The strongest impulse of the human heart is for self-expression. The simplest form of expression is speech. Speech is the instinctive use of a natural instrument, the voice. The failure to deal justly with this simple and natural means of expression is one of the serious failures of our educational system. Whether the student is to wait on another's table or be host at his own; whether he is to sell "goods" from one side of a counter or buy them from the other; whether he is to enter one of the three great professions of law, medicine, or theology; "go on the stage" or platform; become Minister to France or President of the United States, it remains precisely true that to speak effectively will be essential to his success, and should be as essential to his own happiness as it will be to that of all involved in his pursuit of success.

Yet, if we give heed at all to the question of voice and speech, it is our last, not our first, consideration. We still look upon the mind as a storehouse instead of a clearing-house. We continue to concern ourselves with its ability to take in, not its capacity to give out. Voice and speech are still left to shift for themselves during the period of school life when they should be guarded and guided as a most essential equipment for life after school days are over. To convert the resultant hard, high-pitched, nasal tone which betrays the American voice into the adequate agent of a temperament which distinguishes the American personality, and to help English speech in this country to become an efficient medium of lucid intercourse, such is the object of this book.

In an address upon the "Question of Our Speech" delivered before a graduating class at Bryn Mawr, several years ago, Mr. Henry James said:

"No civilized body of men and women has ever left so vital an interest to run wild, to shift, as we say, all for itself, to stumble and flounder, through mere adventure and accident, in the common dust of life, to pick up a living, in fine, by the wayside and the ditch.

"The French, the Germans, the Italians, the English, perhaps, in particular, and many other people, Occidental and Oriental, I surmise, not excluding the Turks and the Chinese, have for the symbol of education, of civility, a tone-standard; we alone flourish in undisturbed and in something like sublime unconsciousness of any such possibility."

So searching an arraignment by so eminent a scholar before an audience of so high a degree of intelligence and culture seems to have been necessary to command an adequate appreciation of the condition of "Our Speech" and to incite an adequate effort toward reform. Since the arraignment was made and afterward published, classes have been organized, books written, and lectures delivered in increasing abundance, forming a veritable speech crusade—and the books and the classes and the lectures have availed much, but the real and only "reliable remedy" lies with the teacher in the public and private schools and colleges of the United States. And it is to the teacher of English and Elocution that this Class Book on Vocal Expression is offered.

Learning to Talk might have been a truer, as it had been a simpler, title, yet the more comprehensive phrase has justifiable significance, and we have chosen it in the same spirit which discards for the text-book in Rhetoric or English Composition the inviting title Learning to Write.

There is a close analogy between the evolution of vocal and the evolution of verbal expression. The method of instruction in the study of the less heeded subject of the "Spoken Word" throws an interesting light on the teaching of the more regarded question of the "Written Word." An experience as teacher of expression and English in a normal school in Minnesota has influenced the author of these pages to so large an extent in the formulation of her own method of study, and so in the plan of this volume, that it seems advisable to record it. To the work of reading or expression to which she was originally called two classes in composition were added. The former teacher of composition had bequeathed to the work as a text-book a rhetoric which consisted of involved theory plus one hundred and twenty-five separate and distinct rules for the use of words, and the teacher of expression found, to her amazed dismay, that the students had been required to learn these rules, not only "by heart," but by number, referring to them as rule six or thirty-six or one hundred and twenty-five, according to the demanded application.

A week, possibly a fortnight, passed in silent struggle, then the distracted teacher of expression went to the president of the school with these questions: "Of what avail are one hundred and twenty-five rules for the use of words when these children have less than that number of words to use, and no desire to acquire more? Could you make teachers of these normal students by giving a hundred and more laws for the governing of pupils and the imparting of the material of knowledge, if you furnished neither pupils nor material upon which to test the laws?" "Certainly not!" was the restful reply of one of the wisest of the educators I have known. "May I lay aside the text-book and read with these students in English for a little?" "You may teach them to write English in any way you can!"

The next day the class in composition was discovered eagerly reading Tennyson's Holy Grail, stopping to note this felicitous phrase, that happy choice of words, the pertinent personnel of a sentence or paragraph. The first examination of the term consisted in a series of single questions, written on separate slips of paper and laid face down on the teacher's desk. Each student took one of these slips which read, "Tell in your own words the story of The Coming of Arthur, the Holy Grail, Lancelot and Elaine or Guinevere," as the chance of the chooser might allot a given idyl. The experiment was a success. The president was satisfied with the papers in English composition. Each student had had "something to say" and had said it. Each student had words at his command little dreamed of in his vocabulary before the meeting with the Knights of the Round Table.

The first step toward a mastery of Verbal Expression had been successfully taken! The consciousness of need—the need of a vocabulary—had been awakened. The desire to supply that need—to acquire a vocabulary—had been aroused. A way to acquire a vocabulary had been made manifest. Out of such consciousness alone is born the willingness to work upon which progress in the mastery of any art depends. To the teacher of expression it seemed no more advisable now than it had seemed before, to ask the students to learn either "by heart" or by number the one hundred and twenty-five rules of technique. But the great laws governing the use of a vocabulary she now found her students eager to study, to understand, and to apply. She found her class willing to enter upon the drudgery which a mastery of technique in any art demands.

So in the teaching of Vocal Expression, he who begins with rules for the use of this change of pitch or that inflection, this pause or that color of tone, before he has aroused in the pupil the desire to express a vivid thought, and so made him conscious of the need to command subtle changes of pitch, swift contrasts in tone and turns of inflection, will find himself responsible for mechanical results sadly divorced from true and natural speech. But let the teacher of expression begin, not with rules of technique, but with the material for inspiration and interpretation; let him rouse in the pupil the impulse to express and then furnish the material and means for study which shall enrich the vocabulary of expression and he will find the instruments of the art—voice and speech—growing into the free and efficient agents of personality they are intended by nature to be.

In March, 1906, the editor of Harper's Bazar began a crusade in the interest of the American voice and speech. Through the issues of more than a year the magazine published arraignment, admonition, and advice on this subject. It was the privilege of the author of this volume to contribute the last four articles in that series. In response to a definite demand from the readers of the Bazar these articles were later embodied in a little book called The Speaking Voice. In a preface to this book the author confesses her "deliberate effort to simplify and condense the principles fundamental to all recognized systems of vocal instruction," making them available for those too occupied to enter upon the more exhaustive study set forth in more elaborate treatises. The book was not intended for hours of class-room work in schools or colleges, but for the spare moments of a business or social life, and its reception in that world was gratifying. But, to the author's delight, the interest aroused created a demand in the schools and colleges for a real text-book, a book which could be put into the hands of students in the departments of English and expression in public and private institutions and colleges, and especially in normal schools. It is in response to that appeal that this class-book in Vocal Expression is issued; and it is to the teachers whose impelling interest and enthusiasm in the subject justify the publication of this volume that the author desires first to express her grateful appreciation.

To Miss Frances Nash, of the Lincoln High School in Cleveland, for her invaluable advice in determining the exact nature of the need which the book must meet, and for her assistance in choosing the material for interpretation, my gratitude and appreciation are especially due.

To others whose influence through books or personal instruction has made this task possible, acknowledgment made in The Speaking Voice is reiterated.