VOCAL EXPRESSION

"The orator must have something in his very soul he feels to be worth saying. He must have in his nature that kindly sympathy that connects him with his fellow-men and which so makes him a part of the audience that his smile is their smile, his tear is their tear, the throb of his heart the throb of the hearts of the whole assembly."—Henry Ward Beecher.

Do you ask me, then, what is this Puritan principle?

The Puritan principle in its essence is simply individual freedom!—Curtis.

Mind your own business with your absolute will and soul, but see that it is a good business first.—Ruskin.

—MacKaye.

What news, and quickly!—MacKaye.

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.—Phillips Brooks.

Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home. Is this a holiday?—Shakespeare.

And so, gentlemen, at this hour we are not Republicans, we are not Democrats, we are Americans!—Curtis.

Do you ask me, then, what is this Puritan principle?

The Puritan principle in its essence is simply individual freedom!

Listen to me!

"You will find the gayest castles in the air far better for comfort and for use than the dungeons that are daily dug and caverned out by grumbling, discontented people."—Emerson.

Let me tell you something!

"Might is right, say many, and so it is. Might is the right to bear the burdens of the weak, to cheer the faint, to uplift the fallen, to pour [Pg 21]from one's own full store to the need of the famishing."—Napier.

It is the angel-aim and standard in an act that consecrates it. He who aims for perfection in a trifle is trying to do that trifle holily. The trier wears the halo, and, therefore, the halo grows as quickly round the brows of peasant as of king.—Gannett.

Think twice before you speak, my son; and it will do no harm if you keep on thinking while you speak.—Anonymous.

—Lanier.

SUGGESTIVE ANALYSIS

HAMLET'S SPEECH TO THE PLAYERS

Let us consider together the problem of vocally interpreting this speech of Hamlet's, keeping the mind of the auditor constantly before us, the special factor in our problem which is the concern of this study. What is the first point to be determined? The situation, is it not? Remember, in our previous discussion I have made it clear that it is not essential to our present purpose that we should know, in determining our situation, the exact conditions under which this speech was delivered. Neither is it essential to our present purpose that we should make an exhaustive study of the play of "Hamlet" or of the character of the Prince of Denmark. Lest you mistake me I must reiterate the fact that[Pg 23] an interpretation of these lines, looked upon as Hamlet's speech, would require just such exhaustive study of context and character—study which would lead to that complete possession which alone insures perfect expression; but it is legitimate at this point in our study of vocal expression to use this text quite apart from its context as a perfect example of direct appeal. It is legitimate to imagine a situation of our own in which this thought could be pertinently expressed. We must then first determine what you, the speaker, are to represent, and the nature of the audience you are to address. One word in the text more than any other, perhaps, determines these points—the word "players." With this word as a key to a probable situation, let us imagine that you, the one who must "speak this speech," are a stage-director of your own play, and that we, the class to whom you must speak, are a company of players (actors, as we now call them) which is about to present your play. The fact that this is exactly the situation in Shakespeare's play from which this speech is[Pg 24] taken is interesting, but does not affect our attitude toward the text. But that we should assume the state of mind which animated the author of the Mouse-trap, is vital to our problem. Hamlet was intent upon getting an effect incalculably potent from the delivery of the "speech" he "had pronounced." You must imagine that you have written not merely a play, but a play which you intend shall have a powerful influence upon the lives of the people who are to hear it. Once more, then, let us determine the exact situation. You, the author of a moving play—you, its stage-director—have called us, your actors, together for rehearsal. You know just how you wish the lines of your play delivered. It is absolutely vital to the success of your venture that we, the actors, should grasp your ideal of delivery and act upon it. You must convince us that this is the only way in which you will permit the text to be handled. You are the orator as Mr. Beecher has drawn him for us. You will realize, in thinking your way through this appeal, that, while the stage-director is address[Pg 25]ing the whole company of players, he has singled out from the others one who is to deliver a particular speech from his play. It is well to follow this idea of the situation. Include us all, then, as a class in your chosen cast, but single out one of us, and speak directly at the mind of that one. Look him straight in the eye. Direct your thought in the main to his mind, even while your thought reaches out and draws us all into the circle of its enthusiasm. Now, with this attitude and intent toward an audience, try to vocally interpret, to think aloud this thought. What is the trouble? "Speak the speech" you say, "is a difficult combination of words to utter"? "'Trippingly' trips up your tongue"? "You don't understand the reference to a 'town-crier'"?

Ah, what discoveries we are making!

"You feel that you should be able to illustrate your own ideal of delivery by delivering these directions after the very manner you ask your players to observe"? That might legitimately be expected of you, I think. "But this you cannot do!" What a[Pg 26] shocking confession! Yes, but how good to have this new knowledge of your own ability, or, in this case, disability. How appalling to find that you cannot easily utter the simple combination of words, "Speak the speech, I pray you," without stumbling; that any word, a plain, simple English word, trips your tongue. How appalling, but how encouraging it is! For the discovery of this fact, the consciousness of these limitations, "constitutes half the battle" before us. It is a battle. But you shall be equipped to meet it. Turn to the chapters on "Freeing the Tone." Find the exercises for training the tongue. Faithful practice of these exercises (even without direction, but, if you are a member of the class in expression for which this book was made, under direction) will very shortly conquer the unruly tongue for use in uttering any difficult combination of words. And your teacher will patiently "pick you up" (in this first study) every time you trip over a word or phrase, and she will patiently refer you to the corner of history which will explain any unfamiliar portions of your text[Pg 27] if you will persistently try to do your part at this point. That part is, to think the thought before you directly at another's mind. That is all we ask at this point. Make this direct appeal for simplicity in delivery straight to the mind of him whom you have chosen to receive, and act upon it. Talk to me if I am your chosen player! Convince me! Make me realize what you expect of me! Make me want to meet your expectation! Make me afraid to fail you!

With these suggestions and this direct appeal to you, I leave you with your teacher and with the following material chosen for your preliminary study in Vocal Interpretation.

SELECTIONS FOR INTERPRETATION

—Henry V., Shakespeare

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that [Pg 31]these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.—Address at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln.

The meaning of Washington in American history is discipline. The message of Washington's life to the American people is discipline. The need of American character is discipline.

Washington did not give patriotism to the American colonies. The people had that as abundantly as he. He did not give them courage. That quality was and is in the American blood. He did not even give them resource. There were intellects more productive than his. But Washington gave balance and direction to elemental forces. He was the genius of order. He was poise personified. He was the spirit of discipline. He was the first Great Conservative. It was this quality in him that made all other elements of the Revolution effective. It was this that organized our nebulous independence into a nation of liberty. The parts of a machine are useless until assembled and fitted each to its appropriate place. Washington was the master mechanic of our nation; so it is that we are a people.[Pg 32]

But we are not yet a perfect people. We are still in the making. It is a glorious circumstance. Youth is the noblest of God's gifts. The youth of a nation is like the youth of a man. The American people are young? Yes! Vital? Yes! Powerful? Yes! Disciplined? Not entirely. Moderate? Not yet, but growing in that grace. And therefore on this, his day, I bear you the message of Washington—he, whose sanity, orderliness, and calm have reached through the century, steadying us, overcoming in us the untamed passions of riotous youth.—Conservatism; the Spirit of National Self-Restraint, Albert Beveridge.

I

Of every two men probably one man thinks he is a drudge, and every second woman is sure she is. Either we are not doing the thing we would like to do in life; or, in what we do and like, we find so much to dislike that the rut tires even when the road runs on the whole, [Pg 38]a pleasant way. I am going to speak of the Culture that comes through this very drudgery.

"Culture through my drudgery!" some one is now thinking: "This treadmill that has worn me out, this grind I hate, this plod that, as long ago as I remember it, seemed tiresome—to this have I owed 'culture'? Keeping house or keeping accounts, tending babies, teaching primary school, weighing sugar and salt at a counter, those blue overalls in the machine shop—have these anything to do with 'culture'? Culture takes leisure, elegance, wide margins of time, a pocket-book; drudgery means limitations, coarseness, crowded hours, chronic worry, old clothes, black hands, headaches. Culture implies college: life allows a daily paper, a monthly magazine, the circulating library, and two gift-books at Christmas. Our real and our ideal are not twins—never were! I want the books,—but the clothes-basket wants me. The two children are good,—and so would be two hours a day without the children. I crave an outdoor life,—and walk down-town of mornings to perch on a high stool till supper-time. I love Nature,—and figures are my fate. My taste is books,—and I farm it. My taste is art,—and I correct exercises. My taste is science,—and I measure tape. I am young and like stir,—the business jogs on like a stage-coach. Or I am not young, I am getting gray over my ears, and like to sit down and be still,—but the drive of the business keeps both tired arms stretched out full length. I hate this overbidding and this under[Pg 39]selling, this spry, unceasing competition, and would willingly give up a quarter of my profits to have two hours of my daylight to myself,—at least I would if, working just as I do, I did not barely get the children bread and clothes. I did not choose my calling, but was dropped into it—by my innocent conceit, or by duty to the family, or by a parent's foolish pride, or by our hasty marriage; or a mere accident wedged me into it. Would I could have my life over again! Then, whatever I should be, at least I would not be what I am to-day!"

Have I spoken truly for any one here? I know I have. Goes not the grumble thus within the silent breast of many a person, whose pluck never lets it escape to words like these, save now and then on a tired evening to husband or to wife?

There is often truth and justice in the grumble. Truth and justice both. Still, when the question rises through the grumble, Can it be that drudgery, not to be escaped, gives "culture"? the true answer is—Yes, and culture of the prime elements of life; of the very fundamentals of all fine manhood and fine womanhood.

Our prime elements are due to our drudgery—I mean that literally; the fundamentals that underlie all fineness and without which no other culture worth the winning is even possible. These, for instance—and what names are more familiar? Power of attention; power of industry; promptitude in beginning work; method and accuracy and despatch in doing work; [Pg 40]perseverance; courage before difficulties; cheer under straining burdens; self-control and self-denial and temperance. These are the prime qualities; these the fundamentals. We have heard these names before! When we were small mother had a way of harping on them, and father joined in emphatically, and the minister used to refer to them in church. And this was what our first employer meant—only his way of putting the matter was, "Look sharp, my boy!"—"Be on time, John!"—"Stick to it!" Yes, that is just what they all meant: these are the very qualities which the mothers tried to tuck into us when they tucked us into bed, the very qualities which the ministers pack into their platitudes, and which the nations pack into their proverbs. And that goes to show that they are the fundamentals. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are very handy, but these fundamentals of a man are handier to have; worth more; worth more than Latin and Greek and French and German and music and art-history and painting and wax flowers and travels in Europe added together. These last are the decorations of a man or woman: even reading and writing are but conveniences: those other things are the indispensables. They make one's sit-fast strength and one's active momentum, whatsoever and wheresoever the lot in life be—be it wealth or poverty, city or country, library or workshop. Those qualities make the solid substance of one's self.

And the question I would ask of myself and [Pg 41]you is, How do we get them? How do they become ours? High-school and college can give much, but these are never on their programmes. All the book processes that we go to the schools for, and commonly call "our education," give no more than opportunity to win these indispensables of education. How, then, do we get them? We get them somewhat as the fields and valleys get their grace. Whence is it that the lines of river and meadow and hill and lake and shore conspire to-day to make the landscape beautiful? Only by long chiselings and steady pressures. Only by ages of glacier crush and grind, by scour of floods, by centuries of storm and sun. These rounded the hills, and scooped the valley-curves, and mellowed the soil for meadow-grace. There was little grace in the operation, had we been there to watch. It was "drudgery" all over the land. Mother Nature was down on her knees doing her early scrubbing work! That was yesterday: to-day, result of scrubbing-work, we have the laughing landscape.

Now what is true of the earth is true of each man and woman on the earth. Father and mother and the ancestors before them have done much to bequeath those elemental qualities to us; but that which scrubs them into us, the clinch which makes them actually ours, and keeps them ours, and adds to them as the years go by—that depends on our own plod, our plod in the rut, our drill of habit; in one word, depends upon our "drudgery." It is because we [Pg 42]have to go, and go, morning after morning, through rain, through shine, through toothache, headache, heartache, to the appointed spot, and do the appointed work; because, and only because, we have to stick to that work through the eight or ten hours, long after rest would be so sweet; because the school-boy's lesson must be learned at nine o'clock and learned without a slip; because the accounts on the ledger must square to a cent; because the goods must tally exactly with the invoice; because good temper must be kept with children, customers, neighbors, not seven, but seventy times seven times; because the besetting sin must be watched to-day, to-morrow, and the next day; in short, without much matter what our work be, whether this or that, it is because, and only because, of the rut, plod, grind, humdrum in the work, that we at last get those self-foundations laid of which I spoke,—attention, promptness, accuracy, firmness, patience, self-denial, and the rest. When I think over that list and seriously ask myself three questions, I have to answer each with No:—Are there any qualities in the list which I can afford to spare, to go without, as mere show-qualities? Not one. Can I get these self-foundations laid, save by the weight, year in, year out, of the steady pressures? No, there is no other way. Is there a single one in the list which I cannot get in some degree by undergoing the steady drills and pressures? No, not one. Then beyond all books, beyond all class-work at the school, beyond all special opportunities of[Pg 43] what I call my "education," it is this drill and pressure of my daily task that is my great school-master. My daily task, whatever it be—that is what mainly educates me. All other culture is mere luxury compared with what that gives. That gives the indispensables. Yet fool that I am, this pressure of my daily task is the very thing that I so growl at as my "drudgery"!

We can add right here this fact, and practically it is a very important fact to girls and boys as ambitious as they ought to be,—-the higher our ideals, the more we need those foundation habits strong. The street-cleaner can better afford to drink and laze than he who would make good shoes; and to make good shoes takes less force of character and brain than to make cures in the sick-room, or laws in the legislature, or children in the nursery. The man who makes the head of a pin or the split of a pen all day long, and the man who must put fresh thought into his work at every stroke,—which of the two more needs the self-control, the method, the accuracy, the power of attention and concentration? Do you sigh for books and leisure and wealth? It takes more "concentration" to use books—head tools—well than to use hand tools. It takes more "self-control" to use leisure well than workdays. Compare the Sundays and Mondays of your city; which day, all things considered, stands for the city's higher life,—the day on which so many men are lolling, or the day on which all toil? It takes more knowledge, more integrity, more justice, to han[Pg 44]dle riches well than to bear the healthy pinch of the just-enough.

Do you think that the great and famous escape drudgery? The native power and temperament, the outfit and capital at birth, counts for much, but it convicts us common minds of huge mistake to hear the uniform testimony of the more successful geniuses about their genius. "Genius is patience," said who? Sir Isaac Newton. "The Prime Minister's secret is patience," said who? Mr. Pitt, the great Prime Minister of England. Who, think you, wrote, "My imagination would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention"? It was Charles Dickens. Who said "The secret of a Wall Street million is common honesty"? Vanderbilt; and he added as the recipe for a million (I know somebody would like to learn it), "Never use what is not your own, never buy what you cannot pay for, never sell what you haven't got." How simple great men's rules are! How easy it is to be a great man! Order, diligence, patience, honesty,—just what you and I must use in order to put our dollar in the savings-bank, to do our school-boy sum, to keep the farm thrifty, and the house clean, and the babies neat. Order, diligence, patience, honesty! There is wide difference between men, but truly it lies less in some special gift or opportunity granted to one and withheld from another, than in the differing degree in which these common elements of human power[Pg 45] are owned and used. Not how much talent have I, but how much will to use the talent that I have, is the main question. Not how much do I know, but how much do I do with what I know? To do their great work the great ones need more of the very same habits which the little ones need to do their smaller work. Goethe, Spencer, Agassiz, Jesus, share, not achievements, but conditions of achievement, with you and me. And those conditions for them, as for us, are largely the plod, the drill, the long disciplines of toil. If we ask such men their secret, they will uniformly tell us so.

Since we lay the firm substrata of ourselves in this way, then, and only in this way; and since the higher we aim, the more, and not the less, we need these firm substrata,—since this is so, I think we ought to make up our minds and our mouths to sing a hallelujah unto Drudgery: Blessed be Drudgery,—the one thing that we cannot spare!

II

But there is something else to be said. Among the people who are drudges there are some who have given up their dreams of what, when younger, they used to talk or think about as their "ideals"; and have grown at last, if not content, resigned to do the actual work before them. Yes, here it is,—before us, and behind us, and on all sides of us; we cannot change it; we have accepted it. Still, we have not given[Pg 46] up one dream,—the dream of success in this work to which we are so clamped. If we cannot win the well-beloved one, then success with the ill-beloved,—this at least is left to hope for. Success may make it well-beloved, too,—who knows? Well, the secret of this success still lies in the same old word, "drudgery." For drudgery is the doing of one thing, one thing, one thing, long after it ceases to be amusing; and it is this "one thing I do" that gathers me together from my chaos, that concentrates me from possibilities to powers, and turns powers into achievements. "One thing I do," said Paul, and, apart from what his one thing was, in that phrase he gave the watchword of salvation. That whole long string of habits—attention, method, patience, self-control, and the others—can be rolled up and balled, as it were, in the word "concentration." We will halt a moment at the word:

Men may be divided into two classes,—those who have a "one thing," and those who have no "one thing," to do; those with aim, and those without aim, in their lives: and practically it turns out that almost all of the success, and, therefore, the greater part of the happiness, go to the first class. The aim in life is what the backbone is in the body: without it we are[Pg 47] invertebrate, belong to some lower order of being not yet man. No wonder that the great question, therefore, with a young man is, What am I to be? and that the future looks rather gloomy until the life-path opens. The lot of many a girl, especially of many a girl with a rich father, is a tragedy of aimlessness. Social standards, and her lack of true ideals and of real education, have condemned her to be frittered: from twelve years old she is a cripple to be pitied, and by thirty she comes to know it. With the brothers the blame is more their own. The boys we used to play our school games with have found their places; they are winning homes and influence and money, their natures are growing strong and shapely, and their days are filling with the happy sense of accomplishment,—while we do not yet know what we are. We have no meaning on the earth. Lose us, and the earth has lost nothing; no niche is empty, no force has ceased to play, for we have got no aim, and therefore we are still—nobody. Get your meaning first of all! Ask the question until it is answered past question, What am I? What do I stand for? What name do I bear in the register of forces? In our national cemeteries there are rows on rows of unknown bodies of our soldiers,—men who did a work and put a meaning to their lives; for the mother and the townsmen say, "He died in the war." But the men and women whose lives are aimless reverse their fates. Our bodies are known, and answer in this world to such or such a name,—but as[Pg 48] to our inner selves, with real and awful meaning our walking bodies might be labeled, "An unknown man sleeps here!"

