31. =And Darius the Median= took =the kingdom, being about threescore and
two years old=.
In the twenty-fifth verse, 'And this' stands out, 'this' being the new
idea, the voice drifting, with some acceleration, over 'is the writing
that was written'; 'MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN,' that is, 'numbered,
numbered, weighed, divisions,' 'mene, mene' being an emphatic
repetition. In the twenty-eighth verse, 'peres,' having the same root,
and meaning 'divided,' is substituted for 'upharsin.'
In the twenty-sixth verse, 'This is the interpretation' stands out, the
voice coming down on 'interpretation' and drifting over, and slighting,
'of the thing.' When 'mene' is pronounced by Daniel, it must be
supposed that its meaning is understood, but not its application; the
word 'kingdom' must, therefore, be marked with the emphasis; 'and
finished it' must be somewhat slighted, as the meaning of the phrase is
anticipated in 'numbered.'
In the twenty-seventh verse, the voice moves along with some
acceleration, over 'thou art weighed in the balances,' the idea of
'weighed' being anticipated in 'tekel,' and 'art found wanting' is
brought strongly out.
In the twenty-eighth verse, 'kingdom' must receive the emphasis,
'divided' being anticipated in 'peres'; 'and given to the Medes and
Persians' we must suppose is not altogether new information to
Belshazzar, after his having been informed that the division of his
kingdom is at hand. He knows who will come into possession of it. This
phrase, therefore, must not be brought fully to the front. It must be
uttered with some acceleration of the voice and in a way to indicate the
supposed feeling of Daniel in regard to the quick work which is to be
made of the kingdom.
The twenty-ninth verse should be read with some acceleration of voice,
and without any special expression, the reader assuming that the promise
made by the king to Daniel, in the sixteenth verse, if he can interpret
the writing, was fulfilled. This twenty-ninth verse must not, therefore,
be read as imparting new information.
In the thirtieth verse, 'In that night' must be brought fully out,
through a time emphasis, to mark how immediate was the fulfilment of
Daniel's interpretation; there must be some acceleration of voice upon
'was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans,' and a quite strong emphasis
given to 'slain.'
In the thirty-first verse, 'took' is the foreground word, the emphasis
of it implying an accordance with Daniel's interpretation; 'being about
threescore and two years old,' should be read as a gratuitously affixed
fact, having no particular bearing upon what has been related.
Cultivated people cannot away with what is generally understood by
'elocution,' which is rather a vocal and Delsartian display than an
honest vocalization, which good reading should be, of what has been
intellectually and spiritually assimilated. Reading is not acting. The
first thing to be done to bring 'elocution' into good repute (it is
certainly not in good repute at present) is to free reading from all
_strain_ of expression--to reduce emphasis and attain to the greatest
degree of simplicity _compatible with the subject-matter_. And one
important feature of reading which should receive special attention, as
a means to this end, is the light touch, which conveys the impression
that the mind of the reader does not come down upon the parts receiving
the same, those parts expressing what has been anticipated, or should
be taken for granted, etc., and constituting the remote background of
expression.
The highest result which can be exhibited of literary culture and a
corresponding vocal culture, is an organic melody, in the reading of a
great poem, the outcome of the poem's organic life. By melody, in
reading, is meant that organic variety in the use of all the vocal
functions and affections, that arabesqueness of expression, which does
not allow the ear of the hearer to detect a regular recurrence of any of
these functions and affections. There is melody of pause, of inflection,
of rhyme, of rhythm, of time, of force, of emphasis, and of every vocal
affection. In truly melodious reading, the design or figure, so to
speak, is so arabesque that it is not taken in by the ear of the hearer,
and does not come to his consciousness, but it tells effectively on his
feelings. And by 'effectively' I specially mean that the feelings are
brought into harmony with, into a state of elective attraction for, the
contriving creative spirit which moulds the poetic form. Such reading of
high poetry is the extreme merit of vocal expression. Some of its
principles may be _taught_; but the vitality of it must be the result of
the spiritual education of the reader, must be exhaled spontaneously
from his _being_.
