Picture Work Part 1

Picture-Work.

by Walter L. (Walter Lowrie) Hervey.

I.

THE PROBLEM AND ONE OF ITS SOLUTIONS.

A friend of the writer, who has since attained to the dignity of a teacher of teachers, relates to the honor of his wise mother that when he was a boy she did not make him promise not to smoke or chew or play cards--probably compa.s.sing these ends in other ways--but she did exert her influence to lead him not to read Sunday-school books. For this warning, he says, he has never ceased to be thankful. In these days of supervising committees and selected lists, when standard literature, undiluted, has found its way into the Sunday-school library, such a course would not be warranted. But there are still thoughtful persons who do not feel that in the matter of Sunday-schools they are out of the woods yet.

"Do you know anything about Sunday-schools?" was asked of one of these, a representative woman.

"I'm sorry to say that I do," was the reply.

And there are other signs that the number is increasing of those who believe that in the choice of a Sunday-school the greatest care must be exercised. Some there are, who, it may be through over-conscientiousness, are fain to give up the search in despair, preferring to teach their children at home.

There is probably no other Sunday-school that, in point of order, quiet seclusion of cla.s.ses, professional preparation of (paid) teachers, can compare with the "Religious School" of Temple Emanuel in New York City.

But there is no intrinsic reason why the mechanical and pedagogical difficulties might not one day be as successfully removed everywhere as in this model school; and why they may not be removed in every grade.

In the infant cla.s.ses, through the beneficent influence of the kindergarten, there are already signs of promise. In the senior departments the problem is less complicated. But in the cla.s.ses where is found "the restless, wide-awake, active, intense, ingenious, irrepressible boy," or "the girl who is just beyond girlhood and yet can scarcely be regarded as a woman," and her awkward, self-conscious, misunderstood brother--here the problem remains, and no one denies that it is a hard one. Who cannot at this moment see with his mind's eye a picture of such a cla.s.s--on the one side a vision of inattention, insubordination, irreverence, on the other, incompetence, blindly, consecratedly, painfully doing his--or her--best?

In all things relating to the common schools there is a quickening of popular interest and of professional spirit. The time is at hand when none but trained experts will be allowed to teach. Is the instruction and guidance of young minds in matters pertaining to the Heavenly Father and the things of the unseen world a task less difficult, delicate, important, than the teaching of arithmetic and geography? The question answers itself. It follows that the religious and moral instruction of our children will one day be put on a firmer and more scientific basis.

In this reform there are three steps: the securing of proper external conditions for thought and feeling--in blunter words, the banishment of hubbub; the systematic training of the teacher; the enrichment of the lesson by giving to it reality, meaning, and life. The last of these ends is the only one here under consideration. To this end there are doubtless several ways. "Picture-work" is one of these, and, it is believed, one of high importance. That it is neglected is beyond question. To point out its value and set forth its method are the aims of this little book.

II.

TYPES OF PICTURE-WORK.

In the Dresden Gallery, the writer once saw two children, brother and sister, one ten and the other twelve, looking at the Sistine Madonna.

They entered the room, and without heeding the crowd there gathered, almost instantly fixed their gaze upon the picture. For many minutes they seemed to be under a spell. They were drinking in something. The great picture was speaking to them--to their very souls. And they understood something of its message. At all events they felt its influence--which is much better than merely to understand.

More striking, because more unexpected, was the influence of a large copy of the same picture upon a little boy not two years and a half old. Although this child was pa.s.sionately fond of pictures, no other picture ever seemed to appeal to him as this one did. As soon as it was brought into the house he instantly began to examine it, and pa.s.s judgment upon it. He at once found the center of interest, the young child and his mother, then pointed to the angels, the "grandfather,"

and lastly to the "lady," but returned always to the "dear little baby Jesus." From this time the story of the birth of Jesus was the one story most loved by the child. And a collection of thirty or more madonnas ("mother-pictures," the child called them) by other great masters was a never-failing source of delight to him.

Even very young children appreciate the best pictures and the best stories. In fact the younger they are the better sometimes seems to be their taste. Are we doing all that we may to gratify, and at the same time to form, this taste?

But our term, "picture-work," includes more than pictures painted with the brush. Literature is full of pictures no less beautiful in theme and in execution, and even more important in meaning, than Raphael's masterpiece. The story of the good bishop, Monseigneur Bienvenu, as it is told for us in "Les Miserables," is a picture, and so are all such stories. Literature is full of them. The Bible is a treasure-house of masterpieces. More wonderful, too, are these story pictures, just as they are, if told so that they can be seen and felt, than they could ever be made with brush or pencil.

How may we gain the power to paint these pictures, helping when help is needed, standing aside when our bungling efforts would only destroy the interest and the charm--rub off, as it were, the delicate bloom?

