PREFACE.
THE author has no doubt but that many captious readers, upon opening this book, will find it puzzling. They will think that it does not present the subject in an orderly fashion. They would much prefer to have us suggest one month’s study of outlines, and then finish with the subject; then two months’ study of shading, which we would maintain covered the whole ground; and they would wish us to separate with equal positiveness the whole study of drawing into distinct portions. To these criticisms I reply with the following parable:
Mrs. Smith, the mother of a large family, distressed by the bigness of the physician’s bill (or rather by her husband’s complaints of the same), procured at the druggist’s a case of homœopathic medicine, with a booklet directing its dispensation, which would enable her to act as her family physician, and bringing it home perused it with delight, as she found every ailment which her children were heir to extensively described therein—chicken-pox, croup, diphtheria and scarlet fever were alphabetically set down, and their proper remedy clearly named. When she retired she staid awake, almost hoping to hear little Johnny cough or Mary toss in her crib, that she might prove her knowledge of symptomatology, and the efficacy of the drugs.
Alas, a month’s experience brought with it a source of embarrassment which she had not anticipated on procuring her book. True, she had learned it by heart with ease, and knew that for a slight attack of fever one drop of aconite and two of belladonna should be given on alternate days, and that for an incipient attack of croup she should give one drop of aconite every half hour, “which might be administered more frequently if the case showed symptoms of rapid development.” Alas, the difficulty did not arise from any omission in the book directions for applying remedies, but the puzzling point was to distinguish in nature between the symptoms of croup, for instance, and those of an ordinary cold. Was Johnny’s sonorous barking due to a real croupy throat, or was it the natural formation of his vocal organs which gave so ominous a tone to a cough that might be only the result of his wading in the rain barrel the morning before? Was Tommy’s calling for “a wink of water” no less than six times in a night due to a prospective fever, or was it the result of loneliness because he had for the first time been put in the spare room, and wanted his mother’s company? Was little Mary’s restlessness indicative of a coming attack of measles, or the result of her cousin’s having read her, that afternoon, “The Goblins ’ll Get You if You Don’t Watch Out.” These were the puzzling questions; if the physician could only diagnose the case for her, she herself could have administered the proper quota of drops of aconite or belladonna.
The moral is plain. Those books on drawing which say, “Having made correct outlines, begin to shade with an F pencil as follows,” are very easy reading; but an attempt at application soon convinces one that such instruction presupposes an amount of previous eye-training on the part of the student which is not often the endowment of the ordinary man.