And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils,
she put her hand to her heart and with pleasure indicated by a
sentimental flash of the eye upon the audience, danced a few graceful
steps expressive of exuberant joy, and bowed herself off the platform
amid the vociferous applause of the audience. The reader's taste in this
case was no worse than that of the audience that applauded her. The
incident shows how great the general lack of taste, and the need of the
systematic study of fitness in the relation of thought to its
expression.'
I would say rather than 'lack of taste,' lack of spiritual life,
although the former is closely allied with the latter. A reader who has
assimilated the 'Daffodils,' who can sympathetically reproduce within
himself the heart-dance of the poet, can better reveal that
reproduction through the voice (the requisite vocal culture being
assumed) than through such mimetic foolery as the above. He would not
and could not condescend to the latter, if he had feeling deep enough
truly to know the poem of the 'Daffodils.' True feeling is always
serious, even if it be that of deep joy. The trouble with many public
readers is, that they don't truly know, have not inwardly experienced,
what they attempt to interpret vocally; and, as a consequence, they
resort to what disgusts people of real culture.
I was once present, by accident, at a lecture given by a
Delsarto-elocutionary woman, and in the course of the lecture, she
presented what, she said, would be false gestures in reciting Whittier's
Maud Muller. She then recited the poem, with, according to her notions,
_true_ gestures, which were more in number than Cicero made, perhaps,
in his orations against Cataline, or Demosthenes, in his oration On the
Crown. Every idea of the poem told outwardly on her body.
If a woman, in reading Maud Muller, has emotions which _must_ find vent
in gesture, and various physical contortions, she ought to be put under
treatment that would tone up her system.
The University of the Future, in order to be a vastly greater power than
the University of the Present, must, at least, rank spiritual education
with intellectual training and discipline. This the University of the
near Future must do; the University of a more remote Future, we must
believe, if we believe that the spiritual is the crowning attribute of
man--that by which he is linked with the permanent, the eternal, will
make all intellectual training and discipline, even all physical
training, so far as may be, subservient to the spiritual man.
Let us cry 'All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'
The rectification of the intellect must, as the greatest poem of the
century, Browning's 'Ring and the Book,' implicitly teaches, be through
the rectification of the spiritual, absolute man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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