Now, since it is concentration that prevents this tragedy of failure, and since this concentration always involves drudgery, long, hard, abundant, we have to own again, I think, that that is even more than what I called it first,—our chief school-master; besides that, drudgery is the gray Angel of Success. The main secret of any success we may hope to rejoice in is in that angel's keeping. Look at the leaders in the profession, the "solid" men in business, the master-workmen who begin as poor boys and end by building a town in which to house their factory hands; they are drudges of the single aim. The man of science, and to-day more than ever, if he would add to the world's knowledge, or even get a reputation, must be, in some one branch at least, a plodding specialist. The great inventors, Palissy at his pots, Goodyear at his rubber, Elias Howe at his sewing-machine, tell the secret,—"One thing I do." The reformer's secret is the same. A one-eyed, grim-jawed folk the reformers are apt to be: one-eyed, grim-jawed, seeing but the one thing, never letting go, they have to be, to start a torpid nation. All these men as doers of the single thing drudge their way to their success. Even so must we, would we win ours. The foot-loose man is not the enviable man. A wise man will be his own necessity and bind himself to a task, if by early wealth or foolish parents or other lowering ci[Pg 49]rcumstances he has lost the help of an outward necessity.

Again, then, I say, Let us sing a hallelujah and make a fresh beatitude: Blessed be Drudgery! It is the one thing we cannot spare.

III

This is a hard gospel, is it not? But now there is a pleasanter word to briefly say. To lay the firm foundations in ourselves, or even to win success in life, we must be drudges. But we can be artists, also, in our daily task. And at that word things brighten.

"Artists," I say,—not artisans. "The difference?" This: the artist is he who strives to perfect his work,—the artisan strives to get through it. The artist would fain finish, too; but with him it is to "finish the work God has given me to do!" It is not how great a thing we do, but how well we do the thing we have to, that puts us in the noble brotherhood of artists. My Real is not my Ideal,—is that my complaint? One thing, at least, is in my power: if I cannot realize my Ideal, I can at least idealize my Real. How? By trying to be perfect in it. If I am but a rain-drop in a shower, I will be, at least, a perfect drop; if but a leaf in a whole June, I will be, at least, a perfect leaf. This poor "one thing I do,"—instead of repining at its lowness or its hardness, I will make it glorious by my supreme loyalty to its demand.

[Pg 50]

An artist himself shall speak. It was Michael Angelo who said: "Nothing makes the soul so pure, so religious, as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives for it strives for something that is godlike. True painting is only an image of God's perfection,—a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony." The great masters in music, the great masters in all that we call artistry, would echo Michael Angelo in this; he speaks the artist essence out. But what holds good upon their grand scale and with those whose names are known, holds equally good of all pursuits and all lives. That true painting is an image of God's perfection must be true, if he says so; but no more true of painting than of shoemaking, of Michael Angelo than of John Pounds, the cobbler. I asked a cobbler once how long it took to become a good shoemaker; he answered, promptly, "Six years,—and then you must travel!" That cobbler had the artist soul. I told a friend the story, and he asked his cobbler the same question: How long does it take to become a good shoemaker? "All your life, sir." That was still better,—a Michael Angelo of shoes! Mr. Maydole, the hammer-maker, of central New York, was an artist: "Yes," said he to Mr. Parton, "I have made hammers here for twenty-eight years." "Well, then, you ought to be able to make a pretty good hammer by this time." "No, sir," was the answer, "I never made a pretty good hammer. I make the best hammer made[Pg 51] in the United States." Daniel Morell, once president of the Cambria Railworks in Pittsburgh, which employed seven thousand men, was an artist, and trained artists. "What is the secret of such a development of business as this?" asked the visitor. "We have no secret," was the answer; "we always try to beat our last batch of rails. That's all the secret we have, and we don't care who knows it." The Paris bookbinder was an artist, who, when the rare volume of Corneille, discovered in a book-stall, was brought to him, and he was asked how long it would take him to bind it, answered, "Oh, sir, you must give me a year, at least; this needs all my care." Our Ben Franklin showed the artist when he began his own epitaph, "Benjamin Franklin, printer." And Professor Agassiz, when he told the interviewer that he had "no time to make money"; and when he began his will, "I, Louis Agassiz, teacher."

In one of Murillo's pictures in the Louvre he shows us the interior of a convent kitchen; but doing the work there are, not mortals in old dresses, but beautiful white-winged angels. One serenely puts the kettle on the fire to boil, and one is lifting up a pail of water with heavenly grace, and one is at the kitchen dresser reaching up for plates; and I believe there is a little cherub running about and getting in the way, trying to help. What the old monkish legend that it represented is, I hardly know. But, as the painter puts it to you on his canvas, all are so busy, and working with such a will, and so[Pg 52] refining the work as they do it, that somehow you forget that pans are pans and pots pots, and only think of the angels, and how very natural and beautiful kitchen-work is,—just what the angels would do, of course.

It is the angel-aim and standard in an act that consecrates it. He who aims for perfectness in a trifle is trying to do that trifle holily. The trier wears the halo, and therefore, the halo grows as quickly round the brows of peasant as of king. This aspiration to do perfectly,—is it not religion practicalized? If we use the name of God, is this not God's presence becoming actor in us? No need, then, of being "great" to share that aspiration and that presence. The smallest roadside pool has its water from heaven, and its gleam from the sun, and can hold the stars in its bosom, as well as the great ocean. Even so the humblest man or woman can live splendidly! That is the royal truth that we need to believe,—you and I who have no "mission," and no great sphere to move in. The universe is not quite complete without my work well done. Have you ever read George Eliot's poem called "Stradivarius"? Stradivarius was the famous old violin-maker, whose violins, nearly two centuries old, are almost worth their weight in gold to-day. Says Stradivarius in the poem:

[Pg 53]

That is just as true of us as of our greatest brothers. What, stand with slackened hands and fallen heart before the littleness of your service! Too little, is it, to be perfect in it? Would you, then, if you were Master, risk a greater treasure in the hands of such a man? Oh, there is no man, no woman, so small that they cannot make their life great by high endeavor; no sick crippled child on its bed that cannot fill a niche of service that way in the world. This is the beginning of all gospels,—that the kingdom of heaven is at hand just where we are. It is just as near us as our work is, for the gate of heaven for each soul lies in the endeavor to do that work perfectly.

But to bend this talk back to the word with which we started: will this striving for perfection in the little thing give "culture"? Have you ever watched such striving in operation? Have you never met humble men and women who read little, who knew little, yet who had a certain fascination as of fineness lurking about them? Know them, and you are likely to find them persons who have put so much thought and honesty and conscientious trying into their common work—it may be sweeping rooms, or planing boards, or painting walls—have put their ideals so long, so constantly, so lovingly into that common work of theirs, that finally these qualities have come to permeate not their work only, but so much of their being that they are fine-fibred within, even if on the outside the rough bark clings. Without being schooled,[Pg 54] they are apt to instinctively detect a sham,—one test of culture. Without haunting the drawing-rooms, they are likely to have manners of quaint grace and graciousness,—another test of culture. Without the singing-lessons, their tones are apt to be gentle,—another test of culture. Without knowing anything about Art, so called, they know and love the best in one thing,—are artists in their own little specialty of work. They make good company, these men and women,—why? Because, not having been able to realize their Ideal, they have idealized their Real, and thus in the depths of their nature have won true "culture."

You know all beatitudes are based on something hard to do or to be. "Blessed are the meek": is it easy to be meek? "Blessed are the pure in heart": is that so very easy? "Blessed are they who mourn." "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst—who starve—after righteousness." So this new beatitude by its hardness only falls into line with all the rest. A third time and heartily I say it,—"Blessed be Drudgery!" For thrice it blesses us: it gives us the fundamental qualities of manhood and womanhood; it gives us success in the thing we have to do; and it makes us, if we choose, artists,—artists within, whatever our outward work may be. Blessed be Drudgery,—the secret of all culture!

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics—or of mathematicians, if you will—to say that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of to-day are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, to-day. I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us.

That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go.

For truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

Some strand of our own misdoing is involved in every quarrel.

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.

[Pg 66]

You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometime fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?

An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions of me, all different from each other and from us; there's no royal road, we just have to sclamber and tumble.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he [Pg 70]must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.... What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.—Self-Reliance.

Exposition is an explanation, a setting forth, or an expounding. It is an attempt to render something plain, an effort to convey to the reader a train of thought which represents the conclusions of the writer upon a subject. The writer, it is at once evident, must be acquainted with the subject with which he deals. He is presuming to teach, and must be in a position which justifies him in so doing. He is prepared to write an exposition only when he is able, in regard to the topic in hand, to take frankly and unreservedly the attitude of a teacher.

A teacher must have many good gifts and graces; and whoever else may fail to be well acquainted with a given lesson, he must have mastered it thoroughly. To teach he must first know. Whoever has taught understands how completely different is the attitude of the teacher from that of the pupil. While the pupil is hardly expected to be able to do more than reasonably well to understand the subject in hand, the teacher must be able to explain, to justify, to make clear relations, and to impart the whole matter. The pupil is excused with a sort of hearsay knowledge, but the teacher must have a vital experience of what he teaches. Especially must he be able to comprehend and [Pg 72]to represent a subject as a whole. He is responsible for the student's being able in turn to co-ordinate facts and theories so as to produce unity; and it is therefore essential that he himself have power to hold and to make clear a continuous train of thought.

The teacher, moreover, must have over his mind discipline so firm that he is not dependent upon moods. He must cover the wide difference between the train of thought which springs spontaneously in the mind and that which is laboriously worked out as a logical sequence of ideas relating to a subject forced upon the attention. The pupil may, to a certain extent, indulge the vagaries of his inclination, but the teacher must respond to the need of the moment. He must have trained his mind to give an intelligent judgment upon any matter presented to it. He is not equipped for instructing—nor is any individual ready for life—until he can command the resources of his inner self to the utmost. The trained person is one who can take a subject which may not at the outset especially appeal to him, which is full of complications, which is not in itself, perhaps, attractive, and can insist with himself that his mind shall master it thoroughly. He is able so to expend his whole mental strength, if need be, upon any necessary topic that the subject shall be examined, acquired, assimilated, and then shall be so organized, so illumined, and so presented that others shall be instructed. The mind of the teacher, in a word, is so disciplined that it will work when it is ordered.

[Pg 73]

The ideal state of mind for him who wishes to communicate knowledge is that of being absolute master of all its resources. Many who possess no inconsiderable powers of thought are practically unable to command the best powers of their intelligence. They depend upon the whim of the moment, upon some outward pressure or inward impulse, to arouse their intellect. They fail to reflect that while any ordinary intellect naturally forms some opinion upon any subject which interests it, only the trained mind is able to judge clearly and lucidly of an indifferent or uninteresting matter. In this mastery of thought lies the difference between the sterile and the productive mind. Only one brain in a thousand has not the disposition to shirk work if it is allowed, and every student has moments when his intelligence seems almost to act like a spoiled child that hates to get up when called on a cold morning. To establish the power of the will over the intellect is the object of education, and the ability to exercise this power is what is meant by the proper use of the word "cultivation."

The mental process of the cultivated thinker when considering any subject is likely to be: first, to become sure of his terms; then, clearly to set before his mind the facts and conditions; and, lastly, to make the possible and resulting deductions and conclusions. This gives a hint, and indeed practically affords a rule for the writer of exposition.

An exposition, broadly speaking, may be said to consist of three steps which nearly corre[Pg 74]spond to the three steps of mental activity just set down: the Definition, the Statement, and the Inference.

Definition is making clear to self or to the reader what is under discussion.

Statement is the setting forth of whatever is to be said of the facts, conditions, relations, and so on, which it is the object of the exposition to make clear.

Inference is the conclusion or conclusions drawn.

These three parts will seldom be found as formal divisions in any ordinary exposition, but in some sort they are always present; and the writer must at least have them clear in his mind if he hopes to render his work well ordered, comprehensive, and symmetrical. Together they are woven as the strands which give a firmness of texture to the whole.

To illustrate the bearing of this analysis on the composition of an exposition, we may imagine that a student has been required to write a theme on "The Influence of College Life." He has first to concern himself with definition. He must decide what he means by college life as a molding influence; whether its intellectual, its social, its moral aspects, or all these. He must consider, too, whether he is to deal with the effect upon specific characters or upon types; whether upon boys during the time they are in college or as a training for after life; whether at a special institution or as the result of any college. If he limits himself to one phase of influence, he must in the same way decide[Pg 75] fully in what sense he intends to treat that phase. If he is to consider the social effect of college life, for instance, he has to define for himself the sense in which he will use the word "social." Is it to mean simply formal society, adaptation to the more conventional and exclusive forms of human intercourse, or to imply all that renders a man more self-poised, more flexible, and more adaptable in any relations with his fellows? If, on the other hand, it is the intellectual influence of college life which is to be studied, the first step is to decide what is to be considered for this purpose the range of the term "intellectual"; whether it is to be taken to mean the mere acquirement of information; whether it has relation to acquirement or to modification of mental conditions; whether it means change in the mind in the way of development or of modification; whether it shall be applied to an alteration in the student's attitude toward knowledge or toward life in general. All this is in the line of definition, and it is naturally connected with the statement of whatever facts bear upon the topic under discussion.

Statement has largely to do with fact. Theory belongs rather to whatever inference is part of an exposition. In the statement will come the observations of the writer; whatever he knows of general conditions at college, or such individual examples as bear upon the question in hand. From these he will inevitably draw some conclusions, and the value of the exposition will depend upon the reasonableness and convincingness of these inferences, as these will, in turn,[Pg 76] depend upon the clearness of the writer's original knowledge in regard to his intentions and the logic of his statements.

Composition, it should be remembered, is the art of communicating to others what is in the mind of the writer. To write without having the subject abundantly in mind is to invite the reader to a Barmecide feast of empty dishes. The necessity of insisting upon such particulars as those just given of the process of making an exposition arises from the stubborn idea of the untrained student that writing is something done with paper and ink. It is, on the contrary, something which is done with brains; it is less putting things on paper than it is thinking things out in the mind.

Before leaving the illustration of a theme on the influence of college life we may glance a moment more at the difficulty, even with so simple a subject, of attaining perfect clarity of thinking. One of the first things which must be determined is the essential difference of life in a college from ordinary existence. If the subject be given out to a class of students half the themes handed in will begin with a remark upon the great change which comes to a boy who finds himself for the first time freed from the restraints of home. The moment this idea is presented to the mind it is to be looked at, not as something with which to fill so much paper, but as a stepping-stone toward ideas beyond. It is necessary, for instance, to determine the distinctions between freedom at college and freedom elsewhere; to decide[Pg 77] wherein lie the differences in the conditions which surround a boy in a university and one who escapes from the restrictions of home by going away to live in a city or in a country village, on shipboard or in the army. To be of value, every thought in an exposition must have been tested by a comparison with allied ideas as wide and as exhaustive as the thinker is equal to making.

To learn to think is, after all, the prime essential in exposition-writing, and the beginning of thought is the realization of what is already known. The student who patiently examines his views on the subject of which he is to write, who determines to discover exactly how much he knows and what is the relative importance of each of his opinions, is likely soon to come to find that he is considering the theme chosen not only deeply, but with tangible results. The value of any exposition, to sum the matter up in a word, rests primarily and chiefly on the thoroughness of the thought which produces it.—Arlo Bates.[3]

The Idylls of the King has been called a quasi-epic. Departing from the conventional epic form by its lack of a closely continuous narrative, it has yet that lofty manner and underlying unity of design which leads us to class it with the epics, at least, in the essentials. It consists of a series of chivalric legends, taken chiefly from the Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas[Pg 78] Malory, grouped so as to exhibit the establishment, the greatness, and the downfall of an ideal kingdom of righteousness among men. "The Coming of Arthur," the ideal ruler, shows us the setting up of this kingdom. Before this was disorder, great tracts of wilderness,

Arthur slays the beast and fells the forest, and the old order changes to give place to new. Then the song of Arthur's knights rises, a majestic chorus of triumph:

In "Gareth and Lynette" the newly established kingdom is seen doing its work among men. Arthur, enthroned in his great hall, dispenses impartial justice. The knights

The allegory shows us, in Gareth's contests with the knights "that have no law nor King," the contest of the soul with the temptations that at different periods of life successively attack it:

Then follow the "Idylls," which trace the entrance and growth of an element of sin and discord, which, spreading, pulls down into ruin that "fellowship of noble knights," "which are[Pg 79] an image of the mighty world." The purity of the ideal kingdom is fouled, almost at its source, by the guilty love of Lancelot and the Queen. Among some the contagion spreads; while others, in an extremity of protest, start in quest of the Holy Grail, leaving the duty at hand for mystical visions. Man cannot bring down heaven to earth; he cannot sanctify the mass of men by his own rapturous anticipations; he cannot safely neglect the preliminary stages of progress appointed for the race; he "may not wander from the allotted field before his work be done."

