Katherine Jewell Everts

“ The boys we used to play our school games with have found their places; they are winning homes and influence and money, their natures are growing strong and shapely, and their days are filling with the happy sense of accomplishment,—while we do not yet know what we are. We have no meaning on the earth. Lose us, and the earth has lost nothing; no niche is empty, no force has ceased to play, for we have got no aim, and therefore we are still—nobody. ”

“ Keeping house or keeping accounts, tending babies, teaching primary school, weighing sugar and salt at a counter, those blue overalls in the machine shop—have these anything to do with 'culture'? Culture takes leisure, elegance, wide margins of time, a pocket-book; drudgery means limitations, coarseness, crowded hours, chronic worry, old clothes, black hands, headaches. Culture implies college: life allows a daily paper, a monthly magazine, the circulating library, and two gift-books at Christmas. Our real and our ideal are not twins—never were! ”

“ But we shall take it in a new spirit—the spirit of an artist bent upon the mastery of his art. If we flounder or fall, we shall not be more content in our ignominy than is the choking swimmer or the prostrate skater. If we produce painful instead of pleasing sounds with our instrument, we shall not persist in a merciless process of tone production; but we shall proceed to study diligently the laws governing the control of the instrument until we have mastered its technique and made it an agent of harmonious intercourse. ”

“ You hesitate, your emotion is killed, your thought inhibited, your eagerness gone, your impulse dead—but you have made a discovery. You have become conscious of a great need, and your teacher, if she be wise, has discovered the nature of that need. You consult together and find three things have failed you, and, through you, the orator you wished to interpret. These things are your mind, your vocabulary, and your voice. You find that your need is threefold—it is the need to feel intelligently and to think vitally on your feet; the need to acquire a vocal vocabulary ”

“ Reading, writing, and arithmetic are very handy, but these fundamentals of a man are handier to have; worth more; worth more than Latin and Greek and French and German and music and art-history and painting and wax flowers and travels in Europe added together. These last are the decorations of a man or woman: even reading and writing are but conveniences: those other things are the indispensables. They make one's sit-fast strength and one's active momentum, whatsoever and wheresoever the lot in life be—be it wealth or poverty, city or country, library or workshop. ”

“ But we must not stop with the throat, which is but part of the channel involved in the emission of breath as speech. There is the tense jaw to be reckoned with—the jaw set by nervous tension, the jaw which refuses to yield itself to the moulding of the tone into the beautiful open vowel and the clean-cut consonant which make our words so interesting to utter. It is the set jaw which, forcing the tone to squeeze itself out, causes it to sound thin and hard. ”

“ High-school and college can give much, but these are never on their programmes. All the book processes that we go to the schools for, and commonly call "our education," give no more than opportunity to win these indispensables of education. How, then, do we get them? We get them somewhat as the fields and valleys get their grace. Whence is it that the lines of river and meadow and hill and lake and shore conspire to-day to make the landscape beautiful? Only by long chiselings and steady pressures. Only by ages of glacier crush and grind, by scour of floods, by centuries of storm and sun. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There is nothing in the lines to make our choice arbitrary. It is only important that we determine a relation and keep it consistently throughout the reading. Here is a possible "setting." They are in the poet's study; he is working at his desk; she is sitting in a great chair before the fire, a book in her hand, which she does not read; she is gazing into the flames. She begins dreamily, more to herself than to him—"What a pretty tale you told me." At what point does her tone lose its reflective quality and become more personal? ”

“ This: the artist is he who strives to perfect his work,—the artisan strives to get through it. The artist would fain finish, too; but with him it is to "finish the work God has given me to do!" It is not how great a thing we do, but how well we do the thing we have to, that puts us in the noble brotherhood of artists. My Real is not my Ideal,—is that my complaint? One thing, at least, is in my power: if I cannot realize my Ideal, I can at least idealize my Real. ”

“ Composition, it should be remembered, is the art of communicating to others what is in the mind of the writer. To write without having the subject abundantly in mind is to invite the reader to a Barmecide feast of empty dishes. The necessity of insisting upon such particulars as those just given of the process of making an exposition arises from the stubborn idea of the untrained student that writing is something done with paper and ink. It is, on the contrary, something which is done with brains; it is less putting things on paper than it is thinking things out in the mind. ”

