Let us continue our suggestions. In looking over a landscape be definite in your seeing. Be sure that the river is to the left, and not to the right; that a certain tree is a sycamore, and not a poplar; that the green on the hillside is the young, fresh green of the dawn of the spring, rather than the richer green of the summer. What is it that makes the landscape artist? His power to portray depends upon his ability to discern and observe. The poet and orator do the same, but they make their pictures with words and phrases instead of pigments and canvas.
In seeing anything, get hold of every fact possible—size, position, color, relative importance, and, then, before you conclude your observations, close your eyes and reconstruct the scene mentally. Do this over and over again, until you add and add to your mental picture things you had before failed to see. Do not merely catalogue mentally, but see everything in its own place, in full detail, and in its relation to every other thing. A comparatively short period of this kind of discipline will enable you to do things that will not only astound your friends, but will be a source of infinite pleasure and, if used intelligently in your business or profession, profit to yourself.
The same principle applies in reading. Read slowly. Be sure you understand. Grasp every idea thoroughly. To do this you must learn to picture mentally. You should compel yourself to make a mental picture of every scene described. You are reading Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” You come to his incomparable description of the battle of Waterloo. He tells us at the very commencement that it was the rain that gained the victory at Waterloo. Observation and reflection on Hugo’s part made it possible for him to make this declaration. Carefully observe this statement and what follows.
Picture that great plain, the undulating sweep of ground. Place the two armies, and then see the attack begin on Hougomont. Watch the changing scene with your mental eyes. Follow Hugo as he describes the general confusion from noon until four o’clock in the afternoon. Now prepare yourself for a great picture of a tremendous day. See Wellington’s disposal of his troops on the farther side of a long hill, on the crest of which was a deep trench caused by a road whose ruts during the centuries had worn down into the earth ten, twenty or more feet. On the near side of this hill Napoleon’s cavalry are ascending—three thousand five hundred of them, colossal men on colossal horses. On, up, they sweep. They seem as irresistible as the passing cyclone. Just as they reach the crest, to their horror they discover this trench between themselves and the English. Let Hugo’s own words now complete the picture for you:
It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning, directly under the horses’ feet, two fathoms deep between its double slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming the riders; and there being no means of retreat,—the whole column being no longer anything more than a projectile,—the force which had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois’s brigade fell into that abyss.
Take an illustration from the American novel—“Ramona.” Get a real picture in your mind of the appearance of the country. See the sheep with their lambs in the fields under the trees. Determine what size, shape, and color these trees are. Picture Juan Can, the foreman or major-domo, listen to his voice, so that you can definitely sense what kind of impression it makes upon your mental ear. Do the same with the Señora Moreno. Can you see that mustard-field described by the author, where Ramona goes out to meet the good Father Salvierderra? Have you got a picture in your mind of Ramona, and the father, and how they met, and how they returned to Camulos together? Picture, picture, picture, mentally, until every scene, every landscape, every character is vividly before you.
This was the method followed by Macaulay, whose memory was so phenomenal that Sydney Smith called him “an encyclopedia in breeches,” and who used to say that he owed much of his memory power to the discipline he used to give himself in mental picturing. He never read in a hurry. He always allowed himself time enough vividly to bring the scene before his mental vision, and once done, with him, it was ready to be recalled at any time.
Joaquin Miller used to say that he even pictured abstract ideas. If, for instance, he was thinking of the abstract quality of coldness, he would make a picture of some one suffering from cold, or some wintry landscape.