To give help in finding the answer to these questions is the object of the chapters that follow. Meanwhile we return to our present theme.

What is picture-work?

There is the main story and the telling of it--a work of art as we shall see--and there are also the side-lights, without which no story-teller can capture and hold his audience.

The story to be told, let us say, is the healing of the paralytic. But before the story begins, the ground must be cleared. The oriental house and bed must be pictured. Get a real specimen of each, if you can, of course.[1] Provide yourself with pictures in any case, but first of all, make an eastern house and bed yourself. A square paper box--a hat box will do--with a hole cut in the top, ready to be torn up when the time comes; a stairway made of paper, leading up the outside of the house to the roof; a small piece of felt--an old bed-quilt will serve equally well--with strings tied in each end, for the bed, to show how a bed could be let down, rolled, and "taken up"; with these accessories the teacher is ready to begin the work of sketching the real picture, the story of the miracle.

[1] See Chapter VIII., last heading.

Not merely for children, but for grown folk too is this kind of picture-work a means of teaching. In a densely populated quarter of New York City there is to-day a minister who is not content with mere word-pictures. He brings into the pulpit the objects themselves--it may be a candle, a plumb line, a live frog, an air pump. With him the method is a success, as it has been with others. Does this seem crude?

So are the mental processes of every forty-nine out of fifty the world over.

Dr. Parkhurst in the second of those memorable sermons with which he opened the public campaign against Tammany, carried into the pulpit and showed his congregation the very bundle of indictments with which he was to strike the first blow for civic purity.

Ezekiel went still further, and not only used objects but actions to enforce and ill.u.s.trate his terrible sermon:

"To the amazement of the people, setting them all awondering what he could mean, he appears one day before them with fire, a pair of scales, a knife, and a barber's razor. These were the heads, and doom was the burden of his sermon. Sweeping off, what an easterner considers it a shame to lose, his beard, and the hair also from his head, this bald and beardless man divides them into three parts; weighing them in the balance. One third he burns in the fire; one third he smites with the knife; and the remaining third he tosses in the air, scattering it on the winds of heaven." Thus the prophet under divine direction foretells the disgrace, division, destruction, dispersion of his people.

Not less striking is the story of Jeremiah's dramatic sermon as graphically told by Dr. Guthrie, from whom the preceding account has been quoted:

"The preacher appears--nor book, nor speech in hand, but an earthen vessel. He addresses his hearers. Pointing across the valley to Jerusalem, with busy thousands in its streets, its ma.s.sive towers and n.o.ble temple glorious and beautiful beneath a southern sky, he says, speaking as an amba.s.sador of G.o.d, 'I will make this city desolate and an hissing' ... pauses--raises his arm--holds up the potter's vessel, dashes it on the ground; and planting his foot on its shivered fragments, he adds, 'Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, even so will I break this people, and this city as one breaketh a potter's vessel.'"

It may have been the inspiration of such examples as these that moved Beecher when, in the stirring days before the war upon the platform of Plymouth Church, after taking up one argument after another against abolition and answering it, he carried each one to the side of the platform and threw it over into the pile with its predecessors, saying, "That disposes of you." And in his famous Liverpool address, did he not, when speaking of the freeing of the slaves, throw down and trample upon actual chains?

At the heart of even the boldest of such instances of picture-work, there lies a true and universal principle. And we may be sure that we are more likely to err on the side of stiffness and conventionality (which is often sheer laziness and ignorance), than on the side of reality and life.

The unaided imagination--the power of the eyes to "see pictures while they're shut"--will, however, often serve us more safely, and not less surely. That was a vivid and memorable action-picture, drawn for us by Bishop Vincent, at a vesper service at the close of a Chautauqua Sabbath, in the "Hall in the Grove." "What if the Master himself were again on the earth at this hour, here at Chautauqua, and should come up the hill, through the trees yonder, and should stand between these pillars and speak to us now...." The picture was complete and irresistible. We all saw and realized all that we needed to see and feel, in order to receive the lesson that followed.

But the imagination must be strengthened and fed by plenty of sense material. It can be trusted to respond with its pictures, provided it has been given material enough and provided these materials are skilfully brought to mind. In the following extract from the wonderful "Story of Jesus,"[2] which should be in the hands of every parent and teacher, we find a type of picture-work which ill.u.s.trates this point, for it quickens and makes many calls upon the imagination: "Imagine traveling through a state no larger than Vermont, and finding not only apples and pears, quinces and plums, waving corn-fields, maples and cedars, but orange-trees fragrant with snowy blossoms, and heavy with golden fruit in January; figs and dates, pomegranates and bananas--all within a day's journey! The fields over which you pa.s.s glow like gorgeous Persian carpets...." This is a part of the author's picture of Palestine.

