people and furniture and then go roaming around as if you were using them all. This would be impersonation and in it you might ask your audience to imagine a stage full of people and a room of definite setting, but you merely suggest what these other people do to you and what you do to them. In the other direction when impersonating, do not stand inert, using merely your voice and lips. If you intend to present understandable human characters, and if your intent is to use vocal mechanisms chiefly and merely to suggest characters rather than present them, you wisely reduce the extent and number of changes in posture, of gestures, and of facial expression. It is only while reading the most prosaic of material that you eliminate these altogether; for, if there is liveliness and vivacity, stress and tension in what you read through posture, bodily movement, gesture, and facial expression, there must be some visible evidence that the thing is worth doing.

The differences can be understood by working both directions from impersonation. Impersonation is your attempt to make the audience believe they see and hear somebody not yourself. The impersonator promises to be an old man with a weak back, or a tittering school girl, or a drunken clubman, or a person of foreign or provincial speech-Irishman, Negro, Frenchman. If you hope to make your audience think that you are a farmer with lumbago just in from the "sticks" and angry because somebody has cheated you, your impersonation falls flat unless you go through the actions-posture, gesture, and voice-that such a man would reveal. If you were in a play acting out such a character, you would be dressed for the part and would get about the stage to take your part in the stage pictures. If, on the other hand, you are only interpreting such a person, with no intention of making the audience feel that they both hear and see the man, you confine yourself to imitating chiefly his voice, with but slight suggestions of bodily twist, gesture, or facial expression.

Your intention and purpose will be affected very commonly by the place and the audience. In a pulpit on a Sunday

morning you would hardly set a stage and act on it, and would be hesitant about indulging in very extreme impersonations. You would be much more disposed to confine your message or your entertainment to what you could carry by the voice, aided by a minimum from the rest of the body. In a chautauqua tent before five thousand people you would be strongly tempted to make your characters go the limit in cutting up capers, and might even feel justified in doing some stunts with costuming and an imaginary stage. In fact, in tents and open places and very large auditoriums such methods are almost necessary to secure and hold the visual attention of an audience. Before a women's club, however, you would be chary about going very far into impersonation; only as far as the oddities of the characters compel you for the sake of clearness and appreciation.

A teacher of English bringing out before a class the meaning of a poem from Tennyson or a passage from Shakespeare will use no acting, a minimum of impersonation, and a maximum of vocal skill. A minister in the pulpit reading from the Bible will use only the technique of vocal expression. A vaudeville "artist" will impersonate and come very close to acting. A "reader" before a luncheon club or a church "sociable" will probably give the extreme of impersonation, but will stop short of acting. A chairman of a committee in a conference or deliberative body will confine himself totally to vocal intelligence and alacrity in making clear and unambiguous the documentary matter he is presenting to the body. Always much depends upon the occasion, and whether or not the person performing fits the occasion depends upon his good sense and taste.

What is Taste? All of which raises the question, What is meant by taste? A dignified answer is that taste is the expression of man's aesthetic judgment. Very good, but what is aesthetic judgment? In the simplest language, it is an expression of your likes and dislikes, what you appreciate and what you reprobate. Tastes differ, always do, always will, always have to. Why? Because tastes grow out of your

life experiences. Tell me what a man has been through and I will tell you what his tastes are; but, of course, I will have to know all, because much of taste grows from our innermost experiences.

From a wide variety of influences come your likes and? dislikes; from your general bodily sprightliness or general slowness, from an inheritance that is phlegmatic or one that is "fidgety," from a disposition to like people or a disposition to live a recluse, from an inferiority complex or a feeling that you own the earth. Your tastes are influenced by the kind of people you have lived with; sociable or individualistic, loving ease or courting struggle, self-centered or philanthropic, "gogetters" or servants of the common good. Early education counts heavily: teachers who have drawn you out or teachers who have held you back; playmates that were willing to see and express beauty or playmates that sneered at any love of fine things; school buildings with pictures and statues; school administrators who believed in music, drama, public speaking, and the expression of good literature, or administrators who believed in nothing but textbooks, laboratories, examinations, grades, and athletics. Then probably the most potent influence of all is your exposure to things aesthetic, to the beautiful things made by man: poems, plays, stories, music, pictures, statues, buildings. Along with this, travel turns out to be very important in your tastes, for through travel you become exposed to the beautiful things men have made in other times and places. All these and more unite to influence your selection of what you call beautiful.

