gain a fine voice; and he must continue systematic practice to retain it. In the voice culture exercises, as each sound is made, not only should he study the organic action until it becomes automatic or subconscious, but should attentively and critically listen; for so is the ear trained to know 'the natural language' of the voice. Unless the inherent meaning of the elements of voice,-time, force, quality, pitch, and abruptness, with all their shades, degrees, and interrelations, is thoroughly mastered, what hope is there of conformity of sound with sense? A powerful and beautiful voice is sometimes developed by a person of heedless and ignorant ear; but he is to be pitied, as the owner of a grand instrument upon which he can never play. In order that the voice shall 'do things', that it shall speak from mind to mind, from heart to heart, from soul to soul,-ear training and voice training must go together; and in the education toward artistic interpretation, the ear must of necessity lead the voice. Sitting on the front porch of his house at Avondale (Cincinnati, Ohio), one Sunday morning in June, 1880, Mr. Murdoch said to me, 'It is very tantalizing, and at the same time very beautiful and inspiring, that, no matter how well I read, the voice inside always reads better.'

Some writers on elocution, unable to understand the Rush philosophy, as set forth by its author, have cavalierly dubbed the method of teaching based upon it 'the mechanical system.' Every art-music, painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, acting, elocution-has its technic. No technic, no art. Until the technic is so mastered that it is automatic, intuitive, a matter of course, the result comes short of art; there is betrayal of effort, palpable adjustment. This proves, not that we are going wrong, but that we have not got far enough-we have not arrived. Technic, then, is the objective point of the first division of this book, and there is no danger of acquiring too much dexterity or too much

voice. But, as fast as certainty and facility and vocal capital are gained, technic becomes the efficient means toward the great and final end-interpretation. At first, the conscious employment of technic-compelled, sedulous, induced, purposed conformity-makes us tentative and clumsy; 'the elocution sticks out'; we are but 'prentice mechanics. Too many stop, complacent or discouraged, while still in this mechanical stage; but a conscientious mechanic, 'sticking to his job,' is better off than the reader who knows neither just what he is trying to do nor the means and method of achieving it. Mere impulse, however noble, mere feeling, however vivid, is not art; indeed, unless controlled and guided, they tend to weaken or entirely defeat the desired result. The skillful mechanic is the possible artist; and he remains a mechanic so long as there is conscious and perceptible effort to adjust and use the technic. The artist uses the same technic; but with him it is the enchanter's spell, by which each uttered impulse falls deftly into due order and place and time and tune and value, as if so it was ordained, and not otherwise; his technic obeys him, as its wings obey the bird: while for the listener the technic is utterly lost in the effect. Here, at last, the art itself is Nature.

Technic, then, is first and foremost, until it is surely and safely ours; and we continually apply it, methodically, carefully, until adjustment becomes self-adjustment: then may we try our wings, and try, and still try, until they support us unwavering, in air as high as we can breathe.

No wonder that the great artists are few! that most work in the direction of art-piano-playing, reciting, reading, speaking, singing, acting, writing, drawing, painting, modeling, building,-is plainly and immitigably work! Any great reader will, because he must, develop along the lines established by Rush: the immense majority, of whatever school or system, must content themselves with getting as

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far as they can. But any degree of progress is preferable to standing still; and no mortal knows what divine possibilities are within him, until he has made some way on the upward path.

The teacher will accomplish far more by example than by precept, though wise precept is indispensable; and he is the best teacher who gives his pupils the most and best illustrations of really fine reading. The student must hear good reading of every style as often and as much as possiblemust be filled with it,-that he may have a definite ideal at which to aim, and that he may be able to estimate his progress toward it. When the ideal is fairly complete, the hearing of poor or commonplace reading can do no further harm, except the sufferance of it; it rather serves to confirm and strengthen the ideal. The great, almost the only reason why reading is the most ill-taught branch of the commonschool curriculum is, that the teachers do not read well.