[2] See Chapter VIII.

And here is a bit of Archdeacon Farrar's graphic word-picture of Nazareth, where Jesus spent nearly thirty years of his life on the earth:

"Gradually the valley opens into a little, natural-looking amphitheater of hills, supposed by some to be the crater of an extinct volcano; and then, clinging to hollows of a hill, which rises to the height of some five hundred feet above it, lie, like 'a handful of pearls in a goblet of emerald,' the flat roofs and narrow streets of a little eastern town. There is ... a clear, abundant fountain, houses built of white stone, and gardens scattered among them, umbrageous with figs and olives, and rich with the white and scarlet blossoms of orange and pomegranates. In spring, at least, everything about the place looks indescribably bright and soft; doves murmur in the trees; the hoopoe flits about in ceaseless activity; the bright blue roller-bird, the commonest and loveliest bird in Palestine, flashes like a living sapphire over fields which are enameled with innumerable flowers."

Who having once read, seen, and felt this picture can ever forget it or fail to feel the atmosphere of this place? It is thus we come to realize that Jesus Christ was really once a boy, a young man, a human being, on the earth. Even here, however, all possible helps in the form of pictures, maps, etc., must be called in as aids to the picturing power of the mind.

The number of "likes" in the two foregoing selections (there are at least eight of them expressed or implied) suggests the remark of a humble woman regarding the parables, "I like best the likes of Scripture." This word lies at the root of all picture-work. Whether in the parables of Jesus, who was the prince of teachers, or in the discourses of great preachers whose sermons teem with "likes," or in the story-teller's skilful comparison of place with place, people with people--Palestine with Vermont as to size, with England, Scotland, and Wales as to its divisions--Galilee, Samaria, and Judaea being "united because they had one government, one ruler; separate because of their peculiar characteristics, their definite boundaries, and jealous claims to special privileges"--in all the notion of likeness is the central point of the thought.

We never can know anything without having something to know it with. A "like" is the key that enables us to unlock and to enter the door of the unknown.

It is through picture-work also--to go a step further--that we come to have revealed to us our own characters. This type of picture-work is at once the most difficult and the most important of all. An example of such picture-making is chosen from an account written by Miss Wiltse, setting forth her method of making stories in order to suit the needs of specific cases among her pupils. Not every one has the love or the genius of Miss Wiltse, and no one can hope to win such success as hers at once; but it may be that by catching some of her spirit, studying her plan, and patiently practicing, we may learn this royal way of reaching the hearts of our children.

"There was in my kindergarten," she writes, "a little boy whose deceit and cruelty were quite abnormal; he would smile in my face with seraphic sweetness while his heavy shoe would be crushing his neighbor's toes.... He seemed incorrigible. At last I wrote a story ent.i.tled 'The Fairy True Child,' into which I put my strongest effort to reach this untruthful child. I told it to the cla.s.s, and before it was concluded this boy's head was low upon his breast, his cheeks aflame with conscious guilt. No direct reference was made to him; no other child thought of him in connection with the story. The next day he asked to have it repeated, and his conduct was noticeably better; the story became his moral tonic, and one glad day he threw his arms about me, saying he wanted to keep his Fairy True Child always.

"Another child who was feeble-minded was helped to be free from his mental inertia and day-dreaming by a story written expressly for him, in which 'I AM THAT WHICH WILLS' was pictured as a fairy, coming softly to the little boy whose power to try was lost, kissing his eyes, breathing softly upon his lips, putting her finger softly upon his ears--making each more ready and attentive--and finally enthroning the little boy's own fairy in its place in his brain, where the fairy grows more and more princely, and the little boy more and more manly, trying hard, so very hard, to keep the dear little fairy on his throne."

Here, then, we have some of the types of picture-work: the picture and the story, the parable in its various forms, and the word-picture--whether of things or actions; ill.u.s.trations or side-lights, the "likes" with which a skilful teacher illumines his teaching, and the objects, models, maps, and sketches on pad or blackboard, with which he re-enforces the lagging imaginations of his hearers.

What, then, is a picture? A picture is anything that helps us to see more clearly, feel more heartily, and act upon more faithfully the truth which is not or cannot be immediately present to our senses. The truth to be pictured may be the truth of people, places, and actions--external things; it may be the truth of character and of inner life--the things that are unseen, which we could never see at all except by the aid of real things or pictures of real things; just as, for example, our idea of G.o.d is built out of our experience of mountains, flowers, thunder-storms, our mother's tenderness, and our father's strength. These pictures may be drawn or painted; they may be expressed in words or in deeds, with pen or brush, with actions, with things.

Where to find our materials and how to use these tools with economy and effectiveness are the questions that next claim our attention.