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Even poetry can only affect us when it exists in the form of words produced by lip or pen. Between the glowing thought of the poet and the corresponding emotion produced in ourselves there must intervene some form of technique i.e., some application of neuro-muscular action. This latter term is a convenient one, and has been already explained.
It tends to emphasize the close relationship existing between muscle and nerve, and to justify the expression "neuro-muscular mechanism," the nervous system being as important for movements as the muscles. Such are the appearances presented under the microscope by skeletal or striped muscles such as those of the larynx.
Thus we see that play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form, but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played off, each in its own time.
People in singing and speaking will, as in other cases, get what they work for, but have no right to expect to sing or speak effectively by inspiration, any more than the athlete to win a race because he is born naturally fleet of foot or with a quick intelligence. In each case the ideas are converted into performance, the results attained, by the exercise of neuro-muscular mechanisms.
Here and there nowadays, among the better social classes, there is ample provision for the development of muscular power in girls, but in any generalized way there is no adequate opportunity for such exercise, and among the working class, above all, in the section of it which touches the lower middle class, although their lives are destined to be filled with a constant strain on the neuro-muscular system from work at home or in shops, etc., there is usually a minimum of healthy exercise and physical development.
Exactly what changes are made in the larynx, and by what means, have already been described, and will be again considered in more than one part of this volume. The main fact is that owing to a multitude of neuro-muscular mechanisms the different parts of the respiratory and laryngeal apparatus are brought to work in harmony for the production of tones.
But Stanton's marvelous neuro-muscular system was already in action. At this stage of the game, it would be suicide to let the Nipe get close. He couldn't fend off eight grasping hands with his own two.
But it is of the greatest importance that the exact nature of this process be realized by both students and teachers, for weighty considerations grow out of it. We wish to impress the fact that the nature of all neuro-muscular processes is essentially the same. Learning to sing is like learning to talk, and the latter is not radically different from learning to walk.
His results depend on the most accurate adjustment of certain neuro-muscular mechanisms, and one might suppose that it would be obvious to all who are concerned with this art that a knowledge of the structure and functions of these delicate arrangements of Nature would be at least of great if not of essential importance.
At the present day that ideal is not so fervently preached as of old, but its traditional influence still to some extent persists, while there is the further difficulty that adequate time and opportunity and encouragement are by no means generally afforded to girls for the cultivation and training of the romping instincts which are really a serious part of education, for it is by such free exercise of the whole body that the neuro-muscular system, the basis of all vital activity, is built up.
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