Title: The Voice and Spiritual Education
Author: Corson, Hiram, 1828-1911
Language: English
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THE VOICE AND SPIRITUAL EDUCATION



  THE VOICE
  AND
  SPIRITUAL EDUCATION

  BY

  HIRAM CORSON, LL.D.

  PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
  CORNELL UNIVERSITY


  New York

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
  1914

  _All rights reserved_


  COPYRIGHT, 1896,
  BY MACMILLAN AND CO.


  Set up and electrotyped March, 1896. Reprinted
  February, 1897; July, 1901; February, 1903; August,
  1904; March, 1908; October, 1914.

  Norwood Press
  J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
  Norwood Mass. U.S.A.



_PREFATORY NOTE_


_While it is the purpose of this little book to emphasize the importance
of vocal culture in its relations to literary and general culture, it is
not its purpose, except incidentally, to impart elocutionary
instruction. Attention is called to a few features of the subject,
which, if realized in any voice, would contribute much to the technical
part, at least, of good reading._

_Special stress is laid upon the importance of spiritual education as
the end toward which all education should be directed, and as an
indispensable condition of interpretative reading. Such education is
demanded for responding to, and assimilating, the informing life of any
product of literary genius; without it, mere vocal training avails
little or nothing. By the spiritual I mean man's essential, absolute
being; and I include in the term the emotional, the susceptible or
impressible, the sympathetic, the instinctive, the intuitive,--in short,
the whole domain of the non-intellectual, the non-discursive._

_With the kind permission of the editor, I have embodied in the part of
the book devoted to the voice, my article on Vocal Culture, published
'The Atlantic Monthly' for June, 1895._

                                          _H. C._
    _Cascadilla Cottage,
        Ithaca, N. Y., 30 Jan., 1896._



_La voix est une révélatrice, une initiatrice, dont la puissance est
aussi merveilleuse qu'inconnue._

       *       *       *       *       *

_Un des plus réels avantages de la lecture à haute voix est précisément
de vous révéler dans les chefs-d'œuvre une foule de petites nuances
ignorées du peintre même qui les y a jetées. Par là, cet art pourrait
devenir un puissant instrument d'éducation. C'est souvent un excellent
professeur de littérature qu'un grand maître de diction._

    ERNEST LEGOUVÉ, _de l'Académie française_.



THE VOICE AND SPIRITUAL EDUCATION


Can reading be taught? is a question often asked, and partly for the
reason, it may be, that so many readers who have gone through courses of
vocal training in schools of elocution, or under private teachers, so
frequently offend people of taste and culture by an extravagance of
expression, by mimetic gesture, and by offensive mannerisms of various
kinds. But a reasonable inference cannot be drawn from such readers that
vocal training must necessarily do more harm than good.

Yes, much can be taught, and is taught, and well taught, it may be; the
desideratum is the education, intellectual and spiritual, especially the
latter, without which the mere teaching and training are vain and
impotent.

The organs of speech can be brought by intelligent training into a
complete obedience to the will and the feelings; and without this
obedience of his vocal organs, a reader, whatever be his other
qualifications, cannot do his best. He is in the position of a musical
performer who has sympathetically assimilated the composition he is
rendering, but whose instrument is badly out of tune. A reader may have
the fullest possible appreciation of the subject matter, intellectual
and spiritual, of a poem, and a susceptibility to all the subtlest
elements of effect involved in its form; but if he have not full control
of his vocal faculties, he can but imperfectly reveal through his voice,
his appreciation and susceptibility. This control can be secured only by
long and intelligent training. The voices, generally, of even the most
cultivated people, have gone more or less astray, and need to be brought
back from the error of their ways, before they can serve effectively to
interpret a literary product.

Many great poets have written subtly organic verse, who could not
vocally realize its potentialities, they not having their organs of
speech sufficiently under control. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is an
example. 'Amongst Coleridge's accomplishments,' says De Quincey,
alluding, in his 'Literary Reminiscences' to Coleridge's lectures on
Poetry and the Fine Arts, at the Royal Institution, 'good reading was
not one; he had neither voice, nor management of voice.' But he must
imaginatively have heard the wonderful verse of Christabel and Kubla
Khan, as an organic, inseparable part of the poetical expression. Mere
literary skill could not have produced such verse. It was a texture
woven by the spirit, which he could not adequately exhibit to the
physical ear, as he was not master of the physical means for so doing.

To read naturally is a common and a very vague phrase. The question is,
what _is_ nature? It is the object of the science and art of reading, to
realize as fully as possible the imperfectly realized instincts of the
voice. 'There is a power in science which searches, discovers,
amplifies, and completes, and which all the strength of spontaneous
effort can never reach.'

When people speak of the natural in expression, they generally mean
nature on the plane on which they are best acquainted with it--the plane
of common speech. But the language of the higher poetry, or of tragedy,
or even of impassioned prose, is, more or less, an idealized language,
for the expression of which a corresponding idealization of voice is
demanded. To read, for example, Milton's apostrophe to Light, at the
beginning of the third book of Paradise Lost, after the manner of common
speech, would be somewhat absurd. The idealization of voice demanded for
the reading of such language, is not, however, a departure from nature,
but is nature on a higher plane.

'Enter into the _spirit_ of what you read, read _naturally_, and you
will read well,' is about the sum and substance of what Archbishop
Whateley teaches on the subject, in his 'Elements of Rhetoric.' Similar
advice might with equal propriety be given to a clumsy, stiff-jointed
clodhopper in regard to dancing: 'Enter into the spirit of the dance,
dance naturally, and you will dance well.' The more he might enter into
the spirit of the dance, the more he might emphasize his
stiff-jointedness and his clodhopperishness.

Of this distinguished advocate of 'natural' reading and speaking, Mr.
Grant, writing in 1835, says: 'Oratory is not his forte, ... he goes
through his addresses in so clumsy and inanimate a way that noble lords
at once come to the conclusion that nothing so befits him as unbroken
silence. He speaks in so low a tone as to be inaudible to those who are
any distance from him. And not only is his voice low in its tones, but
it is unpleasant from its monotony. In his manner there is not a
particle of life or spirit. You would fancy his grace to be half asleep
while speaking. You see so little appearance of consciousness about him
that you can hardly help doubting whether his legs will support him
until he has finished his address.'

The writer of this justly says of the Archbishop's writings: 'They
abound with evidences of profound thought, varied knowledge, great
mental acuteness, and superior powers of reasoning.' But his 'natural'
theory in regard to speaking, did not, it appears, avail with him, even
when backed by such abilities.

'Nature,' says the Archbishop, 'or custom, which is a second nature,
suggests spontaneously the different modes of giving expression to
different thoughts, feelings, and designs, which are present to the mind
of any one who, without study, is speaking in earnest his own
sentiments. Then, if this be the case, why not leave nature to do her
own work? Impress but the mind fully with the sentiments, etc., to be
uttered; withdraw the attention from the sound, and fix it on the sense;
and nature, or habit, will spontaneously suggest the proper delivery.'

Such instruction as this is not unlike that which Hamlet gives to
Guildenstern, for playing upon a pipe, and would be, in the majority of
cases, hardly more efficacious: 'Govern these ventages with your fingers
and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most
excellent music. Look you, these are the stops.' Guildenstern replies:
'But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; _I have not the
skill_.' The last sentence tells the whole story. The Archbishop, with
all his great abilities, had not the requisite _skill_ in oratorical
delivery.

So this may be said to be the conclusion of the whole matter: the main
result which can be secured in teaching reading, and in training the
voice, is technique and elocutionary _skill_ of various kinds--a skill
which the student can bring into his service, when voicing his
intellectual appreciation and spiritual assimilation of a poem or any
other form of spiritualized thought; the illumination of the
subject-matter, intellectual and spiritual, must come from the _being_
of the reader. He can't give to his hearers what he doesn't possess. The
saying of Madame de Sévigné, '_Il faut être, si l'on veut paraître_,' is
applicable to the reader. An attempt to express what is beyond the range
of his spiritual life and experience, at once betrays his deficiency.
And no amount of mere vocal training will compensate for this
deficiency.

There are two unwarrantable assumptions in what Dr. Whateley writes
about Elocution: 1. That a reader or speaker can do with an untrained
voice what his mind wills, or his feelings impel him, to do. Not one in
a thousand can. 2. That all principles of Elocution which may be taught
will continue in the consciousness of the reader or speaker--that he
will be ever thinking of the vocal functions which he exercises. 'The
reader's attention,' he says, 'being fixed on his own voice, the
inevitable consequence would be that he would betray more or less his
studied and artificial delivery.'

All true culture, to _be_ true, must be unconscious of the processes
which induced it. But before it is attained, one must be more or less
'under the law,' until he become a law to himself, and do spontaneously
and unconsciously what he once had to do consciously, and with effort.

It may be that Dr. Whateley's views in regard to Elocution were somewhat
the reactionary product of the highly artificial style of pulpit oratory
which appears to have been the fashion in the Dublin of his day. (Note
1.) He was a man of such perfect honesty and integrity, with such a
resulting aversion to sham and empty display of every kind, that he came
to regard all training in vocal delivery as unfavorable to genuineness.
His theory was fully confirmed, he may have felt, by some of the popular
theatrical preachers around him, who made a display of themselves, and
who, in the Archbishop's words, 'aimed at nothing, and--hit it.'



When I was a small boy, at school, sixty years ago, all the scholars had
to read aloud twice a day; the several classes standing while they read,
and toeing a chalk line. The books used were the New Testament and
Lindley Murray's English Reader. The standard instruction imparted was
very limited, but very good so far as it went, namely, 'Speak distinctly
and mind your stops.' Each boy read, at a time, but a single verse of
the New Testament, or a single paragraph of the English Reader; the
'master' himself first reading a verse, or a paragraph, each time the
reading went around the class.

Well, the result was that all the boys acquired at least a distinct
articulation and a fluent utterance, properly sectioned off by their
minding the stops. Some of the boys, of whom I was one, had to read
aloud, at home, from other books. When I showed by my expression, or,
rather, by my want of it, that I did not understand what I was reading,
I was at once told so, the passage was explained and read to me, and I
had to read it again, to show that I had caught the meaning and the
proper expression. If I were required to read something which was
entirely new to me, my eye was exercised in running ahead of my voice,
and taking in what was coming, to the extent of a sentence or two, in
order to read with sufficient expression not to be stopped, as I was
very impatient of interruption, especially if I particularly enjoyed the
subject-matter.

When I look back upon these daily exercises in reading, at school and at
home, I feel that nothing could have been better at the time. There was
no such thing as 'speaking a piece,' with gesture, 'limbs all going like
a telegraph in motion,' and straining after effect. It was simply
careful, honest reading, with no attempt at make-believe of feeling. No
encouragement was given to any affectation of that kind; but whatever
impressed my listeners as genuine feeling and appreciation on my part,
was duly praised; and I was very fond of praise, and was stimulated by
it to do my best.

I fear that such reading has very much gone out of use, and that
untimely technical instruction has taken its place. Call on a college
student to read any prose passage extempore, and what is the result in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred? Why, he will read it, _experto
credite_, in a most bungling way, with an imperfect articulation,
without any proper grouping or perspective; and if the passage be an
involved and long-suspended period, which his eye should run along and
grasp as a whole, in advance of his voice, he will be lost in it before
he get half way through it. He has had little or no practice in reading
aloud. He has 'parsed' much in the lower schools, but his parsing has
not resulted in synthesis (which should be the sole object of all
analysis), has not resulted in a knowledge of language as a living
organism, and the consequence is that his extempore vocalization of the
passage is more or less chaotic and--afflicting.

Extempore reading requires that the eye be well trained to keep ahead of
the voice, and to take in a whole period, or a whole stanza, in order
that each part of it be read with reference to the whole, that is, with
the proper perspective. To do this demands an almost immediate synthetic
grasp, the result of much training.

The perspective of speech is virtually a part of the meaning. One who
reads without perspective does not give his hearers the exact meaning,
for the reason that, subordinate parts standing out as prominently as
leading parts, the hearer does not get a correct impression of their
various degrees of importance, unless he do for himself what the reader
should do; and, certainly, not many hearers are equal to this--not one
in a thousand. Our estimates of all things are more or less relative, so
that perspective plays a large part in whatever we take account of. What
would a picture be without perspective? But it is of equal importance,
of greater importance, indeed, in the vocal presentation of language.

A true perspective demands, on the part of the reader, the nicest sense
of the relative values of successive and involved groups or sections of
thought--those belonging to the main current of thought being brought to
the front with a fulness of expression, and the subordinate groups or
sections according to their several degrees of subordination, being
thrown back with a corresponding reduction of expression. Along with
this, the whole must have that toning which reveals the spirit of the
whole. Could there be any better test than reading, of a student's
knowledge of the organic structure of the language, and the extent to
which the thought is spiritualized? Hardly. The ordinary examinations
of the schools, through questions, are wholly inadequate for getting at
such knowledge--for evoking a student's sense of the _life_ of the
language as an organ of the intellectual and the spiritual.

Technical knowledge is a good thing in its way, but a knowledge of life,
in whatever form, is a far better thing. And it is only life that can
awaken life. Technical knowledge, by itself, is only dry bones. The
technical, indeed, cannot by itself be appreciated. It must be
appreciated as an expression of life--as an expression of the plastic
spirit of thought and feeling.

Reading must supply all the deficiencies of written or printed language.
It must give life to the letter. How comparatively little is addressed
to the eye, in print or manuscript, of what has to be addressed to the
ear by a reader! There are no indications of tone, quality of voice,
inflection, pitch, time, or any other of the vocal functions demanded
for a full intellectual and spiritual interpretation. A poem is not
truly a poem until it is voiced by an accomplished reader who has
adequately assimilated it--in whom it has, to some extent, been born
again, according to his individual spiritual constitution and
experiences. The potentialities, so to speak, of the printed poem, must
be vocally realized. What Shelley, in his lines 'To a Lady, with a
Guitar,' says of what the revealings of the instrument depend upon, may
be said, with equal truth, of the revealings of every true poem; it

                'will not tell
    To those who cannot question well
    The spirit that inhabits it;
    It talks according to the wit
    Of its companions; and no more
    Is heard than has been felt before,'

by those who endeavor to get at its secrets.