So by impurity and by impatience the rift in the kingdom widens, and in "The Last Tournament," in the stillness before the impending doom, we hear the shrill voice of Dagonet railing at the King, who thinks himself as God, that he can make

In "Guinevere," unequaled elsewhere in the "Idylls" in pure poetry, the blow falls; at length, in the concluding poem, Arthur passes to the isle of Avilion, and once more

Tennyson himself tells us that in this, his longest poem, he has meant to shadow "sense at war with soul," the struggle in the individual and in the race, between that body which links us with the brute and the soul which makes us[Pg 80] part of a spiritual order. But the mastery of the higher over the lower is only obtained through many seeming failures. Wounded and defeated, the King exclaims:

But he also half perceives the truth which it is the poet's purpose to suggest to us. It is short-sighted to expect the immediate sanctification of the race; if we are disheartened, striving to "work His will," it is because "we see not the close." It is impossible that Arthur's work should end in failure—departing, he declares, "I pass, but shall not die," and when his grievous wound is healed, he will return. The Idylls of the King is thus the epic of evolution in application to the progress of human society. In it the teachings of "In Memoriam" assume a narrative form.

may be taken as a brief statement of its theme: and we read in it the belief in the tendency upward and an assurance of ultimate triumph:

As an interlude study which shall look back to the step we have just taken, and forward to the one we are about to take, let us test our growth in vitality in thinking and our need of intelligence in feeling, by voicing the following selections from didactic poetry. This form affords the best exercise in both activities because it makes a double appeal, and so a double demand upon the interpreter—an appeal through form to emotion, through aim to intelligence, and through message and atmosphere to both. I have chosen examples of this form in which the beauty and fascination of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, and the didactic nature of the thought do not seem to overbalance each other. If either should predominate you must, by your interpretation, strike the balance. In reading Robert Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra (from which[Pg 82] I shall quote but a few verses) you must carry to your auditor the full import of the philosophy, but in doing so you must not lose the beauty of the verse in which the poet has set it.

As a final step in this study which has for its aim an increase in your power to think vitally you are to choose from the "great heap of your knowledge" a subject about which you have sufficient understanding and enthusiasm to justify your discussion of it, and with this as a topic you are "to unmuzzle your wisdom" in the form of exposition or argumentation.

[Pg 87]

SECOND STUDY

TO ESTABLISH INTELLIGENCE IN FEELING

Art is in bondage in this country: its internal polity to the temperamental ideal; its external polity to the commercial ideal. Business and social life are in the same bondage. In music, in drama, in letters, in society, and in trade we permit personality to exploit itself for commercial purposes. The result is either chaotic or calculated expression on every side. When temperament seeks restraint in technique, and policy, whether business or social, seeks freedom in service, then shall we have that balanced expression in art, in society, and in trade which should proceed from the American personality and distinguish American life.

It may seem a far cry from a comment[Pg 88] upon American life to the subject of this second study—intelligence in feeling. Carry the idea of balanced expression from the introduction to the body of this exposition and the transition is not difficult to make.

"Wonderful technique, but no heart in her singing!" "Tremendous temperament, but no technique!" "She moves me profoundly, but oh, what a method!" "Her instrument is flawless, but she leaves me absolutely unmoved." Have you ever heard such comment, or made such comment, or been the subject of like comment? Diagnosis of the case, whether it be yours or another's, should be the same—lack of poise in expression, producing the undesirable effect upon the auditor of no emotion at all, or of unintelligent emotion. To determine just what we mean by intelligent emotion is our first problem for this study.

An experience I had in visiting a class in interpretation in a well-known school of oratory some years ago will illustrate the point. The selection for interpretation was[Pg 89] the prelude to the first part of The Vision of Sir Launfal.

The work was well under way when I entered the class-room. My entrance did not disturb the expression on the face of the student who was "up before" the class. A Malvolio smile was never more deliciously indelible. I thought at first my request to see some work in interpretation had been mistaken and I had been ushered into a class in facial gymnastics. Then I concluded that Mr. Lowell's poem was being employed as text for an exercise in smiling. Finally the awful truth came upon me that this teacher of interpretation was seriously attempting to secure from her pupils an expression which should suggest the spirit of the June day by asking them to assume the outward sign of joy known as smiling. The result was a ghastly series of facial contortions, which left at least one auditor's day as bleak as[Pg 90] the bleakest December. No intelligent feeling can be induced in interpreter or auditor by assuming the outward sign of an inward emotion. Some of you are recalling Mr. James's talk to students, on the reflex theory of emotion, and are being confused at this point. Let us stop and straighten out the confusion. Mr. James says:

"Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

"Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear."

The application of this principle to the reading of these lines would seem to justify[Pg 91] the method the teacher was pursuing. A smile is acceptedly the indication of happy emotion, the outward symbol of inward rejoicing or joy. The June day is full of joyful emotion,—the joy of awakening life. Applying Mr. James's theory, a legitimate way to induce the inward emotion would seem to be to assume the outward sign. But wait a moment. Let us look to our premises. Mr. Lanier, who sings of Nature with joyful understanding, cries in Sunrise:

Here is a great master of verbal expression whose inward joy finds its outward symbol not in a smile but in a tear. So you and I may respond to Mr. Lowell's "high tide of[Pg 92] the year" with smiles or with tears, with bowed head and closed eyes, or with eyes wide and head raised to meet the returning flood of life.

The effect upon me of the beauty of this day as Mr. Lowell has painted it, my personal emotional response is interesting psychology, but is not my concern as an interpreter. My own emotion and its personal response belong to my preparatory interpretative efforts in the study; but when the interpretation is ready for the audience-room, the emotion must be assimilated into the interpretative act and appear only as part of the illumination of the bit of life I am presenting.

The object of all great art, whether creative or interpretative, is not to exploit the personality of the artist, but to disclose at some point the personality of the very God himself, which is life. The revelation not of personal emotion but of universal life is the legitimate aim of all artistic effort.

Emotional response will accompany every vital mental conception. Abandonment to[Pg 93] that response is a legitimate and necessary part of full comprehension. But such abandonment, as I have said, belongs to our preparation for expression. Such abandonment must not be taken out of the study on to the stage. No temperamental expression along any line is fit for the public until it is controlled by technique, the technique which has been worked out by the masters of every art, not excluding the art of living.

It is not the effect of June upon you I want from your interpretation, it is the spirit of June itself. You must let me have my own emotion. Your emotional response was the result of your mental concept; mine, to be intelligent, must find the same impulse. If you impose your own emotion upon me mine will be merely an unintelligent reflection of yours. Taking as our ideal of the interpreter, the absolutely pure medium, bars out every manifestation which calls attention to the interpreter, and so interferes with the direct message.

"The natural form of expression which literature takes when it passes beyond the[Pg 94] normal powers of prose, is lyric poetry. When your feelings rise beyond a certain degree of stress you need the stronger beat and vibration of verse; to express the highest joy or the deepest grief poetry is your natural instrument." Again corroborated in our choice of direction in study by Mr. Gardiner, let us turn for "material" in the establishment of intelligence in emotion, to the most intensive type of the literature of feeling,—lyric poetry.

"Every now and then a man will come who will reduce to words—as Mr. Ruskin has done—some impression of vivid pleasure which has never been reduced to words before. It is only the great master who makes these advances; by studying his works you may perhaps come somewhere near the mark that he has set." This further word from the same paragraph should influence us to pause with Mr. Ruskin's poetry in prose form for a brief study on our way to the lyrics of Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats, a song from Shakespeare, and some few from the rare, more modern lyricists. I shall trust[Pg 95] you to this by-path under the guidance of The Forms of Prose Literature, where you will find passages from such masters of prose as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Stevenson—passages of surpassing lyric beauty which shall furnish models for your correlated study in Description.

SUGGESTIVE ANALYSIS

I have chosen for suggestive analysis of the lyric, Shelley's ode To a Skylark. I shall analyze in detail only the first five stanzas:

How shall we create an atmosphere for the reading of these verses! How can we catch the spirit of the creator of them! Shall we ever feel ready to voice that first line? Do you know Jules Breton's picture The Lark? Do you love it? Go, then, and stand before it, actually or in imagination. Let something of the spirit which informs that lovely child, lifting her eyes, her head in an attitude of listening rapture, steal over you. I know her power. I have tested it. In reading the "Skylark" with a class[Pg 97] of boys and girls from twelve to fourteen years old, I tried the experiment. I happened to have with me a beautiful copy of Breton's picture. I took it to the class-room. I wrote on the blackboard verses of the poem and hung the picture over them. The picture taught them to read the poem. The eyes of the girl became their teacher. I tried the experiment, with a private pupil in my studio, with a somewhat different result. I had told her to bring a copy of Shelley's poems to her next lesson. "Do you know the ode To a Skylark?" I asked. "Yes," she said. A copy of Breton's picture hung on the wall. "Before you open your book look at the picture," I said. She obeyed. Her expression, always radiant, deepened its radiance. "Do you know what the girl is doing?" I asked. "Oh yes, she is listening to the skylark." "How do you know?" "I have heard the skylark sing." "I never have," I said. "Read the poem to me." Now when I read the "Skylark," I see the girl in Jules Breton's picture, but I hear the voice of my English pupil.[Pg 98]

But if our apperceptive background fails to furnish a memory of the identical sight and sound for our inspiring, it at least holds bird notes and bird flights of great beauty, and we must call upon these for the impulse to voice Shelley's apostrophe:

An early autumn number of the Atlantic Monthly for 1907 published a poem by Mr. Ridgley Torrence, entitled The Lesser Children, or A Threnody at the Hunting Season. The poem is worthy, in sentiment and structure, to be set beside Shelley's ode. Let us compare with the picture which the eighteenth-century poet has given us this one from our modern song-writer:

[Pg 99]

Now let us study closely the first verse of the older poem. Spirit and voice must soar in the first line, "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!" The two words "hail" and "blithe" are swift-winged words. Let them fly. Give them their wings. Let them do all they are intended to do. The rhythm of the whole poem is aspiring. Reverence the rhythm, but keep the thought floating clear above it in the second line, "Bird thou never wert." With the next two lines the tone must gather head to be poured forth in the last line, "In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." Let us make another comparative study. Set on the other side of this picture Lowell's description of the "little bird" in his prologue to Sir Launfal's vision:

[Pg 100]

The second verse of the "Skylark" demands a still higher flight of imagination and tone. Let us try it.

Again all the words rise and float. Sing them over: higher, higher, springest, fire, wingest, singing, soar, soaring, singest. The reader must feel himself poised for flight in every word of the first three verses. Why does the poet say cloud of fire? What is the color of the skylark? And now the tone, which has been of a radiant hue through these three verses, must soften a little in the first three lines of the next verse—

glow gold again in the last three lines[Pg 101]—

and become the white of an incandescent light in the next verse—

Do you not see that the secret of its beauty lies, for vocal interpretation, in the color of tone and in the inflection of the words? Say "unseen," dwelling on the second syllable; "shrill delight," directing shrill over the head of delight; "keen," making it cleave the air like an arrow; "silver sphere," suggesting a moonlit path across water; "intense" and "narrows," letting the tone recede into the "white dawn"; "see," with a vanishing stress; and "feel," with a deepening note carried to the end. So we might go on through the twenty-one stanzas which make up the poem.[Pg 102]

Please analyze undirected the next two verses.

In reading the first lines of the next four verses we must avoid monotony.

Vary, if only for variety, the pitch on which you begin each of these first lines. Let the first three words of the eighth verse, "like a poet," ascend in pitch. Keep the voice level in the first line of the ninth verse, "like a high-born maiden." Let the pitch fall in the first words of the tenth stanza, "like a glowworm golden." And again keep the tone level on the first line of the next stanza, "like a rose embower'd." I leave to you the analysis of the rest of the poem:

SELECTIONS FOR INTERPRETATION

The following selections from lyric poetry are designed to give the voice exercise in the expression of varied emotions.[Pg 106]

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

Besides the rivers Arve and Arveiron, which have their sources in the foot of Mont Blanc, five conspicuous torrents rush down its sides; and within a few paces of the Glaciers, the Gentiana Major grows in im[Pg 119]mense numbers, with its "flowers of loveliest blue."

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

Mr. Gilbert Chesterton tells us that the real Robert Browning of literary history arrived with the Dramatic Lyrics. "In Dramatic Lyrics," says Mr. Chesterton, "Browning discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else—the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely original; he had discovered a new field of poetry,[Pg 128] and in the center of that field he had found himself." The form is new, but it obeys the fundamental law of lyric poetry, and so in our study belongs to this chapter. The new element which the word "dramatic" suggests makes a new and a somewhat broader demand upon the interpreter; therefore I have chosen this group of Dramatic Lyrics from Browning as the material for your final study of this form:

That "the poet is born, not made," is more and more an undisputed fact in every literary age. But many a birthright of poetic power has been saved from sale for a mess of pottage by a wisely ordered meeting of the young bard, while his gift was still latent, with the masters of lyric expression.

Such an introduction is the object of this study, so far as it can embrace in its aim the ends of both forms of expression,—interpretation and composition. There is no thought of inducing even an aspirant to the poetical purple, much less a Shelley or a Keats or an Alice Brown, through this brief dwelling with their immortal songs; but if this intensive interpretative study of the highest lyric expression does not result in a new sense of word values, a new sensitiveness to the music of the English language, out of which the songs of America must be made, then the study will have failed in its purpose toward you. If from this suggestive analysis of Shelley's "Skylark" you receive no impulse to use words with a new delight in the[Pg 133] fitting of sound to sense, a new reverence for their harmonious arrangement to suggest and sustain an atmosphere; if, in short, your vocabulary is not enriched and your choice of words clarified through this study, then your new acquaintance with lyric expression will have been in vain. And, finally, if some one of you at least is not impelled by these excursions into the world of song to use his enriched vocabulary in an attempt to create a bit of lyric description in prose or verse, then the author of this study, and the teacher under whose direction it is made, must admit a failure to reach with the pupil the ultimate aim of such interpretative effort.

Let us make the test. As a final problem of this study I shall ask you to let your emotion find expression—lyric expression—in a bit of prose description. Don't be afraid! Use your vocabulary! Take as a subject: the bit of earth and sky you have secretly worshiped; the bird song or flight which has charmed your day; the memory of some illumined moment; the effect of any[Pg 134] one of these lyrics upon you. Don't be afraid! And remember it is to be literature of feeling rather than thought; description, not exposition.

[Pg 135]

THIRD STUDY

TO DEVELOP THE WHIMSICAL SENSE

Addressing the Gentle Reader in deliciously whimsical vein on the Mission of Humor, Mr. Samuel Arthur Crothers declares: "Were I appointed by the school board to consider the applicants for teachers' certificates, after they had passed the examinations in the arts and sciences, I should subject them to a more rigid test. I should hand each candidate Lamb's essays on 'The Old and New Schoolmaster' and on 'Imperfect Sympathies.' I should make him read them to himself, while I sat by and watched. If his countenance never relaxed, as if he were inwardly saying, 'That's so,' I should withhold the certificate. I should not consider him a fit person to have charge of innocent youth." We can readily see from this e[Pg 136]xtract that we need not go back to the early part of the last century to find material for our test of this sovereign quality, a sense of humor. Mr. Crothers himself, the Charles Lamb of our American Letters to-day, shall furnish our subject-matter. Bring your Gentle Reader, or The Pardoner's Wallet, or the essays collected with the Christmas Sermon, to class to-morrow. If these volumes are not in your personal library, your library is sadly lacking. Read "The Honorable Points of Ignorance," "How to Know the Fallacies," or "Conscience Concerning Witchcraft." If any one of these fails to disclose in you the mental alertness and power of discrimination which their author considers to be requisite characteristics of a true sense of humor, then you are sadly lacking in that coveted quality of mind and heart, and it behooves us to make an attempt to supply these deficiencies.

Can a sense of humor be cultivated, and if it can be cultivated, is it safe to do so? some one asks—some one who has suffered at the hands of a clever jester perhaps. By way[Pg 137] of arriving at an answer, let us examine a little further the category of qualities which Mr. Crothers considers requisite to true humor.

We have already noted mental alertness and power of discrimination. There can be no question as to the desirability or feasibility of developing these characteristics, since such development belongs to the fundamental effort of education. But these are but two characteristics of the quality we are considering, and not the distinguishing ones. "Humor," continues the category, "is the frank enjoyment of the imperfect." Now we scent a danger! For if, as Mr. Crothers admits, "artistic sensibility finds satisfaction only in the perfect," and since, as we all admit, artistic sensibility is an end in education devoutly to be desired, then is not a cultivation of the "frank enjoyment of the imperfect," oh dear and gentle humorist, a dangerous indulgence? The conclusive answer comes: "One may have learned to enjoy the sublime, the beautiful, the useful, the orderly, but he has missed something if he has not also learned to enjoy the incon[Pg 138]gruous, the illusive, and the unexpected." It is a conclusive reply, because we know that it is just as essential to achievement in the finest of the Fine Arts,—the art of living, as in every other form of Art, to recognize that the inrush of discord is for the final issue of harmony; that only through our ability to recognize illusion shall we come to know reality; that only through sensitiveness to the incongruous shall we develop a true sense of the fitness of things; that only frank enjoyment can disarm imperfection and find satisfaction in the perfect. So let us not hesitate to do all we can to cultivate a quality which Thackeray defines as a mixture of love and wit; to which Erasmus ascribes such desirable characteristics as good temper and insight into human nature; and for one grade of which, in addition to all its other qualities, Mr. Crothers claims "that it can proceed only from a mind free from any taint of morbidness."

If then we conclude that it is not only safe, but possible and desirable, to cultivate a sense of humor, how shall we set about it? To[Pg 139] answer you, as to one way at least, and that a way of interpretation, Mr. Crothers "is left alive," not only to furnish new material for the exercise of the sense, but to point a gently reminding finger toward the immortal sources of good humor,—"Chaucer and Cervantes and Montaigne; Shakespeare and Bacon and Fielding and Addison; Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, and Walter Scott, and in our own country, Irving and Dr. Holmes and James Russell Lowell." Whatever period of time your schedule grants to this phase of the work should be dedicated to a closer acquaintance with the flavor and atmosphere of these great-hearted humorists in their most genial moments. Let us also heed Mr. Crothers' warning against the humor of the Dean Swifts which "would be so irresistible were it not bad humor." Let us avoid more intimate acquaintance with the broad variety furnished by the Mark Twains and Mr. Dooleys, which may be legitimately classed as "good humor," but which is so obvious as to be little conducive to that mental alertness and power of discrimination which we[Pg 140] aim to acquire through this study. Instead, let us seek the gracious company of William Dean Howells in the whimsical mood he so often induces.

