PICTURE STUDY

THE WARRENER

George Morland (1763-1804)

It was the most natural thing in the world for George Morland to become an artist, because from childhood he was surrounded by painters and engravers. His father, his

grandfather, and many of his relatives were prominent among British painters. George was only seven years old when he began sketching. At fifteen years of age he exhibited in the Royal Academy, London. From the first his pictures were popular. Many of them were engraved, and by this means became well known throughout England.

Morland's favorite subjects were rural scenes and scenes from lowly life. He liked to paint children and animals. His pictures show children nutting, playing soldier, blackberrying, fishing, etc. He was extremely fond of animals. At one time he kept twelve riding horses on his country place, where he also had foxes, goats, pigs, dogs, monkeys, squirrels, guinea pigs, dormice, and a donkey. He particularly liked to paint pigs. In The Warrener the pigs are more interested in their dinner than in anything else, while the dogs join with the family in welcoming the returning warrener (gamekeeper). The Warrener belongs to the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D. C.

Morland was a very hard worker. He painted a surprisingly large number of pictures, which had a ready sale. Although his work brought him in large sums of money, he spent it as freely as he made it. When he died, at the early age of forty-one, he left no estate behind him, but he left pictures that have given pleasure to many people.

XII. TELLING A STORY

An Old and a New Art. Story-telling is at once the oldest and the newest of arts. The most primitive races told stories to their children; the earliest history of every people is full of myths and stories commemorating the heroic deeds of gods and heroes. It is true also that there is no better way to hold the interest of the present day than to tell a story well. Children always flock around a good storyteller, while the popularity of magazines of fiction shows what a hold stories have on young and old alike.

Social Value of Stories. We have daily opportunity and occasion to tell stories; a large part of friendly conversation consists of recounting our experiences or stories we have read. Often we wish that the story-tellers of our acquaintance had some little familiarity with the art of telling stories, so that their dull narratives should not be quite so long drawn out and so lacking in interest. It is a social duty to learn to tell a story so that at least we shall not bore our audience.

What Makes a Story? Of course we all know what a story is; but perhaps we have not thought of just how it differs from other spoken or written material. The chief characteristic of a story is action. There can be no story without events. But these events must be so related to one another that they make a whole that stirs our feelings and imagination.

Some accounts of events are not stories, for they do not form a vitally related whole. For example, the long, rambling account of a camping trip that brings in many unrelated incidents and gives a detailed account of three meals a day is not a story in the true sense of the word. A good story has plenty of movement; it tells things so plainly that we can see them, hear them-sense them in reality; and above all it arranges the incidents in such a way that our interest is held to the end. This is a simple way of stating the elements of a good story. To put it in a somewhat more exact form, we may say that a story must contain the following elements: (1) action; (2) sense appeal; (3) suspense and climax.

Character. There are other elements that often come into a story; for example, the best stories give us some delineation of character. In Hawthorne's The Great Stone Face we readily see the kind of people Ernest, Gathergold, and Old Blood and Thunder were. In Treasure Island, Stevenson gives us a lively picture of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver. But it takes the hand of a master to write a story so that the characters stand out with such distinctness that we should know them if we met them in real life. For our purposes, then, we may omit this element of character drawing, and confine ourselves to the endeavor to express the three elements given in the preceding paragraph.

1. Action. Some one has said that many people fail to tell a story well because they have no story to tell. A story is concerned primarily with what people do, not with how they look, nor with the scenery that surrounds them, nor with the opinions of the author on various subjects. Verbs are the most important words in a good story. The best possible models of stories are the parables of Jesus. By a

WHAT MAKES A STORY?

305

careful reading of those parables you will be impressed with the number of verbs they contain. Of the one hundred and sixty-four words contained in the parable of The Good Samaritan, thirty-three are verbs or verbals. The Prodigal Son contains five hundred and six words, of which one hundred and sixteen are verbs and only fifty-three are adjectives.

In selecting a story to tell be sure that it has movement. In telling it, emphasize the movement; do not delay your story with unnecessary detail or description.

2. Sense Appeal. We mean by sense appeal that the story is so told that we can see, hear, and feel the real situation. Color, sound, and odor are made apparent to our senses. The Gingerbread Man is attractive to children as described by Miss Bryant: "A chocolate jacket and cinnamon seeds for buttons! His eyes were made of fine, fat currants; his mouth was of rose-colored sugar, and he had a gay little cap of orange-sugar candy." Can you not see and smell and taste this delightful gingerbread man?

Kipling makes us see Wee Willie Winkie in the following description:

His face was permanently freckled, as his legs were permanently scratched, and in spite of his mother's almost tearful remonstrances he had insisted upon having his long yellow locks cut short in the military fashion.

We get a vivid picture of Ichabod Crane in Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:

He rode with short stirrups, which brought his knees nearly up to the pommel of the saddle; his sharp elbows stuck out like grasshoppers'; he carried his whip perpendicularly in his hand, like a scepter; and, as his horse jogged on, the motion of his arms was not unlike the flapping of a pair of wings.

A good rule is to avoid lengthy description in a story; whatever description you give should so appeal to the eye or ear that it will add to the reality of the story.

3. Suspense and Climax. - The succession of events that your story relates must be arranged in such an orderly manner that they lead up to the most interesting point of the story, known as the climax. The art of story-telling consists in relating the events so that the audience must wait to see what is going to happen. This is what we mean by suspense the waiting for the rest of the story.

All the movement of the story is toward the climax. "The climax knits together the thread of the narrative," as Miss Bailey expresses it in her excellent book, For the StoryTeller. For instance, in the story of The Ugly Duckling one event after another leads us to expect more and more disappointment and ill-treatment for the poor little bird, until the time when he sees his reflection in the water and realizes that he is no longer ugly and despised, but beautiful. The element of surprise in this story is wonderfully well treated; for not only is the reader surprised at the change, but the ugly duckling himself is the most surprised of all. An artistic climax usually contains an element of surprise, not only to the readers or the audience, but also to the characters of the story.

Devices to Use in Telling a Story. 1. Know Your Story. Be sure you know the story well before attempting to tell it; otherwise you are doomed to certain failure. A Sundayschool worker was studying a story to tell to a class of children, when her little niece came up and asked her to tell the story. The little girl settled herself to listen, but her aunt so frequently had to go back to say,.“ Oh, I forgot to tell you," that after a while the child ran away, saying,