Page:Shakespeare in the Class-Room, Weld, Shakespeariana, October 1886.djvu/7

Rh state in detail the means to this end is aside from my present purpose. I will only add that I have found the persistent exercise of the dramatic element in such persons, vastly more effectual, and that too, in a far shorter time, than in the use of all other means combined. The teacher must of course begin his process in private, and continue it until the pupil acquires sufficient confidence to bear the presence of others. These morbidly sensitive pupils always think that they lack utterly dramatic power, whereas, they usually possess it in a rare degree. Consequently, when this is developed it gives self-confidence in other respects, substitutes freedom for fetters, tells favorably upon all their studies and elevates their intellectual tone.

In selecting pieces for recitation and assigning parts in dramatic scenes, the teacher can provide in other ways for the needs of his pupils. Such selections being left to the pupils themselves, they choose what they can speak and act most easily, thus, instead of those elements being called out which most need development, those may be stimulated, which are already so prominent as to disturb the balance of mind and character. Thus instead of restoring an equilibrium already jostled, they jostle it all the more. The true educator will ask, not who will act this part best, but who most needs its stimulation. With him, dramatic exercises are not an exhibition to show off his scholars, but a discipline to develop them, a process consecrated to their symmetrical unfolding. He will study the peculiarities of each, and prescribe accordingly. Thus to excessive timidity he will assign characters full of self assertion—to chronic gravity, mirth: in a word, he will prescribe for each undesirable habit, its special corrective, and generally for whatever is defective, or redundant, the personation of those opposite traits which antagonize each.

In thus urging the claims of development of the dramatic power, I advocate no novelty, I do but ask that our system of education be made self-consistent. All our schools provide dramatic training in one respect. What is taught in a reading lesson? Is it merely to speak plain, and mind the stops? Many a parrot is taught to do that. Must the pupil stop where the parrot stops? Such reading is the mere saying off of words.

To teach reading is to train the pupil to express meaning, to voice in varying tones the shifting shades of the author's thought and feeling. This expression in tones of the ideas and emotions of the writer is dramatic action, none the less dramatic because only vocal action. Those dramatics are professedly taught in every school-house in New England.

All teachers assume to develop the dramatic element in vocal expression. Let us then be self-consistent. Why develop the dramatics of sound and leave out those of sight. Why teach the pupil to reproduce the author's conception to the ear, and not to the eye? In the former, he has a daily drill for years, in the latter not a lesson.