she put her hand to her heart and with pleasure indicated by a sentimental flash of the eye upon the audience, danced a few graceful steps expressive of exuberant joy, and bowed herself off the platform amid the vociferous applause of the audience. The reader's taste in this case was no worse than that of the audience that applauded her. The incident shows how great the general lack of taste, and the need of the systematic study of fitness in the relation of thought to its expression.'
I would say rather than 'lack of taste,' lack of spiritual life, although the former is closely allied with the latter. A reader who has assimilated the 'Daffodils,' who can sympathetically reproduce within himself the heart-dance of the poet, can better reveal that reproduction through the voice (the requisite vocal culture being assumed) than through such mimetic foolery as the above. He would not and could not condescend to the latter, if he had feeling deep enough truly to know the poem of the 'Daffodils.' True feeling is always serious, even if it be that of deep joy. The trouble with many public readers is, that they don't truly know, have not inwardly experienced, what they attempt to interpret vocally; and, as a consequence, they resort to what disgusts people of real culture.
I was once present, by accident, at a lecture given by a Delsarto-elocutionary woman, and in the course of the lecture, she presented what, she said, would be false gestures in reciting Whittier's Maud Muller. She then recited the poem, with, according to her notions, true gestures, which were more in number than Cicero made, perhaps, in his orations against Cataline, or Demosthenes, in his oration On the Crown. Every idea of the poem told outwardly on her body.
If a woman, in reading Maud Muller, has emotions which must find vent in gesture, and various physical contortions, she ought to be put under treatment that would tone up her system.
THE University of the Future, in order to be a vastly greater power than the University of the Present, must, at least, rank spiritual education with intellectual training and discipline. This the University of the near Future must do; the University of a more remote Future, we must believe, if we believe that the spiritual is the crowning attribute of man—that by which he is linked with the permanent, the eternal, will make all intellectual training and discipline, even all physical training, so far as may be, subservient to the spiritual man.
The rectification of the intellect must, as the greatest poem of the century, Browning's 'Ring and the Book,' implicitly teaches, be through the rectification of the spiritual, absolute man.
As bearing directly on my leading subject, the vocal interpretation of literature (that is, spiritualized thought), I would indicate some of the means and conditions of a more spiritual education than is contemplated in the most advanced educational schemes of the day.
What may be said to be the predominant idea of the present day, entertained especially by scientists and exercising its influence, more or less, on the great majority of minds, in regard to the main avenue to knowledge and truth? I answer, and I think not unjustifiably, the idea that the analytic, discursive, generalizing intellect, is adequate to solve all solvable problems—that it is the only reliable means of arriving at a positive knowledge; that, accordingly, education, the highest education, consists almost exclusively in learning and in being trained to discover and apply, the laws, so called, of nature, to trace facts to their (scientific) causes and to advance logically from causes to facts—that upon which the analyzing and generalizing intellect cannot be exercised, being set down as unknowable. Of an intuition inaccessible to analysis, they take little or no account. This some future age, with a more complete education, than ours, will, I am persuaded, regard as the cardinal defect in the education and philosophy of the present age—a defect that tends to deaden, if not to destroy, in many minds, all faith in those spiritual instincts and spiritual susceptibilities and apprehensions, which constitute the basis of a living hope and faith in immortality, and through which, and through which alone, man may know, without thought, some of the highest truths, truths which are beyond the reach of the discourse of reason. While the reasoning faculties of a man may exist in vigor, the ties which unite the soul sympathetically and through assimilation, with universal spirituality, may be sundered, and a spiritual world for him there will then be none.
That there are higher and subtler organs of discernment than the discursive intellect, and higher things to be discerned than can be discerned by the senses, the lowliest of men and women, no less than the most exalted in intellect and genius, have, throughout the whole recorded history of the race, borne an incontrovertible testimony. 'The natural condition of humanity,' says William Howitt, 'is alliance with the spiritual; the anti-spiritual is but an epidemic—a disease.'
Great have been the conquests of Science, the last fifty years, and great has been their influence on the temporal well-being of mankind. But it must be admitted, perhaps, that these conquests, the product mainly of the insulated intellect, have been somewhat at the expense of 'the interior divinity.'
Wordsworth, addressing his friend Coleridge, in the second book of 'The Prelude,' says:
He has been speaking of mental science.
