Educated men do not know by heart the noble poetry of the language. The voices of American students are hard and cold. There is among us little appreciation of art. The monologue seems to come as a peculiar blessing at this time as a means of educating the imagination and dramatic instinct. It furnishes a course for recitation that obviates the necessity for a stage, avoids the stiltedness of declamation, yet supplies an adequate method of studying the lost art of recitation,--the art that made the Greek what he was.
The monologue will help students in all the arts to overcome tendencies to mechanical practice. There is danger of making all exercises mechanical. Take, for example, the student of song. If he practises scales or songs without thought, or any sense of expressing feeling to others, it is simply a matter of execution. Some of our leading singers express no feeling. Song, to them, is a matter of technical execution,--very beautiful as an exhibition, but not as a revelation of the heart.
A similar condition is found also in other forms of art,--in instrumental music, in painting or drawing. There is a continual tendency to forget that art is the expression of thinking and feeling to another mind; and while there must be very severe training to master technicalities, this is not the end, but the means. The monologue furnishes a simple and adequate method for the mastery of the relations of one mind to another. It is just as necessary in the development of the artist that he should come to feel the laws of the human mind, the laws of his own thinking and feeling, and the character of the suggestion of that feeling, and to recognize the modifications which the presence of another soul makes upon his own, as it is that he should master the technique of his art.
All art is social. It is founded on the relation of human beings to each other; on the character of the soul; on the love of one human being for others, and the desire to reveal to his fellows the impressions that nature, or human character, make upon him. In all artistic practice, of song, of instrumental music, of painting, of drama, there should be in the mind of the artist a perception of the race.