A Child's Guide to Pictures. Charles H. Caffin
of human nature. Have you ever noticed that when a man carries a bucket of water, he holds the free arm away from his body? He does it by instinct, to offset the drag of the bucket on his other arm and to balance his body. Have you ever walked upon the steel rail of a railroad track? Most of us have, I imagine. We tread pretty firmly for a little while, and then we totter. Out go our arms immediately to restore our balance. We walk up and down the deck of an ocean liner, when the sea is rough, and slope our bodies to the movement of the vessel. Why? To keep our balance. If we lose it we are hurled across the deck in a very undignified fashion. On the contrary, what a beautiful spectacle is presented when a good skater balances backward and forward; perhaps an even more beautiful one, when a good dancer who feels the joy of movement sways to the rhythm of the music.
So, to maintain a balance is an instinct of human nature; to lose it produces ugly results; while beautiful ones may be secured from it, especially if the balance is rhythmic.
Another principle, then, of artistic composition is rhythm, and this, too, is founded on an instinct of human nature. Let us see what rhythm is. A small boy has found an old pot, catches up a stick, and begins to belabor the pot and make himself a nuisance. By and by he gets tired of his own noise, imagines his pot a drum, and hits it with rhythmic strokes, one following the other in measured beats. Watch how his legs begin to move to the time of the strokes, and how the other youngsters fall in behind him. Left, right, left, right, on they march; their legs and shoulders swinging to the rhythmic beat. I wonder if they know they are following an instinct, pretty nearly as old as humanity. Probably they don’t, and wouldn’t care if they did. All they know is that they are having a good time. That’s just it! And they are having the same sort of good time that the primitive man gave his friends, when he first hit on the idea of clapping his hands together in rhythm. Later on he found he could get more stirring effects and save his hands by rhythmic hammering of one piece of wood upon another. Then came along a primitive Edison who perfected the principle and put tom-toms on the market. And so, in time, music came to be invented. For the basis of music and of the pleasure that is received from it is its measured beat or rhythm.
It is, however, not only from the actual measured beat, appealing to our ear, that we gain pleasure, but also from the suggestion of rhythm to our sense of sight.
A man stone deaf can enjoy watching a dance. He has never heard a sound in his life, but his sense of sight is stirred to pleasure by the spectacle of measured repetition of the movements. Similarly, the measured repetitions of stationary objects gives us pleasure—the measured repetition, for example, presented by the West Point cadets, as they suddenly halt, either in close formation or in open ranks. “How beautiful!” we exclaim. And it is because the Athenians realized the beauty of measured repetition and the pleasure that it gives to the sense of sight, that they surrounded their great temple, the Parthenon, with ranks of columns, arranged at equal distance from one another. For, though they may have learned the beauty of repetition from studying the tree stems in the woods, yet, when they built their work of art, they avoided the haphazard of nature, and introduced order and arrangement by making the repetitions measured.
Behind the columns, however, high up on the outside of the temple wall they set a frieze or band of figures. It extended clear around the temple, representing a procession of people on their way to the great festival of the goddess Athene. The remains are now in the British Museum; but, doubtless, you have seen casts of portions of it, and will recall some in which young men are riding, the head of each horse overlapping the body of the one in front of it. There is here no longer an actual measured repetition, as in the case of the columns. The bodies are not separated by exact intervals, nor do they repeat the same forms. The youths differ, so do the horses, and the actions of the forms are dissimilar. And yet the arching of the horses’ necks, the prancing of the forelegs, and the bodies of the youths swaying to the movement of the horses are so arranged, that there is no break or interruption or confusion, but the whole seems to flow up and down regularly. There are no actual, measured intervals or actual repetitions, yet the feeling of both is suggested. The arrangement of the forms is rhythmic, in that it suggests rhythm. And the principle of this also the Greeks found in nature, as you may, if you watch the waves rolling shoreward.
But all this while the artist’s canvas is standing white and bare upon the easel, and must continue to stand. For, when he gets to work, I want you, not only to see what he does, but feel the meaning of his intention. And we can best enter into another person’s feeling, if we have experienced something of his feeling in ourselves. So, I have rummaged among our own experiences, in order to make you feel how much we have in common with the artist. He and ourselves are creatures of like nature, with similar senses, similar sources of pleasure and pain, and similar instincts leading us to do and to like similar things. Only the artist has keener senses, and has cultivated his instincts and study of nature, and has drawn from them certain practical hints to help him create his work of art.
Among the instincts that we share with him are, as I have tried to show—first, an instinctive preference for order and arrangement; secondly, the need of balance and the pleasure we receive from it; thirdly, the increased pleasure we derive from balance, when it is accompanied with rhythmic repetitions. These are the principles on which he relies when he makes his composition. For let me repeat, and not for the last time, that the purpose of his composition is not only to suggest some scene of nature, but to make the composition itself a source of pleasure to our sense of sight.
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