Good reading is a vocal manifestation of responsiveness, on the part of
the reader, to the hieroglyphic letter.



Such early training in reading as I have described, is the best
preparation for the more elaborate expression demanded by the higher
literature. And we shall not have a true, honest vocal interpretation of
literature until we return to this early honest reading. I say 'return,'
for, so far as my knowledge goes, there is a plentiful lack of it, at
present, in primary schools--a lack somewhat due, no doubt, to the
ever-increasing amount and variety of knowledge which students are
compelled to acquire in the schools. _There is no time left for
education._ He would be the ideal teacher who could induce a maximum
amount of education on the basis of a minimum amount of acquirement. But
just the reverse prevails. Acquirement is made the all in all, and
education is left to take care of itself. The acquisition of knowledge,
too, becomes a mere indulgence with thousands of people, in these
days--an indulgence which renders them more and more averse to any of
that independent activity of mind upon which education so largely
depends.

I am quite surprised at what M. Ernest Legouvé says, in his 'Petit
Traité de lecture à haute voix à l'usage des écoles primaires,' of the
importance attached, in America, to reading aloud. In the very opening
sentence of this work, he says, 'La lecture à haute voix compte, en
Amérique, parmi les éléments les plus importants de l'instruction
publique; elle est une des bases de l'enseignement primaire.' And
elsewhere he calls upon the people of France to imitate the United
States of North America, in making the art of reading aloud the very
corner-stone of public education! Where could M. Legouvé have got this
remarkable opinion of the high estimate, in this country, of reading
aloud, as an educational agency? From whatever source he derived it, it
is certainly most remote from the truth. What Sir Henry Taylor says of
the neglect of the art of reading in England (Correspondence, edited by
Professor Dowden, p. 225), is quite applicable to this country. After
saying that he regards the reading of Shakespeare to boys and girls, if
it be well read and they are apt, 'as carrying with it a deeper
cultivation than anything else which can be done to cultivate them,' he
adds, 'I often think how strange it is that amongst all the efforts
which are made in these times to teach young people everything that is
to be known, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, the
one thing omitted is teaching them to read. At present, to be sure, it
is a very rare thing to find any one who _can_ teach it; but it is an
art which might be propagated from the few to the many with great
rapidity, if a due appreciation of it were to become current. The rage
for lecturing would be a more reasonable rage if that were taught in
lectures which can be conveyed only by voice and utterance, and not by
books.'

Here, by the way, is indicated what the literary lecture should be. It
is a comparatively easy thing to lecture about literary products and to
deal out literary knowledge of various kinds, and cheap philosophy in
regard to the relations of literature to time and place. A professor of
literature might do this respectably well without much knowledge of the
literature itself. But what students especially need is to be brought
into direct relationship with literature in its essential, absolute
character; so that the very highest form of literary lecturing is
interpretative reading. Such reading brings home to sufficiently
susceptible students what cannot be lectured about--namely, the
intellectually indefinite element of a literary product. Much of what is
otherwise done for students, in the way of lecturing, they could do
quite as well for themselves.

'A book of criticism,' says Hume, 'ought to consist chiefly of
quotations.' The same should be said of a literary lecture, with the
important addition to the word 'quotations,' 'effectively read.'

To return from this digression, what seemed so strange to Sir Henry
Taylor, is not so strange when it is considered that the dealing out of
knowledge, in the schools, on the part of the teacher, and the
acquiring of it on the part of students, leave no time for education of
any kind except the little which is _incident_ upon the imparting and
the acquisition of various kinds of knowledge 'from the cedar of Lebanon
to the hyssop on the wall.'

Perhaps the greatest danger to which education proper will be more and
more exposed, in the future, will be the great increase of knowledge, in
every department of thought. This may sound paradoxical; but with the
increase of knowledge, the temptation will correspondingly increase to
make the acquisition of the greatest possible amount of it, in schools,
colleges, and universities, the leading aim. To give the student the
fullest command of his faculties, should certainly be the prime object,
to which the acquisition of knowledge should be subservient; but this
object seems to be more and more lost sight of, while to cram his mind
to the utmost, with vague, indefinite, and heterogeneous knowledge, is
getting more and more to be, if not the sole, at any rate the chief,
consideration. This state of things prevails from our lowest to our
highest schools. We hear and read _ad nauseam_ that the word 'education'
means 'a drawing out.' This one etymology everybody knows, if he doesn't
know any other. Lecturers and writers on education, and school
circulars, keep reiterating it. There are certain truths so ding-donged
in our ears that they lose all their vitality. One of these certainly
is, that the word 'education' means 'a drawing out.' Sometimes a teacher
at a school institute, after presenting this etymology, proceeds to
present what he considers the best methods of ramming in!

There are schools, and their patrons think them excellent, which
out-herod Herod in their slaughter of the Innocents. Sad, indeed, is it
that the young are so debarred, as they are, by the tasks imposed upon
them, from all sweet and quickening 'impressions before the letter.' 'As
in Hood's exquisite parody of George Robins's advertisement,' says
George Henry Lewes in his novel, Ranthorpe, 'the pump is enumerated as
having "a handle _within reach of the smallest child_," so do our
illustrious educators wish to place the pump of knowledge within reach
of the meanest capacity, that infants may forego the mother's milk to
drink of its Pierian spring.' The time must come, it is no doubt in the
very far future,--there are no indications, at present, of its being in
the near future,--when it will be a pedagogical question how to induce a
maximum amount of education with a minimum amount of brain-slaughter.

To get back, now, to the leading subject, vocal culture: a college
student whose voice was neglected in early life, and, worst of all,
whose sympathies were not then so attuned to good literature, by the
influences and atmosphere of his home, that he came to have an inward
impulsion to vocalize whatever he specially enjoyed in his reading, will
not be much profited by a course in soulless elocutionary spouting. One
may have an extraordinary natural gift of vocal expression which is
superior to all adverse circumstances; but such an one is a _rara avis
in terris_. Unless there be an early initiation into literature and its
vocalization, in advance of the benumbing technical instruction of the
schools, much cannot be expected from the great majority of students, in
a literary or elocutionary direction. Truly 'illuminative reading,' to
use Carlyle's phrase, is, apart from this condition, quite out of the
question.



In the whole range of linguistic and literary studies, English, Latin,
Greek, German, French, Italian, Spanish, or whatever be the language and
literature studied, vocalization should be made of prime importance. So
it should even in Anglo-Saxon and early English studies. When I
conducted these studies, which I did, for more than twenty-five years, I
pronounced to my classes all that was gone over. Beowulf I read to them
entire. The interest of students in this Anglo-Saxon epic is much
enhanced when it is fluently and _vigorously_ read. It is the only way
by which the spirit of the poem can be brought home to them.

To know Chaucer as a poet, and not merely as a writer of
fourteenth-century English, his verse, which, after a lapse of five
hundred years, continues to rank with the best in the literature, _must_
be voiced; and to voice it, with the best knowledge of its pronunciation
which has been attained to by Alexander J. Ellis, in his 'Early English
Pronunciation,' and by other phonologists, requires a careful training
of the voice and much practice. A susceptible reader comes, in time, to
feel, to some extent, what the _intonation_, also, of the verse, must
have been. To inspire students with a permanent interest in 'the morning
star of song,' the teacher must be an accomplished reader of his verse,
and must train his students to the best reading of it of which they are
capable. Of course, a knowledge of the language in its historical
development, previous to Chaucer, is desirable, though not
indispensable, to appreciate his poetry; but the best vocalization, in
the fullest sense of the word, which can be attained to, _is_
indispensable. To know of what earlier inflection any final _-e_ is the
residual, is well enough; but I cannot think that any one would insist
that such knowledge is indispensable to an appreciation of the poetry.
Philology is not the handmaid to poetical cultivation. She can be
dismissed altogether from service. There are no emergencies, even, where
it is necessary to engage her temporarily.

In the study of Latin and Greek, even with our imperfect knowledge of
the ancient pronunciation, and our no knowledge of the ancient
intonation, of these languages, it is all important that the student
should read Greek and Roman authors aloud. A student who has first been
trained to read Greek and Latin prose with fluency and expression can
then have considerable appreciation of verse in advance of any technical
knowledge. And if he be trained to read in time, he will know what
'quantity' really means. As Latin and Greek verse is read in the schools
(when it is read at all), it is accentual, not quantitative. I cannot
think that there was any more quantity in Greek and Latin than there is
in English, or in any other modern language, unless the Greeks and
Romans _spoke_ more in time than we do, which is not likely. The Romans
were probably more measured in their speech than the Greeks. Syllables,
in Greek and Latin verse, must have been made long or short by an
intoning of the verse.

When Vergil, or Ovid, or any hexameter poet, is read in the schools, his
verse is the same as that of Longfellow's Evangeline, made up of _xa_,
_ax_, and _axx_ feet. (Note 2.)

The following verse from Ovid, for example (Met. I. 143),

    Sanguine | aque ma | nu crepi | tantia | concutit |
      arma,

is read in the same way as the following from Longfellow's Evangeline:

    Or by the | owl, as he | greeted the | moon
      with de|moniac | laughter;

and the first and second of the following verses from Ovid (Met. I. 148,
149),

    Filius | ante di|em patri|os in|quirit in | annos.
    Victa ja|cet Pie|tas; et | Virgo | cæde ma-|dentes
    Ultima cœlestum terras Astræa reliquit,

are read in the same way as the following from Evangeline:

    And as she | gazed from the | window she |
      saw se|renely the | moon pass
    Forth from the | folds of a | cloud, and | one
      star | follow her | footsteps.

Ovid's Met. I. 22,

    Nam cœ|lo ter|ras et | terris | abscidit | undas,

is read in the same way as Colossians iii. 19:

    Husbands, | love your | wives, and | be not |
      bitter a|gainst them;

and Ovid's Met. I. 36,

    Tum freta | diffun | di, rapi|disque tum | escere |
      ventis,

is read in the same way as Psalm ii. 1:

    Why do the | heathen | rage, and the | people
      im|agine a | vain thing.

_Rebus sic stantibus_, what's the use of talking about quantitative and
accentual verse, as if they were really two kinds of verse? They are, to
be sure, but they are not made so, in reading.

There is, in fact, no such thing as a spondee in ordinary speech. A true
spondee must be made by voicing two syllables in equal time, and each
without stress.

After having been trained in the 'scanning' of the schools (counting
verses on the fingers), I threw aside and tried, and successfully tried,
to forget all the scholarship of Latin verse, and began reading Vergil
aloud and in time. I felt, at first, the movement of the verse backward,
the ultimate and the penultimate foot came out first to my feelings; and
in time, the movement of the entire verse became distinct.

Chaucer's verse must be read more in time than modern verse. (Note 3.)
But all true verse must be read more in time than prose. And even
impassioned prose, like some of De Quincey's, for example, must be read,
more or less, in time. Perhaps it may be said that both prose and verse
should be read in time according as the thought is spiritualized.

The choruses in Milton's Samson Agonistes can be properly appreciated
only when read in time. The verse has been condemned by some critics, as
if Milton, whose ear, as De Quincey says, was angelic, could not compose
good verse when he dictated, in his blindness (to which the merit of the
verse of the Paradise Lost and the Paradise Regained, was, no doubt,
somewhat due), this last of his great poetic compositions!

Even in the study of modern languages, in the schools, there is not
enough pronouncing of the original. It is mostly read off in English. If
a teacher of a foreign language, whose pronunciation is correct (if it
is not correct, he should not teach it), were simply to read aloud to
his students, they having the text before their eyes, and were to
require them to read, until they could pronounce correctly and fluently,
the language studied, it would be a much better introduction to the
language than the usual grammatical grind at the outset. A certain
amount of grammatical grind is necessary, but a thorough training in
pronunciation should come first of all. And then, if a student got
nothing other than a good pronunciation, it would be certainly worth
more to him than any amount of grammatical drill without it. A living
language should not be studied scientifically until it is _known_. And
the most important thing to know, at first, is its pronunciation.

Thomas Elwood, Milton's young Quaker friend, tells us, in his
autobiography, of his reading Latin to the blind poet,--how he was
required to get rid of his English pronunciation of the language, which
his 'master' disliked, and to learn what he calls 'the foreign
pronunciation,' his description thereof showing it to have been the
Italian,--and then adds, 'Having a curious ear' (that is, a careful,
accurate, nice, keenly susceptible ear), 'he understood by my tone, when
I understood what I read, and when I did not; and accordingly would stop
me, examine me, and open up the most difficult passages to me.'

This sentence suggests that much more might be done than is done, in the
way of getting at students' appreciation of the Latin or Greek they may
be reciting, by requiring them to voice the original in advance of
translating. After having attained, by sufficient practice, an easy
fluency of utterance, they could--or some could--bring out, through
their voices, much which they could not reveal through translation or
any amount of exegesis. All the members of the class might be on a par,
so far as translation and exegesis go, in exhibiting their knowledge and
appreciation of the original; but there would always be a few who could
reveal through vocalization what is beyond translation and exegesis.
And the professor would not necessarily need to have the 'curious ear'
of a Milton to detect this kind of superiority of the few.

This brings me to say that, in literary examinations, whatever other
means be employed, a sufficiently qualified teacher could arrive at a
nicer and more certain estimate of what a student has appropriated, both
intellectually and spiritually, of a literary product, or any portion of
a literary product, by requiring him to read it, than he could arrive at
through any amount of catechising. The requisite vocal cultivation on
the part of the student is, of course, presumed.

