Some who heard the voice from heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased,” said it thundered. This does not indicate that the voice was loud, but that it had the quality of illimitation, and so impressed the imagination as nature’s voice. It is the Christ, speaking through man’s voice that has turned this world “upside down”; that has lifted up the cross of Christ, before whom all the kings of earth tremble, and become like chaff on the summer threshing floor.
FORMING PICTURES.
The fourth chapter in Volume II. is Forming Pictures. The picturesque voice is that voice which causes the imagination of the hearers to create pictures of the things described by the language of the speaker. It is the unnoticed voice, the voice which attracts no attention to itself. The picturesque voice is not an end, but a means, and therefore may properly be called the artistic voice, because it so appeals to the imagination of the hearer as to cause images to arise in his mind. This voice may be called the suggestive voice because it suggests what tone cannot literally actualize, but that which can be perceived only by the imagination.
The characteristics of this voice are elasticity and shading.
In this quality of the voice which I have termed elasticity, the vocal organs do not seem to report themselves, but only the thought and sentiment. By shading, I mean the degree of density in the tone where the thought and not the word seems to be stressed. The vocal organs are held under firm but most delicate control. Here the voice may suggest great noise but make none, and in all ways cause the mind of the hearer to listen to sounds it does not really make.
The picturesque voice springs from the desire to make other minds think what it cannot literalize. The state of mind which produces this voice is that of asking the hearer to imagine real things that cannot be presented to the senses. For an illustration of this, read the poem, “Midsummer,” by Trowbridge.
There is a voice of fact and a voice of power. The voice of fact gives information; the voice of power appeals to the imagination. The artistic voice is the voice of the imagination. One of the offices of the imagination is that of image making. In children this power is very noticeable. When some children think of a thing, an image of it rises in their minds; they suppose this image to be a fact of experience, and, with no thought of falsehood, describe it as such. Because of this they are frequently whipped for lying; and this power of mental image making, which, if properly developed, would be of inestimable value to the child, instead of being guided, is cruelly interfered with and arrested.
This power of mental image making is always highly developed in great artists. Great musical composers first hear the music in their minds, and then make it intelligible to others through the noted page. The great painter carries objects in his mind long before he puts them on canvas, and is able as well to create new objects suggested by things he has seen. An architect sees in his mind the magnificent temple, when as yet not a stone of which it is to be built has left the quarry. John B. Gough declared that sometimes he was unable to distinguish persons whom he saw in the audience from those which his imagination created.
Wordsworth did not write “The Daffodils” while looking at the flowers as sense objects. It was afterwards, when he saw them as they lived in his imagination, that he wrote of them in a way that has made them real to the imaginations of others.