A SYSTEM OF ELOCUTION.

INTRODUCTION.

THE Greek Demosthenes, on being asked what constituted the first, second, and third excellence of an orator, replied three times in succession, manner; and the Roman Cicero opines that the possession of this elocutionary manner can invest an oration, otherwise commonplace, with an expression and power unattainable by the mere literary artist.* This is no feeble and uncertain voice asserting the dignity and highly practical character of elocutionary art. Philip of Macedon professed to dread the eloquence of Demosthenes more than all the fleets and armies of the Athenians; and scarcely less effective was the deep and flexible baritone voice of him, the gathering of whose flowing robe, the scenic facility of whose countenance, and the rhetorical gesture of whose hand, swayed the multitude of the forum by an impulse mighty and irresistible, and dug for the notorious Catiline his dishonoured and bloody grave on the field of Pistoria. And this theurgic power is as

*"Actio in dicendo una dominatur. Sine hâc summus orator esse numero nullo potest: mediocris, hâc instructus, summos saepo superare. Huic primas dedisse Demosthenes dicitur, cum rogaretur quid in dicendo esset primum; huic secundus, huic tertius.”— CIC. De Orat. 1. iii. n. 213.

serted, by those who know best, by the two great masters of declamation themselves, to be evolved, not from the finelyrounded periods of the most splendid diction, but from the speaker's impersonation with his speech, every particle and every clause vibrating, as it were, through the thought of the brain or the passion of the heart, made chaste by the judgment and the discipline of elocutionary training.

Systems of Elocution must always be the more or less excellent as they are the more or less simple and natural. But all the phenomena of nature resolve themselves into immutable codes of laws, which laws are the subjectmatter of the sciences, and those laws or formulæ certainly extend to verbal communication. Hence, in the communication of our simplest thought or feeling, a science is involved, not in the language in which it is signified, which may be the radical phenomenon itself, but in the utterance. In this respect nature would make all possessed of the faculty of language strictly amenable to her laws, but that their legitimate sway is counteracted by vitiated taste or a bluntness of mental or æsthetic perception, so that with the communicated thought or feeling there is too little of mental or æsthetic sympathy. Hence a true and natural system of Elocution is not merely an effective rendering of thought and feeling into language, but is involved in the principles of ethics. The language of intense passion is uniform in its pauses, manner, and inflections, in whatever tongue it may be uttered, and whether the individual that utters it be learned or illiterate. If this be true, why does the same law not apply to all utterance of language whatsoever? Simply because in intense passion we cannot dissemble. If through some occult origin we have language equal to the expression of the loftiest feeling and the most subtile thought, it is more than a

feasible hypothesis that we have primarily an expression common to all language expressive of the same feeling or thought. If this be taken for granted, it follows that Elocution is a moral law of nature, and its lack of uniform compatibility with utterance more than a deleterious conventionalism—a rusted and defective link in the grand chain of moral philosophy. If words are spoken to mean something different from what is thought or felt, or perhaps to mean nothing at all, can it be wondered at that there is no grace, no beauty, no earnestness and truth, in the manner in which they are spoken ?

There is an order of individuals which corrupts nature's general laws of verbal expression, because with them it is polite and elegant to talk or pretend to talk in the absence of all impulse or emotion whatsoever, and words, to be more than the signs and signals of telegraphy, must be invested with something of the thought of the brain or the feeling of the heart. The speeches of the lover to his mistress, the lamentation of the mother for the death of her first-born, the supplication of the beggar dying of starvation, to these the most fastidious professor of Elocution would not take exception. Because we have in requisition the elements of Elocution, at least, when we really mean and feel what we say. All our great orators and actors have been men of a deep and earnest nature, vir probus bonus orator, and their eminence has been perhaps less attained by dint of talent proper, than through the earnest and intense qualities of their sensibilities. The actor makes his happiest chef d'œuvre when his personal identity becomes utterly lost in the character which he represents. If the reader or the actor may not be, strictly speaking, orators or poets themselves, though they lack the impulsive strength of the one and the fire of the other, though they cannot be the