The present signs of the times, however, give promise that humanity, far as it has drifted in one direction, will assert its wholeness, and will 'render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's,' and that the awakening of 'the interior divinity,' of the spiritual instincts and intuitions, will be as much the aim of the education of the future as the exercise of the mere intellect now is. This awakening must begin in infancy, when the child first 'rounds to a separate mind,' and can respond to its mother's smile, and feel her protecting care, and the rosy warmth of her love. Then will the wise mother regard her child as almost wholly an impressionable being, and will see especially to its surroundings and its associations whether they are suitable to be stamped upon its plastic mind. As it grows, she will aim to quicken and purify it sentiment, and to cultivate a love of the beautiful in form, in color, in sound, especially as these are exhibited in the works of Nature; will endeavor to bring it into the fullest sympathy with all forms of animal life, down to 'the meanest thing that feels.' It is a good sign when a boy loves animals and is kind to them; but when he is bent on killing things, it can be quite safely inferred that he has not received at home lessons in love and had his sympathies and affections duly awakened. Home-life in this country is not, as a general thing, such as to bring the best affections into a healthy play. There is too much worry, too much taking thought of the morrow, too much dissatisfaction with the present condition, too much eagerness to get rich. Some fathers never sufficiently dismiss their business and cares from their minds, to play with their children and to show them those little attentions which their young hearts crave; and mothers expend their souls in the cares and vexations of housekeeping, or, if, by reason of their position and wealth, they are free from these, in social or other matters which shut them off, more or less, from those maternal functions which they should consider it their highest duty to exercise. Filial affection certainly does not increase in this country, as the years go on. Is it too much to say, perhaps it is, that it is rather the exception than the rule, for children, after, and often before, their majority, to show a strong attachment either for their parents or for each other? And there is a word in our language that has quite survived its usefulness; and if things continue to go on as they are now going, it will soon be a fit subject for an Archaic Dictionary—I mean the word REVERENCE. It still maintains its place in our Dictionaries of living vocables, but the thing it represents is a rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno. Vain is the attempt to awaken the religious sentiment in a child, to cause it to feel the real significance of the words, as it utters them, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' in whom the filial and the reverential sentiments are quite extinguished. These sentiments are the soil in which the religious sentiment can best germinate, grow, bud, and fragrantly bloom.
During a child's earliest years the foundation should be laid for that spiritual relationship with Nature which Wordsworth has presented in his great autobiographic poem, 'The Prelude.' Such relationship but very few could realize in themselves as the great high priest of Nature realized it; but all could be brought into a more intimate spiritual relationship with Nature than is favored and promoted, at present, by home influences and by school studies. The latter, when prematurely analytical, and brain slaughtering, tend rather to shut off such relationship.
What is understood as a scientific observation of nature, is not its highest form, so far, at least, as spiritual culture is concerned. It is almost exclusively an analytic observation, in which the conscious intellect plays the chief part. It is study, not spiritual communion. The highest form of observation (if observation it can strictly be called, which is to so great an extent a rapture of necessity and spontaneity) is that which results from the synthetic play of the spiritual faculties, and brings the outer world and all its minutest features into relation with the inner world of man's spirit, and makes him feel his great allies. It is this kind of observation rather than the other, which 'adds a precious seeing to the eye,' and gives to a man some measure of 'the vision and the faculty divine,' and enables him to know something of the fields that are his own; but from which spiritual torpor may alienate him.
'I, long before the blissful hour arrives,' writes Wordsworth, meaning when the discerning intellect of man shall be wedded to this goodly universe in love and holy passion, and shall find the ideal forms of Poets, a simple produce of the common day,
that is, what we really or potentially are,
The system of general spiritual education which is both explicitly and implicitly set forth in 'The Prelude,' makes this great autobiographical poem one of the most valuable productions in English Literature; and teachers capable of bringing its informing spirit home to their students (capable by virtue of their own assimilation of it), might do great things in the way of a spiritual quickening of their students.
And how much capable mothers might derive from Wordsworth's poetry for the spiritual nurture of their children! Capable mothers are, alas! comparatively few; but forces, to be noticed further on, are now at work, which are increasing the number of such mothers, and will continue to increase it more and more, as the ideals of a true womanhood are more and more exalted and realized. The kind of regeneration which the world, at present, most needs, will have to be largely induced by woman, and she will induce it according as her true rights, which are involved in her 'distinctive womanhood,' are recognized and granted her, by her not over-generous brother.
