The fourth chapter in Volume II. is Forming Pictures. The picturesque
voice is that voice which causes the imagination of the hearers to
create pictures of the things described by the language of the speaker.
It is the unnoticed voice, the voice which attracts no attention to
itself. The picturesque voice is not an end, but a means, and therefore
may properly be called the artistic voice, because it so appeals to the
imagination of the hearer as to cause images to arise in his mind. This
voice may be called the suggestive voice because it suggests what tone
cannot literally actualize, but that which can be perceived only by the
imagination.
The characteristics of this voice are elasticity and shading.
In this quality of the voice which I have termed elasticity, the vocal
organs do not seem to report themselves, but only the thought and
sentiment. By shading, I mean the degree of density in the tone where
the thought and not the word seems to be stressed. The vocal organs are
held under firm but most delicate control. Here the voice may suggest
great noise but make none, and in all ways cause the mind of the hearer
to listen to sounds it does not really make.
The picturesque voice springs from the desire to make other minds think
what it cannot literalize. The state of mind which produces this voice
is that of asking the hearer to imagine real things that cannot be
presented to the senses. For an illustration of this, read the poem,
“Midsummer,” by Trowbridge.
There is a voice of fact and a voice of power. The voice of fact gives
information; the voice of power appeals to the imagination. The artistic
voice is the voice of the imagination. One of the offices of the
imagination is that of image making. In children this power is very
noticeable. When some children think of a thing, an image of it rises in
their minds; they suppose this image to be a fact of experience, and,
with no thought of falsehood, describe it as such. Because of this they
are frequently whipped for lying; and this power of mental image making,
which, if properly developed, would be of inestimable value to the
child, instead of being guided, is cruelly interfered with and arrested.
This power of mental image making is always highly developed in great
artists. Great musical composers first hear the music in their minds,
and then make it intelligible to others through the noted page. The
great painter carries objects in his mind long before he puts them on
canvas, and is able as well to create new objects suggested by things he
has seen. An architect sees in his mind the magnificent temple, when as
yet not a stone of which it is to be built has left the quarry. John B.
Gough declared that sometimes he was unable to distinguish persons whom
he saw in the audience from those which his imagination created.
Wordsworth did not write “The Daffodils” while looking at the flowers as
sense objects. It was afterwards, when he saw them as they lived in his
imagination, that he wrote of them in a way that has made them real to
the imaginations of others.
“For oft when on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
I have dwelt upon the physiology of the voice, showing its relation to
psychology. In the third and fourth volumes of the Evolution of
Expression we deal with the direct relation of psychology to Oratory.
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