THE LIVING VOICE.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18431, 11 July 1925, Page 13

THE LIVING VOICE.

S^CIAL^TICLE.

(Bf J. H. E. Schroder.) .« „r. thv pleasant voices, thy, __ -still are toy tinii i e9l awake."

. t the end of the introduction to Jith' published "Chilswell Book of h Poetrv," Robert Bridges t of "the recent astonishing inSP Sons of Science, whereby the spoken be transmitted all over the < * nld "and goes on to say: "Every :f;illwish g to hear and understand S best speakers; and all that we it needed and desired (to avoid a Rentable disruption of our speech s Ss promised to us in the amplest • lution of that problem, namely, tha Si whatever dialect they speak at Ue, -bould hear the language of n „r ercat literature in wireless broadciting, and through their normal schooling be familiar with it." _ ■-'May our democracies have mtellinc; to make a right use of God's „ifts and not leave this paramount and f 'penal means of national culture to be squandered in the selfish interests 0 f commercialism." The poet-laureate 's faith that the listener-in will wish for its own sake j 0 hear and understand the English 0 f the best speakers is perhaps rather insccurelv founded in his intense love nf the language and anxiety for its ?»tnrc Perhaps, too, his devout prayer i ion that his faith is crossed by some doubt But whether the broadcasters] and the listeners-in will avert that , catastrophe to the language which Mr flridees refers to, or not, Science has, done something to restore to the human voice at last a little of its diminished importance. • Which it is proper that Science should have done, and no more than amends; for when Science, "represented by her innocent ministers, Gutenberg and Caxton, set up her first printing-presses, she served speech a very ill turn. When, through ]icr slave Edison (was it Edison?) she flickered the first motion-picture on a screen, she served speech another. She turned poets into writers, and hearers into readers; actors into mimes, posturing in a dumb-show, and audiences into packs of spectators. The eye is a sort of handv-nian, always willing to -scramble good-naturedly through services which the ear could perform better; but the car is a. tricky, subtle -•servant to train, and so is the tongue. Bar and tongue,- then, lazy fellows, combine to dodge what labour they . can foist upon the eye, in which evasion Science has cunningly abetted them, to the admiration of us all. Between the poet and his audience stands, and has stood now for centuries, the inky, forbidding figure of the printer, drowning, most of his music in the clatter and stamp of .machines. Poetry was once sung or spoken by the poet, and the rhythms of speech fired an enthusiasm which heightened the poet s own. The poet to-day holds aloof from his readers, neither directly inspires them, nor is inspired by them. # Those who read may hear his rhythm, if .they will, by a translation of his printed * words into sound for the inward ear; r ' but for most readers poetry is no more than '' a chain of extremely valuable thoughts," or a rather curiously expressed emotion. They read poetry as they Tead an advertisement, with the eve alone; and they miss the third dimension of poetry, rhythm. Thought* feeling, and rhythm, which, like thickness added to'length and breadth, substantiates and incorporates the whole, /and.embodies, thought and emotion, in a i significance rich and complete: W.ith- ' out the three there is no poetry, but only prose in bondage. Mr Harold Monro, at his Poetry Bookshop in London, used to arrange regular "readings." The contributors to the Geor- ,:' gian anthologies published there used to read their works to an audience which was later refreshed with tea and biscuits. "'Tis something—nay, 'tis much"; but, more closely considered, rather pbkv, rather self-consciously "literary,"' and "interesting." One pictures the umbrellas of Kensington, a twitter of conversation, an earnest, a'pious silence, the poet fumbling his y manuscript, a well-bred cough, chairs in a semi-circle, and Mr Monro dih- . gent with a plato. of biscuits. There ; .. is little to be hoped from such rar.e assemblies. 'Mr John Masefield's 'Association, for the Speaking of Verse promises more. Once a year at Oxford they have a gathering, and compete in ■' the reading and recitation of poetry. As there are no prizes, the professional and amateur "elocutionists" stay "away: nor does it appear that Mr Masefield would welcome them. Scotland has founded a sister association. But Mr' Bridges may bo right; and the poet may again speak to his tribe, a sightless voice, restoring to poetry some-. . thing of its lost and true popularity. England has already listened to Mr Masefield speaking some of his own poems. Whether England was more thrilled by the poetry or by the novelty 'of it all is not clear.' Indeed, it is not , clear whether England was thrilled at all: probablv, just amused, and given a ; better appetite for the more solid ,; fare of broadcast jazz music, political propaganda, and comie singers. Plays were, once addressed to the ear. We go to see Oscar Aschc and his like •present Shakespeare: an Elizabethan worthy would probably talk of hearing Master Burbage. What ispfc the good citizen into spellbound belief that th; bare and curtained stage, on the very edge of which he- perhaps rested his elbows as he stared up into Burbage's face and strained to see that air-drawn dagger, was Macbeth's murder-haunted castle; that the broad daylight of a Loudon playhouse was black midnight —what but the magic of uttered poetry, poetry uttered by actors who knew almost "as well ;;s Shakespeare its power of illusion? Thoy knew its effect, and had to use i',; for the "realistic" scene-painters, mechanics, and electricJans had not begun to turn plays into spectacles. Hamlet was a prince of -,---words, as well as Prince of Denmark, Und Cleopatra's bargo cost only a speech, not, as nowadays, a small fortune for "burnished gold" and carpentry. But Science has brought to tho actor's aid more and more of technical realism, while (strange paradox!) the illusion of reality has become harder and harder to create. Producers have filled the stage with things to look at, gorgeous, expensive things, and gorgeous, 'expensive persons—ladies of title, divorced or likely to be, mannequins, and comedians. Drama of real life has little chance with a populace whoso lazy ears have forgotteu how to listen. It is symptomatic that when Capek's Insect play and the Robot play we're done in London, it was the strange spectacle provided that drew the crowds. In Czecho-Slovakia nothing elaborate was attempted in the way of horned and shelled and antennad insects, or of realistically mechanical men; but an English critic of some repute was gripped by the Czech production, and left cold by the English. . In Czecho-Slovakia the actors acted and spoke the play into realism; in England the mechanical men looked so very mechanical and the insects so repulsively like bug-a-boos, that people spent all their time nudging each other to ask "Did you see that one with the funny beak?" Fortunately there aro producers and men of tho theatre who