Spiritual education is not a matter of abstract instruction. It must be induced on the basis of the concrete and the personal. The spiritual faculties have no affinities for the abstract. Christianity was introduced into the world through the personal and concrete; rather, it is the personal and the concrete, and its arch-enemy has ever been the abstract, in the form of dogma and stark-naked doctrine. Dogmatism implies materialism. As one advances spiritually, dogma declines with him, in inverse proportion. Christianity is essential being, and not a doctrine, not a body of opinions, not 'a matter of antiquarian pedantry or of historical perspective.' In the great words of the 'De Imitatione Christi,' 'Cui æternum verbum loquitur, ille a multis opinionibus expeditur' (he to whom the eternal word speaks, is freed from many opinions); and to fit the soul to be spoken to by the eternal word, is the true, the ultimate object of spiritual education. The permanent, the eternal, that which is alive for evermore, should, indeed, be the object of all education. Phenomena, in themselves, are not educative. A feeding on them alone, if that were possible (man naturally, whatever his condition, seeks other pabulum), would soon result in a general atrophy of all the faculties, intellectual and spiritual. To use the words of St. Vincent de Lérins, which he applied to the Catholic Church,—would that the Church had always made them its controlling principle!—'magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est' (it must be especially seen to, that we hold to that which everywhere, which always, which by all, has been believed).
There is no exclusiveness in the eternal word; it speaks to every one whose ears are open to it; it enters wherever it is not shut out. It speaks through Nature, through every form of Art (which to be art must be a manifestation of it), through Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' through Music, Sculpture, Painting, Architecture, through all sacred books, and, above all, through sanctified men and women, of the Present and the Past, 'the noble Living and the noble Dead.' In the words of Emerson:
The kind of books which the young should read, is, of course, an important consideration. If 'a general insight into useful facts' be regarded as the main thing in a child's education, such as 'the royal genealogies of Oviedo, the internal laws of the Burmese empire, by how many feet Mount Chimborazo outsoars Teneriffe, what navigable river joins itself to Lara, and what census of the year five was taken at Klagenfurt,' and other matters not having much to do with the advancement of the millennium, why the question is easily settled as to the kind of books a child should be provided with, and be required to learn, and recite; but if some vitality of soul, the indispensable condition of intellectual vitality, in after life, be the aim, then a different kind of books will be needed—such books as will serve to vitalize and guide the instincts, to bring the feelings into a healthful play, and awaken enthusiasm, and thus to prepare the way for the later exercise of the reasoning faculties, and for the comprehension of moral and religious principles. There is a time to feel the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, and a time to regard all these, as far as may be, under intellectual relations. If 'the years that bring the philosophic mind' be anticipated in a child's education, it will be likely, by reason of the premature philosophy served out to it, to become a stupid man or woman, with a plentiful lack of both intellect and soul. Upon the closed bud of reason, while it is not yet ready to be unfolded, must be brought to bear the genial warmth of sensibility, sympathy, and enthusiasm; and when it opens in its own good season, it will not be dwarfed nor canker-bitten.
Sensibility, sympathy, enthusiasm, I repeat, are the elements of the atmosphere in which the intellectual, the moral, and the religious nature of a child can alone germinate and healthily grow, and in later years, bloom and shed a wholesome fragrance.
Stories written for the young must be concrete representations of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good; in other words, they must be works of art. Says Browning, in 'The Ring and the Book,'
that is, bring what is implicit within the soul, into the right attitude to become explicit—bring about a silent adjustment through sympathy induced by the concrete (it cannot be induced by the abstract); in other words, prepare the way for the apprehension of the truth—
that is, Art, so to speak, is the word made flesh,—is the truth, and, as Art, has nothing directly to do with an explicit presentation of the truth. 'The highest, the only operation of Art, as of Nature,' says Goethe, 'is formation' (Gestaltung).
