Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/113

Rh, but each dialect is being continually, though imperceptibly, modified not only in construction but in pronunciation. The pronunciation of an Englishman of Chaucer's day would be unintelligible to us, while that of one of Shakespeare's contemporaries would be as strange to our ears as the accent of an Aberdeen fishwife is to the average cockney. If the speaking voice has a distinctly sing-song character—that is to say, if it proceeds by musical intervals—the result is as grotesque as it would be to talk in blank verse, or, as Sir Toby Belch says, "to go to church in a galliard and come home in a coranto." On the other hand, the speaking voice becomes most sympathetic in its quality when it approaches the singing voice, the musical character, however, being concealed by the variety of its inflections. It is important that in speaking a musical note should never be recognized; the effect is as unpleasant to our ears as an accidental hexameter in a sentence of prose was to the ancients.

Wide as the difference is between speech and song, the great gulf fixed between them is partly filled up by intermediate modes of using the voice which partake of the nature of both. Thus there is the measured utterance of declamation, which may be so rhythmical in time and varied in tone as to be almost song. On the other hand, the recitativo of the opera approaches speech. Various intermediate forms between speech and song may be heard in the ordinary speech of certain races, notably in Italians, Welshmen, and the inhabitants of certain parts of Scotland and England. The Puritans, as is well known, uttered their formal and affected diction in a peculiar nasal tone; and the term "cant," though properly belonging to their sing-song delivery, came to be applied to the sentiments expressed by it. Many of the ancient orators, to judge from the description left us by Cicero and Quintilian, would seem to have sung their speeches, the style of declamation being, in fact, expressly termed cantus obscurior. As they generally spoke in the open air, and to vast audiences, this artificial mode of delivery may have been necessary in order to make the voice reach farther than if they had spoken in a more natural way. C. Gracchus used to have a musician behind him while he spoke, to give him the note from time to time with a musical instrument called a tonarion. A similar plan might, with much advantage to the "general ear," be adopted by certain modern orators, the crescendo of whose enthusiasm expresses itself in increasing intensity of shrillness.

Those who have not given much attention to the subject are apt to think of speaking, as Dogberry did of reading and writing, that it "comes by nature"—that it is, in fact, an instinctive act, which no more needs cultivation for its right performance than eating or sleeping. This is a great mistake. Speaking, even of