Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10: The GuideSylvester, Charles Herbert
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Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10: The Guide
Sylvester, Charles Herbert
Children's literature; Literature -- Collections
While such questioning is going on both speaker and listener are seeing
more clearly every minute. Besides, in order to see accurately they are
drawing on their own previous knowledge and experience, and are
reasoning just as truly as though they were solving a problem in
arithmetic.
In every picture we form in our reading there are certain elements that
we must accept and include because the writer gives them to us. Other
elements suggest themselves, and we accept them and put them in place or
reject them entirely. In the fable just discussed we are told that the
dog is big, the piece of meat is big, and the bridge is narrow. We may
not see a small dog with a little piece of meat on a big, wide bridge.
Houses, trees, sedges on the river bank, children playing by the side of
the path, spring, summer or autumn foliage, or even snowclad shores with
black water between--any of these we may put into our picture, for the
fable is silent on these points. We must be accurate, and the parent can
do no better service in reading than to make his child see accurately
whatever he sees at all.
The artist studies the selection he means to illustrate in just this
way, and then draws his picture. When we see his picture we may accept
it as good and true to the conditions, or call it poor and inapplicable.
We should not be hasty, but should try to get his point of view before
we criticise. If he violates any of the fixed conditions of the story
his work is bad; if he gives us his interpretation and violates no fixed
conditions, his work may be good or bad according to the standards we
set up: are we always certain that our standards are correct?
In the fable _The Fox and the Stork_ (Volume I, page 73) the artist has
given us two beautiful pictures which in themselves tell almost the
entire story, and his pictures are almost wholly from his own
imagination, for there was given him to work with very little more than
a fox, a stork, a wide dish and a vase. Such a pictorial imagination as
he possessed is what should be cultivated in children. If they can be
encouraged to draw what they see, they not only fix their own
impressions, but they learn to see more vividly and more accurately.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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