Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

either case, dignity and impressiveness, and even distinctness, are, more or less, sacrificed to impulse and velocity.

The audience which the minister of religion usually addresses, is of a mixed character, as to intellectual discipline and ability, and is largely made up of persons who are daily engaged in the practical pursuits of active business. Minds addicted to habits of this description, do not usually prove rapid in the formation of strictly intellectual associations: they need a comparatively full allowance of time to aid the development of a train of thought. An audience formed of students and professional men, accustomed to facility and rapidity of mental action, can more easily keep up with the succession of ideas created by a reader whose gait of voice inclines to velocity. The habit of silent reading enables the practised student to follow the succession of thought with the utmost rapidity; and his discipline of intellect renders him competent even to foresee a speaker's drift of thought, and anticipate his train of argument. But the man of merely operative and practical habit, must move deliberately, and follow, rather than accompany, a speaker. The aged hearer, who has little intellectual facility, often complains of the preacher's rapidity and confusion of utterance. Complaints such as this, are not always well grounded; and the waning faculties of age are, too often, in these cases, the chief source of apparent feebleness and indistinctness in the voice of the preacher. No speaker, however, who addresses a mixed audience, should suffer himself to fall into the rapidity of utterance which leaves any passage unintelligible to any individual among his hearers.

Deliberateness of manner is not only an indispensable requisite to intelligible address, but a powerful and natural aid to impressive utterance. Without a moderate rate of 'movement' in the voice, there can be no association of grave or grand effect on the ear: the style of utterance is, in such instances, unavoidably rendered light and trivial. Solemnity, in particular, demands the utmost slowness of utterance. The uncultivated reader is always prone to celerity of enunciation,

and thus hinders repose and reverence, and every other form of deep and tranquil impression. A style like this, is peculiarly ill-suited to the purposes of reading and speaking, as connected with the duties of the sacred office.

The cultivated reader is taught to appreciate the becoming effect and moral beauty of due slowness, as an attribute of sacred eloquence. He gives, accordingly, ample scope to sound, lengthens the duration of every prominent vowel, and thus makes it the fit vehicle of deep and full emotion: he avoids a crowded utterance as the very bane of serious and grave feeling; he cultivates the habit of moderation in the succession of sounds; and his pauses all naturally receive a proportioned length, by which they become deeply impressive to the ear. These traits of utterance are indispensable to the majesty of style prevalent in all the sublime descriptions of the Old Testament, and are required, not unfrequently, in the New.

But while taste and feeling demand due slowness in uttering whatever is deeply impressive to the mind; they forbid equally all lagging and drawling, as wholly destructive of every good effect,—as only irksome or ridiculous,—bespeaking a feeble temperament and habit, and an utter inability to create any deep or powerful effect. This style, however, is proverbially current in pulpit elocution, and forms one of the distinctive and prominent features of its mechanically solemn and exaggerated manner. The discipline of elocution dispels such effects, by the light which it sheds on the nature of 'movement,' as an element of vocal effect; and, just as the: musician obeys, with instinctive readiness, the direction which accelerates or retards his voice, with the most definite precision, and vivid effect on the ear, so does the instructed reader produce the characteristic expression of every sentiment by the instantaneous adaptation of his rate of utterance to the spirit of the language which falls from his lips. Truth, and nature, and propriety, preside, thus, over his whole manner, and render it living and eloquent.

'Rhythm' and Pausing.

6

[ocr errors]

The discipline of the voice offers to the public speaker a great facility, as regards the proper vocal effect required for his purposes, in the regularity of rhythm,' or the equable succession of sound, and the due length of pauses. Rhythm,' as a part of elocution, enables the reader to maintain an equal and symmetrical flow of voice, while it guards him, not less carefully, against a mechanical prominence of rhythmical accent, which is attended with a hammering effect on the ear.

A true rhythm has been demonstrated by Steele to constitute, as distinctly, a trait of appropriate reading and speaking, as of music. It serves, in the former, the same purposes as in the latter it imparts a smooth, agreeable, and symmetrical effect to the voice: it prescribes and facilitates a regular and easy style of breathing: it enables the reader or speaker to pronounce the successive clauses of every sentence with a regulated, easy, fluent style of accent, which renders the effort. of full utterance comparatively light, promotes the tranquillity of his emotions, saves his own organic strength, and gives forth his language with an harmonious and pleasing effect to the ear of others.

The uncultivated reader wastes breath and strength, and disturbs his utterance, by want of regularity in the alternate successions of sound and pause. His whole style of voice is like that of a person who, in singing, pays no regard to 'time,' -the very foundation of music.*

Emphasis.

Nothing, perhaps, displays so strikingly the benefit of systematic practice in elocution, as the force, the spirit, and the efficacy which it imparts to emphasis.† The dull routine of

*For exercises in 'rhythm,' see the manual on Orthophony.

† Dr. Rush has justly given to the word ' emphasis' a wider application than that which restricts it to mere comparative force. He comprehends under it, in accordance with its etymology, all the phenomena of voice which render a word significant or impressive.

school reading, in its customary forms, deadens the distinctive character of all prominent phrases, and reduces all the words of a sentence to one flat monotonous level, in which there are no projecting and salient points to arrest the attention; the voice gliding on from beginning to end of a period, as if every clause were of exactly equal weight, and every word of precisely the same significance.

The influence of early habit is so strong with most persons, that few, even among professional readers, seem to have the power of throwing into a significant word, or an expressive phrase, that force which an energetic and distinctive effect of sense or emotion demands. A proper emphasis adds a heightened colouring of passion, or gives a bolder prominence of meaning, to the most energetic style, and is capable even of concealing the deficiencies of expression comparatively tame. But most public readers have accustomed themselves to a certain medium of ordinary effect in emphasis, which forbids the possibility of their imparting weight, or significance, or vivid force to distinctive expressions. Hence their mode of reading is so far from lending a powerful aid to written composition, that it serves rather to weaken and impair it.

The actor who is distinguished in his art, studies his emphasis with the most assiduous attention, and uses every endeavour which professional ambition can prompt, or professional skill can suggest, to give the most prominent relief and the boldest effect to emphatic turns of expression. He will sometimes devote successive hours to the most laborious reïteration of vocal effort, to give life and pungency to a single passage. Nor is this the practice of mere drudges in their vocation, endeavouring to work up dull conceptions to a vivid effect: it was the daily self-discipline of men whose expressive genius the world has always acknowledged and admired.

A disciplined voice may be recognized in its emphasis as readily as in any other point, notwithstanding the current notion that, to give a true emphasis, nothing more is needed than a right understanding of the language which requires it. Force and skill are, in this as in all other things, the fruit of

practice. The violent blow of the angry rustic may fall with little harm to him at whom it is aimed: the skilful one of the scientific athlete, tells with a direct and concentrated force, which renders it as effective as it is inevitable. A similar result is exhibited in the use of the voice, when the practised reader throws into the emphasis of a single word a whole world of meaning, condensed into one energetic sound; while the unskilful voice, with its vague loudness and aimless noise, fights as one that beateth the air.'

The study of elocution not only prescribes this due discipline of the voice for positive force of emphasis, but for that not less valuable means of impressive effect, the power and the habit of withholding force,. in anticipation of emphasis or subsequently to its occurrence, so as to give it the due relief arising from the comparative reduction of preceding and following words. In this mode of managing the voice lies the main effect of expressive and distinctive force. The unpractised reader is prone to follow the negligent habit of conversational utterance, which throws out a more frequent but a feebler emphasis than impressive public reading demands. He is addicted, perhaps, to those habits of false emphasis which lead him to give unnecessary prominence to insignificant and inexpressive words, and, consequently, to mar the whole effect of what emphasis he chiefly intends. He forces into emphatic style the auxiliaries and particles of a sentence, to the utter subversion of meaning and emotion.* The elocutionary training of the voice in emphasis, leads to the observance of a principle directly contrary to such practice, and accustoms the reader, by the use of a few obvious rules, to reserve his force for the prominent points of meaning, and always to husband his emphasis so as to make it tell.

Another very important effect of the due discipline of the voice, as to emphasis, is the security which it gives that the

*The ecstatic joy of the father, at the return of the prodigal son, is, in this style, converted from a burst of grateful and glad feeling, into the recitation of a lesson in etymology; thus, 'For this my son was lost, and is found!'

« AnteriorContinuar »