Vocal Expression: A Class-book of Voice Training and Interpretation

Exposition is an explanation, a setting forth, or an expounding. It is an attempt to render something plain, an effort to convey to the reader a train of thought which represents the conclusions of the writer upon a subject. The writer, it is at once evident, must be acquainted with the subject with which he deals. He is presuming to teach, and must be in a position which justifies him in so doing. He is prepared to write an exposition only when he is able, in regard to the topic in hand, to take frankly and unreservedly the attitude of a teacher.

A teacher must have many good gifts and graces; and whoever else may fail to be well acquainted with a given lesson, he must have mastered it thoroughly. To teach he must first know. Whoever has taught understands how completely different is the attitude of the teacher from that of the pupil. While the pupil is hardly expected to be able to do more than reasonably well to understand the subject in hand, the teacher must be able to explain, to justify, to make clear relations, and to impart the whole matter. The pupil is excused with a sort of hearsay knowledge, but the teacher must have a vital experience of what he teaches. Especially must he be able to comprehend and to represent a subject as a whole. He is responsible for the student's being able in turn to co-ordinate facts and theories so as to produce unity; and it is therefore essential that he himself have power to hold and to make clear a continuous train of thought.

The teacher, moreover, must have over his mind discipline so firm that he is not dependent upon moods. He must cover the wide difference between the train of thought which springs spontaneously in the mind and that which is laboriously worked out as a logical sequence of ideas relating to a subject forced upon the attention. The pupil may, to a certain extent, indulge the vagaries of his inclination, but the teacher must respond to the need of the moment. He must have trained his mind to give an intelligent judgment upon any matter presented to it. He is not equipped for instructing—nor is any individual ready for life—until he can command the resources of his inner self to the utmost. The trained person is one who can take a subject which may not at the outset especially appeal to him, which is full of complications, which is not in itself, perhaps, attractive, and can insist with himself that his mind shall master it thoroughly. He is able so to expend his whole mental strength, if need be, upon any necessary topic that the subject shall be examined, acquired, assimilated, and then shall be so organized, so illumined, and so presented that others shall be instructed. The mind of the teacher, in a word, is so disciplined that it will work when it is ordered.

The ideal state of mind for him who wishes to communicate knowledge is that of being absolute master of all its resources. Many who possess no inconsiderable powers of thought are practically unable to command the best powers of their intelligence. They depend upon the whim of the moment, upon some outward pressure or inward impulse, to arouse their intellect. They fail to reflect that while any ordinary intellect naturally forms some opinion upon any subject which interests it, only the trained mind is able to judge clearly and lucidly of an indifferent or uninteresting matter. In this mastery of thought lies the difference between the sterile and the productive mind. Only one brain in a thousand has not the disposition to shirk work if it is allowed, and every student has moments when his intelligence seems almost to act like a spoiled child that hates to get up when called on a cold morning. To establish the power of the will over the intellect is the object of education, and the ability to exercise this power is what is meant by the proper use of the word "cultivation."

The mental process of the cultivated thinker when considering any subject is likely to be: first, to become sure of his terms; then, clearly to set before his mind the facts and conditions; and, lastly, to make the possible and resulting deductions and conclusions. This gives a hint, and indeed practically affords a rule for the writer of exposition.

An exposition, broadly speaking, may be said to consist of three steps which nearly correspond to the three steps of mental activity just set down: the Definition, the Statement, and the Inference.

Definition is making clear to self or to the reader what is under discussion.

Statement is the setting forth of whatever is to be said of the facts, conditions, relations, and so on, which it is the object of the exposition to make clear.

Inference is the conclusion or conclusions drawn.

These three parts will seldom be found as formal divisions in any ordinary exposition, but in some sort they are always present; and the writer must at least have them clear in his mind if he hopes to render his work well ordered, comprehensive, and symmetrical. Together they are woven as the strands which give a firmness of texture to the whole.