Accepting, then, as a distinguishing characteristic of the humor we desire to cultivate, ability to enjoy the incongruous, the illusive, and the unexpected, let us look to a master maker of these conditions for class-room guidance in this effort. I suppose Mr. Lewis Carroll has done more to develop this distinguishing characteristic than any other contributor to our Letters. So we shall go on an excursion with his Alice into the Wonderland he made for her. If her frank enjoyment and free acceptance of the incongruous and the unexpected does not prove infectious, we must be forever written down among those who could not understand Peter Pan. We shall read and enjoy a chapter or two of Alice together in class, but for suggestive analysis along interpretative lines Heaven forbid that I should lay violent hands on her text. No one can teach you to interpret your Alice save Alice herself. You may[Pg 141] walk with her, talk with her, dwindle and grow with her, join her adventures in any way she will permit, but you may not analyze nor dissect her. You may learn to interpret her only by living with her and loving her.

Now Æsop is another matter. However long you may live with him, however much you may love his fables, there is a trick of interpretation to be learned in voicing his philosophy which will develop the whimsical side of your sense of humor and counteract the insistent moral tone attached to every fable.

SUGGESTIVE ANALYSIS

The danger in handling a fable does not lie, as the interpreter seems so often to think, in adopting too serious a tone. All the literature of pure fancy, from the humorous essays of Bacon through the Arabian Nights to the nonsensical rhymes of Lear, must be treated with great gravity of tone and temper by the interpreter. It is not levity, but only whimsicality of temperament, I demand from one who would read from this particu[Pg 142]lar lore to me. I want my whimsical friend to interpret my Chaucer and Crothers, Peter Pan and the Pied Piper, Hans Christian Andersen, Carroll, and Lear, and all the rest of the genial host who minister to my most precious sense of nonsense. And, perhaps, most of all, it is he (the whimsical friend) who must read fables to me, for a fable, the dictionary tells us, is "a story in which, by the imagined dealings of men with animals or mere things, or by the supposed doings of these alone, useful lessons are taught." Now a moral "rubbed in" is like an overdose of certain kinds of medicine, where a little cures, too much kills. It is the presence of the lesson which the whimsical tone alone can offset. The whimsical tone never falls into the monotone. Whimsicality always seeks variety of emphasis and movement. Let us apply this to the reading of the fable called

How shall we avoid the monotony of the lines beginning "Then he took another pebble and dropped it into the pitcher"? Note that this line is followed by one in which but two words are changed, and then by a line with but one change, and then by three lines with no change at all. Our only hope lies in a variation of emphasis and movement—a whimsical variation. Try it! Give "another" the particular stress in reading the[Pg 144] first of these lines. Pause at the close of the line as if to study the effect of the pebble. In the next line "that," of course, takes the emphasis. Pause before the word and give it a salient stress. The movement of the voice through these two lines has been deliberate. On the next line hasten it a little, and make the pause at the close of the line shorter. With the fourth line let the tone settle down to work. Give each of the first five words equal stress. With the fifth and last line let us feel that you may "go on forever," and surprise us with a very short pause and a joyful stress upon "at last, at last," and don't fail to let the enthusiasm of your tone give us the full sense of the relief which comes with the mounting of the water, and the delight in the conclusion—"he was able to quench his thirst and save his life." And now, most whimsically, let us voice the moral, "Little by little does the trick."

SELECTIONS FOR INTERPRETATION

And, now, here is Alice herself to play with a little. Go fearlessly into her Wonderland and let her teach you "how to meet the illusive, the incongruous, and the unexpected." Let her minister to your ability to enjoy the imperfect. Let her develop your sense of humor. If she cannot do so no one can.

[Pg 166]

We must not deny to humor and fancy the opportunity for creative effort offered to other faculties in our previous studies. What form shall the effort take: fable, fairy tale, a whimsical play of fancy in essay, or merely a nonsense rhyme? I think we must bar the limerick from our serious creative efforts in the study. You may engage as a class in an extemporaneous contest in the making of this infectious form of verse if you like.

Meanwhile, there is still another class-room test of humor which should be made,—the test of the clever anecdote. There is nothing which so effectually discloses the quality of your sense of humor as your attitude toward so-called funny stories. Judgment in such a case will rest upon three points: What you think is "funny" enough to tell; when you judge it "apropos" to tell; and the manner of the telling. Three warnings are in order at this point. If you find that you must preface your anecdote with the question too often heard, "Do you think you can stand this story?—it really is clever," in the name of clean humor, don't[Pg 167] tell it! If you find you must introduce your anecdote with the remark, "Apropos of nothing," or "This is not apropos, but"—in the name of "sulphitic" humor, don't tell it; finally, if you don't know how to tell it, in the name of any and all humor, don't tell it.

With these cautions in mind, I shall ask you to bring to class to-morrow your best three "funny stories." Conflicting choice is not likely to have appropriated all three of your favorite anecdotes. Should you find that it has done so, never mind. Your taste, though it coincides with another's, can be quite as well questioned or commended; and the manner of your telling will be subjected to trial by comparison, which, if not always comfortable, is always helpful (when met in the right spirit).

Remember, the serious creative work you are to produce is to take the form of a fable, fairy story, or humorous essay.

[Pg 168]

FOURTH STUDY

TO DEVELOP IMAGINATIVE VIGOR

In one of the great manufacturing towns of the Northwest there are some twenty-five thousand girls employed in factories. The city permits conditions of work hostile to the physical life of these girls. Civic reform is trying to control these conditions. In time it doubtless will succeed in doing so; meanwhile it makes efforts in other directions. It establishes working girls' clubs. A class in literature in one of these clubs enlisted the services of a comprehending young teacher, who kept the girls interested for more than two years. A little girl from a bag factory entered this class. She came to every meeting of the first year. She did not join in the discussions nor ask questions nor evince unusual intelligence or enjoyment, but she[Pg 169] came every night. The class began its second year. The little girl from the bag factory was the first to enroll. The teacher could not cover the surprise in her question, "Are you coming into the class again?" The girl's breathless "Oh yes" sent her to investigate the case. She went to the factory. She found the child standing at a bench folding bags. Eight hours a day she folded bags. A swing back on her right foot with the stuff of which the bag was made grasped in her hands—a swing forward, and her hands brought the edges of the stuff together evenly. Over and over a thousand times the single motion repeated made up the girl's day. "It used to make me tired," she said, simply. "But it doesn't any more?" "No, because now I forget what I am doing sometimes. I have my book, you see. They let me fasten it here." There it was—a paper copy of Shelley's poems. The print was good; the teacher had seen to that. She had observed that factory girls' eyes are not always very strong. The book was fastened to the front of the desk. The child could catch a line[Pg 170] from time to time without interrupting her bag-folding. "But I know most of the poems we have studied in class by heart." So she had to recall but a line, and then off she would go through the windows of the stifling factory into the open fields on the wings of her imagination. She was a swift, sure, little workman; her eye watched the stuff before her and measured it truly; her hands obeyed her eye, did her work efficiently, and "kept her job." But the eye of her imagination had been opened in the literature class and kept her soul alive in spite "of her job." This is a true story. It has significance for you and me.

If through the use of her imagination a little factory girl can escape from the monotony of bag-folding, and find freedom and joy in the lyric world Shelley has created, what limit need be set to our emancipation through the development of this faculty?

But emancipation is but one result of such development. Listen to David as he stands with his harp before the King in Browning's story of Saul. Already his song has released[Pg 171] the monarch from the depths of his great despair, but now comes the boy's cry:

So the imagination of the young shepherd boy had not only disregarded the limits of his actual environment and escaped in fancy to the great world beyond, but so vividly had he realized that world through his imagination that his sympathies had been made broad to comprehend a monarch's need and his song potent to meet it. Experience alone gives comprehension. We are prone to think that experience is limited by our actual horizon. We need to know that experience has no limit save that which is set by the limit of our imaginative insight. No door of life is closed to the imaginative mind and heart. The world is its playground to wander in at will. Experience, and thorough experience, comprehension of life is at the command of imagination.

Life can be intelligently apprehended on the material plane through trained senses. Life can be vividly realized on the spirit's plane only through a trained imagination. It is only vivid realization of life at every point which makes it worth living. You may see the lark long after he is lost to my[Pg 173] duller eye in our common sky, you may hear the song when my less keen ear no longer catches a faintest thread of melody; but unless the eye and ear of your imagination match mine you shall not vividly realize flight or song, and so I shall follow both long after they are lost to you. Your skylark will pass with the moment of his rapturous song-flight, while mine shall remain forever a spirit of joy to be recalled at will for my spirit's refreshing.

Looking then upon imagination as a key to that comprehension of life which clarifies and constitutes its worth, let us eagerly enter upon the cultivation of such power. We have left this question of imaginative development as a definite exercise to a fifth place in our interpretative study, not because it is less vital to effective expression than the first four subjects we have considered, but because balanced expression is our aim, and imagination once given free play may easily impair that harmonious development of all our faculties which makes for balance in expression. Of course there is no[Pg 174] phase of the study of interpretation which, when rightly conducted, does not indirectly or directly involve the training of the imagination. On the other hand, training of the imagination wisely conducted may comprehend and carry on development along all other lines of evolution in expression. A sensitive imagination trained and controlled to its highest power of apprehension must make for sympathy and intelligence in thought and feeling, keep humor sane, and give direction to purpose. But imaginative vigor set free to the uses of thought and emotion already disciplined, to conscious purpose and to good humor, becomes a safe master of expressive living.

The material through which we are to exercise the imagination and develop imaginative vigor is the narrative form of discourse. Narration is successful when it records or has the effect of recording actual experience. A story (according to the authority we so often invoke,—Mr. Gardiner), "whether it be as simple as those of the Book of Genesis or as complex as Mr. James[Pg 175] or Mr. Meredith, must carry the effect of the concreteness, and, as it were, the solidity of life." The plot, the characters, the setting of a story which is to live, must have the vividness of real experience. This does not mean that the creator of the story must have actually experienced the plot, the people, and the pictures which together make up his tale—they may be the product of actual experience or of imagination—but it does mean that while he is putting these elements together and creating his narrative he must realize as though it were actual experience the incident of his plot with the characters and in the atmosphere of his creation. Such realization can only come through vivid imagination.

Exactly the same demand is made upon the imagination of the interpreter. When you retell the tale of a master creator of stories your interpretation will be convincing, exactly as was his creation,—through the lucid play of a vivid imagination. You must make me feel that I am in the presence of incidents, characters, pictures which you[Pg 176] yourself have experienced. Nay, more, you must make me feel that I myself am actually meeting these people, seeing these pictures, taking part in these incidents, as you relive for me in imagination at the moment of your interpretation the tale you are retelling to me.

SUGGESTIVE ANALYSIS

We shall use for suggestive analysis in this study not a complete specimen of narration, but several examples illustrating two of the three elements necessary to the personnel of a good story. These three recognized elements are the setting or situation which the pictures compose, the atmosphere which the characters create, and the plot or the action in which the characters engage. We shall leave the question of the plot to class work upon the selections from epic poetry to be considered later in this study.

Suppose we test our imaginations in the analysis of a situation or setting before we attempt a character study. Remember the situation is to be realized through imagina[Pg 177]tion as though it were actual experience. It is to be recreated. Give your imagination full play in this opening chapter of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. Let us read the first sentence:

Can you see and feel the elements of this picture! You have never experienced a tide river? Never mind! There is enough in the picture which is familiar to your actual senses through experience to brace your imagination for a grasp of the unfamiliar elements. The wide plain, the river hurrying between green banks—no apperceptive background fails thus far in the picture. What do we mean by apperceptive background? Let us investigate for a moment the psychology involved in the art of "making pictures." Let us get back of this word-picture. Rather let us stay this side of it. Look at the page before you not with the inner eye of your imagination, but with[Pg 178] the outer eye—the eye which is merely the organ of the sense of sight. Use your eye as a physical sense only. What does your eye carry to your mind when you look at this page? "Black letters grouped into words on a white surface." Did you get all these qualities at once? Yes, because you have seen other printed pages. Can you wipe out of your mind your knowledge of paper, print, and words? Can you imagine looking on such a page as this for the first time—perceiving it for the first time? If you can do this you will arrive at an understanding of apperceptive background through its elimination. You will realize, that all that is in the back of your mind, stored there by its previous acquaintance with other printed pages, makes up the apperceptive background by which you get a conception of this page. That conception comes first through your physical sense of sight. You may perceive also through touch, through feeling, for instance, the quality of paper. But all that you perceive in this initial process,—the stimulus which comes through the physical senses,[Pg 179] yields little to the complete conception as compared with the yield of your so-called mental senses. It is when you have fully apperceived the object that your conception is complete. It is when you have brought to bear upon this page (still looked upon, remember, merely as a printed page regardless of the matter behind the print) all your previous knowledge,—it is when you have observed that the paper is of good quality, that the page is closely set, that the print is excellent, that the margin is wide,—it is when you have compared it in memory with other pages in other books,—it is when you have not only perceived but apperceived it that you have really gained a conception of it. Of course, if you are a type-setter, or a proof-reader, or a printer, or an editor, or one connected with book-making in any least or last capacity, you will see a printed page quite lost to me, because your apperceptive background will outmatch mine as to paper, print, margin, and type. Good! I yield to you from type-setter to editor! But I challenge you to another contest over the[Pg 180] same page. Match with me now conceptions gained from another view of this same printed matter. Forget now type, paper, margins, and words—yes, forget the words as printed words—look back of them with me. What do you see now on the page? Still words? Look behind them at the pictures! Now, what do you see? "A wide plain, a river, green banks, the sea!" Yes, but I see more than that! And you do, too? "The river flows between green banks?" You have missed a point. How does she flow? Ah, yes, "She hurries on." Where? "To the sea!" Yes! And what meets her? "The tide!" Yes, the loving tide meets her! But how? "Rushing, he checks her passage in an impetuous embrace!" "You see all this!" you say. Yes, but do you hear it, smell it, taste it, feel it? Are you, too, caught up in that impetuous embrace? No? Ah, then your imagination is only half awake. No, it is not a question of background or actual experience now. There are enough familiar elements, as I have said before, to rouse your senses to vividly realize the picture as a[Pg 181] whole if you will not shut the door to such realization—that door is your imagination. Open it! Open it! Now I shall close the book and ask the class to do likewise, while you read once more to us these first sentences, paint for us this picture. Yes, now you are using your imagination to stimulate my senses and awake my imagination, but you must take heed. You must let me enjoy this picture as a whole. You must let me see, feel, taste, smell, all "in the same breath." Remember it is a picture. Don't disregard its perspective. Let all the elements rest in proper relation one to another and to the whole—as George Eliot placed them when she made the setting. The atmosphere is on the whole full of peace. The river "hurries," but the "plain is wide"; the tide "rushes," but it is a "loving tide," even though its embrace be "impetuous." Try it once more! Is there not the joy of creation in such interpretation? Let us read on! You read to us still.

If, in your interpretation of this passage, a sensitive imagination free, but controlled by vital thought and intelligent feeling, has found in trained instruments a lucid channel for expression, then, at the close of your reading, we, your auditors, shall find our arms really benumbed from pressing our elbows on the arms of our chairs as we dream with you that we are standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill—the Mill on the Floss, which we find on awakening is but the title and setting of a great author's great story.

We turn now to the second element of Narration—the characters. The setting we have just analyzed has introduced us to the main characters of a great story. Our interest is already awake to the little girl who has been watching with us the unresting wheel of the mill. Why not take Maggie Tulliver for our character study? To follow Maggie but a little way is to find Tom. This is well for us, because we need to study[Pg 186] both types. Let us read from the chapter called "Tom Comes Home" in the life of the boy and girl.

This text furnishes an easier exercise in interpretation, does it not? It does not require a great stretch of imagination to slip back five, ten, a dozen years to play with these children. But I cannot let you play with them. We want to meet and know them. The task for your imagination is not so simple as you think. It is called upon to [Pg 194]engage in character interpretation. You cannot be allowed to merely watch Maggie and Tom play, or even to play with them. You must use your imagination to get inside the minds, hearts, souls of this boy and girl and reveal them to us. You must relive this scene for us, becoming first Maggie and then Tom. This exercise of your imagination belongs in its final and complete stage to the next and last of our studies, and to work on the drama; so we shall not demand too much of you along this line here, and I shall confine my suggestive analysis of the text to the following questions:

Define the relation existing between this brother and sister indicated by this scene.

Is this scene typical of their relation?

Is it a relation likely to obtain throughout their lives? Why?

Define the dispositions of these two children by applying to each three adjectives.

Will Maggie or Tom make the sacrifices inevitable to such a relation?

Characterize as to inflection and tone-color Maggie's voice and Tom's. (If your use of this book has been intelligently di[Pg 195]rected you have already made a study of these two elements of a vocal vocabulary—inflection and tone-color.)

Answer these questions and re-read the scene.

SELECTIONS FOR INTERPRETATION

The following selections were chosen for this study with a double concern in the choice,—concern for the development of imaginative vigor in vocal interpretation; concern for the development of a sense of plot in narrative composition. The demand upon the interpreter of any of these poems, for sensitive progressive play of imagination, in carrying an auditor through a series of events up to a critical issue, cannot fail to develop, with imaginative vigor, a new sensitiveness of creative instinct to the third element in narrative,—action.

Your imagination given free play can no more carry the "good news" from Ghent to Aix on this wild ride, and in the feat fail to outgrow all its former dimensions, than could the heart of Roland's master remain untouched in actually performing the feat itself.[Pg 196]

Your imagination can no more follow the flight of the Formidable, steered by Hervé Riel, with the French fleet close following her guidance and "the English at her heels"[Pg 218] past the rocks and shoals of Grève to safe harbor at Solidor, and remain creatively unsensitive to the pulse of progressive action, than could the actual rescue of his country's squadron leave unmoved toward the "man who did the deed" the heart of her Captain Damfreville.

And when your imagination has not only carried you through such adventure, but stimulated my imagination to like activity, there is no limit to be set to the development which may result for us both.

Suggestive analysis can be of little help at this point, the work must be done in the class-room under direction.

To such stimulating exercise in the vocal interpretation of these poems of action, I leave you and your imagination. I shall hope to find difficulty in recognizing either of you at our next meeting. Like Mr. Rhoades's[11] pupil when he emerged from the Ninth book of Paradise Lost, you ought to have "outgrown all your present intellectual clothes" in the study of these stories in verse.

