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.
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