But even an uncultivated voice would reveal appreciation, or the want of
it, to some extent. For, after all, it is not so much the cultivated
voice as spiritual appreciation, which tells in reading. I have heard
'poor, but honest' voices read some poems very effectively, and I have
heard rich, but dishonest voices read very afflictingly. To adapt the
French saying, _le style, c'est l'homme_, it may be said that _la
lecture à haute voix c'est l'homme_. Reading reveals the reader's
spiritual appreciation or the absence of it. And it is only to the
extent that a reader assures his hearers that he has himself experienced
the sentiments to which he gives utterance, that he impresses them. To
one who has truly appreciated it, there is nothing more dreary than the
usual elocutionary rendering of a poem.

Suppose a teacher were to examine a student on such a poem as
Coleridge's Christabel by questioning him about it, and the student were
to show that he was thoroughly acquainted with all the facts and details
of the poem; there would still be no evidence of that student's
susceptibility to what in the poem constitutes its mysterious
charm,--none whatever. The student might be utterly destitute of such
susceptibility, and yet he could just as well prepare himself to answer
all the teacher's questions. A very small boy might do so, whose
appreciation of poetry had not gone beyond 'How doth the little busy
bee.' There might be a most susceptible literary genius in the class,
who might fall below the other student in such an examination! It is
quite likely that he would, for he would be chiefly occupied with the
poem as a poem, and would assimilate its life without retaining a
recollection of all the details, to which the other had given exclusive
attention. Or suppose the poem were Gray's Elegy written in a Country
Churchyard, and the student were to pass a perfectly satisfactory
examination thereupon, on the basis, say, of the valuable notes in
Professor Hales's Longer English Poems; what would that signify, in
comparison with the reading of the poem, which would unmistakably show
whether he had responded, to any extent, or not, to its sweet evening
pensiveness, to the general tenor of the theme, to the moulding spirit
of the whole?

That he should understand the articulating thought, all the grammatical
constructions (and there are several which need to be particularly
looked into), and all points to which attention is called in Professor
Hales's notes, is, to be sure, important; but an examination confined to
these would not be any test of his literary capacity, of his
susceptibility to the poem as a poem.

In these remarks, I assume, of course, that the prime object of a
literary examination should be to test not so much a student's
knowingness, as his literary capacity, which means a capacity to respond
to the spiritual life of a poem, or any other form of literature, in
the true sense of the word 'literature.' It is its spiritual life which
makes a poem a poem, whatever the thought articulation may be. The
student who is capable of such response should rank higher (nobody but a
Dr. Dryasdust could deny this) than the student who could answer all
questions which the most prolific questioner could ask him, but who
could afford no evidence, through his reading of it, that the poem was
anything more to him than was a primrose to Wordsworth's 'Peter Bell.'



As the student advances to the higher literature, he should be trained
in the higher, more complex vocal functions demanded for its
interpretation; he should understand, all along, in his vocal education,
the relation of that education to the rendering of works of genius. He
should always know what his vocal exercises are for, what relation they
have to the interpreting and symbolizing of thought and feeling.

I remember a teacher who advised his scholars--I was one of them--to go
out frequently into the open air and exercise their voices. And the poor
fellows did go, and 'fright the isle from her propriety' with their
bawling without having any conception of what they were bawling for.
Their lungs were exercised thereby, but the bawling did nothing for
their vocal training.

Vocal exercise must not only be physiologically intelligent, but there
must always be some conception back of it which it is the aim of the
exercise to realize in the voice. One may have a conception, more or
less distinct, of how some very significant sentence in Shakespeare, for
example, should be uttered, and yet his voice is not sufficiently
obedient to his will and his feelings. He therefore has something to
work after, and in time may vocally realize, to his full satisfaction,
his conception; and in doing so, he has acquired some new and valuable
control of his voice, which he can make use of, whenever required, in
the rendering of other expressions.

A true poem is a piece of articulate music which may require to be long
practised upon by the voice before all its possible significance and
effectiveness be realized. But there must be an ideal back of the
practice (merely to keep 'going over' the poem will not do); not, of
course, an entirely distinct ideal, it may be more or less vague, but
such an ideal as may be got in advance through a responsiveness to its
informing life. This ideal will become more and more distinct in the
course of the practice.

This is true of every form of art. The artist starts with an ideal more
or less vague (but it is an ideal which motives all his work), and this
ideal only gradually takes shape in the process of its realization in a
picture or a statue. Composing continues to the end. The poet is still
composing, still working after a fuller realization of his ideal, when
he is making the last verbal change in his poem. (Note 4.) To quote from
Browning's 'A Death in the Desert':

    God's gift was that man should conceive of truth,
    And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake
    As midway help, till he reach fact indeed.
    The statuary ere he mould a shape
    Boasts a like gift, the shape's idea, and next
    The aspiration to produce the same;
    So, taking clay, he calls his shape thereout,
    Cries ever, 'Now I have the thing I see':
    Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought,
    From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself.

           *       *       *       *       *

    God only makes the live shape at a jet.

Interpretative reading goes on in the same way. After a reader's long
familiarity with a poem, and when he thinks he has realized all its
possibilities of vocal effectiveness, some new vocal movement on a
single word, it may be, is suggested, which is a decided contribution to
the effect before reached. The play of Hamlet abounds in little
speeches, and single words, even, whose possibilities of expressiveness
can hardly be exhausted. Every great poet writes, at times, more
significantly than he knows.

In the creation of every great work of genius, a large degree of
unconscious might enters; and this unconscious might the reader with the
requisite degree of spiritual susceptibility may respond to. This is an
activity of the highest order on the part of a reader. Melody, harmony,
and every mode of form, are, to some extent, the product of an
unconscious might. Deep feeling attracts to itself such elements of
language as serve best to conduct it. Assonance, especially, is a
manifestation of it. Paradise Lost abounds with the assonance which the
dominant feeling of the poet induced.

When Hamlet is subjecting his friends to a searching examination in
regard to the appearance of the ghost of his father, he asks 'His beard
was grisly?' and then adds, 'no.' (The word is followed by a period, in
the Folio.) What a varied expressiveness this little word 'no' admits
of! When Macbeth says to his wife, when they are considering the murder
of the king, 'If we should fail?' she replies 'We fail?' Though the
interrogative is used in the Folio, the period would, perhaps, be the
better pointing. However that be, the reading of 'we fail' involves much
consideration; and so does the reading of thousands of single words in
Shakespeare's Plays.

But, after all, it is not upon inflections and emphases and other vocal
functions which pertain more especially to the interpretation of the
articulating thought, that the true reader chiefly depends. The most
important thing with him is the choral atmosphere in which a
spiritualized composition requires to be presented. And it is in this
respect that the art of reading particularly corresponds with the sister
art of painting. The artist in form and color bathes his landscape in
'the light that never was, on sea or land,' or, if not that, in some
light or other, some 'tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies,'
and which serves to reveal the feeling which he aimed to express through
the landscape. The landscape itself corresponds in painting with the
articulating thought in reading; but the spiritual attitude of the
artist is exhibited through the light in which the landscape is bathed.
And so the spiritual attitude of the reader is exhibited through his
intonation, which corresponds with atmosphere in painting. A susceptible
reader will, on the first reading of a poem or an impassioned prose
composition, be more or less immediately responsive to the key-note of
the composition. An increased familiarity will finally bring this
key-note fully home to his feelings, or as fully as may be; and if he
has made the articulating thought his own, he is now prepared to
interpret the composition to the ears of others. A reader's success in
interpreting such a poem as Tennyson's In Memoriam, for example, can be
but partial if he has not adequately caught, and does not vocally
reproduce, the key-note, however distinctly he may present the
articulating thought. It is the tone which spiritualizes and quickens
the thought; and it is the main object in reading, to spiritualize and
quicken thought, to bring it into relation with the spiritual being of
the hearer.

Vocal training, the most scientific and systematic, will not of itself
make readers, that is, vocal interpreters of genius. Something more must
be done than is at present done, in homes and schools, especially in
homes, for the education of the spiritual nature; and this education
must be begun early, must precede the education of the intellect. The
premature forcing open of the bud of reason, which now prevails to a
lamentable degree, must receive its due condemnation. It is a thing to
be condemned from Christian pulpits. As George Henry Lewes says, in his
novel, Ranthorpe, 'the child must _feel_ before it can _know_; and
knowledge, great and glorious as it is, can never be the end of life: it
is but one of the many means.'



It is quite superfluous to say that a reader should have a perfect
articulation; that he should be able to command a wide range of pitch;
all degrees of force, from _pianissimo_ to _fortissimo_; radical,
median, vanishing, and compound stress; every variety of inflection,
direct upward and direct downward inflection; equal and unequal, upward
and downward, single and double waves; accelerated and retarded
utterance; many qualities of voice; not to name numerous other vocal
functions and attributes which are means to various kinds of
interpretative ends. He should also have a complete knowledge of the
language he is rendering, as a living organism,--an indispensable
condition of his presenting the successive and involved groups of
thought with the requisite distinctness of outline, and with the
requisite perspective, determined by their relative value, of which he
should have the nicest sense. A very important condition of perspective,
I would say by the way, is the light touch which needs to be given to
whatever is implied, has been anticipated, should be taken for granted,
etc.,--the light touch which conveys the impression that the mind of the
reader does not come down upon the parts receiving the same, those parts
saying themselves, so to speak, but is occupied with the main current
of thought. Any untrained voice can emphasize, but only a trained or a
naturally unperverted voice can give the light touch successfully. Yet
it is possible for the heaviest, clumsiest voice to be trained to the
light touch, to delicacy of tint, just as one who is clay-fisted may, in
time, attain to some delicacy of manipulation. The voice and the hand
have wonderful possibilities, rarely realized; the former, when
converted from the error of its ways, being, indeed, the most expressive
organ of the soul; the latter being 'the consummation of all perfection
as an instrument.'

One great secret in forcible speech is, that all the force be thrown
upon the vowels--the inarticulate elements. While sounding them, the
organs of speech are apart, and if the lungs are kept well inflated, the
throat is open, and no friction results; while articulating the
consonants, certain two of the organs of speech are in contact, and the
throat is more or less closed. If force be thrown upon the consonants,
the articulate elements, or certain of them, such as _r_ and _k_, for
example, there is more or less friction in the throat. In uttering
forcibly the word 'struck,' for example, all the force should be thrown
upon the _ŭ_, the consonants _str_ and _k_ being about the same as in
ordinary utterance.

The music of speech is chiefly in the vowels. But the consonants must,
of course, be distinctly articulated and not be drowned in the vocality.

Sir Henry Taylor writes to Lady Taunton, May 23, 1862 (Correspondence,
edited by Edward Dowden), of Tennyson's reading: 'As to his reading, he
is a very deep-mouthed hound, and the sound of it is very grand; but I
rather need to know by heart what he is reading, for otherwise I find
the sense to be lost in sounds from time to time; and, even when I do
know what the words are, I think more of articulation is wanted to give
the consonantal effects of the rhythm; for without these effects the
melodious sinks into the mellifluous in any ordinary utterance; and even
when intoned by such an organ as Alfred's, if the poetry be of a high
order, the rhythm so sounded loses something of its musical and more of
its intellectual significance. In the best verse, not every word only,
but every letter, should speak. Nevertheless, his reading is very fine
of its kind, and it is a very rare thing to hear fine reading of any
kind.'

In regard to inflections, or bends, of the voice, of every kind, direct
upward, or downward, or combinations of both, which are called waves
(upward waves being a combination of downward and upward inflections, or
bends, and downward waves the reverse, and double waves being a
combination of upward and downward waves, or the reverse), I would say,
what I have said in my 'Primer of English Verse,' that a reader must
have a sub-consciousness of a dead level, by which, or from which, to
graduate all his departures; and it is only by avoiding all
non-significant departures that he imparts to his hearers a
sub-consciousness of his own standard. There should never be in reading
a non-significant departure from a pure monotony. Significant vocal
intervals lose their effectiveness when they are mixed up with
non-significant ones. Great effects can be secured through very simple
means by a reader who strictly observes this principle. Every little
bend of the voice tells. But a wriggling voice, the general tenor of
which is a violation of this principle, cannot secure such effects. The
hearer is presented with a jumble of non-significant and would-be
significant intervals, which is less effective than a pure monotony
would be.

Appreciative reading is shown as much, perhaps, in what I will call
_time_ melody, as in almost any other feature of vocalization. A
reader's sense of the relative values of successive and involved groups
of thought, is largely indicated by his varied (melodious) rate of
utterance. And much of the pleasure which an appreciative listener
derives from reading, as reading, is this indication on the part of the
reader of a nice estimate of relative values. He feels that the reader
is a qualified interpreter. This estimate cannot always be determined
by what a writer makes, syntactically, principal, and what subordinate,
in the construction of his language. Of course, a mere variation of time
is not, of itself, sufficient. There must be an appropriate variation of
tone-color, etc.

A simile or comparison, for example, must be so read as to indicate the
reader's estimate of what it illustrates; and this is particularly shown
by the accelerated or retarded utterance of it, and by the tone-color
given to it.

The following striking simile from II Kings, xxi. 13, should be read
with an accelerated utterance, implying the ease with which the act
illustrated will be performed: 'And I will stretch over Jerusalem the
line of Samaria, and the plummet of the house of Ahab: and I will wipe
Jerusalem _as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside
down_.'

The following comparison (Isaiah, lv. 10, 11) should be read in slower
time, in itself considered, and, partly, for the reason that it precedes
what it illustrates (a due expectation must be awakened as to what
follows): '_As the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and
returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth
and bud, and giveth seed to the sower and bread to the eater_; so shall
my word be that goeth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void,
but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in
the thing whereto I sent it.'