[Pg 219]

As further material for this study there is no better choice to be made than Tennyson's great quasi-epic, The Idylls of the King, from which but for lack of space we should have printed selections. The following suggestions for work in composition at this point are based on the Idylls.

Describe in your own words Camelot.

Write an imaginary scene between Gareth and his mother.

Tell the story of Elaine.

Make the Holy Grail into the form of a miracle play.

[Pg 220]

FIFTH STUDY

TO DEVELOP DRAMATIC INSTINCT

Our final study in interpretation has for its concern the development of dramatic instinct. The work just finished should have left no doubt in your mind as to the nature or value of this final step in the training, since it has anticipated both. Development of imaginative vigor should arouse a latent dramatic instinct and release histrionic power. The choice of place in these studies for this phase of the training was made to insure cumulative evolution resulting in balanced expression. As imagination needs to safeguard her freedom with sympathetic thought and intelligent emotion, so dramatic instinct needs the guidance of a vigorous but trained imagination. Dramatic instinct so directed should achieve skill in[Pg 221] interpreting drama and lead to distinction in the art of acting. The immediate evolution should be a clarified vision of life. Your final attainment from this theory should be distinction in the art of living.

With dramatic instinct capable of such achievement, let us proceed to exercise it in the material chosen for this study,—dramatic literature. The natural transition from story to play, from narrative to drama, is by way of the monologue. Some discussion with suggestive analysis of this form is necessary in order to impress upon you the difference between suggestive impersonation and actual impersonation or characterization, leading to a clear understanding of the difference between reading a play and acting in one; but the final evolution of interpretative power must come through acted drama,—through taking part in a play.

The dictionary in defining the monologue authorizes three forms: (1) when the actor tells a continuous story in which he is the chief character, referring to the others as absent; (2) when he assumes the voice or[Pg 222] manner of several characters successively; (3) more recently, when he implies that the others are present, leading the audience to imagine what they say by his replies. Browning created this more recent form, which is the most vital of the three. I have chosen for your study of the monologue examples from Browning alone. To interpret effectively any one of the Browning monologues will call into play every element of power in voice and expression which you have gained in your study of previous forms. You must think vividly, feel intelligently, realize and suggest an atmosphere, sustain a situation, and keep the beauty of the poetic form. And you must do all this in the person of another. The new demand which the monologue makes is impersonation. Let us see just what we mean by impersonation. It is the art of identifying one's self with the character to be portrayed. It is the art of losing one's self in the character and the situation the dramatist has created. This means that the spirit of the character must take possession of the impersonator, and in[Pg 223]form his every thought and feeling, and so his every motion and tone. Remember, it is the spirit of the character that must determine the nature of the tone and gesture. The great danger in entering upon the study of impersonation lies in emphasizing the outward manifestation instead of the inward spirit of the character to be portrayed. If you really sense the soul, mind, heart quality of the character you are to present, and have made your voice and body free agents for the manifestation of those qualities, your impersonation will be convincing. If the spirit of the Patriot or Andrea del Sarto or Fra Lippo Lippi or Pompilia or Caponsacchi or Guido obsesses you, the outward manifestation will take care of itself—always provided your instruments are responsive. Don't begin with the outward manifestation. Don't say I think this man would frown a great deal, or fold his arms over his breast, or use an eyeglass, or strut, or stoop, or do any one of a hundred things which, if repeated a half-dozen times during an impersonation, may become a mannerism and get between[Pg 224] the audience and the spirit of the character. When you are studying a character for the purpose of impersonation determine first to what type it belongs. Then study that type, wherever you are. Daily life becomes your teacher and studio. When you enter upon this art there are no longer dull moments in railroad stations or trains, in shops or in the social whirl. Everywhere and always you are the student seeking to know and understand types of people better, that you may use your knowledge in presenting to an audience an individual. When you have caught the spirit of the individual you must realize the situation out of which this particular individual speaks.

Let us make a special study of the Tale (Browning's epilogue to The Two Poets of Croisic). It is perhaps the most exquisite of the poet's creations in this field. The situation reveals a young girl recalling to her poet lover an old Greek tale he had once told her. There is a suggestion from some critics that Browning has drawn his wife in this portrait, and through it pays his tribute to her.[Pg 225] This immediately affords us a clue to the type of character to which the speaker belongs. We cannot hope (nor do we wish) to impersonate Mrs. Browning, but a knowledge of Mrs. Browning and her relation to her poet lover, gained through a study of her Letters and Sonnets, will lead us more quickly to a comprehension of the speaker and situation in the Tale.

Obsessed by the spirit of the character and fully realizing the situation, our next step is, in imagination, to set the stage. This is an important point in presenting a monologue. The impersonator must have a clear idea of his position on his imaginary stage relative to his imaginary interlocutor. But he must remember that imaginary stage-setting admits of only delicately suggestive use. This is true of the handling of a monologue at every point. It must be suggestive. The actor carries to completion the action which the monologuist suggests. The art of interpreting a monologue depends upon the discrimination of the impersonator in drawing his line between suggestion and actualization[Pg 226] in gesture. The business of the monologuist is to make an appeal to the imagination of the audience so vivid that the imagination of the audience can actualize the suggestion. And the illusion is complete. What are the relative positions of the girl and her lover in the Tale? There is nothing in the lines to make our choice arbitrary. It is only important that we determine a relation and keep it consistently throughout the reading. Here is a possible "setting." They are in the poet's study; he is working at his desk; she is sitting in a great chair before the fire, a book in her hand, which she does not read; she is gazing into the flames. She begins dreamily, more to herself than to him—"What a pretty tale you told me." At what point does her tone lose its reflective quality and become more personal? Where does she turn to him? How do we know that he leaves his chair and comes over to sit on the arm of her chair? What calls him to her? What two qualities of feeling run through her mood and determine the color of her tone and the character of her move[Pg 227]ments. If your study of Mrs. Browning has been intelligent, this interplay of the whimsical and serious in her nature cannot have escaped you, and it will illumine now your impersonation of this girl. It is the secret of the peculiar charm of this creation. The story she tells is an old and well-known one. It is the manner of the telling through which we come in touch with an exquisite woman's soul that holds us spellbound. Unless the interpreter catches this secret and reveals it to his audience, he will miss the distinctive feature of the monologue and reduce it to a narrative poem.

Our last form for interpretative vocal study is the play. We shall discover that the presentation of the play makes the same demands upon the interpreter as the monologue with the new element of transition. We are still studying the monologue, because we are to read, not act, the play. It is still suggestive, not actualized impersonation. But instead of one character to suggestively set forth we have two, three, a dozen to present. The transition from character to character becomes our one new problem. As we have said before, in making the transition from character to character, voice, mind, and body must be so volatile that the action of the play shall not be interrupted. I know of no[Pg 237] better way to enter upon the study of a play for reading (or acting) than to treat each character as the speaker in a monologue of the Browning type. The danger in transition from character to character centers in the instant's pause when one speaker yields to another. The unskilful reader loses both characters at this point and becomes conscious of himself; the action of the play stops; and the illusion of scene and situation is lost. The great reader of the play (in that instant's pause), as he utters the last word of one character, becomes the interlocutor listening to the words which he as the other character has just uttered. In that instant he must show the effect of the speech he has just uttered upon the character he has just become. Which is the greater art: to read a play, or to act in it?

Use for your study of the play the Shakespearian drama. Begin with scenes from As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice; but begin with actualized impersonation of the characters. No discussion more! No analysis more! The play—the "play's the[Pg 238] thing" through which to complete this evolution in Vocal Expression.

A FINAL WORD ON INTERPRETATION

Looking back over these studies in interpretation, let us review in true scholastic fashion the main points thus far discovered. We say looking back, but as far as the arrangement of our text goes this review involves looking forward too. The division of the book into three parts is purely a matter of a necessary separation in discussing the three activities involved in vocal expression. If your use of this book has been intelligent, each study in interpretation has revealed your need to strengthen your vocal vocabulary or to perfect your vocal technique, and you have turned at once for the required help to the studies in Part II and the exercises in Part III.

Omitting a review of the preliminary plunge, which was intended to "show up" all your peculiar powers and all your especial needs at once, and so furnish a basis for the main work, let us see what happened in the[Pg 239] five following studies. It will simplify our statement in each case to base the analysis of our discoveries on the form of literature employed in each study.

You found then (or ought to have found) in Study One: that the essay and didactic poem make a fundamental appeal to the mind; that the demand upon the interpreter of this form is for clear, concise thinking; that your need is for a command of unerring emphasis and purposeful inflection. You turned to the studies in pause, change of pitch, and inflection to meet that need. Returning to the main study, you tested your vocal skill on the essay to find the essay so read might persuade an auditor to some readjustment of his ideas, values, discriminations, or strengthen him in convictions already held.

Study Two revealed that in lyric poetry the primary appeal is to emotion; that its vocal demand upon the interpreter is for a mastery of tone-color, a sense of rhythm, and the power to suggest a background of musical sound. Having supplied as far as possible[Pg 240] any lack in your vocabulary or technique by supplementary work in Parts II and III, returning you found that a lyric rightly read could release in the auditor pity, forgiveness, forbearance, endurance, understanding, love.

The Third Study should have convinced you that a sense of good humor is a safe and desirable thing to cultivate; that the whimsical tone in interpretation will leaven almost any lump of sheer learning and counteract a serious overdose of sentiment; that fable, fairy tale, and nonsense rhyme depend too for successful interpretation upon this element of whimsicality in the reader; that the secret of the whimsical element in vocal expression lies in a use of pause and inflection.

Study Four should have discovered to you that the three elements of the short story can only be realized through imagination; that imaginative vigor dealing with action requires sustained vitality of tone. Such discovery should have resulted in many hours of work on the exercises for support and freedom of tone.[Pg 241]

When you reached the Fifth and last Study, the work in monologue and drama should have easily awakened your dramatic instinct and quickly released your histrionic power. You should have learned through monologue and drama to understand various types of persons; to see more clearly the relations of men and events; to more intelligently comprehend life itself.

Finally, we have discovered that to become a true interpreter of literature means to become a lucid channel for the message of an author to the mind of an auditor,—nay, that it means more than that. In final evolution the interpreter of literature becomes a revealer of life. The final effect of literature worth interpreting is to enlarge the world's knowledge of life's beauty, truth, or power. Your final concern as an interpreter is to let life find through you uninterrupted revelation on one of these planes; to become a pure medium between the beauty, truth, and power of life and the seeking soul. The author need not be considered in this final analysis, because you, the interpreter, first[Pg 242] became identified with the author, and then both of you are lost in the vision, save only as either personality may enlarge or clarify the revelation.

A personal experience may help you to realize this ideal of the interpreter's art.

With a sense of protest, I had presented a play I loved to an audience with which I felt little sympathy. By chance there was in that audience one of our best teachers and critics. After my recital I sought his criticism. Beginning, as the true critic always should, with a noting of some point of power, he said, "I congratulate you upon your illumined moments, but—they are too infrequent. You must multiply them." "What do you mean by my illumined moments?" I asked. "The moments when you do not get between your audience and the thought you are uttering—the moments when you become a revealer of life to them. Your attitude toward your audience is not sustained in the simplicity and clearness of some of its moments. You suddenly ring down the curtain in the middle of the scene. That[Pg 243] spoils the scene, you know. You seem to feel a revolt against the giving of your confidence to the audience, and thereupon you immediately shut them away. You become conscious of yourself, and we, the audience, lose the vision and become conscious of you and the way you are reading or reciting or acting." Then he added, "Adelaide Neilson, at first, had illumined moments in her playing of Juliet, but finally her impersonation became one piece of illumination." That delightful teacher, reader, and critic, the late Mr. Howard Ticknor, suggested the same ideal in comparing a Juliet of to-day with Miss Neilson's Juliet. "When Miss —— is on the balcony," he said, "you hear all around you: 'How lovely she looks!' 'Isn't that robe dear?' 'How beautiful her voice is!' When Miss Neilson lived that little minute, a breathless people prayed with Juliet, 'I would not for the world they found thee here,' and sighed with Romeo—'O blessed, blessed night! I am afeard, being in night, all this is but a dream.'" Miss Neilson was Juliet. They, the audience, lived with these lovers[Pg 244] one hour of lyric rapture, and could never again be quite so commonplace in their attitude toward the "deathless passion." They may not now remember Adelaide Neilson, but they remember that story, and forever carry a new vision of life and love, because the actress lost herself in the life of the play. She did not exploit her personality and let it stand between the audience and the drama. When some one says to you—the reader or actress, "I shall never forget the way you raised your eyebrow at that point," don't stop to reply, but fly to your study and read the lines "at that point" over and over, with level brows, until you understand the meaning, and can express the thought so effectively by a lift of your voice that you no longer need the help of your eyebrow. Every gesture, every tone, must call attention, not to itself, but to the hidden meaning of the author. It must illumine the text of the character portrayed. That is it: if we would be artists (and there is not one among us who would not be an artist) we must cease to put our little selves[Pg 245] in front of our messages. In the home, in the office, in the houses of our friends, in the school-room, on the platform, on the stage, let us be simple, natural, sincere. Let us lay aside our mannerisms. Let us seek to know and reveal life. Then shall we be remembered—not, for a queer way of combing our hair, or lifting our eyes, or using our hands, or shrugging our shoulders, but for some revelation of truth or of beauty which we have brought to a community.

[Pg 246]

[Pg 247]

PART II

STUDIES IN VOCAL EXPRESSION

[Pg 248]

[Pg 249]

STUDIES IN VOCAL EXPRESSION

THE VOCAL VOCABULARY

There is a theory that it is dangerous to go beyond the mere freeing of the instrument in either vocal or physical training. In accordance with this theory I was advised by a well-known actress to confine my study for the stage, so far as the vocal and pantomimic preparation was concerned, to singing, dancing, and fencing. "Get your voice and body under control," she said. "Make them free, but don't connect shades of thought and emotion with definite tones of the voice or movements of the body; don't meddle with Delsarte or elocution." This advice seemed good at the time. It still seems to me that it ought to be the right method. But I have grown to distrust it. One of the chief sources of my distrust has been the effect of the[Pg 250] theory upon the art of the actress who gave the advice. She is perhaps the most graceful woman on the stage to-day, and her voice is pure music. But her gestures and tones fail in lucidity; they fail to illumine the text of the part she essays to interpret. One grows suddenly impatient of the meaningless grace of her movements, the meaningless music of her voice. One longs for a swift—if studied—stride across the stage in anger instead of the unstudied grace of her glide in swirling-robed protest. One longs to hear a staccato declaration of intention instead of the cadenced music of a voice guiltless of intention. No! After the body has been made a free and responsive agent, a mastery of certain fundamental laws, a mastery of certain principles of gesture in accordance with the dictates of thought and emotion, is necessary to its further perfecting as a vivid, powerful, and true agent of personality. The action must be suited to the word, the word to the action, through a study of the laws governing expression in action.

So with the voice: to become not only a[Pg 251] free instrument, but a beautiful and powerful means of expression and communication it must learn to recognize and obey certain fundamental laws governing its modulations. A master of verbal expression is distinguished by his vast vocabulary of words, and his skill and discrimination in its use. A master of vocal expression must acquire what we may call a vocal vocabulary, consisting of changes of pitch, varieties of inflection and variations in tone color, and must know how to use these elements with skill and discrimination. Our need for such a vocabulary was discovered to us at every step of the work in interpretation. The suggestions and exercises of the following studies aim to supplement the work in interpretation by meeting that need. Before making a detailed study of each element of this vocal vocabulary let us make a quick study with the four elements in mind. Remember, in the last preliminary exercise, as in the final complete interpretative endeavor, the material we employ is to be chosen from real literature. It is to be worth interpreting whether it be a[Pg 252] single line or phrase or a complete poetical drama. We have agreed to consider literature as real literature, and so worth our interpretative efforts, when it possesses one or combines all of the three qualities,—beauty, truth, and power.

This passage from Emerson's Friendship surely meets that requirement. It is truth beautifully and powerfully expressed. It will serve.

Having read this passage cursorily (as is the custom in reading to one's self to-day), will you now study it for a moment very closely. Now, once more, please, read it silently, noting the action of your mind as you read. ("Watch its pulsations," Dr. Curry would say.) And now, aloud, although without an auditor, read it, this time noting the effect of the action of the mind upon your voice. Did its pitch change? Where and why? How did you inflect the words "wine[Pg 253] and dreams"? How did the inflection of these words differ from that of the last six words, "tough fiber of the human heart," with which they are contrasted in thought? Did your tone change color at any point? Why? Where? But now, once more, let us approach the passage, this time with a different intention. Let us study it with the idea of interpreting it for another mind. Now the method of attack is very different. Not that it ought to be different. But it is. Intense concentration ought to characterize all our reading, whether its object be to acquire knowledge or pleasure for one's self, or to impart either to another. But the day of reading which "maketh a full man" seems to be long past, so far as the general public is concerned. The necessity of skimming the pages of a dozen fourth-rate books of the hour in order to be at least a lucid interlocutor, and so a desired dinner guest, is making our reading a swift gathering of colorless impressions which may remain a week or only a day, and which leave no lasting effect of beauty or truth upon the mind and[Pg 254] heart of the reader. Should it not be rather an intense application of the mind to the thought of a master mind, until that thought, in all its power and beauty, has broadened the boundaries of the reader's mind and enlarged the meaning of all his thoughts? I wonder if a much smaller proportion of time spent in such reading might not result in a less bromidic social atmosphere, even though its tendency were a bit serious. I think it might be both safe and interesting to try such an experiment.

But now we must return to Emerson on Friendship. In studying a passage for the purpose of vocal interpretation you have learned that the concentration of attention upon the thought must be intense, you must make the thought absolutely your own before you can present it to your auditor, it must possess you before you can express it; that the thought must seem in the moment of its expression to be a creation of your own brain, it must belong to you as only the thing you have created can, and until you have so recreated the thought it is not yours to give.[Pg 255] Having recalled these precepts, read the passage silently again. Pour upon it the light of your experience, your philosophy, your ideals, your perception of truth. Comment upon it silently as you read. Now read it aloud and let your voice do this commenting. But wait a moment. Let me quote for you the paragraph following this statement.

