You hear now no roar of hostile cannon, you see no mixed volume of smoke and flame rising from burning Charlestown. The ground strewed with the dead and dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the loud call to repeated assault; the summoning of all that is manly to repeated resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death; all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no more.
All is peace. The heights of yonder metropolis, its towers and roofs, which you then saw filled with wives and children and countrymen in distress and terror, and looking with unutterable emotions for the issue of the combat, have presented you to-day with the sight of its whole happy population come out to welcome and greet you with a universal jubilee. Yonder proud ships, by a felicity of position appropriately lying at the foot of this mount, and seeming fondly to cling around it, are not means of annoyance to you, but your country’s own means of destruction and defense.—Webster.
What lesson shall those lips teach us? Before that still, calm brow let us take a new baptism. How can we stand here without a fresh and utter consecration? These tears! how shall we dare even to offer consolation? Only lips fresh from such a vow have the right to mingle their words with your tears. We envy you your nearer place to these martyred children of God. I do not believe slavery will go down in blood. Ours is an age of thought. Hearts are stronger than swords. That last fortnight! How sublime its lesson! the Christian one of conscience,—of truth. Virginia is weak, because each man’s heart said amen to John Brown. His words,—they are stronger even than his rifles. These crushed a State. Those have changed the thoughts of millions, and will yet crush slavery. Men said, “Would he had died in arms!” God ordered better, and granted to him and the slave those noble prison hours,—that single hour of death; granted him a higher than the soldier’s place,—that of teacher; the echoes of his rifles have died away in the hills,—a million hearts guard his words. God bless this roof,—make it bless us. We dare not say bless you, children of this home! you stand nearer to one whose lips God touched, and we rather bend for your blessings. God make us all worthier of him whose dust we lay among these hills he loved. Here he girded himself and went forth to battle. Fuller success than his heart ever dreamed God granted him. He sleeps in the blessings of the crushed and the poor, and men believe more firmly in virtue, now that such a man has lived. Standing here, let us thank God for a firmer faith and fuller hope.—Wendell Phillips.
A great deal of space has been given to the preceding illustrations because the quality necessary to express the emotions in those selections is very rare. Rare for two reasons: first, because we dwell so much of the time in the realm of the so-called practical that we lose interest in the sublimer aspects presented in poetry; and, secondly, we do not express these larger emotions freely and often. Expression, like all other powers, comes through practice.
The second distinct quality is what has been called the Normal. This is the voice of everyday life, the voice in which we carry on the conversation of the home, the schoolroom, and the business of life generally. We need no special practice in this quality, but it is well to recognize it in order that we may compare with it the other qualities. The following extract would be expressed in Normal quality.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. And do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you avoid it.
Be not too tame either, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of Nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first, and now, was, and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to Nature, to show Virtue her own feature, Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance, o’erweigh a whole theater of others. Oh, there be players that I have seen play—and heard others praise, and that highly—not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, or man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.—Hamlet, Act iii., Sc. 2.
In a work which makes no pretension to cover the whole realm of elocution, it would be out of place to discuss the more extravagant forms of emotion, such as terror, rage, hate, and the like. In order, however, to give this phase of the subject a certain approximation to complete treatment, it may be well to touch upon these abnormal emotional states and the respective qualities in which they find expression.
There is a wide range of feeling that so affects the action of the vocal apparatus as to produce a breathy tone. It would be idle and misleading to enumerate all the occasions upon which we might expect to hear this aspirated voice. Suffice it that a sense of oppression resulting from any one of many causes: the desire not to be overheard; the weakness of old age and disease—any of these conditions may produce the aspirated tone. Aspiration does not manifest any one emotion, but may accompany many. There may be considerable aspiration mixed with the expression of joy, as well as with the expression of hate or despair. It is well to bear this in mind, for many text books give the “Aspirated Quality” as a specific kind of voice manifesting specific emotions and those only. When we observe that this quality is found in awe, terror, hate, and like emotions; in debility; and when we wish to whisper; the unscientific nature of such a classification becomes sufficiently clear. A few examples are appended:
St! Don’t make any noise: he’s asleep.