The greatest moral teachers the world has ever known, have exhibited the least of explicit moralizing. They have embodied their gospels,—clothed them in circumstance,—woven them into a tissue of imagery and incident and, by so doing, have given them that vitality which alone can awaken sympathy, and thus induce a mental preparedness for a reception of the higher truths, and a comprehension of great principles. A deep sympathy with truth is the important thing: this implies a rectification of the spiritual nature—its harmonization with the constitution of things. A great amount of abstract truth may be lodged in one's brain, and this sympathy may be more or less wanting. To secure it, the 'Word' of the teacher must become flesh,—it must be contemplated in the flesh, living and breathing,—it must be represented as militant, subject to accident and antagonism, but assuring men of its unquenchable vitality, its relationship with the divine, through the might of its resistance, and through its final triumph, though not necessarily according to earthly standards of the triumphant. There are novels which exhibit a somewhat low ideal of life through the general squaring up of things at the end—the good being rewarded outwardly and the bad punished. But
The teachings of Jesus are clothed in circumstance and imagery which were familiar to all whom he addressed. 'All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them.' To use the words of Archbishop Trench in his 'Unconscious Prophecies of Heathendom,' 'In his life and person, the idea and the fact at length kissed each other, and were thenceforward wedded forever.'
The liberal-minded reader of the four records which we have of Christ's life and teachings, must admit that he added little or nothing to the previously existing knowledge of truth in the abstract; he rather caused truth which philosophers and moralists had already intellectually recognized, to be known 'by heart.' He presented it concretely, in his own life and in his teachings, and thus worked it into that 'daily bread' for which he commanded us to pray, and which alone will nourish human sympathy and love. In its previous intellectual, abstract form, it did not, and could not, become an element of spiritual life.
In the thirty beautiful little stories in the New Testament, educators of the young, and indeed all educators in the fullest sense, may see the cardinal principle of their calling, namely, that the greatest power of ethical and religious truth can be secured only through the concrete, and the personal, through that which is the truth, and not through an abstract enunciation—through that form which is loved for its own sake; whose beauty is its own excuse for being; and the sense of love and beauty, when awakened, makes all things plain. Ubi caritas, ibi claritas.
Many who have written books for the young professedly to impart Christian instruction, have least observed the mode exhibited in the teachings of him whom they profess to take as their Great Exemplar. Their instruction is too explicit. It is presented without a sufficiency of concrete clothing to keep it warm; sometimes in its abstract nakedness. It is thus powerless to awaken the love and sympathy of young hearts.
If the views above expressed are sound, I would say that, in choosing reading matter for the young, special preference should be given to such stories as serve to awaken the imagination, exercise the sympathies, and nourish a lively and joyous enthusiasm. I should wholly exclude explicitly moral and religious stories, and should choose in their stead, stories of human sympathy and sacrifice, heroic endurance, and unconscious virtues (conscious virtue is always weak), fairy tales, and legends gay and sad. A child of healthful, unperverted feelings is averse to moral and religious books, as a class. It would rather read about Robinson Crusoe and his faithful man Friday, and it is far better that it should have such preference—far better that it should live, while a child,
instead of being prematurely crammed with, to it, lifeless moral and religious principles, 'useful' knowledge, and the sciences. Wholesome to every one would be such 'Recollections of the Arabian Nights' as are expressed by Tennyson:
A child cannot be made virtuous by maxims. The life which is before it, is not a scheme to be taught, but a drama to be acted.
But
Blessings upon all the books that are the delight of childhood and youth and unperverted manhood! Precious are the sympathetic tears which dim the page and which it is so wholesome to encourage in early life as a check to the growth of selfishness and egoism. 'Who,' writes George Sand, in her 'Lettres d'un Voyageur,' 'does not remember with delight, the first books which he relished and devoured? Has never an old dusty cover of some volume found upon the shelves of a neglected closet, brought back to your mind the lovely pictures of early years? Are you not again, in fancy, seated in the green meadow bathed in the evening sunlight, where you read it for the first time?'
What galleries of sweet, pathetic, inspiriting, and noble pictures, have been prepared for the modern child!—pictures, which time and all the damp and cold of after life cannot obscure, to those who have enjoyed them. And to what a goodly company is it the privilege of childhood and youth, and early manhood, to be admitted!—the immortal offspring of cheerful genius, whose companionship expands and strengthens and purifies the heart.
But the young are lamentably debarred, in these days of excessive, and non-educating, learning, from the wholesome influences, wholesome, in the way of inducing sympathy, enthusiasm, and a play of the imagination, which the best books of the past and of the present might exert upon them. Their school tasks and examinations absorb all their time, and the accompanying worry about 'marks,' saps their minds—'Death loves a shining mark.'
