Then we began to wander through the wood of error; we tried speaking
through music in the ordinary way under I know not whose evil influence,
until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms that were so
often at discord with one another, the tune and rhythm of the verse and
the tune and rhythm of the music. Then we tried, persuaded by somebody who
thought quarter-tones and less intervals the especial mark of speech as
distinct from singing, to write out what we did in wavy lines. On finding
something like these lines in Tibetan music, we became so confident that
we covered a large piece of pasteboard, which now blows up my fire in the
morning, with a notation in wavy lines as a demonstration for a lecture;
but at last Mr. Dolmetsch put us back to our first thought. He made us a
beautiful instrument half psaltery half lyre which contains, I understand,
all the chromatic intervals within the range of the speaking voice; and he
taught us to regulate our speech by the ordinary musical notes.
Some of the notations he taught us--those in which there is no lilt, no
recurring pattern of sounds--are like this notation for a song out of the
first Act of _The Countess Cathleen_.
It is written in the old C clef, which is, I am told, the most reasonable
way to write it, for it would be below the stave on the treble clef or
above it on the bass clef. The central line of the stave corresponds to
the middle C of the piano; the first note of the poem is therefore D. The
marks of long and short over the syllables are not marks of scansion, but
show the syllables one makes the voice hurry or linger over.
[Illustration: Song and music.]
One needs, of course, a far less complicated notation than a singer, and
one is even permitted slight modifications of the fixed note when dramatic
expression demands it and the instrument is not sounding. The notation
which regulates the general form of the sound leaves it free to add a
complexity of dramatic expression from its own incommunicable genius which
compensates the lover of speech for the lack of complex musical
expression. Ordinary speech is formless, and its variety is like the
variety which separates bad prose from the regulated speech of Milton, or
anything that is formless and void from anything that has form and beauty.
The orator, the speaker who has some little of the great tradition of his
craft, differs from the debater very largely because he understands how to
assume that subtle monotony of voice which runs through the nerves like
fire.
Even when one is speaking to a single note sounded faintly on the
Psaltery, if one is sufficiently practised to speak on it without
thinking about it one can get an endless variety of expression. All art
is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior
variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of
the imagination. But this new art, new in modern life I mean, will have to
train its hearers as well as its speakers, for it takes time to surrender
gladly the gross efforts one is accustomed to, and one may well find mere
monotony at first where one soon learns to find a variety as incalculable
as in the outline of faces or in the expression of eyes. Modern acting and
recitation have taught us to fix our attention on the gross effects till
we have come to think gesture and the intonation that copies the
accidental surface of life more important than the rhythm; and yet we
understand theoretically that it is precisely this rhythm that separates
good writing from bad, that is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of
all intense literature. I do not say that we should speak our plays to
musical notes, for dramatic verse will need its own method, and I have
hitherto experimented with short lyric poems alone; but I am certain that,
if people would listen for a while to lyrical verse spoken to notes, they
would soon find it impossible to listen without indignation to verse as it
is spoken in our leading theatres. They would get a subtlety of hearing
that would demand new effects from actors and even from public speakers,
and they might, it may be, begin even to notice one another's voices till
poetry and rhythm had come nearer to common life.
I cannot tell what changes this new art is to go through, or to what
greatness or littleness of fortune; but I can imagine little stories in
prose with their dialogues in metre going pleasantly to the strings. I am
not certain that I shall not see some Order naming itself from the Golden
Violet of the Troubadours or the like, and having among its members none
but well-taught and well-mannered speakers who will keep the new art from
disrepute. They will know how to keep from singing notes and from prosaic
lifeless intonations, and they will always understand, however far they
push their experiments, that poetry and not music is their object; and
they will have by heart, like the Irish _File_, so many poems and
notations that they will never have to bend their heads over the book to
the ruin of dramatic expression and of that wild air the bard had always
about him in my boyish imagination. They will go here and there speaking
their verses and their little stories wherever they can find a score or
two of poetical-minded people in a big room, or a couple of
poetical-minded friends sitting by the hearth, and poets will write them
poems and little stories to the confounding of print and paper. I, at any
rate, from this out mean to write all my longer poems for the stage, and
all my shorter ones for the Psaltery, if only some strong angel keep me to
my good resolutions.
1902.