To illustrate the bearing of this analysis on the composition of an exposition, we may imagine that a student has been required to write a theme on "The Influence of College Life." He has first to concern himself with definition. He must decide what he means by college life as a molding influence; whether its intellectual, its social, its moral aspects, or all these. He must consider, too, whether he is to deal with the effect upon specific characters or upon types; whether upon boys during the time they are in college or as a training for after life; whether at a special institution or as the result of any college. If he limits himself to one phase of influence, he must in the same way decide fully in what sense he intends to treat that phase. If he is to consider the social effect of college life, for instance, he has to define for himself the sense in which he will use the word "social." Is it to mean simply formal society, adaptation to the more conventional and exclusive forms of human intercourse, or to imply all that renders a man more self-poised, more flexible, and more adaptable in any relations with his fellows? If, on the other hand, it is the intellectual influence of college life which is to be studied, the first step is to decide what is to be considered for this purpose the range of the term "intellectual"; whether it is to be taken to mean the mere acquirement of information; whether it has relation to acquirement or to modification of mental conditions; whether it means change in the mind in the way of development or of modification; whether it shall be applied to an alteration in the student's attitude toward knowledge or toward life in general. All this is in the line of definition, and it is naturally connected with the statement of whatever facts bear upon the topic under discussion.

Statement has largely to do with fact. Theory belongs rather to whatever inference is part of an exposition. In the statement will come the observations of the writer; whatever he knows of general conditions at college, or such individual examples as bear upon the question in hand. From these he will inevitably draw some conclusions, and the value of the exposition will depend upon the reasonableness and convincingness of these inferences, as these will, in turn, depend upon the clearness of the writer's original knowledge in regard to his intentions and the logic of his statements.

Composition, it should be remembered, is the art of communicating to others what is in the mind of the writer. To write without having the subject abundantly in mind is to invite the reader to a Barmecide feast of empty dishes. The necessity of insisting upon such particulars as those just given of the process of making an exposition arises from the stubborn idea of the untrained student that writing is something done with paper and ink. It is, on the contrary, something which is done with brains; it is less putting things on paper than it is thinking things out in the mind.

Before leaving the illustration of a theme on the influence of college life we may glance a moment more at the difficulty, even with so simple a subject, of attaining perfect clarity of thinking. One of the first things which must be determined is the essential difference of life in a college from ordinary existence. If the subject be given out to a class of students half the themes handed in will begin with a remark upon the great change which comes to a boy who finds himself for the first time freed from the restraints of home. The moment this idea is presented to the mind it is to be looked at, not as something with which to fill so much paper, but as a stepping-stone toward ideas beyond. It is necessary, for instance, to determine the distinctions between freedom at college and freedom elsewhere; to decide wherein lie the differences in the conditions which surround a boy in a university and one who escapes from the restrictions of home by going away to live in a city or in a country village, on shipboard or in the army. To be of value, every thought in an exposition must have been tested by a comparison with allied ideas as wide and as exhaustive as the thinker is equal to making.

To learn to think is, after all, the prime essential in exposition-writing, and the beginning of thought is the realization of what is already known. The student who patiently examines his views on the subject of which he is to write, who determines to discover exactly how much he knows and what is the relative importance of each of his opinions, is likely soon to come to find that he is considering the theme chosen not only deeply, but with tangible results. The value of any exposition, to sum the matter up in a word, rests primarily and chiefly on the thoroughness of the thought which produces it.—Arlo Bates.[3]

The Idylls of the King has been called a quasi-epic. Departing from the conventional epic form by its lack of a closely continuous narrative, it has yet that lofty manner and underlying unity of design which leads us to class it with the epics, at least, in the essentials. It consists of a series of chivalric legends, taken chiefly from the Morte d'Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory, grouped so as to exhibit the establishment, the greatness, and the downfall of an ideal kingdom of righteousness among men. "The Coming of Arthur," the ideal ruler, shows us the setting up of this kingdom. Before this was disorder, great tracts of wilderness,

Arthur slays the beast and fells the forest, and the old order changes to give place to new. Then the song of Arthur's knights rises, a majestic chorus of triumph:

In "Gareth and Lynette" the newly established kingdom is seen doing its work among men. Arthur, enthroned in his great hall, dispenses impartial justice. The knights

The allegory shows us, in Gareth's contests with the knights "that have no law nor King," the contest of the soul with the temptations that at different periods of life successively attack it:

Then follow the "Idylls," which trace the entrance and growth of an element of sin and discord, which, spreading, pulls down into ruin that "fellowship of noble knights," "which are an image of the mighty world." The purity of the ideal kingdom is fouled, almost at its source, by the guilty love of Lancelot and the Queen. Among some the contagion spreads; while others, in an extremity of protest, start in quest of the Holy Grail, leaving the duty at hand for mystical visions. Man cannot bring down heaven to earth; he cannot sanctify the mass of men by his own rapturous anticipations; he cannot safely neglect the preliminary stages of progress appointed for the race; he "may not wander from the allotted field before his work be done."

So by impurity and by impatience the rift in the kingdom widens, and in "The Last Tournament," in the stillness before the impending doom, we hear the shrill voice of Dagonet railing at the King, who thinks himself as God, that he can make

In "Guinevere," unequaled elsewhere in the "Idylls" in pure poetry, the blow falls; at length, in the concluding poem, Arthur passes to the isle of Avilion, and once more

Tennyson himself tells us that in this, his longest poem, he has meant to shadow "sense at war with soul," the struggle in the individual and in the race, between that body which links us with the brute and the soul which makes us part of a spiritual order. But the mastery of the higher over the lower is only obtained through many seeming failures. Wounded and defeated, the King exclaims:

But he also half perceives the truth which it is the poet's purpose to suggest to us. It is short-sighted to expect the immediate sanctification of the race; if we are disheartened, striving to "work His will," it is because "we see not the close." It is impossible that Arthur's work should end in failure—departing, he declares, "I pass, but shall not die," and when his grievous wound is healed, he will return. The Idylls of the King is thus the epic of evolution in application to the progress of human society. In it the teachings of "In Memoriam" assume a narrative form.

may be taken as a brief statement of its theme: and we read in it the belief in the tendency upward and an assurance of ultimate triumph:

As an interlude study which shall look back to the step we have just taken, and forward to the one we are about to take, let us test our growth in vitality in thinking and our need of intelligence in feeling, by voicing the following selections from didactic poetry. This form affords the best exercise in both activities because it makes a double appeal, and so a double demand upon the interpreter—an appeal through form to emotion, through aim to intelligence, and through message and atmosphere to both. I have chosen examples of this form in which the beauty and fascination of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, and the didactic nature of the thought do not seem to overbalance each other. If either should predominate you must, by your interpretation, strike the balance. In reading Robert Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra (from which I shall quote but a few verses) you must carry to your auditor the full import of the philosophy, but in doing so you must not lose the beauty of the verse in which the poet has set it.

As a final step in this study which has for its aim an increase in your power to think vitally you are to choose from the "great heap of your knowledge" a subject about which you have sufficient understanding and enthusiasm to justify your discussion of it, and with this as a topic you are "to unmuzzle your wisdom" in the form of exposition or argumentation.

SECOND STUDY

It may seem a far cry from a comment upon American life to the subject of this second study—intelligence in feeling. Carry the idea of balanced expression from the introduction to the body of this exposition and the transition is not difficult to make.

"Wonderful technique, but no heart in her singing!" "Tremendous temperament, but no technique!" "She moves me profoundly, but oh, what a method!" "Her instrument is flawless, but she leaves me absolutely unmoved." Have you ever heard such comment, or made such comment, or been the subject of like comment? Diagnosis of the case, whether it be yours or another's, should be the same—lack of poise in expression, producing the undesirable effect upon the auditor of no emotion at all, or of unintelligent emotion. To determine just what we mean by intelligent emotion is our first problem for this study.

An experience I had in visiting a class in interpretation in a well-known school of oratory some years ago will illustrate the point. The selection for interpretation was the prelude to the first part of The Vision of Sir Launfal.