Later on, in the higher schools, colleges, and universities, there is no time for communion with great authors. The reading which is done, is largely perfunctory. Speaking from my own long experience, I do not think that one out of twenty of university students, even of those who elect courses in English Literature, has read and assimilated the works of any one good author, or any single work. This is a statement based on an exceptionally long experience. Many have studied literature, as the phrase goes, but have no literary education, however well they may have 'passed' in the kind of work done. And such students pursue the study of elocution, with a sufficiently pitiable result. They have never had awakened in them the faculties which are demanded for assimilating the life of a work of genius, and consequently can do nothing in the way of vocal interpretation. They cannot give through the voice, however well trained it may be, what is not theirs to give.
BELIEVING as I do, in the imperative need of the kind of education I have suggested, I must, as a natural consequence, believe in the co-education of the sexes, in the opening to women of all the avenues along which men only have hitherto gone, and in the removal of all obstacles to the exercise of the powers inherent in 'distinctive womanhood.' These things will do more for civilization, in the highest sense of the word, that is, the spiritual sense, than all other agencies combined. A true manhood and a true womanhood cannot be reached except through the mutual influence of the sexes upon each other. They must be educated together, such education beginning in the family, and continuing through all stages of scholastic training up to and through the university. Boys at home, without affectionate sisters, and girls without affectionate brothers, are at a disadvantage. At no less disadvantage is either sex when separated from the other, in school, college, or university. For it is only at this period of their lives, and in such relations, that they can be fitted, if fitted at all, to walk the world together,
The moral insight of man, to say nothing of his finer spiritual insight, owes much of its penetrating clearness to the feminine element of his nature; and unless this element be developed in due proportion to the intellectual element, he can have, at best, but distorted views of right and wrong, justice and injustice. On this side of his nature, the rays of an unclouded womanhood must strike, before it can be awakened into a genial vitality, and thus impart health, vigor, and subtlety to the intellectual side. 'You cannot think,' says Ruskin (Sesame and Lilies: 2. Of Queen's Gardens), 'that the buckling on of the knight's armor by his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth—that the soul's armor is never well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails.' On the other hand, woman can be a true woman, only to the degree to which she is permitted to share with man all his highest interests, to sympathize with all his noblest aims, and to work side by side with him in the regeneration of the world. That which is especially distinctive in her nature, must be subdued, toned, and guided by a greater breadth and solidity of intellectual culture; and this can be most effectually secured by co-education, and by her being afforded the opportunity to move with man along the higher planes of learning and of thought, and to have a larger share with him than she has hitherto had, in the fruits of the world's intellectual and moral conquests.
The general recognition and realization which are near at hand, of woman's equal rights with man in all that pertains to the highest good of a human being, will have an especially beneficial influence in the marriage relation, the most important in its bearings of all the relations of human life. There are numberless husbands who pass in society for kind and generous men, recognizing the rights of all with whom they have dealings, and cheerfully according those rights, but who are, in many ways, ungenerous and inconsiderate toward their wives, and that, too, without being in the least aware of it. They would be very much surprised if any one were to tell them so. And why is this? It is, no doubt, in most cases, because of a feeling engendered by the whole past constitution of society—a feeling that has become so ingrained as to be an unconscious one—that woman has peculiar duties which she must fulfil, but that her rights, apart from these peculiar duties, depend upon the arbitrary will of man. Children, from a very early age, are made to feel this more or less, according to the influences of their home-life. When a father shows no estimate of the mother's opinions and advice, never talks with her on the higher current subjects of interest, nor consults her about the weightier matters with which he has to deal, but regards her (and this he may do in all kindness) as one whose sole business it is to look well to the ways of her household, the son's ideal of woman is not likely to be the highest. Happy indeed is he whose home education has been such that 'faith in womankind beats with his blood.' That, by itself, is a liberal education.
Fears are entertained by many good people, that co-education, and woman's larger co-operation with man in the affairs of the world, will tend to unsex her, to render her mannish, and eclipse, more or less, those qualities and graces which have hitherto been regarded as constituting the chief charm and glory of her sex. She may, indeed, have less of mere femineity, but, in its stead, she will certainly have more womanliness, in the best sense of the word (by virtue of which she is a specially commissioned regenerating power in the world), if she is reared and educated with the other sex, and allowed her full share in all the great interests of human life, social, political, educational, moral, and religious. Under such circumstances she has a better chance of becoming
than if she be excluded from those interests and lead the restricted life she has ever been obliged to lead by the conventionalities and regulations of society.