In still slower time, every appreciative reader would spontaneously read
the following comparison (Milton's Paradise Lost, Book I., w. 591-600):

                    his form had not yet lost
    All her original brightness; nor appeared
    Less than archangel ruined, and the excess
    Of glory obscured: _as when the sun, new risen,
    Looks thro' the horizontal misty air
    Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon,
    In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
    On half the nations, and with fear of change
    Perplexes monarchs._ Darken'd so, yet shone
    Above them all the archangel.

An increased time of utterance must be secured through the prolongable
vowels and consonants, rather than through pauses, though the latter
must also be somewhat extended. Accelerated utterance must not impress
as hurry.

The fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel, descriptive of Belshazzar's
feast, affords good illustrations of the slighting of speech. (Note 5.)
Take, for example, the first five verses (the parts which should be
slighted are indicated by smaller type):

1. Belshazzar, =the king=, made a great feast =to a thousand of his lords=,
and drank wine =before the thousand=.

2. Belshazzar, =whiles he tasted the wine=, commanded to bring the golden
and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the
temple which was in Jerusalem; =that the king, and his princes, his
wives, and his concubines=, might drink therein.

3. =Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the
temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king and his
princes, his wives and his concubines=, drank =in them=.

4. =They drank wine=, and praised the gods of gold, =and of silver, of
brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone=.

5. In the same hour came forth fingers =of a man's hand=, and wrote =over
against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's
palace=; and the king saw =the part of the hand that wrote=.

The parts in smaller type have various degrees of subordinate value,
which the nicely appreciative reader would indicate by his reading; but
they all belong to the background of the description. Any of these
parts, if brought fully into the foreground, would be given an undue
importance, and would reduce somewhat the prominence and distinctness of
the other parts.

In the first verse, 'the king,' should be read with an abatement of
voice, being an understood appositive; 'to a thousand of his lords'
('thousand' being used for an indefinite large number), is sufficiently
implied in 'gave a great feast,' and the voice should be reduced upon
it, and should not descend upon 'lords,' as it is assumed that the feast
was given to the chief men of the kingdom; 'and drank wine _before the
thousand_:' the voice after descending upon 'wine,' should drift lightly
over 'before the thousand.'

In the second verse, 'whiles he tasted the wine' should, as it were,
say itself; and then the command of the king, in regard to the sacred
vessels of the temple, should be brought to the front; 'that the king,
and his princes, his wives, and his concubines,' should be thrown back
with a reduced and somewhat accelerated voice, and prominence given to
'might drink therein,' the purpose being to invite chief attention to
the sacrilegious act of making such use of the sacred vessels. A
distinct noting of the different kinds of people present at the feast is
not called for here. The voice has other business on hand, namely, the
bringing forward of the sacrilegious purpose to drink wine from the
sacred vessels of the temple. Further on in the chapter, in the speech
of Daniel to the king (v. 23), it is necessary to bring these people
fully to the front, the melodious movement of the voice being adapted to
the special emphasizing of 'thou' and 'concubines,' thus: 'and thòu, and
thy lórds, thy wíves, and thy còncubines,' a somewhat increased pitch
and force being given to 'concubines.'

In the third verse, 'Then they brought the golden vessels,' etc., should
be read as a matter of course, and not as if it were necessary to invite
the attention of the hearer to the fact that the command of the king was
obeyed. The latter mode of reading would be wholly gratuitous (as it
should be assumed that the command of the king was obeyed), and would
waste attention; 'and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his
concubines' should be again thrown back, and, the voice should descend
somewhat forcibly upon 'drank,' thus marking distinctly the sacrilege.

In the fourth verse, 'They drank wine,' being a mere repetition, should
say itself (the mind of the reader not coming down upon it, but keeping
along on the upper plane of expression), and the voice should come out
strongly upon 'and praised the gods of gold'; but it should be reduced,
and somewhat accelerated, upon, 'and of silver, of brass, of iron, of
wood, and of stone.' Their idolatry having been sufficiently brought out
through 'and praised the gods of gold,' it would waste attention to
bring forward also the several other materials of which their gods were
composed. These should be expressed, as it were, by the way. The mind of
the reader is done with the fact of idolatry.

In the fifth verse, 'In the same hour, came forth fingers ... and
wrote,' should be brought fully to the front, an increase of time being
given to 'In the same hour,' to mark distinctly the fact that divine
vengeance followed close upon the sacrilege of drinking from the sacred
vessels of the temple, which was aggravated by their idolatry (the words
'hour,' 'fingers,' and 'wrote,' receiving each the falling inflection);
but 'of a man's hand' should be slighted, the voice being kept up on
'hand,' it being assumed that the fingers were, of course, those of a
man's hand, or, at least, of a human hand. The place just _where_ the
writing was done, 'over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the
wall of the king's palace,' being of no special importance, under the
circumstances, should be slighted. To bring it to the front would cause
an entirely unnecessary expenditure of attention on the part of the
hearer. It should be left to its own intrinsic value, without any
enforcement from the voice; 'and the king saw' comes to the front, the
voice falling upon 'saw,' and drifting down over 'the part of the hand
that wrote.'

As additional examples, take the last seven verses of the chapter: they
afford illustrations, too, of the marking of the new idea, as
distinguished from the important idea, of a sentence considered by
itself:

25. And this =is the writing that was written=, MENE, MENE, TEKEL,
UPHARSIN.

26. This is the interpretation =of the thing=: MENE; God hath numbered thy
kingdom, =and finished it=.

27. TEKEL: =Thou art weighed in the balances, and art= found wanting.

28. PERES: Thy kingdom =is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians=.

29. =Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with scarlet, and
put a chain of gold about his neck, and made a proclamation concerning
him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.=

30. In that night was Belshazzar =the king of the Chaldeans slain=.

31. =And Darius the Median= took =the kingdom, being about threescore and
two years old=.

In the twenty-fifth verse, 'And this' stands out, 'this' being the new
idea, the voice drifting, with some acceleration, over 'is the writing
that was written'; 'MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,' that is, 'numbered,
numbered, weighed, divisions,' 'mene, mene' being an emphatic
repetition. In the twenty-eighth verse, 'peres,' having the same root,
and meaning 'divided,' is substituted for 'upharsin.'

In the twenty-sixth verse, 'This is the interpretation' stands out, the
voice coming down on 'interpretation' and drifting over, and slighting,
'of the thing.' When 'mene' is pronounced by Daniel, it must be
supposed that its meaning is understood, but not its application; the
word 'kingdom' must, therefore, be marked with the emphasis; 'and
finished it' must be somewhat slighted, as the meaning of the phrase is
anticipated in 'numbered.'

In the twenty-seventh verse, the voice moves along with some
acceleration, over 'thou art weighed in the balances,' the idea of
'weighed' being anticipated in 'tekel,' and 'art found wanting' is
brought strongly out.

In the twenty-eighth verse, 'kingdom' must receive the emphasis,
'divided' being anticipated in 'peres'; 'and given to the Medes and
Persians' we must suppose is not altogether new information to
Belshazzar, after his having been informed that the division of his
kingdom is at hand. He knows who will come into possession of it. This
phrase, therefore, must not be brought fully to the front. It must be
uttered with some acceleration of the voice and in a way to indicate the
supposed feeling of Daniel in regard to the quick work which is to be
made of the kingdom.

The twenty-ninth verse should be read with some acceleration of voice,
and without any special expression, the reader assuming that the promise
made by the king to Daniel, in the sixteenth verse, if he can interpret
the writing, was fulfilled. This twenty-ninth verse must not, therefore,
be read as imparting new information.

In the thirtieth verse, 'In that night' must be brought fully out,
through a time emphasis, to mark how immediate was the fulfilment of
Daniel's interpretation; there must be some acceleration of voice upon
'was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans,' and a quite strong emphasis
given to 'slain.'

In the thirty-first verse, 'took' is the foreground word, the emphasis
of it implying an accordance with Daniel's interpretation; 'being about
threescore and two years old,' should be read as a gratuitously affixed
fact, having no particular bearing upon what has been related.

Cultivated people cannot away with what is generally understood by
'elocution,' which is rather a vocal and Delsartian display than an
honest vocalization, which good reading should be, of what has been
intellectually and spiritually assimilated. Reading is not acting. The
first thing to be done to bring 'elocution' into good repute (it is
certainly not in good repute at present) is to free reading from all
_strain_ of expression--to reduce emphasis and attain to the greatest
degree of simplicity _compatible with the subject-matter_. And one
important feature of reading which should receive special attention, as
a means to this end, is the light touch, which conveys the impression
that the mind of the reader does not come down upon the parts receiving
the same, those parts expressing what has been anticipated, or should
be taken for granted, etc., and constituting the remote background of
expression.

The highest result which can be exhibited of literary culture and a
corresponding vocal culture, is an organic melody, in the reading of a
great poem, the outcome of the poem's organic life. By melody, in
reading, is meant that organic variety in the use of all the vocal
functions and affections, that arabesqueness of expression, which does
not allow the ear of the hearer to detect a regular recurrence of any of
these functions and affections. There is melody of pause, of inflection,
of rhyme, of rhythm, of time, of force, of emphasis, and of every vocal
affection. In truly melodious reading, the design or figure, so to
speak, is so arabesque that it is not taken in by the ear of the hearer,
and does not come to his consciousness, but it tells effectively on his
feelings. And by 'effectively' I specially mean that the feelings are
brought into harmony with, into a state of elective attraction for, the
contriving creative spirit which moulds the poetic form. Such reading of
high poetry is the extreme merit of vocal expression. Some of its
principles may be _taught_; but the vitality of it must be the result of
the spiritual education of the reader, must be exhaled spontaneously
from his _being_.

A reader with a nice sense of melody may conceal a deficiency of melody
in the poem he is reading; and he may do this, without arbitrarily
imposing variety. An imposed variety is not true melody, which must be
vital, organic. In the reading of Pope's uniform couplets, for example,
he may keep down the rocking-horse movement of the verse (Note 6) by a
skilful management of the pauses (which come so uniformly in the middle
and at the end of the verses), and of the rhyming words, by an
acceleration and retardation of voice wherever these are permissible, by
the light touch, and by various other means. To counteract the uniform
construction of such verse as the following, for example, from the Essay
on Man, without arbitrarily imposing variety, the reader's art must
approach the artful:

    Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
    Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
    Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent,
    Spreads undivided, operates unspent; etc.

or the following, descriptive of the heroine, in The Rape of the Lock:

    On her white breast, a sparkling cross she wore,
    Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.
    Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,
    Quick as her eyes, and as unfix'd as those:
    Favors to none, to all she smiles extends;
    Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
    Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike,
    And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.
    Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,
    Might hide her faults, if Belles had faults to hide:
    If to her share some female errors fall,
    Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.

The absence of _enjambement_ makes it somewhat difficult so to keep down
the rhyme emphasis that it may not pester the ear. (Note 7.)

Where a reader's feelings have been melodized by culture, they will
protect him against the influence of a too artificial construction of
the verse. He will not impose variety, but he will utter humdrum verse,
as far as possible, under the conditions of his melodized feeling.



The importance of cultivating the speaking voice is quite as great as
that of cultivating the reading voice. Perhaps it is greater; for the
speaking voice has a wider and more constant influence--an influence
which is exerted in all the relations of life, an influence calming or
irritating, an influence bringing men into friendly or unfriendly
attitudes toward each other. How demulcent the effect of a gracious
voice, and how rasping that of a snappish one! 'The sweetest music,'
says Emerson, 'is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it
speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage.
The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun,
and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these.'

Of Emerson's own voice, the Rev. Charles G. Ames, in 'A Memorial
Address,' says: 'His speech had a subtle spell,--a charm like Nature's
own, so that he affected men like Old Honesty ... so silvery, cheery,
sane, fearless!... There was no false ring, no trick to catch applause
or to turn off attention from the message to the messenger; no _show_ of
knowledge or power or art. One might forget it all next hour, through
sheer moral inability to stay at such an unwonted altitude; but while
listening to that high discourse it certainly did seem as if we
belonged up there,--as if a man ought to make the very earth a pedestal
of honor for his feet and wear the sky about his brow as an aureole.'

How much wrath, with its evil consequences, might be averted by soft
answers! How much pleasanter an arrival at a hotel might be than it
often is, if the slapdash clerk in the office had a voice better attuned
to a courteous reception of a guest! or an arrival in New York, from
abroad, if a custom-house official knew how to ask, in a civilized way,
'What's in that box?' The question is often asked in a way which has a
decidedly indurating effect upon the conscience of a traveller, in
regard to dutiable things he may have brought with him. How afflicting
the chaotic clatter of high-pitched voices, at a reception, or an
evening party! A room jam-full of standing people, 'unaimed prattle
flying up and down' (true conversation is out of the question) is hard
to endure, even with the prospect of lobster and of chicken salad, ice
cream, and numerous other unwholesome things about to be. American
girls, before they 'come out,' may talk in a quiet way; but so soon as
they 'come out,' many of them think they must show that they _have_
'come out,' by the high pitch and rapidity of their voices, which quite
deprive a nervous man of his self-possession.

How much 'the charm of beauty's powerful glance' may be heightened or
lowered by the character of the voice which goes along with it! Woman
tells on others by a gracious manner, by the beauty of holiness as it is
manifested in all her ways, in all her relations, domestic and social,
and especially by her voice. A woman with a sweet and gracious voice,
the index of a sweet and gracious nature, may exert through it, in the
ordinary relations of life, without even knowing it, a better influence
than she could by advisedly devoting herself to doing good, even if such
devotion took the form of distributing religious tracts! The moral
atmosphere of a home may be not a little due to the voice of the wife
and mother. The memory, even, of a voice which was toned by love and
sympathy, may continue to be a sweet influence long after the voice
itself has been hushed in death. The influence of the voice for good or
evil, in the domestic, social, and all other relations of life, cannot
be estimated. A voice may even have a good or bad reflex action upon its
possessor. A slovenly articulation, for example, may be the index of a
moral slovenliness, and may react upon the latter. Subtle, indeed, and
imperceptible, are the influences upon ourselves, for good or evil, of
all our commonest doings.