do not think of plays as spectacles, or adjuncts to the Divorce Court, fashionable society, and the establishments of Parisian or London dressmakers. Their attempts to devise stage-settings, especially for Shakespeare, suggestive and symbolic rather than realistic, are extremely interesting, and may give us a new principle of Shakespearean production, avoiding the extremes of the bare-stage crank, who would do nothing to intensify the effect of word and action, and of the extravagant "base mechanical," who overwhelms the actor with Persian apparatus. But the moving pictures are against them—against all spoken drama. The Elizabethans could follow Shakespeare's packed and crowded English, spoken with a rapidity we should to-day find bewildering. I What is a generation bred on the exaggerated gestures, the close-ups, the violent simplifications of motive and character, the childish morality of the films, and possessed of ears grown deaf, through disuse, to the significance and the music of ail speech except the day's colloquialisms (which, after all, have little or none) to make even of plain English like Shaw's or Galsworthy's, let alone so rich and close-woven an idiom as Shakespeare's? What of characterisation which is complex because it is true, not falsified into the simplicity of a film-formula? The confirmed picture-fan, should ho by some freak or mistake find himself at a Barrio or a Galsworthy or a Shaw play, is baffled and distressed by an action the motives of which he cannot grasp, by speeches which he only dimly understands, or misunderstands, and by. the very movements and gestures of people who behave not in the least like the ladies and gentlemen of the screen. The stage must do something to win back and re-cultivate the ear of the people. Now, it is just possible that Science, which has played the stage exactly such a trick as she has played poetry, may be helpful. A while ago Mr Shaw obligingly read aloud to the listening Kingdom one of his short pJaj-s. Is it conceivable that repeated doses of the sort will unstop deaf ears and send them, trembling from this new Apollo touch, to the theatre? A play heard from the loud-speaker is not a play; but at least it has to be heard, and the eye cannot distract the ear's attention. A course of concentrated listening may serve to adjust the balance between ear and eye. Even practice in listening to less admirable speeches than those in Mr Shaw's plays, say those of the House of Commons, will help to redress a now ancient wrong. It is perhaps worth suggesting that Members of Parliament, no longer haranguing their bored companions, the Press Gallery, and Hansard, but a wider audience, less patient of mumbling and er-er-ing, may speak their speeeli more trippingly 'on the tongue, and indeed reform it altogether. One result of Mr Shaw's broadcast reading was that the.Gramophone Company invited him to make a record, to be preserved with others in what ought to be, and perhaps is, called the Hall of Voices. Shaw's is now a name, like Milton's, "to resound for ages." Lamb and his friends amused themselves discussing the figures they would like to summon from the past. Posterity will at least Lo able to provoke from our silent dust some echoes of our speech. Whose voices will they most wish to hear? Each one of us knows, or can play the tantalising game of choosing, what men they were whose accents he would most gladly hear; but can we be sure that our descendants will agree with the Gramophone Company's selected Programme of sarly Twentieth Century Speakers? They may want the SitweUs, or Father Konald Knox, and (except the phoneticians,' who will be interested in anything we care to leave them, and wish—like Mary, housemaid at Mr Nupkins's—there was more) be petulantly dissatisfied with Shaw and King George V. Our .graves and ghosts can only, be safe from their contempt if we record everybody—an imagination-boggling task. But if we ourselves could recapture from the ether vibrations long lost, whose should wo most eagerly gather in? Each to his taste; for the present writer's part, he would hear the exact, tone in which Pilate said "What is truth?" Bacon calls him "jesting Pilate," who "would not stay for an answer"; but it is hard to. believe that the words were jest. They lend themselves to'so many inflexions, from that of cynicism to the. weary sadness of tragic. doubt. Not voices, "after all, so much as particular utterances, for some reason closely held by the memory, attract searching fancy. Hogg, in an exquisite passage, describes how Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft met on.o day, and each sr>oke the other's name. That "Shelley!", that "Mary!" one would give much to hear. The writer would choose, too, that he might hear Shakespeare say, as if to.himself, the lines in "The Tempest," "You do look, my son, in a moved sort . . ~" ending with' "And our little life is rounded iKith a sleep." . Not that Shakespeare would speak them better than (say), ForbesRobertson ; but because they seem to have sprung straight from the heart of the man who had added in his life so much knowledge to so much. And, for an impossible wish, let it be imagined that some sentences, kindly, trivial even, could he recalled from his last days, when,