The great Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini, 'the prophet and spiritual hero of his nation,' and, indeed, of the whole modern world, wrote in 1858: 'Seek in woman not merely a comfort, but a force, an inspiration, the redoubling of your intellectual and moral faculties. Cancel from your mind every idea of superiority over her. You have none whatever.
'Long prejudice, an inferior education, and a perennial legal inequality and injustice have created that apparent intellectual inferiority which has been converted into an argument of continued oppression.... Like two distinct branches springing from the same trunk, man and woman are varieties springing from the common basis—Humanity. There is no inequality between them, but—even as is the case among men—diversity of tendency and of special vocation.
'Are two notes of the same musical chord unequal or of different nature? Man and woman are the two notes without which the Human chord is impossible. They fulfil different functions in Humanity, but these functions are equally sacred, equally manifestations of that Thought of God which He has made the soul of the universe.
'Consider woman, therefore, as the partner and companion, not merely of your joys and sorrows, but of your thoughts, your aspirations, your studies, and your endeavors after social amelioration. Consider her your equal in your civil and political life. Be ye the two human wings that lift the soul towards the Ideal we are destined to attain.'
William Lloyd Garrison, in an introduction to 'Joseph Mazzini, his life, writings, and political principles,' writes:
'Mazzini's concern for the rights of man was never, on any pretext, in a purely masculine sense. Years ago he inculcated the equality of the sexes in regard to all civil and political immunities. Largely indebted to his mother for the grand impulses which led him to consecrate his life to the service of his country, his generic respect for woman amounted almost to sanctitude: it was the embodiment of all that is tender in affection, fragrant in purity, devout in aspiration, and self-sacrificing in love.'
It has never been a matter of much regret to me that so little is known of Shakespeare's personal history—the circumstances of his outer life. Of what his interior life was, we can have no doubt. It must have been a life capable of sympathetically reproducing within itself all the great characters, men and women, of the Dramas. But if I could wear the wishing-cap of Fortunatus, I would wish to know what manner of woman, in all particulars, was Mary Arden, the poet's mother. The men whose intellectual and, more especially, spiritual gifts to the world, have been the greatest, and most quickening, have oftener, no doubt, been more indebted, for those gifts, to their mothers than to their fathers. The radiant shapes of the women of Shakespeare's Dramas certainly had their source in the feminine element, the ewig weibliche, of his nature, and this element was as certainly, I cannot but think, derived from, and quickened by, his mother. In what was, without doubt, his earliest play, Love's Labor's Lost, Biron, I am quite sure, expresses Shakespeare's own opinion of the peculiar power of women (A. IV. S. III.):
This was as certainly Shakespeare's own opinion about woman as what Biron says (A. I. S. I.) was his own opinion about study:
Shakespeare must early have felt his superiority in true education (the nimble play of all the faculties) to the merely learned men with whom he came in contact, and must soon have discovered that he drank from fountains of which they knew nothing. His own vitality of soul was responsive to the essential life of men and things; and it was through this responsiveness that he attained to a wisdom inaccessible to mere learning and intellectual enlightenment. It was his mother, I like to think, who initiated him into the mysteries of the spirit.
See Vol. I, pp. 229 et seq. of 'Memoirs of Richard Whateley, Archbishop of Dublin. With a glance at his contemporaries and times. By William John Fitzpatrick, J.P. In two volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1864.'
This notation of feet I have used in my 'Primer of English Verse,' a representing an accented, and x, an unaccented, syllable.
