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Show 22 HANDBOOK FOR TEACHERS OF INTERPRETATION conception can be more clearly through tone color, that subtle quality of the voice which will suggest the sense subjectively, never literally. -The imitation of bugles, bells, bird notes, moaning, groaning, tremulo-s-all this rubbish which has brought the profession into disrepute with the thinking public-all this will never make a lyric. So befogged was my mind with the effort to imitate a bugle, which I had been taught to do, that it took me years to comprehend Tennyson's "Bugle Song." The poem seemed to be. written as a selection for vocal pyrotechnics, and when I gave up such exhibi tions, I discarded this beautiful lyric altogether. Somehow, some thing brought me to realize that the author was singing of human influence which would roll from "soul to soul." Not only was the meaning obscured by imitation, but a misunderstanding resulted from vocal imitation. In "The Bugle Song" the "dying, dying, dying," diminishing and dying out as it will be read in the imitative vocalization of the idea since the and impressively portrayed treatment of the song, should instead grow and pass on, since it "rolls from soul to soul" "and grows forever and forever." Indirect Discourse. . Indirect discourse, because of bad training in reading, is hard to handle by high school and college students and should receive a good deal of attention. Particularly is this true in Pupils in the grades have been allowed, if not trained, to read indirect discourse "lower and faster," and to throw the ideas into the junk heap instead of being led to appreciate that the indirect discourse is the speaker's means of making com ments and giving explanations, and therefore should be made very interesting in story telling. To make it interesting and to hold the at tention of the audience, many readers act out the thing described instead of relating it as though it were a very present drama enacted not in the past, but living in pictorial present. If the audience can see by the face of the reader that he sees what he is talking about and that his ideas are spontaneous, they will be held in rapt atten tion. If the reader not only holds the ideas with spontaneity but also attacks the page with sympathetic interest that is manifest in the voice and body, the listener cannot help being swept along. the field of description. Direct and Indirect Discourse. indirect discourse presents even a A combination of direct and more difficult problem. Direct |
