The Voice and Spiritual Education

THE VOICE AND SPIRITUAL EDUCATION BY HIRAM CORSON, LL.D. 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. 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.
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.