A reader with a nice sense of melody may conceal a deficiency of melody
in the poem he is reading; and he may do this, without arbitrarily
imposing variety. An imposed variety is not true melody, which must be
vital, organic. In the reading of Pope's uniform couplets, for example,
he may keep down the rocking-horse movement of the verse (Note 6) by a
skilful management of the pauses (which come so uniformly in the middle
and at the end of the verses), and of the rhyming words, by an
acceleration and retardation of voice wherever these are permissible, by
the light touch, and by various other means. To counteract the uniform
construction of such verse as the following, for example, from the Essay
on Man, without arbitrarily imposing variety, the reader's art must
approach the artful:
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent; etc.
or the following, descriptive of the heroine, in The Rape of the Lock:
On her white breast, a sparkling cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.
Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,
Quick as her eyes, and as unfix'd as those:
Favors to none, to all she smiles extends;
Oft she rejects, but never once offends.
Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike,
And, like the sun, they shine on all alike.
Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,
Might hide her faults, if Belles had faults to hide:
If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.
The absence of _enjambement_ makes it somewhat difficult so to keep down
the rhyme emphasis that it may not pester the ear. (Note 7.)
Where a reader's feelings have been melodized by culture, they will
protect him against the influence of a too artificial construction of
the verse. He will not impose variety, but he will utter humdrum verse,
as far as possible, under the conditions of his melodized feeling.
The importance of cultivating the speaking voice is quite as great as
that of cultivating the reading voice. Perhaps it is greater; for the
speaking voice has a wider and more constant influence--an influence
which is exerted in all the relations of life, an influence calming or
irritating, an influence bringing men into friendly or unfriendly
attitudes toward each other. How demulcent the effect of a gracious
voice, and how rasping that of a snappish one! 'The sweetest music,'
says Emerson, 'is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it
speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage.
The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun,
and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these.'
Of Emerson's own voice, the Rev. Charles G. Ames, in 'A Memorial
Address,' says: 'His speech had a subtle spell,--a charm like Nature's
own, so that he affected men like Old Honesty ... so silvery, cheery,
sane, fearless!... There was no false ring, no trick to catch applause
or to turn off attention from the message to the messenger; no _show_ of
knowledge or power or art. One might forget it all next hour, through
sheer moral inability to stay at such an unwonted altitude; but while
listening to that high discourse it certainly did seem as if we
belonged up there,--as if a man ought to make the very earth a pedestal
of honor for his feet and wear the sky about his brow as an aureole.'
How much wrath, with its evil consequences, might be averted by soft
answers! How much pleasanter an arrival at a hotel might be than it
often is, if the slapdash clerk in the office had a voice better attuned
to a courteous reception of a guest! or an arrival in New York, from
abroad, if a custom-house official knew how to ask, in a civilized way,
'What's in that box?' The question is often asked in a way which has a
decidedly indurating effect upon the conscience of a traveller, in
regard to dutiable things he may have brought with him. How afflicting
the chaotic clatter of high-pitched voices, at a reception, or an
evening party! A room jam-full of standing people, 'unaimed prattle
flying up and down' (true conversation is out of the question) is hard
to endure, even with the prospect of lobster and of chicken salad, ice
cream, and numerous other unwholesome things about to be. American
girls, before they 'come out,' may talk in a quiet way; but so soon as
they 'come out,' many of them think they must show that they _have_
'come out,' by the high pitch and rapidity of their voices, which quite
deprive a nervous man of his self-possession.
How much 'the charm of beauty's powerful glance' may be heightened or
lowered by the character of the voice which goes along with it! Woman
tells on others by a gracious manner, by the beauty of holiness as it is
manifested in all her ways, in all her relations, domestic and social,
and especially by her voice. A woman with a sweet and gracious voice,
the index of a sweet and gracious nature, may exert through it, in the
ordinary relations of life, without even knowing it, a better influence
than she could by advisedly devoting herself to doing good, even if such
devotion took the form of distributing religious tracts! The moral
atmosphere of a home may be not a little due to the voice of the wife
and mother. The memory, even, of a voice which was toned by love and
sympathy, may continue to be a sweet influence long after the voice
itself has been hushed in death. The influence of the voice for good or
evil, in the domestic, social, and all other relations of life, cannot
be estimated. A voice may even have a good or bad reflex action upon its
possessor. A slovenly articulation, for example, may be the index of a
moral slovenliness, and may react upon the latter. Subtle, indeed, and
imperceptible, are the influences upon ourselves, for good or evil, of
all our commonest doings.
