sing a _very_ ignorant audience, had to use the word
'rotatory,' for example, he might make a cyclic movement or two with his
hand, to illustrate its meaning. But to do so before an audience
presumably intelligent enough to know the meaning of the word, would be
impertinent--a 'wasteful and ridiculous excess.' So, too, it would be,
to illustrate the word 'somersault,' before an audience of ordinary
intelligence. The absurdity of mimetic action is well illustrated in the
following: 'I have heard,' says a writer in 'Expression' (Vol. I., No.
2), published in Boston, 'of a popular public reader of Boston giving
last season Wordsworth's "Daffodils"; and as she came to the last two
lines,--

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils,

she put her hand to her heart and with pleasure indicated by a
sentimental flash of the eye upon the audience, danced a few graceful
steps expressive of exuberant joy, and bowed herself off the platform
amid the vociferous applause of the audience. The reader's taste in this
case was no worse than that of the audience that applauded her. The
incident shows how great the general lack of taste, and the need of the
systematic study of fitness in the relation of thought to its
expression.'

I would say rather than 'lack of taste,' lack of spiritual life,
although the former is closely allied with the latter. A reader who has
assimilated the 'Daffodils,' who can sympathetically reproduce within
himself the heart-dance of the poet, can better reveal that
reproduction through the voice (the requisite vocal culture being
assumed) than through such mimetic foolery as the above. He would not
and could not condescend to the latter, if he had feeling deep enough
truly to know the poem of the 'Daffodils.' True feeling is always
serious, even if it be that of deep joy. The trouble with many public
readers is, that they don't truly know, have not inwardly experienced,
what they attempt to interpret vocally; and, as a consequence, they
resort to what disgusts people of real culture.

I was once present, by accident, at a lecture given by a
Delsarto-elocutionary woman, and in the course of the lecture, she
presented what, she said, would be false gestures in reciting Whittier's
Maud Muller. She then recited the poem, with, according to her notions,
_true_ gestures, which were more in number than Cicero made, perhaps,
in his orations against Cataline, or Demosthenes, in hi