ion, more or
less distinct, of how some very significant sentence in Shakespeare, for
example, should be uttered, and yet his voice is not sufficiently
obedient to his will and his feelings. He therefore has something to
work after, and in time may vocally realize, to his full satisfaction,
his conception; and in doing so, he has acquired some new and valuable
control of his voice, which he can make use of, whenever required, in
the rendering of other expressions.

A true poem is a piece of articulate music which may require to be long
practised upon by the voice before all its possible significance and
effectiveness be realized. But there must be an ideal back of the
practice (merely to keep 'going over' the poem will not do); not, of
course, an entirely distinct ideal, it may be more or less vague, but
such an ideal as may be got in advance through a responsiveness to its
informing life. This ideal will become more and more distinct in the
course of the practice.

This is true of every form of art. The artist starts with an ideal more
or less vague (but it is an ideal which motives all his work), and this
ideal only gradually takes shape in the process of its realization in a
picture or a statue. Composing continues to the end. The poet is still
composing, still working after a fuller realization of his ideal, when
he is making the last verbal change in his poem. (Note 4.) To quote from
Browning's 'A Death in the Desert':

God's gift was that man should conceive of truth,
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake
As midway help, till he reach fact indeed.
The statuary ere he mould a shape
Boasts a like gift, the shape's idea, and next
The aspiration to produce the same;
So, taking clay, he calls his shape thereout,
Cries ever, 'Now I have the thing I see':
Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought,
From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself.

* * * * *

God only makes the live shape at a jet.

Interpretative reading goes on in the same way. After a reader's long
familiarity with a poem, and when he thinks he has realized all its
possibilities of vocal effectiveness, some new vocal movement on a
single word, it may be, is suggested, which is a decided contribution to
the effect before reached. The play of Hamlet abounds in little
speeches, and single words, even, whose possibilities of expressiveness
can hardly be exhaus