Читать книгу Vocal Expression: A Class-book of Voice Training and Interpretation - Katherine Jewell Everts - Страница 14

Among the axioms of our subject-matter already formulated stands this one: reading aloud is thinking aloud. If reading aloud is thinking aloud the quality of the reading will depend, of course, upon the quality of the thinking. But while clear thinking does not assure lucid reading (since there are other elements in the problem), the converse is true, that good reading implies clear thinking. For it is impossible to read convincingly unless one is thinking vitally, which brings us to the object of this study: To Establish Vitality in Thinking.

Do you know what it means to think vitally in reading? It means a concentration of your mind upon the thought before you until you, yourself, seem to be thinking that thought for the first time,—until you seem to be bringing forth a thought of your own conception instead of rethinking the conception of another's mind. Is this a familiar experience? It must become one if you are to become a true interpreter. For the true interpreter is first of all the keen thinker.

We do not say of the great actor, after a performance of Hamlet, "He played Hamlet wonderfully!" We say, rather, "He was Hamlet." The great actor creates the part he plays each time he plays it. He creates the part by living the part. Even in the same way the great interpreter creates the thought he voices through a concentration of mind which appropriates the thought and makes it his own to voice.

We have said that the greatest need of the human heart is for self-expression. To satisfy the heart that act of expression must be a creative act. True interpretation is creative expression. The fundamental step toward creative expression is complete possession of the thought to be expressed. Complete possession depends upon your power to concentrate your mind upon a thought until it is your own. The first step in interpretation is to establish vitality in thinking.

The new arithmetic trains the mind to see the relation behind the mathematical statement of the relation. The child who "says his tables" to-day is not repeating by rote words and figures, he is realizing vital relations, he is developing a sense of proportion, he is learning to think vitally. The old method in arithmetic left the statement "two times one is two" a cold mathematical fact; the new method makes it a key to living relations. One in the "tables" of the child in mathematics to-day stands for a definite object, and the statement "two times one is two" is an interesting and significant fact. The statement through imaginative thinking, which is vital thinking, may be invested with personal significance and become a personally interesting fact. Try it! Say your "tables of one" up to ten times one is ten, thinking vitally, which means getting behind the statement of the relation to the relation itself, behind the sign to the thing signified. Let your "one" stand each time for something you desire—as a small boy might desire pieces of candy, or a miser "pieces of eight"; now think vitally in this way and say, "Ten times one is ten!" What has happened to the mathematical fact? It has become a living expression!

This might be called interpreting our mathematics. Why not? That is the surest way to master them! It is the surest way to mastery of any subject, of any art, of Life itself. It is the only real way. But we have leaped from the part to the whole, from the study of a detail to an application of the law governing the whole subject. Back we must go to our special point. If we can turn the statement of a cold mathematical fact into the expression of a living vital relation by thinking vitally, so investing the fact with personal significance and making it our own, what can we not do with the more easily appropriated thought which poets and philosophers and play-writers have given us, and with which rests our especial concern as interpreters? Let us see what we can do! But first there is one other point to be considered in this question of vital thinking. We have spoken of one aspect of the process of the mind in thinking,—the concentration upon an idea until it is one's own. But there is the passing of the mind from idea to idea to be noted. This phase the psychologists name "transition." This alternate concentration and transition constitutes the "pulsing of the mind" in reading, which Doctor Curry discusses so vitally in his Lessons in Vocal Expression. Now transition is an inevitable result of concentration and follows it as naturally as expiration follows inspiration. This being true, we need only note, in our study of the process of the mind in reading aloud, the question of transition, letting it follow naturally the fundamental act of concentration which is our chief concern. If the intense concentration is accomplished the clean transition will follow. In choosing material which shall require for adequate interpretation this intense concentration of the mind, we find our source, of course, to be the literature of thought rather than the literature of feeling. The literary form which seems to furnish the best examples for our purpose at this point is the essay where the appeal is, primarily, at least, an intellectual appeal. For my own suggestive analysis and for our preliminary study in vital thinking I have chosen paragraphs from Emerson's essays because Emerson's almost every paragraph is an essay in miniature. The story is told of the gentle seer that once in the midst of a lecture he dropped all the pages of his manuscript over the front of the pulpit. The incident disturbed his auditors greatly until they saw Mr. Emerson gather up the leaves and without any effort at rearrangement in the old order begin to read as though nothing had happened. Every sentence was almost equally pertinent to the main theme, and suffered not from a new juxtaposition. So in printing extracts from this source we feel no sense of incompleteness.