indispensable. Let any one who has not tried it look with such a glass at sunset-decked water in motion. I am sure they will be startled by its beauty, and this especially if the surface be seen from a boat, because merely to look down on water is to make no acquaintance with its loveliness. A scroll of paper to limit the view and cut out side-lights also intensifies color. The materials my pupil is to use are words, and words only. Constant dissatisfaction with the little they can tell us is the fate of all who use them. The sketcher, the great word-painter, and even the poet feels this when, like Browning, he seems so to suffer from their weakness as to be troubled into audacious employment of the words that will not obey his will, torment them as he may. Yet, as my pupil goes on, she will find her vocabulary growing, and will become more and more accurate in her use and more ingenious in her combination of words to give her meaning. As she learns to feel strongly--for she will in time--her love will give her increasing power both to see and to state what she sees, because this gentle passion for nature in all her moods is like a true-love affair, and grows by what it feeds upon.

When we come to sketch in words the rare and weird effects, the storm, the sunsets that seem not of earth, the cascade, or the ravage of the "windfall," it is wise not to be lured into fanciful word-painting, and the temptation is large. Yet the simplest expression of facts is then and for such rare occasions the best, and often by far the most forceful.

I venture, yet again, to give from a note-book of last year a few lines as to a sunset. I was on a steam-yacht awaiting the yachts which were racing for the Newport cup.

August 6, time, sunset; level sea; light breeze; fire-red sun on horizon; vast masses of intensely-lighted scarlet clouds; a broad track of fiery red on water; three yachts, with all sail set, coming over this sea of red towards us. Their sails are a vivid green. The vast mass of reds and scarlets give one a strange sense of terror as if something would happen. I could go on to expand upon "this color such as shall be in heaven," and on the sails which seemed to be green, but for the purpose of a sketch and to refresh the traitor memory in the future, the lines I wrote are enough and are yet baldly simple.

Out of this practice grow, as I have said, love of accuracy, larger insights, careful valuation of words, and also an increasing and more intelligent love of art in all its forms; nor will all these gains in the power to observe be without practical value in life.

I trust that I have said enough to tempt others to try each in their way to do what has been for me since boyhood a constant summer amusement.

THE END.