foundations. The worst of dives comes from an attempt to hang on to the board while sailing out into the air. It cannot be done. Thus it is with all art. The artist has to abandon himself to the consequences of his plunge. Every artist is a plunger. The history of the world shows that the really great writers and painters and sculptors and architects and actors and orators were people who took their plunge and never openly flinched at the possible consequences. Here is where the principle of projection plays so important a part in speech and reading; you have to be willing to get out of your every-day self and find that self that is willing to dash into the limelight and offer yourself for a target to others. The advice “Be yourself" was never intended for interpreters, impersonators, and actors. It is for home-bodies and society devotees. The artist always gets out of this tame self into one ramping and raring to go somewhere other than here. Thus success in interpretation calls for freedom of action, an enlarging of the concept of self, a bursting of the bounds of the everyday and the commonplace. This is why the rule of practice should begin with a policy of overdoing during practice. You should be sure to go far enough before you are ready to go at all. Half-way practice and work leaves you in the air with one hand and foot reaching for the spring board. Work hard enough, just as work, but also let the things you do, the exercises you set yourself, be freely done. Some few may well fear the evils of exaggeration and bombast; but hardly with our American school system as it is, turning out young Robots all cut to pattern and drilled into restraint and fear of taking the open places. The majority of our American youth will do well, if they wish to delight others with the spoken word, to practice and cherish the virtues of going the last mile, even of going two when only one is demanded. Especially is this advice allowable when we consider that interpretation is the art of all arts that most invites to laziness. There are the words and supposedly the ideas ready at hand, all bought and paid for. Yes, but only for the person so intense on being rich in thought and magnetic in presentation that he will work and work and work until he has extracted the last ion of power from the words that so easily trip the unwary and the somnolent. Let the young artist in the realm of words remember that there is a vast difference between a meaning and the meaning that best carries the author's intention. Genius in interpretation is genius in mastering the how of getting the best meaning and then of carrying it alive and glowing to those whom he would enlighten and charm. L.. CHAPTER XV LONG SELECTIONS FOR PUBLIC READING COL. BRERETON'S AUNTY 1 It was pleasant enough inside the Justice's front parlour, with its bright ingrain carpet, its gilt clock, and its marble-topped centertable. But the Justice and the five gentlemen who were paying him a business call-although it was Sunday morning-looked, the whole half-dozen of them, ill in accord with the spirit of the Spring day. The Justice looked annoyed. The five assembled gentlemen looked stern. “Well, as you say," remarked the fat little Justice, who was an Irishman, "if this divilment goes on-" "It's not a question of going on, Mr. O'Brien," broke in Alfred Winthrop; "it has gone on too long." Alfred is a little inclined to be arrogant with the unwinthropian world; and, moreover, he was rushing the season in a very grand Isuit of white flannels. He looked rather too much of a lord of creation for a democratic community. Antagonism lit the Justice's eye. "I'm afraid we've got to do it, O'Brien," I interposed, hastily. "Well, well," he assented; "let's have him up and see what he's got to say for himself. Mike! bring up Colonel Brereton!" Colonel Brereton had appeared in our village about a year before that Sunday. Why he came, whence he came, he never deigned to say. But he made no secret of the fact that he was an unreconstructed Southron. He had a little money when he arrived-enough to buy a tiny one-story house on the outskirts of the town. By vocation he was a lawyer, and, somehow or other, he managed to pick up enough to support him in his avocation, which, we soon found out, was that of village drunkard. In this capacity he was a glorious, picturesque and startling success. So long as the Colonel's excesses threatened only his own liver, no one interfered with him. But on the night before we called upon the Justice, the Colonel, having brooded long over his wrongs at the hands of the Yankees, and having made himself a reservoir of cocktails, decided to enter his protest against the whole system of 1 Reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, publishers. free coloured labour by cutting the liver out of every negro in the