A fond, worldly mother may be anxiously ambitious that her daughter
shall have all the accomplishments required for her fullest
attractiveness when she 'comes out.' Years may be spent upon her
musical education, with the poor result, perhaps, of 'fine sleights of
hand and unimagined fingering, shuffling off the hearer's soul through
hurricanes of notes to a noisy Tophet'; she may be taught dancing which
rivals that of a Taglioni, and French, and drawing, and painting; she
may be sent abroad to snatch the graces beyond the reach of art, of the
most elegant European society; and yet, in the grand scheme of
accomplishments, the speaking voice is left out and entirely neglected,
though she have a voice unpleasantly pitched, and with other remediable
defects which are far, very far, from idealizing, transfiguring her! If
the time devoted to the piano, with the supposed poor result, had been
devoted to a careful cultivation of her voice, her power to charm (that
being the end proposed) would be much more increased than by any or all
of her other accomplishments.

It is easy to infer what Shakespeare's opinions were on many subjects,
although his Plays are regarded by some critics as peculiarly
impersonal; but they are charged with his personality, and shadow forth,
not dimly, his views in regard to many things. The evidence is abundant
that the voice was to him very significant, apart from his estimate of
its importance, as a professional actor, and that he was most
susceptible to its charms and to its defects. It is her voice which the
grief-stricken Lear is made to speak of, when he bends over the dead
Cordelia: 'Her voice,' he says, 'was ever soft, gentle, and low'; and to
this he adds, 'an excellent thing in woman'; Shakespeare, no doubt,
meaning that he had in his mind, at the time, the cruel voices,
expressive of their hard and wicked hearts, of Regan and Goneril. After
the death of Antony, Cleopatra, in her rapturous praise of him, says,---

                    His voice was propertied
    As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
    But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
    It was as rattling thunder.

Hamlet's advice to the players we may take as an expression of
Shakespeare's own standard of vocal delivery, and as his protest
against a stilted and ranting declamation, which, no doubt,
characterized many of the actors of his day.

There is evidence in the Plays that, in the process of composition, he
must either have heard imaginatively what he was writing, or have
actually voiced his language as he went along. He did not write for the
eye, but for the ear. And the high vocal capabilities of his language
may be somewhat attributable to his hearing of what he wrote. Must he
not have heard the effect of monosyllabic words, uttered with the tremor
and semi-tone of old age, when he wrote King Lear's speeches?--'You see
me here, you gods, a poor old man, as full of grief as age,' etc., and
'When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of
fools,' etc. And must he not have heard the effect of polysyllabic
words as expressive of Macbeth's sense of the vastness of his guilt,
when he wrote, 'this my hand will rather the _multitudinous_ seas
_incarnadine_,' etc.? of the guttural emphasis, expressive of
detestation, in the speech of Coriolanus to the rabble?--'You _c_ommon
_c_ry of _c_urs! whose breath I _h_ate as _r_eek o' the _r_otten fens,'
etc.

An interesting compilation might be made from the Plays, of passages
expressive of strong passion of various kinds, the several vocabularies
of which testify to Shakespeare's having imaginatively or actually
voiced what he wrote. The speech of the Bastard to Hubert, in King John
(A. iv. S. 3), is a signal example:

    _Bastard._ Here's a good world!--Knew you of this fair work?
    Beyond the infinite and boundless reach
    Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death,
    Art thou damn'd, Hubert.

    _Hubert._ Do but hear me, sir.

    _Bastard._ Ha! I'll tell thee what;
    Thou'rt damn'd as black--nay, nothing is so black;
    Thou art more deep damn'd than Prince Lucifer:
    There is not yet so ugly a fiend of hell
    As thou shalt be, if thou didst kill this child.

I fancy that Shakespeare had a fine voice. If he had not, it is quite
certain that he had the highest estimate and appreciation of the voice
as the organ of the soul. His creative spirit, too, attracted to itself
the most effective vocabulary for the vocal expression of every kind of
passion--the most effective by reason of their monosyllabic or their
polysyllabic character, of their vowel or their consonantal elements. To
him, language was for the ear, not for the eye. The written word was to
him what it was to Socrates, 'the mere image or phantom of the living
and animated word.' (Note 8.)

The art of printing has caused language to be overmuch transferred from
its true domain, the sense of hearing, to the sense of sight. The lofty
idealized language of poetry is known, in these days, chiefly through
the eye, and its true power is consequently quiescent for the generality
of silent readers. In silent reading, an appreciation of matter and
form must be largely due to an imaginative transference to the ear of
what is taken in by the eye.



The impression seems to be getting stronger and stronger, in these days
of excessive teaching and excessive learning, that no one can do
anything or learn anything without being taught,--without 'taking a
regular course,' as the phrase is. This seems to be especially true in
the matter of vocal cultivation. People go to schools of oratory with
nothing within themselves which is clamorous for expression; not even a
very 'still small voice' urging them to express something. Many who
desire, or think they do, to be readers, as there are many who desire,
or think they do, to be artists, evidently believe that if they be
trained in technique they can be readers or artists.

But suppose some one is impelled to cultivate vocal power because of his
desire to express what he has sympathetically and lovingly assimilated,
of a work of genius: if he endeavor to give an honest expression, so far
as in him lies, to what he feels, and avoid trying to express what he
does not feel, and if he persevere in his endeavor, with always a
coefficient ideal back of his reading, he may--in time, he certainly
will--become a better reader than another could if he should set out,
with malice prepense, to be an elocutionist, and with that malicious
purpose, were to employ a mere voice-trainer who should teach him to
perpetrate all sorts of vocal extravagances, to make faces, and to
gesticulate when reading what does not need any gesture. Such an one,
after passing out of the hands of his trainer, is most likely to go
forth and afflict the public with his performances, which will be wholly
a pitiable exhibition of himself.

Some of the best readers I have ever known have been of the former
class, who honestly voiced what they had sympathetically assimilated,
and did not strain after effect. But it seems that when one sets out to
read, with no interior capital, he or she, especially she, is apt to run
into all kinds of extravagances which disgust people of culture and
taste. The voice, instead of being the organ of the soul, is the
betrayer of soullessness.

Without that interior life which can respond to the indefinite life of a
work of genius (indefinite, that is, to the intellect), a trained voice
can do nothing of itself in the way of real interpretation. It may bring
out the definite articulating thought, in a way, but the electric aura
in which the thought should be enveloped, will be wanting; and where
this is wanting, in the expression of spiritualized thought, the true
object of reading is but imperfectly realized. What can be got through
the eye, it is not the main function of the voice to deliver. There must
be the requisite 'drift' and choral intonation--drift, the air, the
pervading, ruling spirit, 'the dominant's persistence,' the prevailing
tone color.

I am pleased to quote, in this connection, what Professor Edward Dowden
writes in his article on 'The teaching of English literature,' contained
in his recent volume, 'New Studies in Literature': 'Few persons nowadays
seem to feel how powerful an instrument of culture may be found in
modest, intelligent, and sympathetic reading aloud. The reciter and the
elocutionist of late have done much to rob us of this which is one of
the finest of the fine arts. A mongrel something which, at least with
the inferior adepts, is neither good reading nor yet veritable acting,
but which sets agape the half-educated with the wonder of its airs and
attitudinizing, its pseudo-heroics and pseudo-pathos, has usurped the
place of the true art of reading aloud, and has made the word
"recitation" a terror to quiet folk who are content with intelligence
and refinement. Happily in their behalf the great sense-carrier to the
Empire, Mr. Punch, has at length seen it right to intervene. (Note 9.)
The reading which we should desire to cultivate is intelligent reading,
that is, it should express the meaning of each passage clearly;
sympathetic reading, that is, it should convey the feeling delicately;
musical reading, that is, it should move in accord with the melody and
harmony of what is read, be it in verse or prose.'

A training of the organs of speech which brings them into complete
obedience to the will and the feelings, and a perfect technique,
important and indispensable as they are, cannot, of themselves, avail
much in the interpretation of spiritualized thought. This must be mainly
the result of such education as induces an inward preparedness for
responding to and assimilating the essential life of a work of genius.
_Quicquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis_ (whatever is
received, is received according to the measure of the recipient). And it
is, or should be, the leading object of literary education to enlarge
the spiritual measure of the recipient.

Now it must be said that the schools, with all their grammars, their
rhetorics, their philologies, their psychologies, their histories and
cheap philosophies of literature, their commentaries and annotations, do
not prepare their students to know works of genius in their absolute
character; for such knowledge implies an adequate education of the
absolute, that is, spiritual man, and such education is not induced by
the above studies as at present conducted. It demands spiritual life to
respond to spiritual life; or, in the words of St. Paul, 'the natural
man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are
foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are
spiritually discerned.'

What is generally understood in the schools as a thorough study of a
work of genius, is occupied quite exclusively with the language and with
that part of the subject-matter which can be intellectually formulated.
That part which demands a spiritual response and which it is the main
object of reading to vocalize for the purpose of calling forth such
response, is not included in the so-called thorough study. The latter
may do much, indeed, to shut off any spiritual response which a student
might give if he were not subjected to such study. In this statement no
depreciation of scholarship is meant to be implied. Let us have the most
thorough scholarship possible; but it must not become an end to itself;
it must be a means to the higher end of intellectual and spiritual
life.

What chiefly afflicts a cultivated hearer, in 'elocution,' is the
conspicuous absence of spiritual assimilation on the part of the reader.
At best, he voices only what the eye of an ordinary reader could take
in, and leaves the all-important part to his face, arms, and legs, and
various attitudes of the body. But the spiritual in literature must be
addressed to the ear. 'A spirit aërial informs the cell of Hearing,'
says Wordsworth, in his great poem, 'On the power of sound.'



Reading, I have said, is not acting. It is the acting which usually
accompanies the reading or recitation of the professional elocutionist
which cultivated people especially dislike. When they wish to see
acting, they prefer going to a theatre. When they listen to reading,
they want serious interpretative vocalization; only that and nothing
more is necessary, unless it be a spontaneous and graceful movement of
the hands, occasionally, such as one makes in animated conversation.

Again, the most elegant way of vocally interpreting a poem, is to read
it from a book, rather than to recite it. Recitation has much to do with
this acting business. In fact, elocutionists recite in order to have
their arms free to act--to illustrate the thought they are expressing.
Thought should not be helped out by gesture. Gesture results, or should
result, from emotion, and should, therefore, be indefinite. Mimetic
gesture, or mimetic action of any kind, is rarely, if ever, in place. If
a speaker, addressing a _very_ ignorant audience, had to use the word
'rotatory,' for example, he might make a cyclic movement or two with his
hand, to illustrate its meaning. But to do so before an audience
presumably intelligent enough to know the meaning of the word, would be
impertinent--a 'wasteful and ridiculous excess.' So, too, it would be,
to illustrate the word 'somersault,' before an audience of ordinary
intelligence. The absurdity of mimetic action is well illustrated in the
following: 'I have heard,' says a writer in 'Expression' (Vol. I., No.
2), published in Boston, 'of a popular public reader of Boston giving
last season Wordsworth's "Daffodils"; and as she came to the last two
lines,--

    And then my heart with pleasure fills,
    And dances with the daffodils,

she put her hand to her heart and with pleasure indicated by a
sentimental flash of the eye upon the audience, danced a few graceful
steps expressive of exuberant joy, and bowed herself off the platform
amid the vociferous applause of the audience. The reader's taste in this
case was no worse than that of the audience that applauded her. The
incident shows how great the general lack of taste, and the need of the
systematic study of fitness in the relation of thought to its
expression.'

I would say rather than 'lack of taste,' lack of spiritual life,
although the former is closely allied with the latter. A reader who has
assimilated the 'Daffodils,' who can sympathetically reproduce within
himself the heart-dance of the poet, can better reveal that
reproduction through the voice (the requisite vocal culture being
assumed) than through such mimetic foolery as the above. He would not
and could not condescend to the latter, if he had feeling deep enough
truly to know the poem of the 'Daffodils.' True feeling is always
serious, even if it be that of deep joy. The trouble with many public
readers is, that they don't truly know, have not inwardly experienced,
what they attempt to interpret vocally; and, as a consequence, they
resort to what disgusts people of real culture.

I was once present, by accident, at a lecture given by a
Delsarto-elocutionary woman, and in the course of the lecture, she
presented what, she said, would be false gestures in reciting Whittier's
Maud Muller. She then recited the poem, with, according to her notions,
_true_ gestures, which were more in number than Cicero made, perhaps,
in his orations against Cataline, or Demosthenes, in his oration On the
Crown. Every idea of the poem told outwardly on her body.

If a woman, in reading Maud Muller, has emotions which _must_ find vent
in gesture, and various physical contortions, she ought to be put under
treatment that would tone up her system.



The University of the Future, in order to be a vastly greater power than
the University of the Present, must, at least, rank spiritual education
with intellectual training and discipline. This the University of the
near Future must do; the University of a more remote Future, we must
believe, if we believe that the spiritual is the crowning attribute of
man--that by which he is linked with the permanent, the eternal, will
make all intellectual training and discipline, even all physical
training, so far as may be, subservient to the spiritual man.

    Let us cry 'All good things
    Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'

The rectification of the intellect must, as the greatest poem of the
century, Browning's 'Ring and the Book,' implicitly teaches, be through
the rectification of the spiritual, absolute man.

As bearing directly on my leading subject, the vocal interpretation of
literature (that is, spiritualized thought), I would indicate some of
the means and conditions of a more spiritual education than is
contemplated in the most advanced educational schemes of the day.

