Emotion in song or speech.
The elements of emotional expression are alike in speech and song. In each you have quality, time, force, and pitch. The variation of these elements makes expression of feeling; and each sound you make contains all these elements. It has a certain quality; it has more or less of force; it is relatively high or low in pitch, it takes a longer or shorter time. | Variety in expression.| The more you vary in the elements of emotional expression, the better the effect, provided the variation is caused by the variation of your feeling, and not by any artificiality, or seeming to express what you do not feel.
Quality.
Force.
Pitch.
Time.
The quality of voice, its purity or harshness, its aspiration, &c., will vary with the kind of feeling; the degree of force will vary according to the intensity of feeling; the pitch will be according to what we may call the height or depth of your feeling; the movement, or time, will be according as the emotion is quick or slow. After having cultivated the voice well in these elements of emotional expression, your own common sense ought to be your best guide in the application of them to reading and speaking. You, for the time being, should be the author of what you read. "Put yourself in his place," and express as you feel that he felt while writing it.
Feeling without expression.
It is possible for you to feel intense emotion, and not be capable of properly expressing it, so as to make others feel it. You may not have had training that will give you command of sound and motion, those channels of expression through which the body is made to obey mind and soul, and express their thought and feeling. | No expression without feeling.| It is impossible to express, even with the best cultivation, what, at the moment of utterance, you do not feel: therefore you must sink your own personality in your subject; and, according to your conception, so will you express.
Reserve power.
All apparent effort must be avoided; that is, in the expression of the strongest passion or emotion, you must not give the audience the slightest indication of want of power. You will give that impression if you try to express more than you actually feel. In emotional expression it must seem as if it overflowed because of excess, and you could hardly control it; but you must never lose control of it. This control will give the audience the impression that you feel more than you express, and is what is called reserved power. If—your well of emotion not being overflowingly full—you use a force-pump, or, in other words, your will-power, to make it overflow, you will fail in expression.
How to get reserve power.