Precision and beauty of enunciation are much assisted by habitual practice of the graduated series of all the tones from the keynote to its octave. Do not sing when you are reading, but, in order to read well, first learn to sing; otherwise your reading will be flat and monotonous, without light and shade, instead of being fresh, richly modulated, and melodious.
The next requirement of good reading is to learn the relative value of the letters, and the right handling of the syllables, of which words are composed.
This study is both interesting and attractive, for, as Plato observes, letters themselves have a clear significance. The letter r is expressive of motion, the letters d and t of binding and rest, the letter l of smoothness, n of inwardness, the letter e of length and the letter o of roundness.[2] Letters run in families, and each family has its own characteristic significance of sound. Some letters belong to the lips, others to the throat, others employ the whole mouth. Vowels and final consonants are the letters which demand most care and support in good reading. For the most part, vowels should be rich and full, and the final consonant well sustained.
[2] Cf. Jowett's Plato, I. 311.
If letters in themselves are expressive and significant, collocations of letters in syllables and words are clearly more significant still. "By various degrees of strength or weakness, emphasis or pitch, length or shortness, they become the natural expressions both of the stronger and the finer parts of human feeling and thought." To read well, therefore, it is necessary to give intelligent and ready heed to the relative weight of words, to notice whether consonants are massed together to increase their density, or vowels are freely interspersed to leaven and make them light. True enunciation largely depends on a careful study of the natural formation of words and a right appreciation of the proportionate value of their several syllables.
Reading, however, is frequently spoiled by pedantry and exaggerated minuteness. In seeking to avoid slovenliness readers often fall into foppery. Good reading goes at an easy pace, it is neither too fast nor too slow; it neither counts the letters nor omits them, neither jumbles syllables together nor anatomises words. The good reader reads so that intelligent listeners can spell his words, but he does not read as if spelling them himself. He avoids the extremes both of negligence and nicety, and constantly remembers that whatever is overdone is badly done. Avoid ostentation. No rule in reading is more fundamental than this.
Near akin to ostentation is the taint of false and histrionic emphasis. Colourless reading, bad though it be, is better than tawdry reading. Especially in all reading of a religious or sacred character should affectation and dramatic artifices be reverently avoided.
To read the Bible in church as if playing a part on the stage is as inappropriate and irreligious as to read like one in haste to catch a train.
Each kind of subject demands its own proper style in reading. Prose should not be read like poetry; nor all kinds either of prose or poetry alike. As in writing, each species should be dressed in language from its own wardrobe; so in reading, each several kind should receive its own appropriate tone, and travel at its own appropriate speed. To read everything alike is to read nothing—or at most only one thing—well.
