THE VOICE
AND
SPIRITUAL EDUCATION
THE VOICE
AND
SPIRITUAL EDUCATION
BY
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. ReprintedFebruary, 1897; July, 1901; February, 1903; August,1904; March, 1908; October, 1914.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
[5]PREFATORY NOTE
While it is the purpose of this little book to emphasize the importanceof vocal culture in its relations to literary and general culture, it isnot its purpose, except incidentally, to impart elocutionaryinstruction. Attention is called to a few features of the subject,which, if realized in any voice, would contribute much to the technicalpart, at least, of good reading.
Special stress is laid upon the importance of spiritual education asthe end toward which all education should be directed, and as anindispensable condition of interpretative reading. Such education isdemanded for responding to, and[6] assimilating, the informing life of anyproduct of literary genius; without it, mere vocal training availslittle or nothing. By the spiritual I mean man's essential, absolutebeing; and I include in the term the emotional, the susceptible orimpressible, 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 ofthe 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.[7]
[8]La voix est une révélatrice, une initiatrice, dont la puissance estaussi merveilleuse qu'inconnue.
Un des plus réels avantages de la lecture à haute voix est précisémentde vous révéler dans les chefs-d'œuvre une foule de petites nuancesignorées du peintre même qui les y a jetées. Par là, cet art pourraitdevenir un puissant instrument d'éducation. C'est souvent un excellentprofesseur de littérature qu'un grand maître de diction.
Ernest Legouvé, de l'Académie française.
CAN[9]reading be taught? is a question often asked, and partly for thereason, it may be, that so many readers who have gone through courses ofvocal training in schools of elocution, or under private teachers, sofrequently offend people of taste and culture by an extravagance ofexpression, by mimetic gesture, and by offensive mannerisms of variousk