This is Emerson's paraphrase of his original statement. How much of it did your mental commentary include? How did your silent paraphrase resemble this? Read the original passage again to yourself in the light of this paraphrase. I shall ask you now to repeat the first sentence from memory, for you will find, after this concentrated contemplation of a thought, that its form is fixed fast in your mind. That is a delightful accompaniment of this kind of reading. The form of[Pg 256] the thought, if it be apposite (which it must be to be literature, and we are considering only literature), the form of a thought so approached stays with us in all its beauty.

Let us then repeat the original statement, having read the passage in which Emerson has elaborated it. Now, what you must demand of your voice is this: that it shall so handle the single introductory sentence as to suggest the rest of the paragraph. In other words, your voice must do the paraphrasing, by means of its changes in pitch, its inflections, and its variations in tone-color; by means, in short, of its vocal vocabulary.

I

STUDY IN PAUSE AND CHANGE OF PITCH

It is asserted that, "the last word has not been said on any subject." Mr. Hamilton Mabie seemed to me to achieve a last word on the subject of pause when he casually remarked: "Emerson was a master of pause; he would pause, and into the pool[Pg 257] of expectancy created by that pause drop just the right word." There seems little to be added to complete the exposition of that single sentence. It surely leaves no doubt in our minds as to the effect to be desired from the use of this element of our vocabulary. How to use it to gain that effect is our problem. First of all, we must cease to be afraid to pause. We hurry on over splendid opportunities to elucidate our text through a just use of this form of emphasis, beset by two fears: fear that we shall seem to have forgotten the text; fear that we shall actually forget it if we stop to think. Think of being afraid to stop to think lest we should stop thinking! That is precisely what the fear indicates. It arises, of course, from a confusion as to the real nature of pause. We confuse pause with its ghost, hesitation. Dr. Curry makes the difference clear for us in his definition of hesitation as an "empty pause." "Empty of what?" you ask. Empty of thought! Of course, an empty pause is a ghastly as well as a ghostly thing to experience. If you have ever faced an audience[Pg 258] in one of those "awful" moments when your voice has ceased because your thought has stopped, and when you are painfully aware of a pool of embarrassed sympathy into which you know there is no word to drop, then you have learned the meaning of an empty pause.

On the other hand, if you shall ever face an audience in one of those fateful moments when your voice pauses because your thought is so vital, that you realize both your audience and you must be given time to fully grasp it, and when you are serenely conscious of that "pool of expectancy" into which you know you have just the right word to drop, then you will learn the meaning of a true pause.

Some one has called inflection a running commentary of the emotions upon the thought. Emphasis might well be defined in the same way. The definition would need to be a bit more inclusive, since emphasis includes inflection. Emphasis then may be defined as a running commentary of the thought and emotion of the reader upon the thought of the text he interprets. The[Pg 259] words reveal the thought; your valuation of that thought, as you interpret it, is revealed through your vocal vocabulary in voicing it. We, your auditors, can only gather from your emphasis your valuation of the truth or importance of what you are uttering. You may use one or all of the elements of your vocal vocabulary to bring out the thought of a single phrase. The elements of the vocal vocabulary are all forms of emphasis.

Since pause is a cessation of speech it can hardly be called an element of a vocal vocabulary; but it may rightly be called the basis of our vocabulary because it determines our use of the other elements. It behooves us then to make a study of pause before testing our vocabulary as to its other elements.

Here are two texts to be valued by our use of the pause.

The same hour, midnight, is designated by both girl and poet; the same two words, "at midnight," open the confession and the[Pg 261] poem. A pause must follow these words in the reading of either text, and another pause must be made after the qualifying phrase which immediately follows the opening words of either text. But what a difference in the comparative length of the pauses demanded by the two readings! A very different atmosphere attends an hour when it is the time chosen for a school-girl's escapade or set apart for a poet's meditation. And the voice by its use of pause can preserve or destroy either atmosphere. Try it. Make your pauses in reading the school-girl's text of equal length with the pauses the reading of Lanier's poem demands. You will find the result is that overemphasis which has brought such discredit upon the name of "elocution." I once heard a much-advertised reader strain all the elements of her vocal vocabulary in announcing a simple change in her programme. I have heard more than one reader give the stage directions, indicate the scene setting, and introduce the characters in exactly the same voice and with the same use of emphasis which[Pg 262] were afterward employed in the most dramatic passages. Of course all the ammunition had been used up before the real battle began, and no one was in the least affected by the firing during the rest of the engagement.

We have said that the use of pause determines the use of all other elements of the vocabulary. This is particularly true of the change of pitch which immediately follows pause. We pause before a new idea to get possession of it; in that pause we measure the idea, and the pitch of the voice changes to accord with that measure. Every change of thought causes a change of pitch, but the degree and direction of change in pitch of the voice depends upon the degree and direction of change in thought values. In the pause the mind takes time to value the new thought, and tells the voice what change it must make. Robert Browning affords the best material for a study in change of pitch, because of his sudden and long parentheses, which can be handled lucidly by a voice only after it has mastered this element of[Pg 263] the vocal vocabulary. Abt Vogler offers the voice an excellent opportunity for exercise in change of pitch. I print the first stanza and first line of the second stanza of this poem for your use.

Remember, you are to confine your consideration to the one point, change of pitch, not the change of pitch within a word, which is inflection and belongs to another chapter,[Pg 264] but to the broad changes of pitch from word to word, phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, following the intricate changes of the thought.

I leave you to blaze a trail through this forest of ideas. You must find the main road, and then trace the by-paths which lead away from that main road, and in this case, fortunately, come back to it again—which does not always happen in Mr. Browning's "woody tracts of thought." To employ a better figure for vocal purposes, you must cut off the stream, the voice, and trace the bed of this river of thought, following the main channel, and then its branches. You will find the main channel cut by the first and last lines:

All between, beginning with the second line, "Bidding my organ obey," and including the last words of the eighth line, "the princess[Pg 265] he loved," is a branch channel, leading away from and coming back to the main river's bed. But this branch channel is interrupted in turn by its own branch leading away from it and returning with it to join the main bed with the last line we quote. This second branch begins in the middle of the third line with the words, "As when Solomon willed," wanders in this course for five lines, and, rejoining the first offshoot, returns to the main channel with the last line. Now turn on the stream, the Voice, and watch it flow into the course as traced. Analyze the reading as to the use of pause and change of pitch.

II

STUDY IN INFLECTION

To me, the most notable among the many notable elements in Madame Alla Nazimova's acting is her illumination of the text of her impersonations through inflection. To an ear unaccustomed to the "broken music" of her speech, a word may now and then be lost be[Pg 266]cause of her still faulty English, but of her attitude toward the thought she is uttering, or the person she is addressing, or the situation she is meeting, there can never be a moment's doubt—so illuminating is the inflectional play of her voice. The tone she uses is not to me pleasing in quality. It does not fall in liquid alluring cadences upon the ear as does Miss Marlowe's, for instance. It is always keyed high, whether the child-wife Nora, or Hedda, omnivorous of experience, is speaking. But this high-pitched tone is endlessly volatile. It is restless. It never lets your attention wander. It is never monotonous. It is a master of inflection. Madame Nazimova's emotion is always primarily intellectual. It always proceeds from a mind keenly alive to the instant's incident. This intensely intellectual temperament reveals itself through her voice in a rare degree of inflectional agility. Recall the revelation of Nora's soul in her cry: "It is not possible! It is not possible!" Madame Nazimova's conception of the mistress of The Doll's House is concentrated in these[Pg 267] four words—in her inflection of the last word, I may almost say. When I close my eyes and think of Madame Nazimova's voice I see a grove of soft maples in early October with the sun playing upon them, while Miss Marlowe's tone carries me at once into the pine woods, where a white birch now and then shimmers its yellow leaves. Again, the voice of the Russian actress suggests a handful of diamonds, and the American instrument a set of turquoise in the matrix. The difference in these two agents of two compelling personalities is, of course, the result of a difference in the two temperaments; but undoubtedly it also arises from a difference in methods of training. Whatever the temperament, light and shade can be developed in the voice through practice of inflection; and whatever the temperament, a pure tone can be secured through a mastery of support of breath and freedom of vocal conditions. The voices of these two actresses vividly illustrate these two points. We shall study how to secure Miss Marlowe's tone. We are now to work for Madame Nazimova's[Pg 268] light and shade, so far as a mastery of inflection will secure it. How shall we proceed?

"All my life," writes Ellen Terry, in her entrancing memoirs, "the thing which has struck me as wanting on the stage is variety. Some people are tone-deaf, and they find it physically impossible to observe the law of contrasts. But even a physical deficiency can be overcome by that faculty of taking infinite pains." That is the secret of successful acquisition in any direction, is it not—the faculty of taking infinite pains? With Ellen Terry it resulted in a voice which in its prime estate suggested, it is said, all the riotous colors of all the autumns, or Henry Ward Beecher's most varied collection of precious stones. We can secure an approximate result by employing the same method. Let us proceed with infinite pains to practise, practise, practise inflection.

Let us first examine this change of pitch within a word which we call inflection. How does the pitch change, and why, and what does the change indicate? We have dis[Pg 269]covered that a change of thought results in a broad change of pitch from word to word, phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, and we shall discover that a change in emotion results in a change in the color of the tone we are using; but this element of our vocal vocabulary, inflection, is subtler than either of the other two. While change of pitch is an intellectual modulation, and variation in tone-color is an emotional modulation, inflection, in a degree, combines both. It is a change in both color and key within the word. It is primarily of intellectual significance, but it also reveals certain temperamental characteristics which cannot be disassociated with emotion. For instance, the staccato utterance of Mrs. Fiske is technically the result of her use of straight, swift-falling inflections, but it is temperamentally the result of thinking and feeling in terms of Becky Sharp.

Let us see how inflections vary. They rise and fall swiftly or slowly. They move in a straight line from point to point, or make a curve. (The latter we call circumflex in[Pg 270]flection.) They make various angles with the original level of pitch, rising or falling abruptly or gradually. These are some of the variations, each indicating an attitude of the mind and heart of the speaker toward the thought, or toward the one spoken to, or toward the circumstances out of which the speech arises. All must be mastered for use at will if light and shade are to be developed in the voice.

Now let us take a phrase or sentence, and voice it under a certain condition, noting the inflection of the word or words which hold the thought of the phrase or sentence in solution. Then let us change the condition and again voice the thought, noting the change in inflection. Let me propound a profound question,—"Do you like growing old?" The answers will all be "yes" or "no." But what of the inflection of those monosyllabic words? Sweet Sixteen will employ a straight, swift-falling inflection on the affirmative (unless some untoward influence, such as "Love the Destroyer," has embittered her life, when she may give us one of May Iverson's[Pg 271] adorable replies, masked in indifference and circumlocution). Twenty will employ the straight-falling inflection without the swiftness of Sweet Sixteen's slide. With twenty-five we detect a faint sign of a curve in the more gradual fall. Twenty-eight to thirty-five employs various degrees of circumflex, according to the desire—or possibility—of concealing the real facts. Forty to forty-five, if in defiant mood, employs the abrupt-falling inflection, or, if quite honest, changes to the negative with as swift and straight a fall. This lasts through sixty-five, and at seventy we hear a new and gentle circumflex of the "no," until the pride of extreme old age sets in at eighty-five with the swift fall of sixteen's affirmative. Were it not expedient to maintain friendly relations with one's printer, I should venture to diagram these changes of tone within a word. As it is, I shall content myself with advising you to do so.

It is my privilege to have had acquaintance with a woman who was a personal friend of Emerson. Among the incidents of[Pg 272] his delightful talk with her, retold to me, I recall one which bears upon our present problem. They were discussing mutual "Friends on the Shelf." "Have you ever read Titan?" asked the gentle seer. "Yes," replied the lady. "Read it again!" said he. Query to the class: How did the lady inflect the word Yes to call forth the injunction, Read it again? What did her inflection reveal?

However inclined we may be to quarrel with Bernhardt's conception of the Duke of Reichstadt, we can never forget her disclosure of the Eaglet's frail soul through inflection as she crushes letter after letter in her hand and tosses them aside, uttering the simple words, Je déchire, and the final revelation in the quick, thrilling curve of her wonderful voice on the same words as the little cousin leaves the room at the close of this episode of the letters.

No better material can be chosen for a study of inflection than the paragraph from Emerson's Friendship, quoted in a preceding chapter. Let us repeat the first sentence again. "Our friendships hurry to short[Pg 273] and poor conclusions because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams instead of the tough fiber of the human heart." Study, in voicing this, how to illumine the thought by your contrastive inflection of the words "wine and dreams" and "tough fiber of the human heart." A lingering circumflex cadence in uttering the first two words will suggest the unstable nature of a friendship woven out of so frail a fabric as wine and dreams, while a swift, strong, straight-falling inflection on each of the last six words indicates the vigorous growth of a love rooted in the tough fiber of the human heart.

In Monna Vanna Maurice Maeterlinck gives the actress a superb opportunity to show her mastery of inflection. Let us turn to the scene in Prinzivalle's tent:[12]

And so the seeming inquisition proceeds. To each relentlessly searching interrogation from Gianello comes Vanna's unfaltering reply, in a single, swift monosyllable, "Yes" or "No." The same word, but, oh, the revelation which may lie in the inflection of that word! Let us try it. Let us read the scene aloud, first giving as nearly as possible the same inflection to each of Vanna's answers, then let us voice it again, putting into the curve of the tone within the narrow space of the two or three lettered monosyllables all the concentrated mental passion of Vanna's soul in its attitude toward the terrible situation and toward the man whom she believes to be her enemy. This is a most difficult[Pg 275] exercise, but if "a man's reach should exceed his grasp," it will not retard our progress toward the goal of a vocal vocabulary to attempt it now. Apart from all aim in its pursuit, there is no more fascinating study than this study of inflection. In this day of artistic photography there is an endless interest for the artist of the camera in playing with a subject's expression by varying the light and shade thrown upon the face. So for the student of vocal expression there is endless interest in this play with the thought behind a group of words by varying the inflection of those words. Lady Macbeth's, "We fail!" or Macbeth's, "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly," occurs to us, of course, as rich material for this exercise.

In her analysis of the character of Lady Macbeth Mrs. Jameson gives us an interesting study in inflection, based on Mrs. Siddons's interpretation of the words "We fail." A foot-note reads: "In her impersonation of the part of Lady Macbeth Mrs. Siddons adopted successively three different[Pg 276] intonations in giving the words 'we fail.' At first a quick, contemptuous interrogation—'we fail?' Afterward with the note of admiration—'we fail!' and an accent of indignant astonishment laying the principal emphasis on the word we—'we fail!' Lastly, she fixed on what I am convinced is the true reading—'we fail'—with the simple period, modulating the voice to a deep, low, resolute tone which settled the issue at once, as though she had said: 'If we fail, why then we fail, and all is over.'"

Think how vitally the total impersonation is affected by your choice of inflections at this point. Compare the effects of the three, Mrs. Siddons tested. Are there other possible intonations of the words? What are they? Do you realize the vital effect upon the voice of such vocal analysis and experimentation? Devote ten minutes of the time you take for reading each day to this phase of vocal interpretation, and at the end of a week note its effect upon your silent reading and upon your voice.

Remember, with inflection, as with every[Pg 277] other phase of the training, the greatest immediate benefit will come from holding the question of its peculiar significance constantly in mind. Study the temperament of the people about you by noting this element in their speech. Study the attitude of every interlocutor you face, by studying the inflection of his replies to the questions of life and death you propound. But, above all, study your own use of this element. Do not let your own attitude go undetected. It may help you to alter an unfortunate attitude to realize its effect upon your own voice.

III

STUDY IN TONE-COLOR

And now we must turn to our last point of discussion, tone-color. What is the nature of this element of our vocabulary—this Klangfarbe, this Timbre? Upon what does it depend? You will say, "It is a property of the voice depending upon the form of the vibrations which produce the tone."[Pg 278] True! And physiologically the form of the vibrations depends upon the condition of the entire vocal apparatus. Tone-color, then, is a modulation of resonance. But what concerns us is the fact that it is an emotional modulation of resonance. What concerns us is the fact that, as a change of thought instantly registers itself in a change of pitch, so a change of emotion instantly produces a change in the color of the tone—if the voice is a free instrument. And so, as before, I want you not to think of the physiological aspect, but to yield to the emotion, noting the character of the resultant tone, regardless of what has happened in the larynx to produce that result.

As Browning affords us the best material for our study in change of pitch, so the poems of Sidney Lanier offer to the voice the richest field for exercise in tone-color. Musician and poet in one, Lanier's peculiar charm lies in his unerring choice of words, which suggest in their sound, when rightly voiced, the atmosphere of the scene he is painting. Lanier uses words as Corot uses colors. This gives[Pg 279] the voice its opportunity to bring out by subtle variations in timbre the variations in light and shade of an atmosphere. To read aloud, sympathetically, once a day, Lanier's The Symphony is the best possible way to develop simultaneously all the elements of a vocal vocabulary. We shall use this poem to-day as a text for our study in tone-color. Let us omit the message of the violins and heavier strings, and take the passage beginning with the interlude upon which the flute-voice breaks:

What an ideal for tone-color! Dare we think to make it ours? We must. We must[Pg 280] adopt it with confidence of attainment. Let me quote a little further:

Read this passage aloud as a mere statement of fact, employing a matter-of-fact tone. Gray in color, is it not? Now let your voice take the color Lanier has blended for you. Let your tone, like a thing "half song, half odor," float forth on these words and linger as only a perfume can about the thought. Now let the tone change in color to clarify and glorify the following message from the flute:[13]

I cannot, for lack of space, reprint the whole flute message, but you will get the[Pg 281] poem, if you have it not, and voice every word of it, I am sure. Here are some of the most telling lines for our present purpose:

You see, to voice this message a mood born of all the "warmths and mysteries and mights of Nature's utmost depths and heights" must take possession of you, and you must yield your instrument to the expression of that mood. Then watch, watch, watch the color of the tone change as the voice, starting with the clear flute-note, follows sympathetically the varying phases of Nature's face which the poet has so sympathetically painted. And now, after a "thrilling calm," the flute yields its place to a sister instrument, and the tone must change its timbre to the reed note of the clarionet. In the "melting" message of that instrument we find two passages which afford the voice chance for a most vivid contrast in color. Beginning with the line, "Now comes a suitor with sharp, prying eye," read the two descriptions which follow, lending your voice to the atmosphere of each:

The first two lines, which set forth a suit in terms of trade, demand a hard, calculating tone, suggestive of large silver dollars. Call this color dull steel gray. This tone flashes out for a moment in the white indignation of the third line, softens and warms with the next two lines, then grows and glows until it reaches a crimson radiance in the last two lines. Try it!

