June 28, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
i.i 
Life and Letters Recitation 
By J. C. Squire 
in Public 
LAST week there was given in London a public 
recitation of poetry- Eleven authors delivered 
passages from their own works to an audience of a 
hundred and fifty ladies wlio paid two guineas each, 
the nuiney going to a charity. As two of the regular con- 
tributors to this paper were amongst the performers I had 
better say nothing about the performance. Only this : That 
one of the two, gallantly endeavouring to get his verses off 
without referring to liis book, got tied up towards the end. 
He left lines out, put lines in, got hnes in tlie wrong order, 
and, being resolved not to break down, shamelessly vamped 
and gagged. Apparently, the candour of his demeanour 
was such that nobody noticed. 
* * * * * 
It is highly probable that these recitations will become 
a permanent institution, analogous to Chamber Concerts. 
The prevailing notion is that there is something ridiculous 
about standing up in public and reciting poetry. But all 
human actions are ridiculous, properly regarded ; and this 
one is certainly no more ridiculous than acting or playing the 
flute in public. Flute-players, in fact, are most ridiculous. 
It is quite evident that verse ought to be spoken aloud. If a 
man takes pains to make his work musical, it is more than 
ridiculous that it should never be heard save by the " inward 
ear." In earlier ages nobody questioned this. When, as Mr. 
Kipling elegantly puts it : " 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' 
lyre," his lyre was merely the background of his declamation, 
and tho finest early English poetry has reached us by oral 
transmission. When minstrels turned into authors recita- 
tion died — -or, rather, was left to the unintelligent. In 
this country, xmtil recently, the general craving to hear verse 
well spoken has been ministered to only by imbeciles. Who, at 
liazaars and smoking concerts, make audiences shufHe uneasily 
in tiicir seats wliile they roar Out with the Lifeboat, Kissing 
Clip's Race, or Tennyson's The Revenge. Millions at functions 
in aid of the Choir Outing or annual concerts of local literary 
societies must have heard this last, and felt their flesh creep 
as the orator leant forward and daintily fluttered his fingers 
when he came to " a pinnace like a fluttered bird cams flying 
from far away." The poets themselves have abstained 
from ])ublic appearances. But their knowledge that recita- 
tion was better than silent reading has usually led them to 
read aloud in private. Tennyson, " rolling out his hollow 
oes and acs," was heard by many, and Swinburne, as we now 
learn, would oblige if asked, and chant his compositions in a 
shrill voice which, at exciting points, rose into a scream. 
If, however, good verse gains by being read aloud, it is 
obviously illogical to restrict such performances to private 
houses : and in the last few years the recognition of this 
fact has spread. The revival is mainly due to Mr. Yeats, 
who thought out and perfected a technique of recitation 
and began giving readings from his own poems. To his 
inspiration was probably due the action of the proprietors of 
the Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street, who have for 
some years given recitals at regular and frequent intervals, 
amongst those who have appeared being Mr. Yeats, Mr. 
Hewlett, Mr. Masefield, Mr. St urge Moore, and Rupert 
Brooke. The Americans, who have a passion for lectures 
of all sorts, have taken to arranging tours of English 
poets ; two or three of them (^ there now, reading to 
immense audiences at, I hope, great 'profit to themselves. 
The practice is go.ng to gi-ow. And for two reasons. 
One is that good recitation is artistically interesting : the 
other is that there will be money in it. 
* ♦ * * • 
Now there is, unhappily, no reason to suppose that because 
a man can write a musical thing, he will necessarily be a good 
reader. For instance, he might be duinb. Failing that quite 
disabling infirmity, he may have a bad voice, he may have 
an imperfect control over his voice, he may have a physical 
appearance so unimpressive that no amount of emotional 
force can counterbalance it, or he may be so reserved that he 
is quite unable to display his intimate feelings in public. 