A fond, worldly mother may be anxiously ambitious that her daughter
shall have all the accomplishments required for her fullest
attractiveness when she 'comes out.' Years may be spent upon her
musical education, with the poor result, perhaps, of 'fine sleights of
hand and unimagined fingering, shuffling off the hearer's soul through
hurricanes of notes to a noisy Tophet'; she may be taught dancing which
rivals that of a Taglioni, and French, and drawing, and painting; she
may be sent abroad to snatch the graces beyond the reach of art, of the
most elegant European society; and yet, in the grand scheme of
accomplishments, the speaking voice is left out and entirely neglected,
though she have a voice unpleasantly pitched, and with other remediable
defects which are far, very far, from idealizing, transfiguring her! If
the time devoted to the piano, with the supposed poor result, had been
devoted to a careful cultivation of her voice, her power to charm (that
being the end proposed) would be much more increased than by any or all
of her other accomplishments.
It is easy to infer what Shakespeare's opinions were on many subjects,
although his Plays are regarded by some critics as peculiarly
impersonal; but they are charged with his personality, and shadow forth,
not dimly, his views in regard to many things. The evidence is abundant
that the voice was to him very significant, apart from his estimate of
its importance, as a professional actor, and that he was most
susceptible to its charms and to its defects. It is her voice which the
grief-stricken Lear is made to speak of, when he bends over the dead
Cordelia: 'Her voice,' he says, 'was ever soft, gentle, and low'; and to
this he adds, 'an excellent thing in woman'; Shakespeare, no doubt,
meaning that he had in his mind, at the time, the cruel voices,
expressive of their hard and wicked hearts, of Regan and Goneril. After
the death of Antony, Cleopatra, in her rapturous praise of him, says,---
His voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
It was as rattling thunder.
Hamlet's advice to the players we may take as an expression of
Shakespeare's own standard of vocal delivery, and as his protest
against a stilted and ranting declamation, which, no doubt,
characterized many of the actors of his day.
There is evidence in the Plays that, in the process of composition, he
must either have heard imaginatively what he was writing, or have
actually voiced his language as he went along. He did not write for the
eye, but for the ear. And the high vocal capabilities of his language
may be somewhat attributable to his hearing of what he wrote. Must he
not have heard the effect of monosyllabic words, uttered with the tremor
and semi-tone of old age, when he wrote King Lear's speeches?--'You see
me here, you gods, a poor old man, as full of grief as age,' etc., and
'When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of
fools,' etc. And must he not have heard the effect of polysyllabic
words as expressive of Macbeth's sense of the vastness of his guilt,
when he wrote, 'this my hand will rather the _multitudinous_ seas
_incarnadine_,' etc.? of the guttural emphasis, expressive of
detestation, in the speech of Coriolanus to the rabble?--'You _c_ommon
_c_ry of _c_urs! whose breath I _h_ate as _r_eek o' the _r_otten fens,'
etc.
An interesting compilation might be made from the Plays, of passages
expressive of strong passion of various kinds, the several vocabularies
of which testify to Shakespeare's having imaginatively or actually
voiced what he wrote. The speech of the Bastard to Hubert, in King John
(A. iv. S. 3), is a signal example:
_Bastard._ Here's a good world!--Knew you of this fair work?
Beyond the infinite and boundless reach
Of mercy, if thou didst this deed of death,
Art thou damn'd, Hubert.
_Hubert._ Do but hear me, sir.
_Bastard._ Ha! I'll tell thee what;
Thou'rt damn'd as black--nay, nothing is so black;
Thou art more deep damn'd than Prince Lucifer:
There is not yet so ugly a fiend of hell
As thou shalt be, if thou didst kill this child.
I fancy that Shakespeare had a fine voice. If he had not, it is quite
certain that he had the highest estimate and appreciation of the voice
as the organ of the soul. His creative spirit, too, attracted to itself
the most effective vocabulary for the vocal expression of every kind of
passion--the most effective by reason of their monosyllabic or their
polysyllabic character, of their vowel or their consonantal elements. To
him, language was for the ear, not for the eye. The written word was to
him what it was to Socrates, 'the mere image or phantom of the living
and animated word.' (Note 8.)
