The Voice and Spiritual Education Part 5

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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.similated 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 'pa.s.sed' 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 a.s.similating 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 s.e.xes, 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 s.e.xes 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 s.e.x 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.blest 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. .h.i.therto 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 pa.s.s 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 const.i.tution 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 uns.e.x her, to render her _mannish_, and eclipse, more or less, those qualities and graces which have hitherto been regarded as const.i.tuting the chief charm and glory of her s.e.x. 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 s.e.x, and allowed her full share in all the great interests of human life, social, political, educational, moral, and religious. Under such circ.u.mstances she has a better chance of becoming

A perfect Woman, n.o.bly 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 G.o.d 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 s.e.xes 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 sanct.i.tude: 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.dfathers 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 G.o.dfather 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 paean 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 p.r.o.nunciation, 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 quant.i.ty 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 quant.i.ty, 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 quant.i.ty.

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 quant.i.ty but the difference between a harp-note and an organ-note? otherwise, quant.i.ty expressed in different ways? It is as easy for matter to subsist out of s.p.a.ce, as music out of time.--_Mrs. E. B. Browning's 'The Book of the Poets.'_

NOTE 4, PAGE 64.

Avant d'executer son uvre, l'artiste la concoit; il enfante au dedans de lui, pour emprunter la langue de Bossuet, 'un tableau, une statue, un edifice qui, dans sa simplicite, est la forme, l'original, le modele immateriel de ce qu'il executera sur la pierre, sur le marbre, sur la toile ou il arrangera toutes ses couleurs.' Ce modele immateriel est pour l'artiste, si l'on veut, un ideal qu'il se propose de realiser dans son uvre: c'est le patron sur lequel il travaille et qu'il s'efforce a reproduire le plus exactement possible. Il y met tous ses soins, toute son etude, et il travaille _avec crainte et tremblement_; il craint de defigurer, de mutiler l'image sainte imprimee dans son esprit; il craint que sa main, interprete infidele, ne traduise mal sa pensee; 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 hesitations, des scrupules, des repentirs; souvent il se decourage, il est sur le point d'abandonner l'uvre commencee, il a peur de rester au-dessous de son sujet; la perfection du modele immateriel le desespere, et ce desespoir provient d'une illusion. D'ordinaire, ce modele ne lui semble si parfait que parce qu'il est encore vague, confus, indetermine. Nous prenons volontiers l'indefini pour la perfection; individualiser une idee, c'est lui donner on mode particulier a l'exclusion de tous les autres dont elle etait susceptible, et cette exclusion nous coute, c'est une sorte de sacrifice que s'impose notre imagination; elle y a regret, comme l'avare, en depensant un ecu pour se donner un plaisir, regrette tous les autres plaisirs imaginables que cet ecu lui aurait pu procurer. Car il ne faut pas accorder a Schleiermacher que l'uvre d'art existe deja tout entiere dans l'esprit de l'artiste avant qu'il ait realise sa pensee dans le marbre ou sur la toile. Cette pensee est toujours plus ou moins enveloppee, plus ou moins confuse; elle n'est pas encore degagee de son delivre, ou plutot c'est un rudiment incomplet, une ebauche indistincte ou l'on n'apercoit que les princ.i.p.aux lineaments de l'uvre; c'est un embryon dont les organes ne sont pas encore developpes. C'est en travaillant a executer son plan que l'artiste parvient a concevoir ce plan d'une maniere claire et distincte; c'est en manifestant au dehors sa pensee qu'il se la rend manifeste a lui-meme.

La composition et l'execution sont deux periodes de l'activite 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 a sa toile.--_Victor Cherbuliez: Philosophie du Beau.--etudes sur le Systeme d'esthetique de M. Th.

Vischer. Troisieme article. (Revue Germanique, Tome x, p. 662.)_

NOTE 5, PAGE 83.

My attention was called to this chapter, many years ago, as affording good ill.u.s.trations 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, ent.i.tled '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 ent.i.tled '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.