We cannot help observing, because certain critics observe otherwise, that Chaucer utters as true music as ever came from poet or musician; that some of the sweetest cadences in all our English are extant in his "swete upon his tongue," in completest modulation. Let "Denham's strength and Waller's sweetness join" the Io pæan of a later age, the "eurekamen" of Pope and his generation. Not one of the "Queen Anne's men," measuring out tuneful breath upon their fingers, like ribbons for topknots, did know the art of versification as the old rude Chaucer knew it. Call him rude for the picturesqueness of the epithet; but his verse has, at least, as much regularity in the sense of true art, and more manifestly in proportion to our increasing acquaintance with his dialect and pronunciation, as can be discovered or dreamed in the French school. Critics, indeed, have set up a system based upon the crushed atoms of first principles, maintaining that poor Chaucer wrote by accent only! Grant to them that he counted no verses on his fingers; grant that he never disciplined his highest thoughts to walk up and down in a paddock—ten paces and a turn; grant that his singing is not after the likeness of their singsong; but there end your admissions. It is our ineffaceable impression, in fact, that the whole theory of accent and quantity held in relation to ancient and modern poetry stands upon a fallacy, totters, rather than stands; and that, when considered in connection with such old moderns as our Chaucer, the fallaciousness is especially apparent. Chaucer wrote by quantity, just as Homer did before him, just as Goethe did after him, just as all poets must. Rules differ, principles are identical. All rhythm presupposes quantity. Organ-pipe or harp, the musician plays by time. Greek or English, Chaucer or Pope, the poet sings by time. What is this accent but a stroke, an emphasis, with a successive pause to make complete the time? And what is the difference between this accent and quantity but the difference between a harp-note and an organ-note? otherwise, quantity expressed in different ways? It is as easy for matter to subsist out of space, as music out of time.—Mrs. E. B. Browning's 'The Book of the Poets.'
Avant d'exécuter son œuvre, l'artiste la conçoit; il enfante au dedans de lui, pour emprunter la langue de Bossuet, 'un tableau, une statue, un édifice qui, dans sa simplicité, est la forme, l'original, le modèle immatériel de ce qu'il exécutera sur la pierre, sur le marbre, sur la toile où il arrangera toutes ses couleurs.' Ce modèle immatériel est pour l'artiste, si l'on veut, un idéal qu'il se propose de réaliser dans son œuvre: c'est le patron sur lequel il travaille et qu'il s'efforce à reproduire le plus exactement possible. Il y met tous ses soins, toute son étude, et il travaille avec crainte et tremblement; il craint de défigurer, de mutiler l'image sainte imprimée dans son esprit; il craint que sa main, interprète infidèle, ne traduise mal sa pensée; il craint que la copie ne soit qu'une caricature de l'original, et il efface, il corrige, il rature, il retouche, il refait, il a des hésitations, des scrupules, des repentirs; souvent il se décourage, il est sur le point d'abandonner l'œuvre commencée, il a peur de rester au-dessous de son sujet; la perfection du modèle immatériel le désespère, et ce désespoir provient d'une illusion. D'ordinaire, ce modèle ne lui semble si parfait que parce qu'il est encore vague, confus, indéterminé. Nous prenons volontiers l'indéfini pour la perfection; individualiser une idée, c'est lui donner on mode particulier à l'exclusion de tous les autres dont elle était susceptible, et cette exclusion nous coûte, c'est une sorte de sacrifice que s'impose notre imagination; elle y a regret, comme l'avare, en dépensant un écu pour se donner un plaisir, regrette tous les autres plaisirs imaginables que cet écu lui aurait pu procurer. Car il ne faut pas accorder à Schleiermacher que l'œuvre d'art existe déjà tout entière dans l'esprit de l'artiste avant qu'il ait réalisé sa pensée dans le marbre ou sur la toile. Cette pensée est toujours plus ou moins enveloppée, plus ou moins confuse; elle n'est pas encore dégagée de son délivre, ou plutôt c'est un rudiment incomplet, une ébauche indistincte où l'on n'aperçoit que les principaux linéaments de l'œuvre; c'est un embryon dont les organes ne sont pas encore développés. C'est en travaillant à exécuter son plan que l'artiste parvient à concevoir ce plan d'une manière claire et distincte; c'est en manifestant au dehors sa pensée qu'il se la rend manifeste à lui-même. La composition et l'exécution sont deux périodes de l'activité de l'artiste que l'abstraction seule peut distinguer; dans le fait, elles ne se distinguent point, et le peintre compose encore dans le dernier coup de pinceau qu'il donne à sa toile.—Victor Cherbuliez: Philosophie du Beau.—Études sur le Système d'esthétique de M. Th. Vischer. Troisième article. (Revue Germanique, Tome x, p. 662.)
My attention was called to this chapter, many years ago, as affording good illustrations of the slighting of speech, by Mr. J. W. Taverner, one of the best teachers of elocution I have ever known. His daughter, Mrs. F. Taverner Graham, has embodied much of his instructions in her valuable text-book, entitled 'Reasonable Elocution,' originally published by A. S. Barnes & Co., in 1874. It is now published by the American Book Company.
John Keats, in his poem entitled 'Sleep and Poetry,' after speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period, continues: