,
until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms that were so
often at discord with one another, the tune and rhythm of the verse and
the tune and rhythm of the music. Then we tried, persuaded by somebody who
thought quarter-tones and less intervals the especial mark of speech as
distinct from singing, to write out what we did in wavy lines. On finding
something like these lines in Tibetan music, we became so confident that
we covered a large piece of pasteboard, which now blows up my fire in the
morning, with a notation in wavy lines as a demonstration for a lecture;
but at last Mr. Dolmetsch put us back to our first thought. He made us a
beautiful instrument half psaltery half lyre which contains, I understand,
all the chromatic intervals within the range of the speaking voice; and he
taught us to regulate our speech by the ordinary musical notes.

Some of the notations he taught us--those in which there is no lilt, no
recurring pattern of sounds--are like this notation for a song out of the
first Act of _The Countess Cathleen_.

It is written in the old C clef, which is, I am told, the most reasonable
way to write it, for it would be below the stave on the treble clef or
above it on the bass clef. The central line of the stave corresponds to
the middle C of the piano; the first note of the poem is therefore D. The
marks of long and short over the syllables are not marks of scansion, but
show the syllables one makes the voice hurry or linger over.

[Illustration: Song and music.]

One needs, of course, a far less complicated notation than a singer, and
one is even permitted slight modifications of the fixed note when dramatic
expression demands it and the instrument is not sounding. The notation
which regulates the general form of the sound leaves it free to add a
complexity of dramatic expression from its own incommunicable genius which
compensates the lover of speech for the lack of complex musical
expression. Ordinary speech is formless, and its variety is like the
variety which separates bad prose from the regulated speech of Milton, or
anything that is formless and void from anything that has form and beauty.
The orator, the speaker who has some little of the great tradition of his
craft, differs from the debater very largely because he understands how to
assume that subtle monotony of voice which runs through the nerves like
fire.

Even when one is speaking to a single note sounded faintly on t