What may be said to be the predominant idea of the present day,
entertained especially by scientists and exercising its influence, more
or less, on the great majority of minds, in regard to the main avenue to
knowledge and truth? I answer, and I think not unjustifiably, the idea
that the analytic, discursive, generalizing intellect, is adequate to
solve all solvable problems--that it is the only reliable means of
arriving at a positive knowledge; that, accordingly, education, the
_highest_ education, consists almost exclusively in learning and in
being trained to discover and apply, the laws, so called, of nature, to
trace facts to their (scientific) causes and to advance logically from
causes to facts--that upon which the analyzing and generalizing
intellect cannot be exercised, being set down as unknowable. Of an
_intuition_ inaccessible to analysis, they take little or no account.
This some future age, with a more complete education, than ours, will,
I am persuaded, regard as the cardinal defect in the education and
philosophy of the present age--a defect that tends to deaden, if not to
destroy, in many minds, all faith in those spiritual instincts and
spiritual susceptibilities and apprehensions, which constitute the basis
of a living hope and faith in immortality, and through which, and
through which alone, man may know, _without_ thought, some of the
highest truths, truths which are beyond the reach of the discourse of
reason. While the reasoning faculties of a man may exist in vigor, the
ties which unite the soul _sympathetically_ and through assimilation,
with universal spirituality, may be sundered, and a spiritual world for
him there will then be none.

That there are higher and subtler organs of discernment than the
discursive intellect, and higher things to be discerned than can be
discerned by the senses, the lowliest of men and women, no less than the
most exalted in intellect and genius, have, throughout the whole
recorded history of the race, borne an incontrovertible testimony. 'The
natural condition of humanity,' says William Howitt, 'is alliance with
the spiritual; the anti-spiritual is but an epidemic--a disease.'

Great have been the conquests of Science, the last fifty years, and
great has been their influence on the temporal well-being of mankind.
But it must be admitted, perhaps, that these conquests, the product
mainly of the insulated intellect, have been somewhat at the expense of
'the interior divinity.'

Wordsworth, addressing his friend Coleridge, in the second book of 'The
Prelude,' says:

                      to thee
    Science appears but what in truth she is,
    Not as our glory and our absolute boast,
    But as a succedaneum, and a prop
    To our infirmity.

He has been speaking of mental science.

The present signs of the times, however, give promise that humanity, far
as it has drifted in one direction, will assert its _wholeness_, and
will 'render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the
things that are God's,' and that the awakening of 'the interior
divinity,' of the spiritual instincts and intuitions, will be as much
the aim of the education of the future as the exercise of the mere
intellect now is. This awakening must begin in infancy, when the child
first 'rounds to a separate mind,' and can respond to its mother's
smile, and feel her protecting care, and the rosy warmth of her love.
Then will the wise mother regard her child as almost wholly an
impressionable being, and will see especially to its surroundings and
its associations whether they are suitable to be stamped upon its
plastic mind. As it grows, she will aim to quicken and purify it
sentiment, and to cultivate a love of the beautiful in form, in color,
in sound, especially as these are exhibited in the works of Nature; will
endeavor to bring it into the fullest sympathy with all forms of animal
life, down to 'the meanest thing that feels.' It is a good sign when a
boy loves animals and is kind to them; but when he is bent on killing
things, it can be quite safely inferred that he has not received at home
lessons in love and had his sympathies and affections duly awakened.
Home-life in this country is not, as a general thing, such as to bring
the best affections into a healthy play. There is too much worry, too
much taking thought of the morrow, too much dissatisfaction with the
present condition, too much eagerness to get rich. Some fathers never
sufficiently dismiss their business and cares from their minds, to play
with their children and to show them those little attentions which their
young hearts crave; and mothers expend their souls in the cares and
vexations of housekeeping, or, if, by reason of their position and
wealth, they are free from these, in social or other matters which shut
them off, more or less, from those maternal functions which they should
consider it their highest duty to exercise. Filial affection certainly
does not increase in this country, as the years go on. Is it too much to
say, perhaps it is, that it is rather the exception than the rule, for
children, after, and often before, their majority, to show a strong
attachment either for their parents or for each other? And there is a
word in our language that has quite survived its usefulness; and if
things continue to go on as they are now going, it will soon be a fit
subject for an Archaic Dictionary--I mean the word REVERENCE. It still
maintains its place in our Dictionaries of living vocables, but the
thing it represents is a _rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno_.
Vain is the attempt to awaken the religious sentiment in a child, to
cause it to _feel_ the real significance of the words, as it utters
them, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' in whom the filial and the
reverential sentiments are quite extinguished. These sentiments are the
soil in which the religious sentiment can best germinate, grow, bud,
and fragrantly bloom.

During a child's earliest years the foundation should be laid for that
spiritual relationship with Nature which Wordsworth has presented in his
great autobiographic poem, 'The Prelude.' Such relationship but very few
could realize in themselves as the great high priest of Nature realized
it; but all could be brought into a more intimate spiritual relationship
with Nature than is favored and promoted, at present, by home influences
and by school studies. The latter, when prematurely analytical, and
brain slaughtering, tend rather to shut off such relationship.

What is understood as a scientific observation of nature, is not its
highest form, so far, at least, as spiritual culture is concerned. It is
almost exclusively an analytic observation, in which the conscious
intellect plays the chief part. It is study, not spiritual communion.
The highest form of observation (if observation it can strictly be
called, which is to so great an extent a rapture of necessity and
spontaneity) is that which results from the synthetic play of the
spiritual faculties, and brings the outer world and all its minutest
features into relation with the inner world of man's spirit, and makes
him feel his great allies. It is this kind of observation rather than
the other, which 'adds a precious seeing to the eye,' and gives to a man
some measure of 'the vision and the faculty divine,' and enables him to
know something of the fields that are his own; but from which spiritual
torpor may alienate him.

'I, long before the blissful hour arrives,' writes Wordsworth, meaning
when the discerning intellect of man shall be wedded to this goodly
universe in love and holy passion, and shall find the ideal forms of
Poets, a simple produce of the common day,

    I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
    Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
    Of this great consummation;--and, by words
    Which speak of nothing more than what we are,

that is, what we really or potentially are,

    Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
    Of death, and win the vacant and the vain
    To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims
    How exquisitely the individual mind
    (And the progressive powers perhaps no less
    Of the whole species) to the external World
    Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too--
    Theme this but little heard of among men--
    The external world is fitted to the mind; etc.

The system of general spiritual education which is both explicitly and
implicitly set forth in 'The Prelude,' makes this great autobiographical
poem one of the most valuable productions in English Literature; and
teachers capable of bringing its informing spirit home to their students
(capable by virtue of their own assimilation of it), might do great
things in the way of a spiritual quickening of their students.

And how much capable mothers might derive from Wordsworth's poetry for
the spiritual nurture of their children! Capable mothers are, alas!
comparatively few; but forces, to be noticed further on, are now at
work, which are increasing the number of such mothers, and will continue
to increase it more and more, as the ideals of a true womanhood are more
and more exalted and realized. The kind of regeneration which the world,
at present, most needs, will have to be largely induced by woman, and
she _will_ induce it according as her true rights, which are involved in
her 'distinctive womanhood,' are recognized and granted her, by her not
over-generous brother.

Spiritual education is not a matter of abstract instruction. It must
be induced on the basis of the concrete and the personal. The
spiritual faculties have no affinities for the abstract. Christianity
was introduced into the world through the personal and concrete;
rather, it _is_ the personal and the concrete, and its arch-enemy has
ever been the abstract, in the form of dogma and stark-naked doctrine.
Dogmatism implies materialism. As one advances spiritually, dogma
declines with him, in inverse proportion. Christianity is essential
being, and not a doctrine, not a body of opinions, not 'a matter of
antiquarian pedantry or of historical perspective.' In the great words
of the 'De Imitatione Christi,' 'Cui æternum verbum loquitur, ille a
multis opinionibus expeditur' (he to whom the eternal word speaks, is
freed from many opinions); and to fit the soul to be spoken to by the
eternal word, is the true, the ultimate object of spiritual education.
The permanent, the eternal, that which is alive for evermore, should,
indeed, be the object of all education. Phenomena, in themselves, are
not educative. A feeding on them alone, if that were possible (man
naturally, whatever his condition, seeks other pabulum), would soon
result in a general atrophy of all the faculties, intellectual and
spiritual. To use the words of St. Vincent de Lérins, which he applied
to the Catholic Church,--would that the Church had always made them
its controlling principle!--'magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus
quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est' (it must be
especially seen to, that we hold to that which everywhere, which
always, which by all, has been believed).

There is no exclusiveness in the eternal word; it speaks to every one
whose ears are open to it; it enters wherever it is not shut out. It
speaks through Nature, through every form of Art (which to be art must
be a manifestation of it), through Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit
of all knowledge,' through Music, Sculpture, Painting, Architecture,
through all sacred books, and, above all, through sanctified men and
women, of the Present and the Past, 'the noble Living and the noble
Dead.' In the words of Emerson:

    Not from a vain or shallow thought
    His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
    Never from lips of cunning fell
    The thrilling Delphic oracle;
    Out from the heart of nature rolled
    The burdens of the Bible old;
    The litanies of nations came,
    Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
    Up from the burning core below,--
    The canticles of love and woe.

       *       *       *       *       *

    The word unto the prophet spoken
    Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
    The word by seers or sibyls told
    In groves of oak or fanes of gold
    Still floats upon the morning wind,
    Still whispers to the willing mind.

The kind of books which the young should read, is, of course, an
important consideration. If 'a general insight into useful facts' be
regarded as the main thing in a child's education, such as 'the royal
genealogies of Oviedo, the internal laws of the Burmese empire, by how
many feet Mount Chimborazo outsoars Teneriffe, what navigable river
joins itself to Lara, and what census of the year five was taken at
Klagenfurt,' and other matters not having much to do with the
advancement of the millennium, why the question is easily settled as to
the kind of books a child should be provided with, and be required to
learn, and recite; but if some vitality of soul, the indispensable
condition of intellectual vitality, in after life, be the aim, then a
different kind of books will be needed--such books as will serve to
vitalize and guide the instincts, to bring the feelings into a healthful
play, and awaken enthusiasm, and thus to prepare the way for the later
exercise of the reasoning faculties, and for the comprehension of moral
and religious principles. There is a time to _feel_ the True, the
Beautiful, and the Good, and a time to regard all these, as far as may
be, under intellectual relations. If 'the years that bring the
philosophic mind' be anticipated in a child's education, it will be
likely, by reason of the premature philosophy served out to it, to
become a stupid man or woman, with a plentiful lack of both intellect
and soul. Upon the closed bud of reason, while it is not yet ready to be
unfolded, must be brought to bear the genial warmth of sensibility,
sympathy, and enthusiasm; and when it opens in its own good season, it
will not be dwarfed nor canker-bitten.

Sensibility, sympathy, enthusiasm, I repeat, are the elements of the
atmosphere in which the intellectual, the moral, and the religious
nature of a child can alone germinate and healthily grow, and in later
years, bloom and shed a wholesome fragrance.

Stories written for the young must be _concrete_ representations of the
True, the Beautiful, and the Good; in other words, they must be works of
art. Says Browning, in 'The Ring and the Book,'

                        Art may tell a truth
    Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,

that is, bring what is _implicit_ within the soul, into the right
attitude to become _explicit_--bring about a silent adjustment through
sympathy induced by the concrete (it cannot be induced by the abstract);
in other words, prepare the way for the apprehension of the truth--

          do the thing shall breed the thought,
    Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word;

that is, Art, so to speak, is the word made flesh,--_is_ the truth, and,
as Art, has nothing directly to do with an explicit presentation of the
truth. 'The highest, the only operation of Art, as of Nature,' says
Goethe, 'is formation' (Gestaltung).

    So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
    Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
    So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
    Deeper than ever the Andante dived,--
    So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts,
    Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.

The greatest moral teachers the world has ever known, have exhibited the
least of explicit moralizing. They have embodied their gospels,--clothed
them in _circumstance_,--woven them into a tissue of imagery and
incident and, by so doing, have given them that _vitality_ which alone
can awaken sympathy, and thus induce a mental preparedness for a
reception of the higher truths, and a comprehension of great principles.
A deep sympathy with truth is the important thing: this implies a
rectification of the spiritual nature--its harmonization with the
constitution of things. A great amount of abstract truth may be lodged
in one's brain, and this sympathy may be more or less wanting. To secure
it, the 'Word' of the teacher must become flesh,--it must be
contemplated in the flesh, living and breathing,--it must be represented
as _militant_, subject to accident and antagonism, but assuring men of
its unquenchable vitality, its relationship with the divine, through the
might of its resistance, and through its final _triumph_, though not
necessarily according to earthly standards of the triumphant. There are
novels which exhibit a somewhat low ideal of life through the general
squaring up of things at the end--the good being rewarded outwardly and
the bad punished. But

    In the corrupted 'currents of this world,
    Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
    ... but 'tis not so above.

The teachings of Jesus are clothed in circumstance and imagery which
were familiar to all whom he addressed. 'All these things spake Jesus
unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto
them.' To use the words of Archbishop Trench in his 'Unconscious
Prophecies of Heathendom,' 'In his life and person, the idea and the
fact at length kissed each other, and were thenceforward wedded
forever.'

The liberal-minded reader of the four records which we have of Christ's
life and teachings, must admit that he added little or nothing to the
previously existing knowledge of truth in the abstract; he rather caused
truth which philosophers and moralists had already intellectually
recognized, to be known 'by heart.' He presented it _concretely_, in his
own life and in his teachings, and thus worked it into that 'daily
bread' for which he commanded us to pray, and which alone will nourish
human sympathy and love. In its previous intellectual, abstract form, it
did not, and could not, become an element of spiritual life.