The art of printing has caused language to be overmuch transferred from
its true domain, the sense of hearing, to the sense of sight. The lofty
idealized language of poetry is known, in these days, chiefly through
the eye, and its true power is consequently quiescent for the generality
of silent readers. In silent reading, an appreciation of matter and
form must be largely due to an imaginative transference to the ear of
what is taken in by the eye.
The impression seems to be getting stronger and stronger, in these days
of excessive teaching and excessive learning, that no one can do
anything or learn anything without being taught,--without 'taking a
regular course,' as the phrase is. This seems to be especially true in
the matter of vocal cultivation. People go to schools of oratory with
nothing within themselves which is clamorous for expression; not even a
very 'still small voice' urging them to express something. Many who
desire, or think they do, to be readers, as there are many who desire,
or think they do, to be artists, evidently believe that if they be
trained in technique they can be readers or artists.
But suppose some one is impelled to cultivate vocal power because of his
desire to express what he has sympathetically and lovingly assimilated,
of a work of genius: if he endeavor to give an honest expression, so far
as in him lies, to what he feels, and avoid trying to express what he
does not feel, and if he persevere in his endeavor, with always a
coefficient ideal back of his reading, he may--in time, he certainly
will--become a better reader than another could if he should set out,
with malice prepense, to be an elocutionist, and with that malicious
purpose, were to employ a mere voice-trainer who should teach him to
perpetrate all sorts of vocal extravagances, to make faces, and to
gesticulate when reading what does not need any gesture. Such an one,
after passing out of the hands of his trainer, is most likely to go
forth and afflict the public with his performances, which will be wholly
a pitiable exhibition of himself.
Some of the best readers I have ever known have been of the former
class, who honestly voiced what they had sympathetically assimilated,
and did not strain after effect. But it seems that when one sets out to
read, with no interior capital, he or she, especially she, is apt to run
into all kinds of extravagances which disgust people of culture and
taste. The voice, instead of being the organ of the soul, is the
betrayer of soullessness.
Without that interior life which can respond to the indefinite life of a
work of genius (indefinite, that is, to the intellect), a trained voice
can do nothing of itself in the way of real interpretation. It may bring
out the definite articulating thought, in a way, but the electric aura
in which the thought should be enveloped, will be wanting; and where
this is wanting, in the expression of spiritualized thought, the true
object of reading is but imperfectly realized. What can be got through
the eye, it is not the main function of the voice to deliver. There must
be the requisite 'drift' and choral intonation--drift, the air, the
pervading, ruling spirit, 'the dominant's persistence,' the prevailing
tone color.
I am pleased to quote, in this connection, what Professor Edward Dowden
writes in his article on 'The teaching of English literature,' contained
in his recent volume, 'New Studies in Literature': 'Few persons nowadays
seem to feel how powerful an instrument of culture may be found in
modest, intelligent, and sympathetic reading aloud. The reciter and the
elocutionist of late have done much to rob us of this which is one of
the finest of the fine arts. A mongrel something which, at least with
the inferior adepts, is neither good reading nor yet veritable acting,
but which sets agape the half-educated with the wonder of its airs and
attitudinizing, its pseudo-heroics and pseudo-pathos, has usurped the
place of the true art of reading aloud, and has made the word
"recitation" a terror to quiet folk who are content with intelligence
and refinement. Happily in their behalf the great sense-carrier to the
Empire, Mr. Punch, has at length seen it right to intervene. (Note 9.)
The reading which we should desire to cultivate is intelligent reading,
that is, it should express the meaning of each passage clearly;
sympathetic reading, that is, it should convey the feeling delicately;
musical reading, that is, it should move in accord with the melody and
harmony of what is read, be it in verse or prose.'
A training of the organs of speech which brings them into complete
obedience to the will and the feelings, and a perfect technique,
important and indispensable as they are, cannot, of themselves, avail
much in the interpretation of spiritualized thought. This must be mainly
the result of such education as induces an inward preparedness for
responding to and assimilating the essential life of a work of genius.
_Quicquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis_ (whatever is
received, is received according to the measure of the recipient). And it
is, or should be, the leading object of literary education to enlarge
the spiritual measure of the recipient.
Now it must be said that the schools, with all their grammars, their
rhetorics, their philologies, their psychologies, their histories and
cheap philosophies of literature, their commentaries and annotations, do
not prepare their students to know works of genius in their absolute
character; for such knowledge implies an adequate education of the
absolute, that is, spiritual man, and such education is not induced by
the above studies as at present conducted. It demands spiritual life to
respond to spiritual life; or, in the words of St. Paul, 'the natural
man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are
foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are
spiritually discerned.'
What is generally understood in the schools as a thorough study of a
work of genius, is occupied quite exclusively with the language and with
that part of the subject-matter which can be intellectually formulated.
That part which demands a spiritual response and which it is the main
object of reading to vocalize for the purpose of calling forth such
response, is not included in the so-called thorough study. The latter
may do much, indeed, to shut off any spiritual response which a student
might give if he were not subjected to such study. In this statement no
depreciation of scholarship is meant to be implied. Let us have the most
thorough scholarship possible; but it must not become an end to itself;
it must be a means to the higher end of intellectual and spiritual
life.
What chiefly afflicts a cultivated hearer, in 'elocution,' is the
conspicuous absence of spiritual assimilation on the part of the reader.
At best, he voices only what the eye of an ordinary reader could take
in, and leaves the all-important part to his face, arms, and legs, and
various attitudes of the body. But the spiritual in literature must be
addressed to the ear. 'A spirit aerial informs the cell of Hearing,'
says Wordsworth, in his great poem, 'On the power of sound.'
Reading, I have said, is not acting. It is the acting which usually
accompanies the reading or recitation of the professional elocutionist
which cultivated people especially dislike. When they wish to see
acting, they prefer going to a theatre. When they listen to reading,
they want serious interpretative vocalization; only that and nothing
more is necessary, unless it be a spontaneous and graceful movement of
the hands, occasionally, such as one makes in animated conversation.
Again, the most elegant way of vocally interpreting a poem, is to read
it from a book, rather than to recite it. Recitation has much to do with
this acting business. In fact, elocutionists recite in order to have
their arms free to act--to illustrate the thought they are expressing.
Thought should not be helped out by gesture. Gesture results, or should
result, from emotion, and should, therefore, be indefinite. Mimetic
gesture, or mimetic action of any kind, is rarely, if ever, in place. If
a speaker, addressing a _very_ ignorant audience, had to use the word
'rotatory,' for example, he might make a cyclic movement or two with his
hand, to illustrate its meaning. But to do so before an audience
presumably intelligent enough to know the meaning of the word, would be
impertinent--a 'wasteful and ridiculous excess.' So, too, it would be,
to illustrate the word 'somersault,' before an audience of ordinary
intelligence. The absurdity of mimetic action is well illustrated in the
following: 'I have heard,' says a writer in 'Expression' (Vol. I., No.
2), published in Boston, 'of a popular public reader of Boston giving
last season Wordsworth's "Daffodils"; and as she came to the last two
lines,--
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils,
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.
Let us cry 'All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'
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:
to thee
Science appears but what in truth she is,
Not as our glory and our absolute boast,
But as a succedaneum, and a prop
To our infirmity.
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 Caesar the things that are Caesar'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,
I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation;--and, by words
Which speak of nothing more than what we are,
that is, what we really or potentially are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
Of death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too--
Theme this but little heard of among men--
The external world is fitted to the mind; etc.
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 aeternum 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 Lerins, 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:
Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,--
The canticles of love and woe.
* * * * *
The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
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,'
Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
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--
do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word;
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).
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
So, note by note, bring music from your mind,
Deeper than ever the Andante dived,--
So write a book shall mean, beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.
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
In the corrupted 'currents of this world,
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
... but 'tis not so above.
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,
in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid,
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:
'Far off, and where the lemon-grove
In closest coverture upsprung,
The living airs of middle night
Died round the bulbul as he sung;
Not he: but something which possessed
The darkness of the world, delight,
Life, anguish, death, immortal love,
Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed,
Apart from place, withholding time,
But flattering the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.'
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.
Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.