It is one thing to wear your heart on your sleeve in print : 
and quite another to stand face to face with an audience and 
expose your tendercst emotions and noblest aspirations. If 
an author himself has the necessary histrionic. gifts, voice, 
and audacity, he is the best person to hear ; as he . should 
know better than anyone else exactly the ilow and stress 
of liis language. But the important thing is not that we 
should hear the words spoken by the person wlio wrote 
them (if it were, recitations from dead poets would be im- 
possible), but that they should be spoken by people with 
sufficient intelligence to understand them. Most Shake- 
spearean actors do not understand Shakespeare's verse, and 
have no idea whatever about rhythm. They either si)out 
their lines with tlie mechanical regularity of a metronome, 
or gabble and garble them with the avowed object of making 
them resemble prose as closely as possible. What is wanted 
is a reciter with all a good poet's critical taste : one wlio, 
whethqr.or not a practising artist himself, can give language 
and rhythms the values that tlie composer meant them to 
have. 
***** 
My observations at last week's performance led to several 
conclusions, whicii may be worth recording. One is that 
there is more in the technique of .recitation than many good 
natural readers might su])pose. A man may have all tlie 
necessary attributes of voice, Understanding and emotional 
force ; but there is room for study. This is especially so 
with poets. The line about Tennyson's " oes and aes " 
is significant. To a poet a musical line has a tendency to 
present itself as a succession of beautiful vowel sounds. 
Vowel sounds, in certain sequences, nre beautiful. Properly 
enunciated, with right tonal inflexion, the syllables " la, la. 
la, la," may be delivered so as to produce quite melting effects. 
Why that is so may be left to Students of Evolution to deter- 
mine ; they will probably establish a connexion with the 
love-song of the megatherium to its mate; or the tuneful 
warnings addressed to the herd by the chief bull bison 
when he scented danger. At any rate, people who read 
musical verse aloud are apt ' to dwell so lovingly on the 
vowels that they forget to make the consonants clear : the 
word " bite " at the end of a line sounds to the audience 
like " bi." I think, again, that the lighting of the audit- 
orium wants considering, However much in harmony 
the souls of the audience may be with tliQ reciter, what ho 
sees in a lighted room is not their souls but their hats : 
which are distracting. The darkened auditorium has its 
drawbacks : it makes one feel rather unnatural ; and if 
it is accomi)anied, as it is at the Poetry Bookshop, by 
lighted candles on the platform, it produces so ecclesiastical 
an atmosphere that the audience dare not applaud or laugli 
without a sense of sin or at least solecism. 
***** 
But the most important thing is this : that if the Art of 
Recitation is to have a fair chance, it should be understood 
that to get much out of a recital you ought — unless tho 
subject matter is very simple — to be fairly familiar before- 
hand with the works recited. The ordinary concert-goer docs 
not expect to " take in " a new symphony properly the fust 
time he hears it ; and he habitually gets most of his pleasure 
out of hearing again things that he has heard before. You 
do not follow verses half so well the first time you hear them 
as you do the first time you read them : the ear cannot 
take the sort of instantaneous survey that the eye takes. 
The simplest poem, if unfamiliar, sounds obscure when read 
aloud. Finally, it is, I think, evident that a programme with 
several names on it is better than a programme filled 
by a single executant. One man's voice — in a public as in 
a private room — if heard for two consecfltivc hours, almost 
inevitably reduces one to a condition of mental coma if it 
does not actually send one to sleep. 
These remarks .are, I know, fragmentary. But noliody 
who has heard good recitaticm could tail to appreciate the 
unexploited possibilities of the craft. And if it develops it 
will have the incidental advantage of supplying poets with 
incomes. Homer sang, probably, in the open air, and got 
.nothing but his keep. But two-guinea seats, or even five- 
shiUing ones, mean something ; and even if the authors do 
not themselves recite and do not even get a percentage ou 
proceeds, there never was so effective a form ol advertise- 
ment of their books. The greatest trouble with good niudern 
literature has been to make people who would like it aware 
of its existence. 
]\fessrs. Funk and Wagnalls, the publishers of '' Loiselle." a 
book on tnemory which was recently referred to on this page, 
ask us to mention that the price of it is los. (jd., not 2s. bd. 