In the thirty beautiful little stories in the New Testament, educators
of the young, and indeed all educators in the fullest sense, may see
the cardinal principle of their calling, namely, that the greatest power
of ethical and religious truth can be secured only through the concrete,
and the personal, through that which is the truth, and not through an
abstract enunciation--through that form which _is_ loved for its own
sake; whose beauty is its own excuse for being; and the sense of love
and beauty, when awakened, makes all things plain. _Ubi caritas, ibi
claritas._

Many who have written books for the young professedly to impart
Christian instruction, have least observed the mode exhibited in the
teachings of him whom they profess to take as their Great Exemplar.
Their instruction is too explicit. It is presented without a
sufficiency of concrete clothing to keep it warm; sometimes in its
abstract nakedness. It is thus powerless to awaken the love and sympathy
of young hearts.

If the views above expressed are sound, I would say that, in choosing
reading matter for the young, special preference should be given to such
stories as serve to awaken the imagination, exercise the sympathies, and
nourish a lively and joyous enthusiasm. I should wholly exclude
explicitly moral and religious stories, and should choose in their
stead, stories of human sympathy and sacrifice, heroic endurance, and
unconscious virtues (_conscious_ virtue is always weak), fairy tales,
and legends gay and sad. A child of healthful, unperverted feelings is
averse to moral and religious books, as a class. It would rather read
about Robinson Crusoe and his faithful man Friday, and it is far better
that it should have such preference--far better that it should live,
while a child,

          in the golden prime
    Of good Haroun Alraschid,

instead of being prematurely crammed with, to it, lifeless moral and
religious principles, 'useful' knowledge, and the sciences. Wholesome to
every one would be such 'Recollections of the Arabian Nights' as are
expressed by Tennyson:

    'Far off, and where the lemon-grove
    In closest coverture upsprung,
    The living airs of middle night
    Died round the bulbul as he sung;
    Not he: but something which possessed
    The darkness of the world, delight,
    Life, anguish, death, immortal love,
    Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed,
    Apart from place, withholding time,
    But flattering the golden prime
        Of good Haroun Alraschid.'

A child cannot be made virtuous by maxims. The life which is before it,
is not a scheme to be taught, but a drama to be acted.

    Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
    Against her beauty? May she mix
    With men and prosper! Who shall fix
    Her pillars? Let her work prevail.

But

    What is she, cut from love and faith,
    But some wild Pallas from the brain
    Of Demons?
              Let her know her place;
    She is the second, not the first.

Man must grow

              not alone in power
    And knowledge, but by year and hour
    In reverence and in charity.

Blessings upon all the books that are the delight of childhood and youth
and unperverted manhood! Precious are the sympathetic tears which dim
the page and which it is so wholesome to encourage in early life as a
check to the growth of selfishness and egoism. 'Who,' writes George
Sand, in her 'Lettres d'un Voyageur,' 'does not remember with delight,
the first books which he relished and devoured? Has never an old dusty
cover of some volume found upon the shelves of a neglected closet,
brought back to your mind the lovely pictures of early years? Are you
not again, in fancy, seated in the green meadow bathed in the evening
sunlight, where you read it for the first time?'

What galleries of sweet, pathetic, inspiriting, and noble pictures, have
been prepared for the modern child!--pictures, which time and all the
damp and cold of after life cannot obscure, to those who have enjoyed
them. And to what a goodly company is it the privilege of childhood and
youth, and early manhood, to be admitted!--the immortal offspring of
cheerful genius, whose companionship expands and strengthens and
purifies the heart.

But the young are lamentably debarred, in these days of excessive, and
non-educating, learning, from the wholesome influences, wholesome, in
the way of inducing sympathy, enthusiasm, and a play of the imagination,
which the best books of the past and of the present might exert upon
them. Their school tasks and examinations absorb all their time, and the
accompanying worry about 'marks,' saps their minds--'Death loves a
_shining_ mark.'

Later on, in the higher schools, colleges, and universities, there is no
time for _communion_ with great authors. The reading which is done, is
largely perfunctory. Speaking from my own long experience, I do not
think that one out of twenty of university students, even of those who
elect courses in English Literature, has read and assimilated the works
of any one good author, or any single work. This is a statement based on
an exceptionally long experience. Many have studied literature, as the
phrase goes, but have no literary education, however well they may have
'passed' in the kind of work done. And such students pursue the study of
elocution, with a sufficiently pitiable result. They have never had
awakened in them the faculties which are demanded for assimilating the
life of a work of genius, and consequently can do nothing in the way of
vocal interpretation. They cannot give through the voice, however well
trained it may be, what is not theirs to give.



Believing as I do, in the imperative need of the kind of education I
have suggested, I must, as a natural consequence, believe in the
co-education of the sexes, in the opening to women of all the avenues
along which men only have hitherto gone, and in the removal of all
obstacles to the exercise of the powers inherent in 'distinctive
womanhood.' These things will do more for civilization, in the highest
sense of the word, that is, the spiritual sense, than all other agencies
combined. A true manhood and a true womanhood cannot be reached except
through the mutual influence of the sexes upon each other. They must be
educated together, such education beginning in the family, and
continuing through all stages of scholastic training up to and through
the university. Boys at home, without affectionate sisters, and girls
without affectionate brothers, are at a disadvantage. At no less
disadvantage is either sex when separated from the other, in school,
college, or university. For it is only at this period of their lives,
and in such relations, that they can be fitted, if fitted at all, to
walk the world together,

    yoked in all exercise of noble end.

The moral insight of man, to say nothing of his finer spiritual
insight, owes much of its penetrating clearness to the feminine element
of his nature; and unless this element be developed in due proportion to
the intellectual element, he can have, at best, but distorted views of
right and wrong, justice and injustice. On this side of his nature, the
rays of an unclouded womanhood must strike, before it can be awakened
into a genial vitality, and thus impart health, vigor, and subtlety to
the intellectual side. 'You cannot think,' says Ruskin (Sesame and
Lilies: 2. Of Queen's Gardens), 'that the buckling on of the knight's
armor by his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is
the type of an eternal truth--that the soul's armor is never well set to
the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she
braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails.' On the other hand,
woman can be a true woman, only to the degree to which she is permitted
to share with man all his highest interests, to sympathize with all his
noblest aims, and to work side by side with him in the regeneration of
the world. That which is especially distinctive in her nature, must be
subdued, toned, and guided by a greater breadth and solidity of
intellectual culture; and this can be most effectually secured by
co-education, and by her being afforded the opportunity to move with man
along the higher planes of learning and of thought, and to have a larger
share with him than she has hitherto had, in the fruits of the world's
intellectual and moral conquests.

The general recognition and realization which are near at hand, of
woman's equal rights with man in all that pertains to the highest good
of a human being, will have an especially beneficial influence in the
marriage relation, the most important in its bearings of all the
relations of human life. There are numberless husbands who pass in
society for kind and generous men, recognizing the rights of all with
whom they have dealings, and cheerfully according those rights, but who
are, in many ways, ungenerous and inconsiderate toward their wives, and
that, too, without being in the least aware of it. They would be very
much surprised if any one were to tell them so. And why is this? It is,
no doubt, in most cases, because of a feeling engendered by the whole
past constitution of society--a feeling that has become so ingrained as
to be an unconscious one--that woman has peculiar duties which she must
fulfil, but that her rights, apart from these peculiar duties, depend
upon the arbitrary will of man. Children, from a very early age, are
made to feel this more or less, according to the influences of their
home-life. When a father shows no estimate of the mother's opinions and
advice, never talks with her on the higher current subjects of interest,
nor consults her about the weightier matters with which he has to deal,
but regards her (and this he may do in all kindness) as one whose sole
business it is to look well to the ways of her household, the son's
ideal of woman is not likely to be the highest. Happy indeed is he whose
home education has been such that 'faith in womankind beats with his
blood.' That, by itself, is a liberal education.

Fears are entertained by many good people, that co-education, and
woman's larger co-operation with man in the affairs of the world, will
tend to unsex her, to render her _mannish_, and eclipse, more or less,
those qualities and graces which have hitherto been regarded as
constituting the chief charm and glory of her sex. She may, indeed, have
less of mere _femineity_, but, in its stead, she will certainly have
more womanliness, in the best sense of the word (by virtue of which she
is a specially commissioned regenerating power in the world), if she is
reared and educated with the other sex, and allowed her full share in
all the great interests of human life, social, political, educational,
moral, and religious. Under such circumstances she has a better chance
of becoming

    A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
    To warn, to comfort, and command,

than if she be excluded from those interests and lead the restricted
life she has ever been obliged to lead by the conventionalities and
regulations of society.

The great Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini, 'the prophet and spiritual
hero of his nation,' and, indeed, of the whole modern world, wrote in
1858: 'Seek in woman not merely a comfort, but a force, an inspiration,
the redoubling of your intellectual and moral faculties. Cancel from
your mind every idea of superiority over her. You have none whatever.

'Long prejudice, an inferior education, and a perennial legal inequality
and injustice have created that apparent intellectual inferiority which
has been converted into an argument of continued oppression.... Like two
distinct branches springing from the same trunk, man and woman are
varieties springing from the common basis--Humanity. There is no
inequality between them, but--even as is the case among men--diversity
of tendency and of special vocation.

'Are two notes of the same musical chord unequal or of different nature?
Man and woman are the two notes without which the Human chord is
impossible. They fulfil different functions in Humanity, but these
functions are equally sacred, equally manifestations of that Thought of
God which He has made the soul of the universe.

'Consider woman, therefore, as the partner and companion, not merely of
your joys and sorrows, but of your thoughts, your aspirations, your
studies, and your endeavors after social amelioration. _Consider her
your equal in your civil and political life._ Be ye the two human wings
that lift the soul towards the Ideal we are destined to attain.'

William Lloyd Garrison, in an introduction to 'Joseph Mazzini, his life,
writings, and political principles,' writes:

'Mazzini's concern for the rights of man was never, on any pretext, in a
purely masculine sense. Years ago he inculcated the equality of the
sexes in regard to all civil and political immunities. _Largely indebted
to his mother for the grand impulses which led him to consecrate his
life to the service of his country, his generic respect for woman
amounted almost to sanctitude: it was the embodiment of all that is
tender in affection, fragrant in purity, devout in aspiration, and
self-sacrificing in love.'_

It has never been a matter of much regret to me that so little is known
of Shakespeare's personal history--the circumstances of his outer life.
Of what his interior life was, we can have no doubt. It must have been a
life capable of sympathetically reproducing within itself all the great
characters, men and women, of the Dramas. But if I could wear the
wishing-cap of Fortunatus, I would wish to know what manner of woman, in
all particulars, was Mary Arden, the poet's mother. The men whose
intellectual and, more especially, spiritual gifts to the world, have
been the greatest, and most quickening, have oftener, no doubt, been
more indebted, for those gifts, to their mothers than to their fathers.
The radiant shapes of the women of Shakespeare's Dramas certainly had
their source in the feminine element, the _ewig weibliche_, of his
nature, and this element was as certainly, I cannot but think, derived
from, and quickened by, his mother. In what was, without doubt, his
earliest play, Love's Labor's Lost, Biron, I am quite sure, expresses
Shakespeare's own opinion of the peculiar power of women (A. IV. S.
III.):

    From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
    They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
    They are the books, the arts, the academes,
    That show, contain, and nourish all the world.

This was as certainly Shakespeare's own opinion about woman as what
Biron says (A. I. S. I.) was his own opinion about study:

    Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,
      That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks;
    Small have continual plodders ever won,
      Save base authority from others' books.
    These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,
      That give a name to every fixed star,
    Have no more profit of their shining nights
      Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
    Too much to know is to know nought but fame;
      And every godfather can give a name.

Shakespeare must early have felt his superiority in true education (the
nimble play of all the faculties) to the merely learned men with whom he
came in contact, and must soon have discovered that _he_ drank from
fountains of which they knew nothing. His own vitality of soul was
responsive to the essential life of men and things; and it was through
this responsiveness that he attained to a wisdom inaccessible to mere
learning and intellectual enlightenment. It was his mother, I like to
think, who initiated him into the mysteries of the spirit.



NOTE 1, PAGE 21.

See Vol. I, pp. 229 _et seq._ of 'Memoirs of Richard Whateley,
Archbishop of Dublin. With a glance at his contemporaries and times. By
William John Fitzpatrick, J.P. In two volumes. London: Richard Bentley,
1864.'


NOTE 2, PAGE 47.

This notation of feet I have used in my 'Primer of English Verse,' _a_
representing an accented, and _x_, an unaccented, syllable.


NOTE 3, PAGE 50.

We cannot help observing, because certain critics observe otherwise,
that Chaucer utters as true music as ever came from poet or musician;
that some of the sweetest cadences in all our English are extant in his
"swete upon his tongue," in completest modulation. Let "Denham's
strength and Waller's sweetness join" the Io pæan of a later age, the
"eurekamen" of Pope and his generation. Not one of the "Queen Anne's
men," measuring out tuneful breath upon their fingers, like ribbons for
topknots, did know the art of versification as the old rude Chaucer knew
it. Call him rude for the picturesqueness of the epithet; but his verse
has, at least, as much regularity in the sense of true art, and more
manifestly in proportion to our increasing acquaintance with his dialect
and pronunciation, as can be discovered or dreamed in the French school.
Critics, indeed, have set up a system based upon the crushed atoms of
first principles, maintaining that poor Chaucer wrote by accent only!
Grant to them that he counted no verses on his fingers; grant that he
never disciplined his highest thoughts to walk up and down in a
paddock--ten paces and a turn; grant that his singing is not after the
likeness of their singsong; but there end your admissions. It is our
ineffaceable impression, in fact, that the whole theory of accent and
quantity held in relation to ancient and modern poetry stands upon a
fallacy, totters, rather than stands; and that, when considered in
connection with such old moderns as our Chaucer, the fallaciousness is
especially apparent. Chaucer wrote by quantity, just as Homer did
before him, just as Goethe did after him, just as all poets must. Rules
differ, principles are identical. All rhythm presupposes quantity.
Organ-pipe or harp, the musician plays by time. Greek or English,
Chaucer or Pope, the poet sings by time. What is this accent but a
stroke, an emphasis, with a successive pause to make complete the time?
And what is the difference between this accent and quantity but the
difference between a harp-note and an organ-note? otherwise, quantity
expressed in different ways? It is as easy for matter to subsist out of
space, as music out of time.--_Mrs. E. B. Browning's 'The Book of the
Poets.'_


NOTE 4, PAGE 64.

