Out-Door and Camp-Life for Women : Part 3

Doctor and Patient
by S. Weir Mitchell, M.D.

(Page 9 of 10)

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. 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.

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.

About the Author

Silas Weir Mitchell was an American physician and writer. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania in that city, and received the degree of M.D. at Jefferson Medical College in 1850. During the Civil War he had charge of nervous injuries and maladies at Turners Lane Hospital, Philadelphia, and at the close of the war became a specialist in neurology.