The last voice comes from the "ancient wise bassoons." Again there is danger. Do not, oh! do not fall afoul of the conventional old man's quavering tone. There is nothing conventional about these "weird, gray-beard old harpers sitting on the high sea-dunes," chanting runes. The last words of these introductory lines safeguard us—"chanted runes." There is only one color of tone in which to chant runes. Gray, is it not? Yes, but a silver gray, not the steel gray of the clarionet when she became for the moment a commercial lover. Then in the silver-gray tone of the philosopher, voice this last motif:
Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss,
The sea of all doth lash and toss,
One wave forward and one across:
But now 'twas trough, now 'tis crest,
And worst doth foam and flash to best,
And curst to blest.
The importance of a right use of tone-color in vocal interpretation was impressed upon a Browning class last winter. We were reading the Dramatic Lyrics. The poem for the hour was Meeting at Night. The tone with which the first student attacked this exquisite love-lyric was so businesslike, so matter of fact, so utterly out of key, that we who listened saw not the lover hastening to his beloved, but a real-estate agent "out to buy" a farm. The "gray sea, the long black land, the yellow half-moon large and low, the startled little waves that creep in fiery ringlets from their sleep, the pushing prow of the boat quenched in the slushy sand, the warm, sea-scented beach, and the three fields" all assumed a merely commercial value. They were interesting exactly as would be a catalogue of properties in a deed of real estate. If you are not a very intense member of a Browning society you will, I think, enjoy the test of tone-color involved in reading this poem from the contrasted standpoints of the business man and the lover. Of course, in the first instance you must stop where I, in desperation, stopped the student on the words, "a farm appears." For I defy any one to read the last two lines in a gray, matter-of-fact tone.
As was the case in our consideration of inflection, so in this study of tone-color there is an embarrassment of rich material for the exercise of this element. Lanier's Sunrise and Corn; Browning's prologue to The Two Poets of Croisic, with a vivid contrast of color in each verse; Swinburne's almost every line; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson—but why enumerate? All the colorists among the poets will reward your search of a text for the development of timbre.
For a final brief study of the three elements we aim to acquire, with especial emphasis in thought upon the last one, let us take this prologue to The Two Poets of Croisic, with its color-contrast in each verse:
Such a starved bank of moss
Till that May morn,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!
Sky—what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star!
World—how it walled about
Life with disgrace
Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face
The vocal treatment of the first two verses will be very much alike. The voice starts in minor key, a gray monotone, in harmony with the absence of color in the bare bank of dull moss. The inflection of the word "starved" must emphasize the grayness. It must be a dull push of the tone on the first syllable, with little, if any, lift above the level of the low pitch on which the whole line is spoken. With a swift, salient, rising inflection on the opening word of the second line, an inflection which creates expectancy of change, the voice lifts the thought out of the minor into the major key. I must call your attention to the vital significance of the use of pause at this point by simply asking you to indulge in it. Stop after uttering the word till and study the effect of the pause. It is the pause quite as much as the inflection, you see, which induces the expectant attitude you desire to create in the mind of your auditor. With the next three words, "that May morn," the tone takes on a bit of the warmth of early summer. A lingering cadence on the word "May" will help the suggestion. With the third line the voice begins to shine. I know no other way to express it. The inflections are swift and straight, but not staccato, because they must suggest a growth, not a burst of color. The tone on which the words are borne must be continuous. It must not be broken off definitely with each word, as is to prove most effective, we shall find, in handling the third line of the second verse. The fourth line brings the full, glowing, radiant tone on the first word, "violets." This tone must be held in full volume on the last two words. The law for beautiful speech must be observed here. (But where should it not be observed?) Let us recall the law, "Beautiful speech depends upon openness of vowels and definiteness of consonants." The vowels give volume to a word, the consonants form. Slur your consonants and squeeze your vowels in the three words of this line, "Violets were born," and what becomes of this miracle of spring? The voicing of the second verse is very like that of the first. The opening line demands the same gray monotone. But the three words, "sky," "scowl," and "cloud," if clear-cut in utterance, as they should be, will break the level of the line more than the single word "starved" in the first line of the first verse can do, or was meant to do. There is the same swift lift of the voice in the opening word of the second line, the same change to the major key, the same growing glow in the tone on the third line, and the same radiant outburst of color sustained through the last line. The only difference lies in the suffusion of radiance in the tone to suggest the coming of color to the bank, in the first verse, and the outburst of radiance to suggest the sudden splitting of the clouds and the star's swift birth, in the second verse. With the emotional change of thought in the last verse, from a travail and birth in nature to a human soul's struggle and rebirth, the deepening color which creeps into the tone indicates the entrance of personal passion. The key does not change. The inflections are still and straight. The tone simply deepens and glows in the last two lines, as a prayerful ecstasy possesses the one who reads.