The work was well under way when I entered the class-room. My entrance did not disturb the expression on the face of the student who was "up before" the class. A Malvolio smile was never more deliciously indelible. I thought at first my request to see some work in interpretation had been mistaken and I had been ushered into a class in facial gymnastics. Then I concluded that Mr. Lowell's poem was being employed as text for an exercise in smiling. Finally the awful truth came upon me that this teacher of interpretation was seriously attempting to secure from her pupils an expression which should suggest the spirit of the June day by asking them to assume the outward sign of joy known as smiling. The result was a ghastly series of facial contortions, which left at least one auditor's day as bleak as the bleakest December. No intelligent feeling can be induced in interpreter or auditor by assuming the outward sign of an inward emotion. Some of you are recalling Mr. James's talk to students, on the reflex theory of emotion, and are being confused at this point. Let us stop and straighten out the confusion. Mr. James says:

"Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

"Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear."

The application of this principle to the reading of these lines would seem to justify the method the teacher was pursuing. A smile is acceptedly the indication of happy emotion, the outward symbol of inward rejoicing or joy. The June day is full of joyful emotion,—the joy of awakening life. Applying Mr. James's theory, a legitimate way to induce the inward emotion would seem to be to assume the outward sign. But wait a moment. Let us look to our premises. Mr. Lanier, who sings of Nature with joyful understanding, cries in Sunrise:

Here is a great master of verbal expression whose inward joy finds its outward symbol not in a smile but in a tear. So you and I may respond to Mr. Lowell's "high tide of the year" with smiles or with tears, with bowed head and closed eyes, or with eyes wide and head raised to meet the returning flood of life.

The effect upon me of the beauty of this day as Mr. Lowell has painted it, my personal emotional response is interesting psychology, but is not my concern as an interpreter. My own emotion and its personal response belong to my preparatory interpretative efforts in the study; but when the interpretation is ready for the audience-room, the emotion must be assimilated into the interpretative act and appear only as part of the illumination of the bit of life I am presenting.

The object of all great art, whether creative or interpretative, is not to exploit the personality of the artist, but to disclose at some point the personality of the very God himself, which is life. The revelation not of personal emotion but of universal life is the legitimate aim of all artistic effort.

Emotional response will accompany every vital mental conception. Abandonment to that response is a legitimate and necessary part of full comprehension. But such abandonment, as I have said, belongs to our preparation for expression. Such abandonment must not be taken out of the study on to the stage. No temperamental expression along any line is fit for the public until it is controlled by technique, the technique which has been worked out by the masters of every art, not excluding the art of living.

It is not the effect of June upon you I want from your interpretation, it is the spirit of June itself. You must let me have my own emotion. Your emotional response was the result of your mental concept; mine, to be intelligent, must find the same impulse. If you impose your own emotion upon me mine will be merely an unintelligent reflection of yours. Taking as our ideal of the interpreter, the absolutely pure medium, bars out every manifestation which calls attention to the interpreter, and so interferes with the direct message.

"The natural form of expression which literature takes when it passes beyond the normal powers of prose, is lyric poetry. When your feelings rise beyond a certain degree of stress you need the stronger beat and vibration of verse; to express the highest joy or the deepest grief poetry is your natural instrument." Again corroborated in our choice of direction in study by Mr. Gardiner, let us turn for "material" in the establishment of intelligence in emotion, to the most intensive type of the literature of feeling,—lyric poetry.

"Every now and then a man will come who will reduce to words—as Mr. Ruskin has done—some impression of vivid pleasure which has never been reduced to words before. It is only the great master who makes these advances; by studying his works you may perhaps come somewhere near the mark that he has set." This further word from the same paragraph should influence us to pause with Mr. Ruskin's poetry in prose form for a brief study on our way to the lyrics of Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats, a song from Shakespeare, and some few from the rare, more modern lyricists. I shall trust you to this by-path under the guidance of The Forms of Prose Literature, where you will find passages from such masters of prose as Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Stevenson—passages of surpassing lyric beauty which shall furnish models for your correlated study in Description.

