The Voice and Spiritual Education Part 1

The Voice and Spiritual Education.

by Hiram Corson.

_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 a.s.similating, 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._

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 a.s.similated 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 Inst.i.tution, '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 impa.s.sioned 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.similation 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 Sevigne, '_Il faut etre, si l'on veut paraitre_,' 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 a.s.sumptions 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s.

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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 'pa.r.s.ed' much in the lower schools, but his parsing has not resulted in synthesis (which should be the sole object of all a.n.a.lysis), has not resulted in a knowledge of language as a living organism, and the consequence is that his extempore vocalization of the pa.s.sage 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 ma.n.u.script, 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 a.s.similated it--in whom it has, to some extent, been born again, according to his individual spiritual const.i.tution and experiences. The potentialities, so to speak, of the printed poem, must be vocally realized. What Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Legouve says, in his 'Pet.i.t Traite de lecture a haute voix a l'usage des ecoles primaires,' of the importance attached, in America, to reading aloud. In the very opening sentence of this work, he says, 'La lecture a haute voix compte, en Amerique, parmi les elements 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. Legouve 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'