"With brow composed and friendly tread ' Ho sought the little streets, of Stratford town, - That knew his dreams and soon must hold him dead," . , . where: "I like to think how Shakespeare pruned his rose And ate his pippin in his orchard close."

Tolstoy's daughter, Tatyana Lvovna Suchotin-Tolstoy, in recent oral reminiscences of her famous father, said that ho was at his desk until late every night. Next morning ho would giro the MS. to the members of his family-to copy out; on the following morning the fair copy had to lie on his writing-table. Then he would begin to alter, correct, improve, and complete, which process he repeated on the next day. A large number of chapters, hitherto unknown, belonging to "My Childhood," "Resurrection," and the "Kreutzer-Sonata" and manyversions of short stories were found among* his posthumous papers. It frequently occurred that he put some work aside and did not resume it until a long time after; often he worked at the same MS. for years before allowing it to be printed. . . . As he was very economical in the use of writing-paper, he would note alterations on old slips or envelopes dragged out of the waste-paper basket, or ho would cover the margins of ms sheets with corrections and completions, so that the setting of his work in order after his death was rendered extremely difficult. Toward the end ot his life Tolstoy could not be prevailed upon to publish anything, since he feared that he might give way to the desire for fame. During a critical illness ho wrote to his family: "The fact that my writings were sold for money has been one of the worst reflections for me during the last years." In his will Tolstoy provided that everybody should have'the right to print his posthumous work, writings and letters without paying royalties. Archdeacon Wilberforce once met John Hare, the actor. The conversation turned upon dogs (relates Bancroft), of which Hare was very fond. "Do you really believe, Archdeacon," asked the actor, "in a hereafter for clogs?" "Indeed I do," was the answer. "But do you mean that I s*nall meet n.y dog again?" "Undoubtedly, if you are good enough."