SUGGESTIVE ANALYSIS

I have chosen for suggestive analysis of the lyric, Shelley's ode To a Skylark. I shall analyze in detail only the first five stanzas:

How shall we create an atmosphere for the reading of these verses! How can we catch the spirit of the creator of them! Shall we ever feel ready to voice that first line? Do you know Jules Breton's picture The Lark? Do you love it? Go, then, and stand before it, actually or in imagination. Let something of the spirit which informs that lovely child, lifting her eyes, her head in an attitude of listening rapture, steal over you. I know her power. I have tested it. In reading the "Skylark" with a class of boys and girls from twelve to fourteen years old, I tried the experiment. I happened to have with me a beautiful copy of Breton's picture. I took it to the class-room. I wrote on the blackboard verses of the poem and hung the picture over them. The picture taught them to read the poem. The eyes of the girl became their teacher. I tried the experiment, with a private pupil in my studio, with a somewhat different result. I had told her to bring a copy of Shelley's poems to her next lesson. "Do you know the ode To a Skylark?" I asked. "Yes," she said. A copy of Breton's picture hung on the wall. "Before you open your book look at the picture," I said. She obeyed. Her expression, always radiant, deepened its radiance. "Do you know what the girl is doing?" I asked. "Oh yes, she is listening to the skylark." "How do you know?" "I have heard the skylark sing." "I never have," I said. "Read the poem to me." Now when I read the "Skylark," I see the girl in Jules Breton's picture, but I hear the voice of my English pupil.

But if our apperceptive background fails to furnish a memory of the identical sight and sound for our inspiring, it at least holds bird notes and bird flights of great beauty, and we must call upon these for the impulse to voice Shelley's apostrophe:

An early autumn number of the Atlantic Monthly for 1907 published a poem by Mr. Ridgley Torrence, entitled The Lesser Children, or A Threnody at the Hunting Season. The poem is worthy, in sentiment and structure, to be set beside Shelley's ode. Let us compare with the picture which the eighteenth-century poet has given us this one from our modern song-writer:

Now let us study closely the first verse of the older poem. Spirit and voice must soar in the first line, "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!" The two words "hail" and "blithe" are swift-winged words. Let them fly. Give them their wings. Let them do all they are intended to do. The rhythm of the whole poem is aspiring. Reverence the rhythm, but keep the thought floating clear above it in the second line, "Bird thou never wert." With the next two lines the tone must gather head to be poured forth in the last line, "In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." Let us make another comparative study. Set on the other side of this picture Lowell's description of the "little bird" in his prologue to Sir Launfal's vision:

The second verse of the "Skylark" demands a still higher flight of imagination and tone. Let us try it.

Again all the words rise and float. Sing them over: higher, higher, springest, fire, wingest, singing, soar, soaring, singest. The reader must feel himself poised for flight in every word of the first three verses. Why does the poet say cloud of fire? What is the color of the skylark? And now the tone, which has been of a radiant hue through these three verses, must soften a little in the first three lines of the next verse—

glow gold again in the last three lines—

and become the white of an incandescent light in the next verse—

Do you not see that the secret of its beauty lies, for vocal interpretation, in the color of tone and in the inflection of the words? Say "unseen," dwelling on the second syllable; "shrill delight," directing shrill over the head of delight; "keen," making it cleave the air like an arrow; "silver sphere," suggesting a moonlit path across water; "intense" and "narrows," letting the tone recede into the "white dawn"; "see," with a vanishing stress; and "feel," with a deepening note carried to the end. So we might go on through the twenty-one stanzas which make up the poem.

Please analyze undirected the next two verses.

In reading the first lines of the next four verses we must avoid monotony.

Vary, if only for variety, the pitch on which you begin each of these first lines. Let the first three words of the eighth verse, "like a poet," ascend in pitch. Keep the voice level in the first line of the ninth verse, "like a high-born maiden." Let the pitch fall in the first words of the tenth stanza, "like a glowworm golden." And again keep the tone level on the first line of the next stanza, "like a rose embower'd." I leave to you the analysis of the rest of the poem: