as his medium, not the pen; hence, he must think and feel with greater intensity than the writer. By him the ideas of the writer are made salient, their movement more natural, their realization more vivid.

According to any adequate view of the nature of vocal expression and delivery there must, therefore, be a definite training of those faculties concerned with the realization of truth. The development of vocal expression is dependent upon and simultaneous with the acquisition of literary taste. A man cannot express what he does not possess. The refinement of feeling, the intense realization of ideas, is fundamentally necessary.

Right vocal expression, then, is dependent upon the realization of truth; and the faculty most concerned with this is imagination. Where the imagination is inactive, all expression is mechanical and cold. "Imagination," says Fénelon, "is the only creative faculty of the human mind." It is the faculty which lies at the fountain-head of all art. Hence, that faculty which enables man to live in a mental world, to hold such an ideal before his mind that he can rise out of the literal and the actual; that faculty which enables him to live in a process of thought, to see and hear whatever is conceived by the mind as if it had real existence,— is especially necessary in vocal expression.

Again, the mind must continually change its point of view. There must be insight not only into truth and Nature, but into men. The reader, speaker, or actor must have quick and instinctive insight into character. He must see as others see, and feel as others feel. He must have that sympathy which will enable him to identify himself with all situations.

Sympathy, it has been said, is synonymous with insight. A lack of sympathy is a lack of imagination. Without imagination there can be no true appreciation, no earnest feeling.

Imagination appeals to imagination. Literature and poetry cannot be interpreted without the help of imagination to appreciate the highest ideals and most poetic visions. An interpretative art must accentuate the deepest and most fundamental elements in the matter interpreted. Imagination is needed to stimulate the deeper impulses, and to bring voice and body into unity. It

alone can give such a vivid realization of ideas as to awaken all the complex impulses and languages of man. It is needed to prevent isolation of ideas, and the hardening of truths into mere facts. It is needed to place ideas and facts in sympathetic relationship with one another; to give the spirit and not the letter, truth and not mere fact, the soul and not the mere body.

Vocal expression is the direct result of the free, spontaneous impulses of mind and heart. The actions and characteristics of the imagination furnish the most essential qualities of vocal expression. No form of art is more intuitive and immediate; nowhere are rules so impossible as in its sphere. All actions in vocal expression are the direct and immediate result of insight. Nowhere is there needed more penetration, more stimulus to feeling; nowhere is there such need to awaken a play of free and spontaneous activity.

The object of rendering a passage of poetry, the function of delivery in oratory, is to make truth more vivid; to give it the life of a personality; to bring unity out of diversity; to change abstractions into living and moving creations. All these fundamental requisites of oratory, of eloquence, of poetry, are the direct product of imagination. Hence, this faculty is the chief characteristic of right delivery. Its development will secure naturalness and effectiveness, and prevent artificiality and affectation.

THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours:

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon ;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be

A

pagan suckled in a creed outworn,

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Wordsworth

The Recluse.

An hourly neighbor. Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields - like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main - why should they be
A history only of departed things,

Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
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,
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 -
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name

Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish:- this is our high argument.
-Such grateful haunts foregoing, if I oft
Must turn elsewhere-travel and see ill sights
Of madding passions mutually inflamed;
Must hear humanity in fields and groves
Pipe solitary anguish; or must hang
Brooding above the fierce confederate storm
Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore

Within the walls of cities

may these sounds

Have their authentic comment; that even these
Hearing, I be not downcast or forlorn!
Descend, prophetic Spirit! that inspir'st
The human Soul of universal earth,
Dreaming on things to come; and dost
A metropolitan temple in the hearts
Of mighty Poets.

possess

Wordsworth.

I.

IMAGINATION, OR THE CREATIVE INSTINCT.

I. CONCEPTION AND IMAGINATION.

IN a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making of others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. Every noble crown is, and on Earth will ever be, a crown of thorns.

MUSIC, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken;
Rose-leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed :

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Carlyle.

Shelley.

In

IN the first of the two sentences of the first extract a truth is stated plainly. In the second, the mind is made to realize the same idea with ten-fold force. What causes the difference? the first there is a sequence of simple conceptions; in the second the mind suddenly and spontaneously discovers unity and relationship among diverse ideas. In the first clause a plain truth is stated in a simple and direct way; in the second, a concrete picture is made to stand for a universal truth.

IN the far North stands a Pine-tree, lone, upon a wintry height;

It sleeps around it snows have thrown a covering of white.

:

It dreams forever of a Palm that, far i' the Morning-land,

Stands silent in a most sad calm midst heaps of burning sand. From Heine.

Lanier.

Diverse objects and situations are here brought into direct and vivid contrast, while unity is discovered between them. The

attention is so attracted by living images that the powers of the mind are quickened and made to realize a thought intensely. The importance of vivid conceptions and their relations to vocal expression has already been explained; but in such extracts and selections as the two preceding we find something more than isolated ideas or logical relations. Here are higher relations of ideas to one another and more complex conceptions. A peculiar faculty is found active, which contemplates objects and penetrates through all superficial relations to ideas which are more central and ideal; and which also brings together two more or less commonplace conceptions into such organic unity as to suggest and awaken interest in an exalted truth. It discovers, not by reasoning or conscious comparison, but by an intuitive, spontaneous, prophetical vision a hidden truth or unity amid seemingly diverse ideas. The power concerned in this process is usually called the imagination.

Poetry was defined by Aristotle as the universal element in human life. The imagination has always something of this universalizing tendency. It is the faculty which gives universal truth by presenting concrete conceptions.

Poetry, however, has never been defined by prose: otherwise prose would be superior to poetry. Neither has imagination ever been adequately defined by reason. Imagination is the transcendent faculty of the human mind. It is a power by which the mind arrives at truth through an immediate process. It is unconscious reason. It sees truth from the heart, and not by external and objective comparison; hence, reason cannot adequately define it. "If asked," says Mr. Shairp, “what imagination is, who can tell? If we turn to the psychologists, - the men who busy themselves with labelling and ticketing the mental faculties, they do not help us. Scattered through the poets, here and there, and in some writers on æsthetic subjects, notably in the works of Mr. Ruskin, we find thoughts which are more suggestive." There will be here, therefore, no effort made to analyze this faculty; but certain illustrations will be given of some of its actions, so that its presence and the conditions of its exercise may be recognized.