town; and he had slightly lacerated Winthrop's mulatto coachman before a delegation of citizens fell upon him, and finding him unwilling to relinquish his plan, placed him for the night in the lock-up in Squire O'Brien's cellar. We waited for the Colonel. From under our feet suddenly arose a round of scuffling and smothered imprecations. A minute later, Mike, the herculean son of the Justice, appeared in the doorway, bearing a very small man hugged to his breast as a baby hugs a doll. "Let me down, seh!" shouted the Colonel. Mike set him down, and he marched proudly into the room, and seated himself with dignity and firmness on the extreme edge of a chair. The Colonel was very small indeed for a man of so much dignity. He could not have been more than five foot one or two; he was slender-but his figure was shapely and supple. He was unquestionably a handsome man, with fine, thin features and an aquiline profile-like a miniature Henry Clay. His hair was snow-white-and though he was small, his carriage was large, and military. There was something military, too, about his attire. He wore a high collar, a long blue frock coat, and tight, light-gray trousers with straps. That is, the coat had once been blue, the trousers once light-gray, but they were now of many tints and tones, and, at that exact moment, they had here and there certain peculiar high lights of whitewash. The Colonel did not wait to be arraigned. Sweeping his black, piercing eye over our little group, he arraigned us. "Well, gentlemen, I reckon you think you've done a right smart thing, getting the Southern gentleman in a hole? A pro-dee-gious fine thing, I reckon, since it's kept you away from chu'ch. Nice Sunday mo'ning to worry a Southern gentleman! Gentleman who's owned a plantation that you could stick this hych picayune town into one co'neh of! Owned mo' niggehs than you eveh saw. Robbed of his land and his niggehs by you Yankee gentlemen. Drinks a little wine to make him fo'get what he's suffehed. Gets ovehtaken. Tries to avenge an insult to his honah. Put him in a felon's cell and whitewash his gyarments. And now you come hych-you come hyeh" here his eye fell with deep disapproval upon Winthrop's white flannels-"you come hyeh in youh underclothes, and you want to have him held fo' Special Sessions." "You are mistaken, Colonel Brereton," Winthrop interposed; "if we can have your promise-" "I will promise you nothing, seh! I will make no conventions with you! I will put no restrictions on my right to defend my honah. Put me in youh felon's cell. I will rot in youh infehnal dungeons; but I will make no conventions with you. You can put me in striped breeches, but you cyan't put my honah in striped breeches!" "That settles it," said the Justice. "And all this hyeh fuss and neglect of youh religious duties, fo' one of the cheapest and most o'nery niggehs I eveh laid eyes on. Why, I wouldn't have given one hundred dollahs fo' that niggeh befo' the wah. No, seh, I give you my wo'd, that niggeh ain't wo'th ninety dollahs!" "Mike!" said the Justice, significantly. The Colonel arose promptly, to insure a voluntary exit. He bowed low to Winthrop. "Allow me to hope, seh, that you won't catch cold." And with one lofty and comprehensive salute he marched haughtily back to his dungeon, followed by the towering Mike. I was sitting on my verandah that afternoon, reading. Hearing my name softly spoken, I looked up and saw the largest and oldest negress I had ever met. She was at least six feet tall, well-built but not fat, full black, with carefully dressed gray hair. I knew at once from her neat dress, her well-trained manner, the easy deference of the curtsey she dropped me, that she belonged to the class that used to be known as "house darkeys." “I understand, seh,” she said, in a gentle, low voice, “that you gentlemen have got Cunnle Bre'eton jailed?" I assented. "How much will it be, seh, to get him out?" She produced a fat roll of twenty and fifty dollar bills. "I do fo' Cunnle Bre'eton. I have always done fo' him. I was his Mammy when he was a baby.” "You may go surety for Colonel Brereton, but he is certain to repeat the offense." "No, seh, the Cunnle won't make any trouble when I'm here to do fo' him." "You were one of his slaves?" "No, seh. Cunnle Bre'eton neveh had any slaves, seh. His father, Majah Bre'eton, he had slaves one time, I guess, but when the Cunnle was bo'n, he was playing kyards fo' a living, and he had only me. When the Cunnle's mother died, Majah Bre'eton he went to Mizzoura, and he put the baby in my ahms, and he said to me, 'Sabrine,' he sez, 'you do fo' him.' And I've done fo' him eveh since. Sometimes he gets away from me, and then he gets kind o' wild. This is the longest time he eveh got away from me. But I always find him, and then he's all right." "But you have to deal with a violent man." |