These aspects, having been dwelt upon at some length in the preceding discussion, may be dismissed with a few words. The knowledge of the psychology of Force and Stress is to serve as a standard of criticism, not as a foundation for mechanical drills. There is a school of reading pedagogy, with lamentably extended sway, that argues, since there are found various kinds of stress in our speech, therefore we must drill our pupils on these. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Stress denotes a state of mind. If our philosophy of stress is sound, it should teach us that the mental state finds instinctive expression in one form of stress or another, and consequently we must get the state before we can get the stress. We might add that this is true of Time, Pitch, and Quality, as well as of Stress.
Do not tell a child to read louder. If you do, you will get loudness—that awful, grating schoolboy loudness—without a particle of expression in it. Many a child reads well, but is bashful. When we tell him to read louder, he braces himself for the effort and kills the quality, which is the finer breath and spirit of oral expression, and gives us a purely physical thing—force. Put your weak-voiced readers on the platform; let them face the class and talk to you, seated in the middle of the room, and you will get all the force you need. On the whole, we have too much force rather than too little. Let the teacher learn that we want quality, not quantity, and our statement of the mental action behind force will be of much benefit in creating the proper conditions.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In describing what is small, delicate, nice, we often note the tendency to use a rather high key. This is no doubt due to the tension that results from unconscious imitation. The voice is to a certain extent squeezed in endeavoring to express the smallness of the idea, with the result that the key is raised. Note how the child’s key rises when he asks for a “leetle, teeny bit.”
[2] The rising inflection will be heard only on the last syllable of this word. Note the discreet skip of the voice between the first and second syllables.
[3] Prof. W. B. Chamberlain in his “Rhetoric of Vocal Expression.” This work is now out of print, but a revision and enlargement of it is published by Scott, Foresman & Co., of Chicago, under the title “Principles of Vocal Expression and Literary Interpretation.”
[4] The falling inflection may properly be given on the italicised words; but the latter are not therefore necessarily to be emphasized.
[5] See Tyndall on “Sound;” or Prof. Halm on the same subject.
[6] A few words are italicized in order to draw attention to the places where we should be likely to use this stress. Observe, too, how the stress impresses us with the desire of the speaker to push away opposition.