And now, with "heartsome voice of mellow scorn," let us sound the message of the "bold straightforward horn."

Remember your key is set for you,—the color of the tone is plainly chosen for you by Mr. Lanier. Not red nor yellow, but a blending of the two. Orange, is it not? Will not an orange tone give us the feel of heartsome confidence behind and through the[Pg 285] mellow scorn of the knight's message? Try it! Let the two primary colors, red and yellow, enter in varying degrees according to, or following, the emotional variation in the thought, as the knight or the lover dominates in the message. In the first seven lines the tone glows with the love radiance and the orange deepens toward red. With the next five lines the lover yields to the knight, and the tone flashes forth a golden, keen-edged sword. With the thirteenth line the tone begins in the orange on "Now by each knight that e'er hath prayed," flashes into yellow in "to fight like a man," softens and deepens toward red in "and love like a maid," and returns to the orange to finish the horn motif.

Next in this poem which affords such a wonderful study for tone-color we have the hautboy's message. The color is mixed and laid on the palette ready for use as before, with the introductory lines:

Don't let the words large-eyed Child mislead you. Don't, I beseech you, make the mistake of adopting the "Little Orphan Annie" tone with which the "elocutionist" too often insults the pure treble of a child's "undefiled" instrument. That is the keynote to us for our choice of color—"cool-hearted and all undefiled." Almost a white tone, is it not? With a little of the blue of the June sky? Try it. Let the blue be visibly present in the first three lines:

turning to pure white in the next three lines:

The last voice comes from the "ancient wise bassoons." Again there is danger. Do not, oh! do not fall afoul of the conventional old man's quavering tone. There is nothing conventional about these "weird, gray-beard[Pg 287] old harpers sitting on the high sea-dunes," chanting runes. The last words of these introductory lines safeguard us—"chanted runes." There is only one color of tone in which to chant runes. Gray, is it not? Yes, but a silver gray, not the steel gray of the clarionet when she became for the moment a commercial lover. Then in the silver-gray tone of the philosopher, voice this last motif:

The importance of a right use of tone-color in vocal interpretation was impressed upon a Browning class last winter. We were reading the Dramatic Lyrics. The poem for the hour was Meeting at Night. The tone with which the first student attacked this exquisite love-lyric was so businesslike, so matter of fact, so utterly out of key, that we who listened saw not the lover hastening to his[Pg 288] beloved, but a real-estate agent "out to buy" a farm. The "gray sea, the long black land, the yellow half-moon large and low, the startled little waves that creep in fiery ringlets from their sleep, the pushing prow of the boat quenched in the slushy sand, the warm, sea-scented beach, and the three fields" all assumed a merely commercial value. They were interesting exactly as would be a catalogue of properties in a deed of real estate. If you are not a very intense member of a Browning society you will, I think, enjoy the test of tone-color involved in reading this poem from the contrasted standpoints of the business man and the lover. Of course, in the first instance you must stop where I, in desperation, stopped the student on the words, "a farm appears." For I defy any one to read the last two lines in a gray, matter-of-fact tone.

As was the case in our consideration of inflection, so in this study of tone-color there is an embarrassment of rich material for the exercise of this element. Lanier's Sunrise and Corn; Browning's prologue[Pg 289] to The Two Poets of Croisic, with a vivid contrast of color in each verse; Swinburne's almost every line; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson—but why enumerate? All the colorists among the poets will reward your search of a text for the development of timbre.

For a final brief study of the three elements we aim to acquire, with especial emphasis in thought upon the last one, let us take this prologue to The Two Poets of Croisic, with its color-contrast in each verse:

The vocal treatment of the first two verses will be very much alike. The voice starts in minor key, a gray monotone, in harmony with the absence of color in the bare bank of dull moss. The inflection of the word "starved" must emphasize the grayness. It must be a dull push of the tone on the first syllable, with little, if any, lift above the level of the low pitch on which the whole line is spoken. With a swift, salient, rising inflection on the opening word of the second line, an inflection which creates expectancy of change, the voice lifts the thought out of the minor into the major key. I must call your attention to the vital significance of the use of pause at this point by simply asking you to indulge in it. Stop after uttering the word till and study the effect of the pause. It is the pause quite as much as the inflection, you see, which induces the expectant attitude you desire to create in the mind of your auditor. With the next three words, "that May morn," the tone takes on a bit of the warmth of early summer. A lingering cadence on the word "May" will[Pg 291] help the suggestion. With the third line the voice begins to shine. I know no other way to express it. The inflections are swift and straight, but not staccato, because they must suggest a growth, not a burst of color. The tone on which the words are borne must be continuous. It must not be broken off definitely with each word, as is to prove most effective, we shall find, in handling the third line of the second verse. The fourth line brings the full, glowing, radiant tone on the first word, "violets." This tone must be held in full volume on the last two words. The law for beautiful speech must be observed here. (But where should it not be observed?) Let us recall the law, "Beautiful speech depends upon openness of vowels and definiteness of consonants." The vowels give volume to a word, the consonants form. Slur your consonants and squeeze your vowels in the three words of this line, "Violets were born," and what becomes of this miracle of spring? The voicing of the second verse is very like that of the first. The opening line demands the same gray mono[Pg 292]tone. But the three words, "sky," "scowl," and "cloud," if clear-cut in utterance, as they should be, will break the level of the line more than the single word "starved" in the first line of the first verse can do, or was meant to do. There is the same swift lift of the voice in the opening word of the second line, the same change to the major key, the same growing glow in the tone on the third line, and the same radiant outburst of color sustained through the last line. The only difference lies in the suffusion of radiance in the tone to suggest the coming of color to the bank, in the first verse, and the outburst of radiance to suggest the sudden splitting of the clouds and the star's swift birth, in the second verse. With the emotional change of thought in the last verse, from a travail and birth in nature to a human soul's struggle and rebirth, the deepening color which creeps into the tone indicates the entrance of personal passion. The key does not change. The inflections are still and straight. The tone simply deepens and glows in the last two lines, as a prayerful ecstasy possesses the one who reads.[Pg 293]

[Pg 294]

PART III

STUDIES IN VOCAL TECHNIQUE

[Pg 295]

STUDIES IN VOCAL TECHNIQUE

THE UNINTERRUPTED TONE

When a rich, dramatic temperament seeks for its instrument of expression the control of faultless technique the result ought to be art of the highest order. Such is the art of Gracia Ricardo. She has translated her English name into musical Italian, but does her country the honor to announce her beautiful voice as an American soprano.

Every tone of Gracia Ricardo's singing voice is as absolutely free from effort as the repeated note of the hermit thrush's song, and her tone as pure tone has the effect of that liquid call. But could you freight the thrush note with knowledge of human passion,—with throb of joy or pulse of pain, you would get from it the effect of Gracia Ricardo's singing of a Heine-Schubert song,[Pg 296] a Schumann, Brahms, or Franz lied, or one of our English ballads. It must always be a song, for Gracia Ricardo does not exploit her voice in astonishing vocal feats. She simply sings her song. It was her wish to interpret the lieder of all countries that sent her in search of a method which would free her voice to that high use. She found that method, not in her own country, alas, but in Germany, where for twelve years she has used it in the guidance of her own voice and that of many others. She finds the American pupil "difficult," because "You are so impatient of a long, quiet preparation. You wish to try your skill at every step of the way—and not in the privacy of your study, but in a public's hearing." Poor American public! How it has suffered from this impatience. It is true, is it not, we are not willing to take time to establish a right condition for tone before using the tone in what should be final efforts of the perfected instrument. Blessed be drudgery has not become a beatitude in the gospel of the American artist. When it is so recog[Pg 297]nized by the student of vocal expression perhaps we can reclaim this great singer and teacher, Madame Ricardo. This book would further that end.

It has been my good fortune while making this book for you to do some brief but intensive studying under Madame Ricardo. It is by her gracious consent that I shall leave with you as an incentive toward the ideal for which we are striving the two watchwords of her teaching which were most potently suggestive to me. The exercises which constitute her method require personal supervision, but the active principle of those exercises for both tone production and breath control is clearly indicated by the two phrases "the uninterrupted tone" and "the constant mouth-breath." These two ideas fully sensed by a voice will work swift wonders in its use.

Like Mr. Mabie's pool of expectancy, these watchwords of the Ricardo method suggest their own application; but let us consider them somewhat more closely. Think then with me of an uninterrupted tone—a tone[Pg 298] which is not interfered with at any point in its production. Think of a breath that flows freely on and on, constantly reinforced, but never interrupted—a breath that is allowed to enter the vocal box, pass between the vocal chords, where it is converted into tone; yield itself to the organs of speech and controlled by the speech process, issue from the mouth in beautiful speech forms, in the words which constitute a language!

Tracing the process of tone production in this way, we find that three distinct steps are involved. Even as I write the words distinct and steps I realize their inharmony with the idea of flowing tone. Rather then let us say three phases in the evolution of speech: breath, tone, speech. In using the word speech to designate the final phase in this evolution I am thinking of it in its broadest sense—really in a sense identical with language. With this final phase beyond its mere initiation this book cannot deeply concern itself. For work along this line I must refer you to Prof. T. R. Lounsbury's Standard of Pronunciation in English;[Pg 299] to the article on The Acquiring of Clear Speech by John D. Barry, published in Harper's Bazaar for August, September, and October, 1907; to The Technique of Speech, by Dora Duty Jones.

Not technique of speech, but technique of tone is our study. Not how to make beautiful speech forms, but how to make beautiful speech-tones; not how to distinguish one speech from another in a language, or the speech forms of one language from those of another, but how to distinguish interrupted speech-tone from uninterrupted speech-tone—such is our problem.

But tone is breath before it becomes speech, so our first concern is with the initial stage. The process of breath control in the Ricardo method of tone production (as in my own) is analogous to the process of pumping water. Let your chest with its lungs represent the reservoir, your diaphragm, the great muscle at the base of the lungs, becomes the piston and your mouth the mouth of the pump. If the mouth of the pump runs dry the pump itself runs down and has to be primed. Priming a pump[Pg 300] is precisely analogous to "catching your breath" in speech.

The active principle of breath control in the Ricardo method is the idea of a constant mouth-breath. A sense of uninterrupted breath is as essential to a knowledge of correct tone as a sense of uninterrupted tone is to a knowledge of correct speech and song.

In breathing to speak or sing there must be such perfect diaphragmatic control that the mouth shall never be out of breath. You must learn in speaking and reading to take easily and quietly breath enough and often enough to supply the tone which is to be made into a single word, a phrase, a sentence, or a series of sentences, and leave the mouth-breath unexhausted, even unaffected. You must never catch your breath; the breath must pass continuously, the mouth-breath remaining a constant quantity.

It was gratifying in my work with this master of tone production to find that my own method in the training of the speaking voice was in accord at almost every point with her method in the training of the sing[Pg 301]ing voice. In reprinting for you the exposition of my own method, as set down in The Speaking Voice, I have found it necessary to make but few changes. I have altered entirely the method of handling the tongue. I have added a word as to the part the lips play in the production of speech. In the few exercises it is safe to offer under the reinforcing of tone I have used the [=e] instead of the ä, convinced that it is the more effective vowel sound through which to work for uninterrupted tone.

It was also a pleasure to find my own instrument, through its training for speech, adequately prepared for the work in song. The studies which constitute Part Three of this book, if faithfully attended, will fit your voices for higher work in either art.

LEARNING TO SUPPORT THE TONE

Before attempting the exercises involved in the first step, let us examine a tone in the making, or, rather, let us feel how it is made—for the process of tone production, so far as it concerns us, is not of physio[Pg 302]logical, but rather psychological, significance. The huge tomes on the physiology of the voice which are of vital interest to the student of anatomy are not only of no use, but are apt to be a positive hindrance to the student of vocal training. A vivid picture of the larynx or vocal cords, a cross-section of the trachea, or a highly illuminated image of any of the cavities concerned in the production of that most wonderful thing in the world, a pure tone of the human voice, is a source of delight to the physiologist, but will only interfere with that feel for the free, full volume of sound which the student of voice as an instrument of thought and emotion is to make, as a first step in vocal training. Then, not as anatomists or physiologists, but as makers of music, let us look at, let us feel for, a tone.

I am "stung by the splendor of a sudden thought"; I desire to share it with you; the desire causes me to take a deep breath, a column of air rises, is converted into tone, passes into the mouth, and is moulded into the words which symbolize my thought.[Pg 303] Let us, without further analysis, try this. Close your eyes, think of some line of prose or poetry which has moved you profoundly; let it take possession of you until you are seized by the desire to voice it. Still with closed eyes, feel yourself take the breath which is to be made into tone, and then into the words which stand for the thought. Hold that sensation, and study it with me for a moment. "But," you say, "the desire to voice the thought does not seize me." Very well, let me ask you a question. "Do you believe in examinations?" Now your thought was converted so swiftly into speech that you had no time to study the conversion. Once more, whether your answer be Yes or No, close your eyes and feel for the tone you are to use in making the single word.

Now, a little more in detail, let us see what happens. A thought full of emotion meets the question, the desire to answer is born; the need of breath to meet the desire contracts the diaphragm (the pump); the chest (the reservoir) fills; a column of air, pumped[Pg 304] and controlled by the diaphragm, and reinforced in the chest, rises, strikes the vocal cords (the "strings" of the instrument), the strings vibrate, converting the air into sound, into tone; the tone, reinforced in all the chambers of the head, passes into the mouth, and is there moulded by the juxtaposition of the organs of speech (lips, teeth, tongue) into the word, the single, monosyllabic word, Yes or No, which frames the thought. Now, once more, with closed eyes, sense the process and hold the sensation, but do not speak the word. Now, still once more, and this time, speak. Alas! did we say we were "makers of music"? Is this harmony,—this harsh, hard, breathy, strident note? What is the trouble?

First of all, fundamental to all, and beyond a doubt the secret of the dissonance, you did not breathe before you spoke or as you spoke. I mean, really breathe. And that is the first point to be attacked. Breathe, breathe, breathe! you must learn how to breathe; you must get your pump, your diaphragm, into working order, you must master it, you must[Pg 305] control it, you must not fetter it, you must give it a free chance to do its work. If you are a man, you have probably at least been fair in not tying down your pump; you have not incased yourself in steel bands and drawn them so tight that your diaphragm could not descend and perform its office. Yes, and if you are the athletic girl of to-day, you have probably learned the delight and benefit of free muscular action. But you may still be suffering from the effect of your mother's crime in this direction. It may have sent you into the world with weakened muscles in control of the great pumping-station upon which must depend the beauty of your voice.

But whatever the condition or the cause, it must, if wrong, be made right. We must learn to breathe properly, freely, naturally. (Do not confuse naturally and "habitually." In this connection these terms are opposites rather than synonyms.) To breathe naturally we must do away with all constriction. We must choose between the alleged beauty of a disproportionately small[Pg 306] waist and the charm of a beautiful and alluring voice. We cannot have both. Then, off with tight corsets! Thank Heaven! they are the exception and not the rule to-day. Please note that I distinctly do not say, "Off with corsets," but only "Off with ill-fitting corsets," for which tight is but another name. I believe, to digress a moment, with our present method of dress, a properly fitted corset is an absolute necessity, except in the rare instances where a perfectly proportioned and slender figure is also under the control of firm, well-trained muscles. In a first flush of rapture over the vision of the gentle ladies of Mr. Howell's Altruria, seen Through the Eye of the Needle, we feel that we can take a step toward that paradise by discarding the strait-laced tailored torture the present-day costume prescribes, for the corsetless grace of the Altrurian garment; but our enthusiasm is short-lived, as we realize that we are in modern America and must make as inconspicuously gracious an appearance as possible without violating the conventions. So, as I say, do not discard[Pg 307] the corset, which is, for the majority of women, the saving grace of the present fashion in dress; only see that your corset brings out what is best in the figure God gave you, instead of disfiguring it, as undue constriction of any part of your body will inevitably do. Incidentally, by this precaution, save your voice as well.

But until we can be refitted, or readjust the corsets we already wear, and the gowns made over them, we must avoid the discouraging effect of trying to work against the odds of a costume which interferes with our breathing, by making a practice of taking the breathing exercises involved in the first step, at night and in the morning. Five minutes of deep, free breathing from the diaphragm, lying flat on your back in bed at night and before you rise in the morning, will accomplish the desired result. The point in lying flat on your back is that in that position alone you can be sure you are breathing naturally, which is diaphragmatically. Indeed, you cannot, without great effort, and sometimes not even then, breathe any other way[Pg 308] than naturally. I cannot tell you why. I can only say, try it and see.

Our first exercise, then, is to lie flat on the back at night and in the morning, when you are perfectly free, and, with closed eyes, take deep, long breaths, letting them go slowly, and studying the accompanying sensation until it is fixed fast and you feel you cannot lose it, but can reproduce, under any condition, the action which resulted in that sensation. The incidental effect of this exercise is to make one very sleepy. Indeed, nothing will so quickly and effectually put to flight that foe of the society woman and business man of to-day, insomnia, as the practice of deep, regular natural breathing. Add counting each respiration, and it is an almost unfailing remedy. The only trouble for our purpose is that it is sometimes so swiftly soporific that we are asleep before the sensation is fixed fast and noted in consciousness: which is one object of the exercise. However, should we find the prescribed five minutes at night interfered with by coming drowsiness, we may yield in sleepy content,[Pg 309] "sustained and soothed" by the thought that we shall be in splendid shape for the morning practice, with which nothing must interfere, "not headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke."

