These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the words
large enough to command respect. In the hope that you are listening,
and that you have confidence in me, I will proceed. Dates are difficult
things to acquire; and after they are acquired it is difficult to keep
them in the head. But they are very valuable. They are like the
cattle-pens of a ranch—they shut in the several brands of historical
cattle, each within its own fence, and keep them from getting mixed
together. Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures;
figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don’t take
hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to
help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick. They can
make nearly anything stick—particularly _if you make the pictures
yourself_. Indeed, that is the great point—make the pictures
_yourself_. I know about this from experience. Thirty years ago I was
delivering a memorized lecture every night, and every night I had to
help myself with a page of notes to keep from getting myself mixed. The
notes consisted of beginnings of sentences, and were eleven in number,
and they ran something like this:
“_In that region the weather_—”
“_at that time it was a custom_—”
“_but in california one never heard_—”
Eleven of them. They initialed the brief divisions of the lecture and
protected me against skipping. But they all looked about alike on the
page; they formed no picture; I had them by heart, but I could never
with certainty remember the order of their succession; therefore I
always had to keep those notes by me and look at them every little
while. Once I mislaid them; you will not be able to imagine the terrors
of that evening. I now saw that I must invent some other protection. So
I got ten of the initial letters by heart in their proper order—I, A,
B, and so on—and I went on the platform the next night with these
marked in ink on my ten finger-nails. But it didn’t answer. I kept
track of the fingers for a while; then I lost it, and after that I was
never quite sure which finger I had used last. I couldn’t lick off a
letter after using it, for while they could have made success certain
it would also have provoked too much curiosity. There was curiosity
enough without that. To the audience I seemed more interested in my
fingernails than I was in my subject; one or two persons asked me
afterward what was the matter with my hands.
It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my troubles
passed away. In two minutes I made six pictures with a pen, and they
did the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did it perfectly. I
threw the pictures away as soon as they were made, for I was sure I
could shut my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a
century ago; the lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years
ago, but I could rewrite it from the pictures—for they remain. Here are
three of them: (Fig. 1).
The first one is a haystack—below it a rattlesnake—and it told me where
to begin to talk ranch-life in Carson Valley. The second one told me
where to begin to talk about a strange and violent wind that used to
burst upon Carson City from the Sierra Nevadas every afternoon at two
o’clock and try to blow the town away. The third picture, as you easily
perceive, is lightning; its duty was to remind me when it was time to
begin to talk about San Francisco weather, where there IS no
lightning—nor thunder, either—and it never failed me.
I will give you a valuable hint. When a man is making a speech and you
are to follow him don’t jot down notes to speak from, jot down
PICTURES. It is awkward and embarrassing to have to keep referring to
notes; and besides it breaks up your speech and makes it ragged and
non-coherent; but you can tear up your pictures as soon as you have
made them—they will stay fresh and strong in your memory in the order
and sequence in which you scratched them down. And many will admire to
see what a good memory you are furnished with, when perhaps your memory
is not any better than mine.
Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess
was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads. Part of
this fun--if you like to call it that--consisted in the memorizing of
the accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled over
England from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter,
hard contract. It was all dates, they all looked alike, and they
wouldn’t stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and
still the kings held the fort; the children couldn’t conquer any six of
them.
With my lecture experience in mind I was aware that I could invent some
way out of the trouble with pictures, but I hoped a way could be found
which would let them romp in the open air while they learned the kings.
I found it, and then they mastered all the monarchs in a day or two.
The idea was to make them _see _the reigns with their eyes; that would
be a large help. We were at the farm then. From the house-porch the
grounds sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the right
to the high ground where my small work-den stood. A carriage-road wound
through the grounds and up the hill. I staked it out with the English
monarchs, beginning with the Conqueror, and you could stand on the
porch and clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest
down to Victoria, then in the forty-sixth year of her reign—_eight
hundred and seventeen years of_ English history under your eye at once!
English history was an unusually live topic in America just then. The
world had suddenly realized that while it was not noticing the Queen
had passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and Elizabeth, and gaining in
length every day. Her reign had entered the list of the long ones;
everybody was interested now—it was watching a race. Would she pass the
long Edward? There was a possibility of it. Would she pass the long
Henry? Doubtful, most people said. The long George? Impossible!
Everybody said it. But we have lived to see her leave him two years
behind.
I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and
at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three-foot white-pine
stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it.
Abreast the middle of the porch-front stood a great granite flower-vase
overflowing with a cataract of bright-yellow flowers—I can’t think of
their name. The vase was William the Conqueror. We put his name on it
and his accession date, 1066. We started from that and measured off
twenty-one feet of the road, and drove William Rufus’s stake; then
thirteen feet and drove the first Henry’s stake; then thirty-five feet
and drove Stephen’s; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past the
summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five, ten, and
seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John; turned the curve
and entered upon just what was needed for Henry III.—a level, straight
stretch of fifty-six feet of road without a crinkle in it. And it lay
exactly in front of the house, in the middle of the grounds. There
couldn’t have been a better place for that long reign; you could stand
on the porch and see those two wide-apart stakes almost with your eyes
shut. (Fig. 2.)
That isn’t the shape of the road—I have bunched it up like that to save
room. The road had some great curves in it, but their gradual sweep was
such that they were no mar to history. No, in our road one could tell
at a glance who was who by the size of the vacancy between stakes—with
_locality _to help, of course.
Although I am away off here in a Swedish village[3] and those stakes
did not stand till the snow came, I can see them today as plainly as
ever; and whenever I think of an English monarch his stakes rise before
me of their own accord and I notice the large or small space which he
takes up on our road. Are your kings spaced off in your mind? When you
think of Richard III. and of James II. do the durations of their reigns
seem about alike to you? It isn’t so to me; I always notice that
there’s a foot’s difference. When you think of Henry III. do you see a
great long stretch of straight road? I do; and just at the end where it
joins on to Edward I. I always see a small pear-bush with its green
fruit hanging down. When I think of the Commonwealth I see a shady
little group of these small saplings which we called the oak parlor;
when I think of George III. I see him stretching up the hill, part of
him occupied by a flight of stone steps; and I can locate Stephen to an
inch when he comes into my mind, for he just filled the stretch which
went by the summer-house. Victoria’s reign reached almost to my study
door on the first little summit; there’s sixteen feet to be added now;
I believe that that would carry it to a big pine-tree that was
shattered by some lightning one summer when it was trying to hit me.
[3] Summer of 1899.
We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exercise, too.
We trotted the course from the conqueror to the study, the children
calling out the names, dates, and length of reigns as we passed the
stakes, going a good gait along the long reigns, but slowing down when
we came upon people like Mary and Edward VI., and the short Stuart and
Plantagenet, to give time to get in the statistics. I offered prizes,
too—apples. I threw one as far as I could send it, and the child that
first shouted the reign it fell in got the apple.
The children were encouraged to stop locating things as being “over by
the arbor,” or “in the oak parlor,” or “up at the stone steps,” and say
instead that the things were in Stephen, or in the Commonwealth, or in
George III. They got the habit without trouble. To have the long road
mapped out with such exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the
habit of leaving books and other articles lying around everywhere, and
had not previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had
often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and
failure; but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send the
children.
Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and peg them
alongside the English ones, so that we could always have
contemporaneous French history under our eyes as we went our English
rounds. We pegged them down to the Hundred Years’ War, then threw the
idea aside, I do not now remember why. After that we made the English
pegs fence in European and American history as well as English, and
that answered very well. English and alien poets, statesmen, artists,
heroes, battles, plagues, cataclysms, revolutions—we shoveled them all
into the English fences according to their dates. Do you understand? We
gave Washington’s birth to George II.’s pegs and his death to George
III.’s; George II. got the Lisbon earthquake and George III. the
Declaration of Independence. Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Savonarola,
Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Edict of Nantes, Clive,
Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey, Patay, Cowpens, Saratoga, the Battle of
the Boyne, the invention of the logarithms, the microscope, the
steam-engine, the telegraph—anything and everything all over the
world—we dumped it all in among the English pegs according to its date
and regardless of its nationality.
If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have lodged the
kings in the children’s heads by means of pictures—that is, I should
have tried. It might have failed, for the pictures could only be
effective _when made by the pupil_; not the master, for it is the work
put upon the drawing that makes the drawing stay in the memory, and my
children were too little to make drawings at that time. And, besides,
they had no talent for art, which is strange, for in other ways they
are like me.
But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will be able
to use it. It will come good for indoors when the weather is bad and
one cannot go outside and peg a road. Let us imagine that the kings are
a procession, and that they have come out of the Ark and down Ararat
for exercise and are now starting back again up the zigzag road. This
will bring several of them into view at once, and each zigzag will
represent the length of a king’s reign.
And so on. You will have plenty of space, for by my project you will
use the parlor wall. You do not mark on the wall; that would cause
trouble. You only attach bits of paper to it with pins or thumb-tacks.
These will leave no mark.
Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper, each two
inches square, and we will do the twenty-one years of the Conqueror’s
reign. On each square draw a picture of a whale and write the dates and
term of service. We choose the whale for several reasons: its name and
William’s begin with the same letter; it is the biggest fish that
swims, and William is the most conspicuous figure in English history in
the way of a landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to
draw. By the time you have drawn twenty-one wales and written “William
I.—1066-1087—twenty-one years” twenty-one times, those details will be
your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory with anything
but dynamite. I will make a sample for you to copy: (Fig. 3).
I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he is looking
for Harold. It may be that a whale hasn’t that fin up there on his
back, but I do not remember; and so, since there is a doubt, it is best
to err on the safe side. He looks better, anyway, than he would without
it.
Be very careful and _attentive _while you are drawing your first whale
from my sample and writing the word and figures under it, so that you
will not need to copy the sample any more. Compare your copy with the
sample; examine closely; if you find you have got everything right and
can shut your eyes and see the picture and call the words and figures,
then turn the sample and copy upside down and make the next copy from
memory; and also the next and next, and so on, always drawing and
writing from memory until you have finished the whole twenty-one. This
will take you twenty minutes, or thirty, and by that time you will find
that you can make a whale in less time than an unpracticed person can
make a sardine; also, up to the time you die you will always be able to
furnish William’s dates to any ignorant person that inquires after
them.
You will now take thirteen pieces of BLUE paper, each two inches
square, and do William II. (Fig. 4.)
Make him spout his water forward instead of backward; also make him
small, and stick a harpoon in him and give him that sick look in the
eye. Otherwise you might seem to be continuing the other William, and
that would be confusing and a damage. It is quite right to make him
small; he was only about a No. 11 whale, or along there somewhere;
there wasn’t room in him for his father’s great spirit. The barb of
that harpoon ought not to show like that, because it is down inside the
whale and ought to be out of sight, but it cannot be helped; if the
barb were removed people would think some one had stuck a whip-stock
into the whale. It is best to leave the barb the way it is, then every
one will know it is a harpoon and attending to business. Remember—draw
from the copy only once; make your other twelve and the inscription
from memory.
Now the truth is that whenever you have copied a picture and its
inscription once from my sample and two or three times from memory the
details will stay with you and be hard to forget. After that, if you
like, you may make merely the whale’s _head and water-spout_ for the
Conqueror till you end his reign, each time _saying _the inscription in
place of writing it; and in the case of William II. make the _harpoon
_alone, and say over the inscription each time you do it. You see, it
will take nearly twice as long to do the first set as it will to do the
second, and that will give you a marked sense of the difference in
length of the two reigns.