And let us not be frightened by the senseless outcry against imitation. The principles and rudiments of all the arts are learned-speech first and most of all,—by imitating the model as closely as may be; and the first steps in application-in interpretation are also necessarily imitative. It is scarcely needful to say that this is sound psychology. If the wings are there, they will grow strong; the neophyte will leave the master in good time: all he has acquired, will quicken whatever of native, individual power is his; his art will approach nearer and nearer to the simplicity of Nature,rich, but chaste; strong, but beautiful; emotional, but not hysterical; and penetrated always with 'that light that never was, on sea or land.' Always the natural, where it is crude, violent, repulsive, harsh, and angular, is to be modifiedidealized 'changed'-into forms pleasing, however severe, pitiful, terrible, or malign. 'In the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say,) the whirlwind of your passion, you must

acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.'* And the passion of the reader and the actor is not the anger, the fear, the jealousy, the grief, the joy, or whatever the scenic emotion may be; but his own artistic enthusiasm, which, through his sympathy and the magic of his technic, he transmutes into the eidolon of the mood. Even a plain didactic composition should be 'delivered from the lips' with an ease, a crispness, a sparkle, a buoyancy, that charm the ear and win and hold the listener's absorbed attention. The student will never become the artist by being turned loose upon the barren heath of his own mannerisms and predilections, to grope in the dark after a vague and formless ideal, with his own untaught ear to lead and mislead him.

*Oldfield was the woman (there is always one) who used the tones of nature upon the stage in that day. She ranted at times, like her neighbors, but she never ranted out of tune, like them. Her declamation was nature, alias art, thundering; theirs was artifice, raving. Her treatment of words was as follows: she mastered them in the tones of household speech; she then gradually built up these simple tones into a gorgeous edifice of music and meaning; but though dilated, heightened, and embellished, they never lost their original truth. Her rivals started from a lie; so the higher they soared, the further they left truth behind them. They do the same thing now pretty universally.

The public is a very good judge, and no judge at all, of such matters. I will explain.

Let the stage voice and the dramatic voice, the artificial and the artistic, the bastard and the legitimate, the false and the true, be kept apart upon separate stages, and there is no security that the public will not, as far as hands go, applaud the monotone or lie more than the melodious truth. But set the lie and the truth side by side upon fair terms, and the public becomes what the critics of this particular art have never been- -a critic; and stage bubbles, that have bubbled for years, are liable to burst in a single night.

-Charles Reade-Art: A Dramatic Tale.

I hope and believe that the book contains nothing of statement, exercise, advice, or suggestion that is not worth acceptance; and that nothing really essential has been omitted.

I have been more specific and comprehensive on the subject of breath control than any other elocutionary writer I know, unless Byron W. King, in his 'Practice of Speech', be excepted. All writers agree that the right management of the breath is of fundamental importance; yet most of them neglect to tell the student exactly of what it consists and precisely how to acquire it; and-'tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis, 'tis true,-many of them give wrong instruction.

Readers, speakers, and actors, who fail, fail, nine times out of ten, not so much for lack of intelligence as for lack of vocal technic: they do not know the how and the why, and the voice is not trained to ready and infallible response: for which reason I have made the treatment of vocal culture very full. Every exercise laid down is good for the purpose assigned to it, and no exercise has been admitted that I have not myself tested. The student should practice all of them some of the time, and some of them all the time; selecting those for daily practice that he finds upon trial best adapted to his needs. 'Therein the patient must minister to himself,'-even if he has the living teacher, as well as the book.

I have made constant reference to interpretation, because, in its last analysis, elocution is interpretation, as is every other art.

The philosophy of expressive speech melody, its forms, analogies, and applications, I have codified more completely than has any other writer hitherto, so far as I know. Many of Doctor Rush's notations of diatonic melody cannot be fluently read, because he failed to discern that the discrete melodic succession of unimpassioned speech is largely influenced, if not practically regulated, by accent. His account of the intonation of interrogative constructions con