We are ready now for the third exercise. When, for five minutes in the morning, lying flat on your back, with closed eyes, you have taken deep, long breaths, letting them go slowly, yielding your whole body to the act of respiration, noting the effect and fixing fast the sensation, as a next step you are to stand up and repeat the operation. Still holding the sensation (not by tightening your muscles, or clenching your fists, or setting your teeth, but simply by thinking the sensation, letting it possess you), in this attitude of mind breathe naturally, standing instead of lying down. That is all. Don't be discouraged if the test prove unsatisfactory at first. Try an intermediate step. Sit on the side of your bed, or in a straight-back chair, and, closing your eyes and relaxing all your muscles except those governing the diaphragm, breathe. Now stand, well poised.[Pg 310] By well poised, of course, you know I mean with the weight perfectly balanced about the center of gravity, which, in turn, means that a perpendicular dropped from the highest point of the lifted chest without encountering any part of your body, and especially not your abdomen (which should be held always back, so that it is flat, if not actually concave) will fall unobstructed to the floor, striking a point just between the balls of your feet. Standing thus, well poised, place the right hand on your body, just below your ribs at the base of the lungs, and your left hand on your back, just opposite your right hand; then breathe, and feel the diaphragm, as it descends, cause the torso, in turn, to expand from front to back, pressing against either hand. Let the breath go slowly, controlling its emission by controlling the diaphragm.

So the three exercises stand progressively thus:

First.—Breathe naturally, which is diaphragmatically, five minutes at night. (At first you can be sure of doing this only by lying flat on your back.)[Pg 311]

Second.—Breathe naturally, which is diaphragmatically, for five minutes in the morning, and note the sensation.

Third.—Stand and test your newly acquired power by trying to breathe diaphragmatically while on your feet.

These three exercises constitute the first step in the first stage of vocal training, and that step is called Learning to Support the Tone.

I know a little girl who, in the beginning of her career, alarmed her parents by refusing to utter a syllable or the semblance of a syllable until she was three years old, when she evidently considered herself ready for her maiden effort at speech. Prepared she proved, for, sitting at the window in her high-chair one day, watching people pass, she remarked quietly and with perfect precision, "There goes Mrs. Tibbets." I find myself secretly wishing it were possible for you to refrain from speech, not for three years, but for three weeks, while you quietly prepare for speech by practising these three breathing exercises. It is quite the customary thing[Pg 312] (or ought to be) for the teacher of voice as an instrument of song to require of the student a period of silence—that is, a period in which only exercises are allowed, and songs, even the simplest, are forbidden. However, our only way to secure this condition would be to go into retreat; but, after all, one of the most encouraging things about this work is the remarkable effect upon the speaking voice of simply holding the thought of the right condition for tone, thinking the three exercises I have given you. It is not so remarkable, perhaps, in the light of the experiment recently made (I am told) in one of our great colleges, when three men daily performed a certain exercise, and three other men simply thought it intensely, and the resultant effect upon the muscles used in the act was marvelously similar. I am half afraid to have recalled this, lest you take advantage of the suggestion and relax your effort, or, out of curiosity, make the experiment. Please don't. I offer it only as an incentive to you, to think at least of the desired condition, if you cannot[Pg 313] every day indulge in an active effort to attain it.

Please test at once the immediate effect of this third exercise. Take the attitude I have defined, and try once more any full-voweled syllable. I think you will find the tone already improved.

LEARNING TO FREE THE TONE

We have worked, so far, for support of tone. We must now free the supported tone, by freeing the channel for the emission of the breath as it is converted into tone and moulded into speech. We shall find that in learning to support the tone we have gone far toward securing that freedom; but the habit of years is not easily overcome, and every time you have spoken without proper support of breath you have forced the tone from the throat, by tightening the muscles and closing the channel, thus making conditions which must now be reformed by steady, patient effort. Yet it is not effort I want from you now; it is lack of effort. It is passivity; it is surrender. I want you to re[Pg 314]lax all the muscles which govern the organs concerned in converting the breath into tone and moulding the tone into speech, all the muscles controlling the throat and mouth, including the lips and jaw. I want utter passivity of the parts from the point where the column of breath strikes the vocal cords to where, as tone, it is moulded into the word "No." Surrender to the desire to utter that word. Concentrate your thought on two things: the taking of the breath and the word it is to become. Now, lying down, or sitting easily, lazily, in a comfortable chair, or standing leaning against the wall, with closed eyes, surrender to the thought "No," and, taking a breath, speak. Still hard and unmusical you find? Yes, but I am sure not so hopelessly hard as before. What shall we do to relax the tense muscles, to release the throat and free the channel? At the risk of being written down a propagandist, in the ranks of the extreme dress-reformers, I shall say, first of all, take off those high, tight collars. Again, as with the corset, it is a case of a misfit rather than too tight a fit.[Pg 315] If your collar is cut to fit, it need not be too high nor too tight for comfort, and it will still be becoming. You want it to cling to the neck and keep the line. Cut it to fit, and it will keep the line; then put in pieces of whalebone, if necessary, or resort to some of the many other devices now in vogue for keeping the soft collar erect, but don't choke yourself, either by fastening it too tight or cutting it too high. But how simple it would be if we could relax the tension by doffing our ill-fitting corsets and collars. Alas! the trouble is deeper seated than that.

It is an indisputable and most unfortunate fact that nervous tension registers itself more easily in the muscles about the mouth and throat than anywhere else. So, if we live as do even the children of to-day, under excitement, and so in a state of nervous tension, the habit of speaking with the channel only half open is quickly formed, and the voice becomes shrill and harsh. You have noticed that the more emphatic one grows in argument the higher and harder the voice becomes, and, incidentally, the less convincing[Pg 316] the argument. This is true of all excitement; the nervous tension accompanying it constricts the throat, and the result is a closed channel. To learn instinctively to refer this tension for registration not to the throat, but to the diaphragm, is a part of vocal training. This can be easily accomplished with children, and the habit established of taking a deep breath under the influence of any emotion. This breath will cause the throat to open instead of shut, and the tone to grow full, deep, and round, instead of high and harsh. The full, deep, round tone will carry twice as far as the high, harsh, breathy one. The one deep breath resulting in the full, deep tone may—nay, will—often serve the same purpose as Tattycoram's "Count five-and-twenty," and save the angry retort.

It is useless to regret, on either ethical or aesthetic grounds, that we were not taught in childhood to take the deep breath and make the deep tone. But let us look to it that the voices and dispositions of our children are not allowed to suffer. Meanwhile,[Pg 317] in correcting the fault in the use of our own instruments, we shall go far toward establishing the proper condition with the next generation, since the child is so mimetic that, to hear sweet, quiet, low tones about him will have more effect than much technical training in keeping his voice free and musical. In the same way, the child who hears good English spoken at home seems less dependent upon text-books in grammar and rhetoric to perfect his verbal expression than the child who is not so fortunate in this respect.

To insure the registration of nervous tension in the muscles controlling the diaphragm and not the throat—that is, to form the habit of breathing deeply when speaking under the influence of emotion, is our problem. The present fault in registration will be found to be different with each one of us, or, at least, will cause us "to flock together" according to the place of registration. Each must locate for himself his own difficulty, or go to a vocal specialist and have it located. The tension may be altogether in the muscles[Pg 318] governing the throat, or it may be in those about the mouth. There is the resultant, breathy tone, the hard tone, the nasal tone, the guttural tone, the tone that issues from a set jaw or an unruly tongue. All mean tension of muscles somewhere, and must be met by relaxation of these muscles and the freeing of the channel. How to relax the throat shall be our initial point of attack. A suggestion made by my first teacher proved most helpful to me, a suggestion so simple that I did not for the moment take it seriously. "Think," she said, "how your throat feels just before you yawn." "Yes," I replied, irrelevantly, "and just after you have eaten a peppermint—that cool, delicious, open sensation." This impressed her as significant, but not so effective as her suggestion to me, which I felt to be true when I began to think of it seriously, and so, of course, to yawn furiously. Try it.

Think of the yawn. Close your eyes and feel how the deep breath with which the yawn begins (the need of which, indeed, caused it) opens the throat, relaxing all the muscles.[Pg 319] Now, instead of yawning, speak. The result will be a good tone, simply because the condition for tone was right. The moment the yawn actually arrives, the condition is lost, the throat closes; but in that moment before the break into the yawn, the muscles about the throat relax and the channel opens, as the muscles controlling the diaphragm tighten and the deep breath is taken.

These, then, are the first exercises in the second step in vocal training. This step is called Freeing the Tone.

First.—Yawn, noting the sensation.

Second.—Just before the throat breaks into the yawn, stop, and, instead of carrying out the yawn, speak. Repeat this fifty times a day, or ten times, as often as you will. Only, keep at it. Take always a single full-voweled monosyllable; one, or four, or no, or love, or loop, or dove, etc.

We cannot, in a printed consideration, touch more in detail upon individual cases, but must confine ourselves to these simple exercises, which will, in general, be swiftly and effectively remedial.[Pg 320]

But we must not stop with the throat, which is but part of the channel involved in the emission of breath as speech. There is the tense jaw to be reckoned with—the jaw set by nervous tension, the jaw which refuses to yield itself to the moulding of the tone into the beautiful open vowel and the clean-cut consonant which make our words so interesting to utter. It is the set jaw which, forcing the tone to squeeze itself out, causes it to sound thin and hard. Again, it is surrender and not effort I want. Just as I should try to secure the relaxation of your arm or hand by asking you to surrender it to me, drop it a dead weight at your side for me to lift as I choose, so now I ask you to surrender your lower jaw to yourself. Let it go.

Drop your head forward, resting your chin on your chest. Then raise your head, but not your chin. Let your mouth fall open. Assume for the moment that mark of the feeble-minded, the idiotic, the dropped-open mouth, just long enough to note the sensation. Place your fingers on either side of your head where the jaws conjoin, and open[Pg 321] your mouth quickly and with intention. Note the action under your finger-tips. Now let the mouth fall open, by simply surrendering the lower jaw, and note this time the lack of action under your fingers, at the juncture of the jaws. It is this passive surrender which we must learn to make, if we find, on investigation, that we are speaking through a half-open mouth held fast by a set jaw. The set jaw resists and distorts the mould, and the beauty of the form of the word which flows from the mould is lost; the relaxed jaw yields to the moulding of the perfectly modeled word.

In practising this relaxation there is very little danger of going too far, since the set jaw is the indication of a tense habit of thought, of a high-strung temperament, and this habit of thought will never become, through the practise of an outward mechanical exercise, the slack habit of thought which is evidenced by the loose dropping of words from a too relaxed jaw—a habit which must be met by quite the opposite method of treatment. There are many exercises involved in[Pg 322] vocal training which must be directed very carefully for a time before the student can be trusted to practise them alone; so I am confining myself in this, as in every step we take together, to the simple, fundamental, and at the same time perfectly safe ones.

To review those for relaxation of the lower jaw:

First.—Drop the head until the chin rests upon the breast. Raise the head, but not the lower jaw.

Second.—With eyes devoid of intelligence and the mouth dropped open, shake the head until you feel the weight of the lower jaw—until the lower jaw seems to hang loosely from the upper jaw and to be shaken by it, as your hand, when you shake it from the wrist, seems to be commanded by the arm, and to have no volition of its own.

Third.—Test your ability to surrender the jaw by placing your fingers on either side your head in front of the ears at the conjunction of the jaws, and first open your mouth with intention, noting the action; then think the word No, and surrender the[Pg 323] jaw to the forming of the word, noting the action or absence of action again.

So much for the set jaw. Ten or fifteen minutes a day—yes, even five minutes a day of actual practice with the constant thought of surrender, will reward you. Try it.

And still the channel is not open. There remains that most unruly member, the tongue. Dora Duty Jones refers all faults of technique in speech to failure in the management of the tongue. Miss Jones bases her entire system upon the three words, "On the tongue," in Hamlet's injunction to the players: speak the speech ... trippingly on the tongue. That this organ plays a vital part in the presentation of speech is not to be questioned; that it is the chief actor may be disputed. But whether the tongue is to play a main or a minor part the training to which Miss Jones would subject it is most interesting, and The Technique of Speech[14] should belong to the library of every student of expression. The only danger of this train[Pg 324]ing lies in that of making the tongue a self-conscious actor. What we require of the tongue is that it shall act as a free agent in modeling the perfect word. Many of the exercises given by Miss Jones can be safely attempted only after the preparatory freeing of the organ has been accomplished, but all of them will eventually repay investigation.

Meanwhile the following drill for freeing the tongue ought to develop the agility we desire:

First.—Combine l (which may be called the tongue's pet consonant) with ä and repeat the syllable la with constantly increasing speed to form the following groups: lä' ... lä lä lä' ... lä lä lä' ... lä' ... lä'.

Second.—Change the accent over the vowel and repeat the exercise until all the sounds of a are exhausted in combination with the l.

Third.—Change the vowel and repeat the exercise until all the vowels have been used in combination with l.

Fourth.—Change the consonant to d,[Pg 325] then to t, then n, and repeat the exercise.

Fifth.—Follow these exercises on groups of syllables with work on groups of words of one syllable beginning with l, such as: late, lade, lane, lame; last, lack, lank, lapse, laugh; lean, least, leak, leap, lead, etc.

Remember, we are considering primarily speech-tone and not speech form, and that our aim in the exercise of the tongue is to keep it from interrupting the tone.

And now a word must be said as to the part the lips take in speech. It must be only a word, because here more than at any other point the work needs the careful supervision of a trained ear and trained eyes. Madame Ricardo yields to the lips control of the tongue, as she gives to the diaphragm control of the breath. I think she would make easily on the lips rather than "trippingly on the tongue" the controlling principle in tone and speech. I shall give you but one exercise:

Combine the speech process m with the vowel ē and let the tone explode easily[Pg 326] on the lips in the repeated syllable, mē, mē, mē.

LEARNING TO REINFORCE THE TONE

And now we turn from the second step in the training to the third and last step—the reinforcing of the supported and freed tone. It is again a freeing process. This time we are to free the cavities now closed against the tone; we are to use the walls of these cavities as sounding-boards for tone, as they were designed to be, so reinforcing the tone and letting it issue a resonant, bell-like note with the carrying power resonance alone can give, instead of the thin, dull, colorless sound which conveys no life to the word into which it is moulded by the organs of speech. How shall we free these cavities? I find myself now impatient of the medium of communication we are using. I want to make the tone for you. I want, for instance, to shut off the nasal cavity and let you hear the resultant nasal note, thin, high, unresonant, which hardly reaches the first member of my audience; then I want you[Pg 327] to hear the tone flood into the nasal cavity, and, reinforced there by the vibration from the walls of the cavity, grow a resonant, ringing, bell-like note, which will carry to the farthest corner of the room without the least increase in loudness. But we must be content with the conditions imposed by print.

First, you must realize that so-called "talking through the nose" is not talking through the nose at all, but rather failure to do so—that is, instead of letting the tone flood into the nasal cavity, to be reinforced there by striking against the walls of the cavity, which act as sounding-boards for the tone confined within that cavity, we shut off the cavity, and refuse the tone its natural reinforcement. It takes on, as a result, a thin, unresonant quality which we call nasal, although it is thin and unpleasing because it lacks true nasal resonance. The only remedy lies in ceasing to shut off the cavity. Think the sound ͞oo. Let the tone on which it is to be borne grow slowly in thought, filling, filling, and, as it grows, flooding the whole face.[Pg 328] Let it press against your lips (in thought only as yet), feel your nostrils expand, your face grow alive between the eyes and the upper lip, that area so often inanimate, lifeless, even in a mobile, animated countenance. Now let the sound come, but let it follow the thought, flood the face, let the nostrils expand, feel the nasal cavity fill with sound; let it go on up into the head and strike the forehead and the eye-sockets and the walls of all the cavities so unused to the impact of sound, which should never have been shut out. Now begin, with lips closed, a humming note, m-m-m. Let it come flooding into the face, until it presses against the lips, demanding the open mouth. Now let it open the mouth into the e. Repeat this over and over—m-ē, m-ē, m-ē. Don't let the tone drop back as the mouth opens. Keep it forward behind the upper lip, which it has made full, and which, playing against, it tickles until we must let the tone escape. Just as much of the day as possible, think the tone in a flood into the face, and as often as possible hum and let it escape, noting its in[Pg 329]creasing resonance. It will increase in resonance, I promise you. It will lose its thin, high-pitched nasal quality, and grow mellow and rich and ringing.

And so, with chest lifted, diaphragm at work, throat open, tongue free, jaws relaxed, and all the cavities concerned in vocalization open to the tone, as you breathe and yawn and hum, let it issue a full, round, resonant, singing note to add itself to the music of the world.

A LAST WORD TO THE PUPIL

Mr. William James tells us that we learn to swim in winter and to skate in summer. The principle underlying this statement is of immense comfort in approaching a class in vocal expression. The hope of satisfying results is fostered by the knowledge that a mere statement of the fundamental facts of right tone production will do much toward inducing a right condition for tone. But I know, too, that immediate results depend upon immediate and faithful putting into practice of the principles set forth. A little practice every day will[Pg 330] work swift wonders with the voice. And so, in leaving with you Madame Ricardo's watchwords, I also commend you to Ellen Terry's "infinite pains." When it means, as it does in pursuing this ideal, that we must be on guard every waking instant—for a time; when it means a watch set (for a time) upon every organ involved in expression—lips, teeth, tongue, jaw, mouth, throat, chest, diaphragm, and all the muscles governing these organs; when it means a watch set (for a time) upon one's every thought and emotion lest it make false demands upon the sensitive instruments of their expression—then it becomes a daring device, indeed, to wear upon one's crest. Let us not hesitate to carve it there, when we realize that to follow it means culture, true culture, the culture which can only come through control and command of one's self.

TO THE TEACHER

When I consider how much depends in the training of a voice upon listening to the[Pg 331] made tone, how little depends upon knowing how it was made, I realize that it is your ear, not my book, which must become the real guide in this Study of Vocal Expression.