THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1914
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1896,
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
Set up and electrotyped March, 1896. Reprinted
February, 1897; July, 1901; February, 1903; August,
1904; March, 1908; October, 1914.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
_PREFATORY NOTE_
_While it is the purpose of this little book to emphasize the importance
of vocal culture in its relations to literary and general culture, it is
not its purpose, except incidentally, to impart elocutionary
instruction. Attention is called to a few features of the subject,
which, if realized in any voice, would contribute much to the technical
part, at least, of good reading._
_Special stress is laid upon the importance of spiritual education as
the end toward which all education should be directed, and as an
indispensable condition of interpretative reading. Such education is
demanded for responding to, and assimilating, the informing life of any
product of literary genius; without it, mere vocal training avails
little or nothing. By the spiritual I mean man's essential, absolute
being; and I include in the term the emotional, the susceptible or
impressible, the sympathetic, the instinctive, the intuitive,--in short,
the whole domain of the non-intellectual, the non-discursive._
_With the kind permission of the editor, I have embodied in the part of
the book devoted to the voice, my article on Vocal Culture, published
'The Atlantic Monthly' for June, 1895._
_H. C._
_Cascadilla Cottage,
Ithaca, N. Y., 30 Jan., 1896._
_La voix est une revelatrice, une initiatrice, dont la puissance est
aussi merveilleuse qu'inconnue._
* * * * *
_Un des plus reels avantages de la lecture a haute voix est precisement
de vous reveler dans les chefs-d'oeuvre une foule de petites nuances
ignorees du peintre meme qui les y a jetees. Par la, cet art pourrait
devenir un puissant instrument d'education. C'est souvent un excellent
professeur de litterature qu'un grand maitre de diction._
ERNEST LEGOUVE, _de l'Academie francaise_.