“ They fail to reflect that while any ordinary intellect naturally forms some opinion upon any subject which interests it, only the trained mind is able to judge clearly and lucidly of an indifferent or uninteresting matter. In this mastery of thought lies the difference between the sterile and the productive mind. Only one brain in a thousand has not the disposition to shirk work if it is allowed, and every student has moments when his intelligence seems almost to act like a spoiled child that hates to get up when called on a cold morning. ”

“ An artist himself shall speak. It was Michael Angelo who said: "Nothing makes the soul so pure, so religious, as the endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives for it strives for something that is godlike. True painting is only an image of God's perfection,—a shadow of the pencil with which he paints, a melody, a striving after harmony." The great masters in music, the great masters in all that we call artistry, would echo Michael Angelo in this; he speaks the artist essence out. ”

“ When a rich, dramatic temperament seeks for its instrument of expression the control of faultless technique the result ought to be art of the highest order. Such is the art of Gracia Ricardo. She has translated her English name into musical Italian, but does her country the honor to announce her beautiful voice as an American soprano.
Every tone of Gracia Ricardo's singing voice is as absolutely free from effort as the repeated note of the hermit thrush's song, and her tone as pure tone has the effect of that liquid call. ”

“ 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 the imagination of the young shepherd boy had not only disregarded the limits of his actual environment and escaped in fancy to the great world beyond, but so vividly had he realized that world through his imagination that his sympathies had been made broad to comprehend a monarch's need and his song potent to meet it. Experience alone gives comprehension. We are prone to think that experience is limited by our actual horizon. ”

“ But what command of the art of skating or swimming or playing the violin would the artist in any of these activities have achieved had he been content to stop with the act of jumping into the water, going out on the ice, or drawing the bow across the violin? The question's answer calls up an illuminating analogy. Are not most of us in regard to our mastery of speech in the condition of the skater, the swimmer, the fiddler in the first stage of those expressive acts? Are we not floundering in the water, fallen on the ice, or alienating the ears of our friends? ”

“ The plot, the characters, the setting of a story which is to live, must have the vividness of real experience. This does not mean that the creator of the story must have actually experienced the plot, the people, and the pictures which together make up his tale—they may be the product of actual experience or of imagination—but it does mean that while he is putting these elements together and creating his narrative he must realize as though it were actual experience the incident of his plot with the characters and in the atmosphere of his creation. ”

“ It is a conclusive reply, because we know that it is just as essential to achievement in the finest of the Fine Arts,—the art of living, as in every other form of Art, to recognize that the inrush of discord is for the final issue of harmony; that only through our ability to recognize illusion shall we come to know reality; that only through sensitiveness to the incongruous shall we develop a true sense of the fitness of things; that only frank enjoyment can disarm imperfection and find satisfaction in the perfect. ”

“ Hervé Riel, accept my verse!
In my verse, Hervé Riel, do thou once more
Save the squadron, honor France, love thy wife the Bell Aurore!
Your imagination can no more follow the flight of the Formidable, steered by Hervé Riel, with the French fleet close following her guidance and "the English at her heels" [Pg 218] past the rocks and shoals of Grève to safe harbor at Solidor, and remain creatively unsensitive to the pulse of progressive action, than could the actual rescue of his country's squadron leave unmoved toward the "man who did the deed" the heart of her Captain Damfreville. ”

“ Such an attack might only make the word conspicuous and so defeat the aim of true emphasis. True emphasis is the art of voicing the words in a phrase so that they shall assume a right relation to one another and, so related, best suggest the thought of which they are the symbols. I do not emphasize one word in a phrase and not the others. I simply vary my stress upon each word, in order to gain the proper perspective for the whole sentence. Just so, in a picture, I make one object stand out, and others fall into the background, by drawing or painting them in proper relation to one another. ”

“ Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
—Keats. ”

“ Then study that type, wherever you are. Daily life becomes your teacher and studio. When you enter upon this art there are no longer dull moments in railroad stations or trains, in shops or in the social whirl. Everywhere and always you are the student seeking to know and understand types of people better, that you may use your knowledge in presenting to an audience an individual. When you have caught the spirit of the individual you must realize the situation out of which this particular individual speaks. ”