Avant d'exécuter son œuvre, l'artiste la conçoit; il enfante au
dedans de lui, pour emprunter la langue de Bossuet, 'un tableau, une
statue, un édifice qui, dans sa simplicité, est la forme, l'original, le
modèle immatériel de ce qu'il exécutera sur la pierre, sur le marbre,
sur la toile où il arrangera toutes ses couleurs.' Ce modèle immatériel
est pour l'artiste, si l'on veut, un idéal qu'il se propose de réaliser
dans son œuvre: c'est le patron sur lequel il travaille et qu'il
s'efforce à reproduire le plus exactement possible. Il y met tous ses
soins, toute son étude, et il travaille _avec crainte et tremblement_;
il craint de défigurer, de mutiler l'image sainte imprimée dans son
esprit; il craint que sa main, interprète infidèle, ne traduise mal sa
pensée; il craint que la copie ne soit qu'une caricature de l'original,
et il efface, il corrige, il rature, il retouche, il refait, il a des
hésitations, des scrupules, des repentirs; souvent il se décourage, il
est sur le point d'abandonner l'œuvre commencée, il a peur de rester
au-dessous de son sujet; la perfection du modèle immatériel le
désespère, et ce désespoir provient d'une illusion. D'ordinaire, ce
modèle ne lui semble si parfait que parce qu'il est encore vague,
confus, indéterminé. Nous prenons volontiers l'indéfini pour la
perfection; individualiser une idée, c'est lui donner on mode
particulier à l'exclusion de tous les autres dont elle était
susceptible, et cette exclusion nous coûte, c'est une sorte de
sacrifice que s'impose notre imagination; elle y a regret, comme
l'avare, en dépensant un écu pour se donner un plaisir, regrette tous
les autres plaisirs imaginables que cet écu lui aurait pu procurer. Car
il ne faut pas accorder à Schleiermacher que l'œuvre d'art existe
déjà tout entière dans l'esprit de l'artiste avant qu'il ait réalisé sa
pensée dans le marbre ou sur la toile. Cette pensée est toujours plus ou
moins enveloppée, plus ou moins confuse; elle n'est pas encore dégagée
de son délivre, ou plutôt c'est un rudiment incomplet, une ébauche
indistincte où l'on n'aperçoit que les principaux linéaments de
l'œuvre; c'est un embryon dont les organes ne sont pas encore
développés. C'est en travaillant à exécuter son plan que l'artiste
parvient à concevoir ce plan d'une manière claire et distincte; c'est en
manifestant au dehors sa pensée qu'il se la rend manifeste à lui-même.
La composition et l'exécution sont deux périodes de l'activité de
l'artiste que l'abstraction seule peut distinguer; dans le fait, elles
ne se distinguent point, et le peintre compose encore dans le dernier
coup de pinceau qu'il donne à sa toile.--_Victor Cherbuliez:
Philosophie du Beau.--Études sur le Système d'esthétique de M. Th.
Vischer. Troisième article. (Revue Germanique, Tome x, p. 662.)_


NOTE 5, PAGE 83.

My attention was called to this chapter, many years ago, as affording
good illustrations of the slighting of speech, by Mr. J. W. Taverner,
one of the best teachers of elocution I have ever known. His daughter,
Mrs. F. Taverner Graham, has embodied much of his instructions in her
valuable text-book, entitled 'Reasonable Elocution,' originally
published by A. S. Barnes & Co., in 1874. It is now published by the
American Book Company.


NOTE 6, PAGE 99.

John Keats, in his poem entitled 'Sleep and Poetry,' after speaking of
the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period,
continues:

    Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
    Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
    Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
    Men were thought wise who could not understand
    His glories: with a puling infant's force
    They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse,
    And thought it Pegasus.

He alludes, of course, to the rocking-horse movement of the rhyming
couplet as used during the Popian period. As used by Chaucer, this
rocking-horse movement is not so felt.


NOTE 7, PAGE 101.

Legouvé, in his 'L'Art de la lecture,' chap. vii, 'Les vers libres,'
says: les vers libres out un rhythme comme les vers alexandrins, comme
les vers des strophes, seulement c'est un rhythme caché. Ils obéissent à
une règle mystérieuse, mais réelle, que vous ne trouverez dans aucun
traité de rhétorique, mais qui est écrite dans l'imagination de tous les
poëtes de génie. Voilà pourquoi les vers libres du dix-septième siècle
sont excellents, et ceux du dix-huitième, sauf quelques pièces de
Voltaire, médiocres; les poëtes n'ont pas deviné le secret.


NOTE 8, PAGE 114.

_Socrates._ I cannot help feeling, Phædrus, that writing is
unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the
attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a
solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine
that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything, and put a
question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.
And when they have been once written down, they are tumbled about
anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to
whom they should reply, to whom not; and if they are maltreated or
abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or
defend themselves. _Phædrus._ That again is most true. _Socrates._ Is
there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and
having far greater power--a son of the same family, but lawfully
begotten? _Phædrus._ Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?
_Socrates._ I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the
learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be
silent. _Phædrus._ You mean the living word of knowledge which has a
soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?
_Socrates._ Yes, of course, that is what I mean.--_Plato, Phædrus, 275
D, 276, Dr. Jowett's translation._


NOTE 9, PAGE 121.

He refers probably to articles in Punch, contained in the 2d volume for
the year 1887, pp. 25, 37, 64, _et al._



INDEX


    Ames's, Rev. C. G., description of Emerson's voice, 103, 104.

    Appreciation of subject-matter, not sufficient for interpretative
        reading, 10, 11.

    Art, its function, 153-157.


    Belshazzar's Feast (Daniel v.), as illustrating the slighting of
        speech, 83-95.

    Books, children's, 150-165.

    Brain slaughter in the schools, 40.

    Browning, Mrs. E. B., quoted on Chaucer's verse, note 3.

    Browning, Robert, quoted on processes of art work, 64;
      on the function of art, 153-155.


    Chaucer's verse must be voiced, 44, 45;
      must be read in time, 50;
      Mrs. Browning quoted thereupon, note 3.

    Cherbuliez, Victor, quoted on processes of art work, note 4.

    Child, early education of the, 138 _et seq._

    Children's books, 150-165.

    Christianity, a religion of the personal and the concrete, 147.

    Co-education of the sexes, 167-174.

    Coleridge's reading, 12.

    Comparisons and similes, reading of, 80-82.

    Culture, true, unconscious of the processes which induced it, 20.


    De Imitatione Christi, quoted on 'the eternal word,' 147, 148.

    De Quincey, Thomas, quoted on Coleridge's reading, 12.

    Dogma, the arch-enemy of Christianity, 147.

    Dowden, Prof. Edward, quoted on reading, 120, 121.


    Education, the danger to which it will be more and more exposed, 38;
      etymology of the word, 39, 40.

    Elocutionary skill, 18.

    Elwood, Thomas, quoted as to his reading Latin to Milton, 53.

    Emerson, quoted on the human voice, 102, 103;
      his own voice described, 103, 104.

    _Enjambement_, absence of, in Pope's verse, 101.

    Estimates of all things, relative, 27.

    Eternal Word, The, not exclusive, 149, 150.

    Examinations, literary, 55-60;
      leading object of, 59.


    Faith in womankind, a liberal education, 173.

    Feeling must precede knowing, in a child, 70, 71.

    Femineity _vs._ womanliness, 173, 174.


    Garrison, William Lloyd, quoted on Mazzini's advocacy of the
        equality of the sexes, 177.

    Gesture, mimetic, its absurdities, 128-131.

    Greek verse must be read aloud, and in time, 46.

    Grouping of speech, 28.


    Home-life in this country, 139, 140.

    Hume, David, quoted on criticism, 37.


    Imitation of Christ, quoted on 'the eternal word,' 147, 148.

    'Impressions before the letter,' 40.

    Inflections, or bends, of the voice, must be always
      significant, 77-79.

    Interior life demanded in reading, 119.


    Jesus, teachings of, clothed in circumstance and imagery, 157-160.


    Keats, John, quoted on the Popian period of English poetry, note 6.


    Language, as addressed to the eye, must be largely supplemented by
        the voice, 29, 30.

    Languages, modern, the study of, 51, 52.

    Latin verse, must be read aloud, and in time, 46.

    Legouvé, Ernest, quoted in regard to reading, in America, as an
        educational agency, 34;
      quoted on 'les vers libres,' note 7.

    Lewes, G. H., quoted on the stuffing of children with
      knowledge, 40, 41.

    Linguistic studies, importance of vocalization in, 43.

    Literary education, leading object of, 122.

    Literary examinations, 55;
      leading object of, 59.

    Literary lecture, what it should be, 36, 37.


    Manhood, a true, 167.

    Mazzini, Giuseppe, quoted on woman, her power, her equality with
        man, and her rights, 174-177;
      William Lloyd Garrison quoted on Mazzini, 177.

    Melody in reading, 97-101.

    Milton's Samson Agonistes, choruses of, must be read in time, 51.

    Mimetic gesture, its absurdities, 128-131.

    Monotony preferable to non-significant intervals, 79.

    Moral influence of the speaking voice, 104-107.

    Moral insight of man, 168, 169.

    Moral teachers, the greatest, not explicit moralizers, 155.

    Mothers, comparatively few, capable, 146;
      indebtedness of great men to their, 178.


    'Natural' reading, 13.

    Nature, spiritual relationship with, 142-145.


    Perspective of speech, an important element of interpretative
        reading, 27.

    Phenomena not in themselves educative, 148.

    Plato quoted on the written and the spoken word, note 8.

    Poem, a, not a poem until it is voiced, 30;
      a true, 62.

    Poets cannot always vocalize their own verse, 14.

    Pope's verse, its mechanical uniformity, 100, 101;
      absence of _enjambement_ in, 101.

    'Prelude,' Wordsworth's, its great educative value, 145.

    Printed, or written, language, deficiencies of, to be supplied by
        the reader, 29, 30.

    Printing, art of, has caused language to be too much known through
        the eye alone, 114, 115.


    Reading, can it be taught?, 9;
      the main achievable result, 18;
      extempore, its requirements, 26;
      the best test of a student's knowledge of language as an
          organism, 28, 29;
      must give life to the letter, 29;
      the conditions for so doing, 30;
      Shelley quoted thereupon, 31;
      requirements in early life for its cultivation, 42;
      art of, its correspondences with that of painting, 68, 69;
      the requisite physical means of, 72;
      technique of, 73 _et seq._;
      is not acting, 126.

    Reading matter for the young, 160-164.

    Reasoning faculties, the premature exercise of, 70, 152, 153.

    Recitation, its evils, 127.

    Reverential sentiments, cultivation of, 141.

    Ruskin, John, quoted on the power of woman, 169, 170.


    Scholarship must not become an end to itself, 124.

    Schools do not fit their students for interpretative reading, 123.

    Science, power of, 13;
      Wordsworth quoted on, 137.

    Shakespeare, reading of, to boys and girls, 35.

    Shakespeare's estimate of the voice, 109-113;
      his personal history and interior life, 178;
      quoted on woman, 179;
      on study, 180;
      his mother, 178, 181.

    Similes and comparisons, reading of, 80-82.

    Skill, elocutionary, 18.

    Slaughter of the innocents, in schools, 40;
      G. H. Lewes quoted, 40, 41.

    Slighting of speech illustrated, 83-95.

    Speaking voice, importance of its cultivation as a moral
        agency, 102-109.

    Speech, slighting of, illustrated, 83-95.

    Spiritual education demanded for interpretative reading, 122;
      means and conditions of, 133-166;
      must be induced on the basis of the concrete and the
          personal, 146, 147.

    Stories for the young, 153.


    Taste, true, an expression of spiritual life, 129.

    Taylor, Sir Henry, quoted on reading, 34-36;
      quoted on Tennyson's reading, 76, 77.

    Teacher, the ideal, 32, 33.

    Tennyson's reading, 76, 77;
      his 'Recollections of the Arabian Nights,' 162.

    'Thorough' study of a work of genius, 124.

    Time, its importance in vocal expression, 79-82.


    Unconscious might, in every work of genius, 65.

    University of the future, what it must do for the spiritual
        man, 132.


    Verse, accentual and quantitative, 46-49.

    Vincent de Lérins, St., quoted on the universal and the
        eternal, 148, 149.

    Vocal exercises, 60-62.

    Voice, the speaking, importance of its cultivation as a moral
        agency, 102-109;
      Shakespeare's estimate of, 109-113.


    Whateley's, Archbishop, theory of 'natural' reading, 14;
      his own oratorical delivery, 15;
      his assumptions in regard to elocution, 19.

    Woman, her power and rights, Mazzini quoted on, 174-177.

    Womanhood, a true, 167, 170.

    Womanliness _vs._ femineity, 173, 174.

    Wordsworth quoted on hearing, 125;
      on science, 137;
      the great educative value of his 'Prelude,' 145.

    Written, or printed, language, deficiencies of, to be supplied
        by the reader, 29, 30.



The Aims of Literary Study.

    BY
    HIRAM CORSON, LL.D.

18mo. Cloth, gilt. 75 cents.


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