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THE VOICE AND SPIRITUAL EDUCATION

THE VOICE AND SPIRITUAL EDUCATION

HIRAM CORSON, LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY

New York

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.'

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.'

The following verse from Ovid, for example ,

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 ,

Filius | ante di|em patri|os in|quirit in | annos. Victa ja|cet Pie|tas; et | Virgo | caede ma-|dentes Ultima coelestum terras Astraea 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.

Nam coe|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;

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.

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 , 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. 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 , this last of his great poetic compositions!

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' , '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.'

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