What is Not Good Interpretation. There is no disputing that among the many kinds of people in the world, somebody somewhere will like what you despise and despise what you like. It is just a bit risky to say that you positively must not do this or positively must not do that in interpretation; the very thing I should inveigh against most viciously might be just exactly what some of my friends dearly love. I happen to have a most violent complex against "kid pieces," yet how they do take! I am quite fond of lyric poetry with a

philosophic angle like "Twilight and Evening Star," but what a bore it is to some of my best friends! Yet there are some things found rather frequently among public readers which are rather calculated "to make the judicious grieve.” Let us run the risk of setting down a few of them.

First, there is the man who thinks all poetry should be chanted. Throwing back his head and giving himself a wide, free jaw he reads all verse as if he were an Indian making medicine or a monk chanting his office. While there is a certain value in a half-chanting effect in such sentiments as

When stars are in the quiet skies,
Then most I pine for thee-

still even this done with the full effect of a chant is little short of ridiculous. The following stanza needs to be given a range of pitch that suggests an effect which is a little bit like chanting in that the range of pitch is not very wide; yet the sheer necessity of bringing out the plain sense of it forbids that it should be reduced to chanting only:

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden lived, whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

Akin to chanting is monopitch. This is peculiarly the sin of the fourth-grade school boy who does not change his pitch enough to bring out the ordinary sense of the passage. The following paragraph means nothing unless there is a wide range of pitch. The school boy reading this would just drone it off on one level, whereas an educated and intelligent person sees to it that his voice covers a wide range and keeps far off from monopitch:

My Lords, you have heard the principles on which Mr. Hastings governs the part of Asia subjected to the British empire. Here he has declared his opinion that he is a despotic prince; that he

is to use arbitrary power; and, of course, all his acts are covered with that shield. "I know," says he, "the Constitution of Asia only from its practice." Will your Lordships submit to hear the corrupt practices of mankind made the principles of Government?

Nor is it good interpretation to rant. Some interpreters 3 read as if every sentence and every phrase and every word and every syllable bore the weight of the world's destiny. They pull, they bear down, they th-rill, they rave. Everything that happens is perfectly tremendous and the greatest thing that ever was. A good many types of audiences rather lap up this and spoil otherwise good interpreters. Read the following passage with enough earnestness to make it seem worth while, but with enough simplicity to make the story worth telling to ordinary people:

He called aloud for Miriam Lane, and said,
"Woman, I have a secret-only swear,
Before I tell you-swear upon the book,
Not to reveal it till you see me dead."

"Dead," clamor'd the good woman; "hear him talk!
I warrant, man, that we shall bring you round."
"Swear," added Enoch, sternly, "on the book."
And on the book, half-frighted, Miriam swore.
Then Enoch, rolling his gray eyes upon her,
"Did you know Enoch Arden, of this town?"
"Know him?" she said; "I knew him far away.
Ay, ay, I mind him coming down the street;
Held his head high, and cared for no man, he."
TENNYSON.

Then there is the interpreter who indulges in jingle, who seems to feel that poetry was written merely for its meter. Everything he reads is exactly like a marching army or a galloping horse. Now of course good interpretation always has a rhythm that is broken. It is the old difference between the rhythm of classical music and the way the fourth-grader reads "The Wreck of the Hesperus." The following passages in the hands of inexperienced interpreters are pure singsong. Read "Lochinvar" first as if it were a sensible story told by a sensible person: