Vocal Expression: A Class-book of Voice Training and Interpretation

by Katherine Jewell Everts

TO DEVELOP THE WHIMSICAL SENSE

Addressing the Gentle Reader in deliciously whimsical vein on the Mission of Humor, Mr. Samuel Arthur Crothers declares: "Were I appointed by the school board to consider the applicants for teachers' certificates, after they had passed the examinations in the arts and sciences, I should subject them to a more rigid test. I should hand each candidate Lamb's essays on 'The Old and New Schoolmaster' and on 'Imperfect Sympathies.' I should make him read them to himself, while I sat by and watched. If his countenance never relaxed, as if he were inwardly saying, 'That's so,' I should withhold the certificate. I should not consider him a fit person to have charge of innocent youth." We can readily see from this extract that we need not go back to the early part of the last century to find material for our test of this sovereign quality, a sense of humor. Mr. Crothers himself, the Charles Lamb of our American Letters to-day, shall furnish our subject-matter. Bring your Gentle Reader, or The Pardoner's Wallet, or the essays collected with the Christmas Sermon, to class to-morrow. If these volumes are not in your personal library, your library is sadly lacking. Read "The Honorable Points of Ignorance," "How to Know the Fallacies," or "Conscience Concerning Witchcraft." If any one of these fails to disclose in you the mental alertness and power of discrimination which their author considers to be requisite characteristics of a true sense of humor, then you are sadly lacking in that coveted quality of mind and heart, and it behooves us to make an attempt to supply these deficiencies.

Can a sense of humor be cultivated, and if it can be cultivated, is it safe to do so? some one asks—some one who has suffered at the hands of a clever jester perhaps. By way of arriving at an answer, let us examine a little further the category of qualities which Mr. Crothers considers requisite to true humor.

We have already noted mental alertness and power of discrimination. There can be no question as to the desirability or feasibility of developing these characteristics, since such development belongs to the fundamental effort of education. But these are but two characteristics of the quality we are considering, and not the distinguishing ones. "Humor," continues the category, "is the frank enjoyment of the imperfect." Now we scent a danger! For if, as Mr. Crothers admits, "artistic sensibility finds satisfaction only in the perfect," and since, as we all admit, artistic sensibility is an end in education devoutly to be desired, then is not a cultivation of the "frank enjoyment of the imperfect," oh dear and gentle humorist, a dangerous indulgence? The conclusive answer comes: "One may have learned to enjoy the sublime, the beautiful, the useful, the orderly, but he has missed something if he has not also learned to enjoy the incongruous, the illusive, and the unexpected." It is a conclusive reply, because we know that it is just as essential to achievement in the finest of the Fine Arts,—the art of living, as in every other form of Art, to recognize that the inrush of discord is for the final issue of harmony; that only through our ability to recognize illusion shall we come to know reality; that only through sensitiveness to the incongruous shall we develop a true sense of the fitness of things; that only frank enjoyment can disarm imperfection and find satisfaction in the perfect. So let us not hesitate to do all we can to cultivate a quality which Thackeray defines as a mixture of love and wit; to which Erasmus ascribes such desirable characteristics as good temper and insight into human nature; and for one grade of which, in addition to all its other qualities, Mr. Crothers claims "that it can proceed only from a mind free from any taint of morbidness."

If then we conclude that it is not only safe, but possible and desirable, to cultivate a sense of humor, how shall we set about it? To answer you, as to one way at least, and that a way of interpretation, Mr. Crothers "is left alive," not only to furnish new material for the exercise of the sense, but to point a gently reminding finger toward the immortal sources of good humor,—"Chaucer and Cervantes and Montaigne; Shakespeare and Bacon and Fielding and Addison; Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, and Walter Scott, and in our own country, Irving and Dr. Holmes and James Russell Lowell." Whatever period of time your schedule grants to this phase of the work should be dedicated to a closer acquaintance with the flavor and atmosphere of these great-hearted humorists in their most genial moments. Let us also heed Mr. Crothers' warning against the humor of the Dean Swifts which "would be so irresistible were it not bad humor." Let us avoid more intimate acquaintance with the broad variety furnished by the Mark Twains and Mr. Dooleys, which may be legitimately classed as "good humor," but which is so obvious as to be little conducive to that mental alertness and power of discrimination which we aim to acquire through this study. Instead, let us seek the gracious company of William Dean Howells in the whimsical mood he so often induces.

Accepting, then, as a distinguishing characteristic of the humor we desire to cultivate, ability to enjoy the incongruous, the illusive, and the unexpected, let us look to a master maker of these conditions for class-room guidance in this effort. I suppose Mr. Lewis Carroll has done more to develop this distinguishing characteristic than any other contributor to our Letters. So we shall go on an excursion with his Alice into the Wonderland he made for her. If her frank enjoyment and free acceptance of the incongruous and the unexpected does not prove infectious, we must be forever written down among those who could not understand Peter Pan. We shall read and enjoy a chapter or two of Alice together in class, but for suggestive analysis along interpretative lines Heaven forbid that I should lay violent hands on her text. No one can teach you to interpret your Alice save Alice herself. You may walk with her, talk with her, dwindle and grow with her, join her adventures in any way she will permit, but you may not analyze nor dissect her. You may learn to interpret her only by living with her and loving her.

Now Æsop is another matter. However long you may live with him, however much you may love his fables, there is a trick of interpretation to be learned in voicing his philosophy which will develop the whimsical side of your sense of humor and counteract the insistent moral tone attached to every fable.

SUGGESTIVE ANALYSIS

The danger in handling a fable does not lie, as the interpreter seems so often to think, in adopting too serious a tone. All the literature of pure fancy, from the humorous essays of Bacon through the Arabian Nights to the nonsensical rhymes of Lear, must be treated with great gravity of tone and temper by the interpreter. It is not levity, but only whimsicality of temperament, I demand from one who would read from this particular lore to me. I want my whimsical friend to interpret my Chaucer and Crothers, Peter Pan and the Pied Piper, Hans Christian Andersen, Carroll, and Lear, and all the rest of the genial host who minister to my most precious sense of nonsense. And, perhaps, most of all, it is he (the whimsical friend) who must read fables to me, for a fable, the dictionary tells us, is "a story in which, by the imagined dealings of men with animals or mere things, or by the supposed doings of these alone, useful lessons are taught." Now a moral "rubbed in" is like an overdose of certain kinds of medicine, where a little cures, too much kills. It is the presence of the lesson which the whimsical tone alone can offset. The whimsical tone never falls into the monotone. Whimsicality always seeks variety of emphasis and movement. Let us apply this to the reading of the fable called

THE CROW AND THE PITCHER