In the best of our elocution schools, such as are found in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, where saner and more thorough methods are pursued and a certain measure of literary scholarship finds a habitation and a name, respectable attention is given to some of the chief masterpieces of literature, and a graduate knows something more than the scrappy selections found in a few recitation books.
Still the aim of all these schools is to turn out readers and teachers of reading, and this very aim precludes a deep, serious and comprehensive study of literature.
In many of our leading colleges and universities there is a professor of oratory, who trains young men for declamation and intercollegiate contests in oratory and debate, but here again the aim determines the character and limitations of the work done. The most suitable department for voice training in a college or university is that of English literature, for it is as needful in the dramas of Shakespeare as in the orations of Webster and Burke; as requisite in the lyrics of Moore, Burns and Longfellow as in the glorious epics of Homer, Dante and Milton; as potent in the sonnets of Cowper and Wordsworth as in the tender elegies of a Shelley, an Arnold or a Tennyson.
But what about the vocal interpretation of literature in our primary and intermediate schools—in our academies preparatory to college and university work? It is here where the great work of vocal culture should begin—and begin in earnest, too. But it should never be pursued as an accomplishment or means of frivolous display. The aim should be, in every class, the adequate voicing of literary thought. Teachers will find in the voice an invaluable aid in the work of interpreting, particularly lyrics.
The lyric being subjective, and its very lifeblood being feeling, a sympathetic vocal interpretation of it will give a better insight into its poetic moment or inspirational thought, around which centres the whole structure, than hours of sentence chopping and phrase stitching. For the purpose of illustrating this fact let us take Tennyson’s exquisite lyric, “Break, Break, Break,” which embodies or crystallizes a mood. Here is the delightful little gem:
“Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
“O well for the fisherman’s boy