2. Rising or falling accent with opposite termination; as Constant, Constant.
3. Accent higher or lower than preceding pitch; as • die? To To dream.
To sleep. sleep? Perchance to These three sources of vocal variety the student of elocution should have under ready and perfect control.
' The art of elocution has received comparatively little attention in modern times. The value of a good delivery is certainly not less now than it was among the orators of ancient Greece and Rome; but the assiduity with which the art was cultivated by the latter, and the estimation in which it was held by them, present a strong contrast to the negligence and apathy of modern speakers in regard to delivery. This fact is not easily accounted for; the influence of elocution being such, that an inferior address well delivered never fails to create a stronger impression on an audience, than the most mas terly composition that lacks the graces and enforcements of effective utterance and action. • The model for effective reading is to be found in the ordinary style of animated con versation. The speaker's tones are not governed by the laws of punctuation, or by formal grammatical periods. Every clause in a sentence is, to the speaker, it period. The most complex sentence is only an aggregation of correlative sentences. each of which is a separate act of thought, and should be delivered as such in reading, as it always is in speaking. Modulation will show the relation of each part to the whole, but inflection should at the same time show each part to be in itself complete, as the meat of is distinct though subordinate fact or circumstance.
The rules which some elocutionists have laid clown for the reading of sentences, are clearly at variance with this natural principle of intonation, and they lead to an artifici ality of manner which is at best a pedantic tune. The formal arrangements of inflec tions which have been prescribed for " simple" and " compound,"_" COMITICHC ing" and "concluding" series, "penultimate" and "ante-penultimate" clauses, etc., have done much to discourage students from paying proper attention to the art of elocu tion, and have altriost justified the denunciations of some authors, who have declared elocution to be altogether unworthy of study. Thus, archbishop Wirately, in iris dis gust at the jerking alternations of ups and downs pfescribed in elocutionary rules, counsels students to have nothing to do with rules, but simply to be "natural." To be
natural, however, is to follow those law,s or principles winch undoubtedly are to be deduced from the operations of the voice in spontaneous speaking; and these must be studied by all who would be "natural" in practising the art of reading. In elocution, as in painting and in every art, the highest attainment of the finished artist is to he natu ral. Nature and art are not opposites; the former is tire end of the latter; the latter the means to the former. To be natural does not "come by nature," but by art; and "art itself is nature." Elocution, therefore, is none the less " natural," that it must be stud ied as an art; and the study of this art is not justly to be contemned, whatever condem nation may be due to the errors of elocutionists.
To acquire a natural style of reading, the chief point colic attended to is, the logical clausing of sentences, so as to present, 'with separate completeness to the hearer's Mind, • every fact and every associated circumstance, whether principal or subordinate. Punc tuation is riot a sufficient guide for this purpose; it will sometimes even mislead. Thus, in the following sentence from Macaulay's _Essay on Milton: " Even when a system has been formed, there is still something to add, to alter, or to reject "—the logic of the sen tence is not brought out by the punctuation. The reader should make a modulative break after the word "something," where no comma is placed, and he should, notwith standing the separating commas, unite the three subsequent clauses by a modulative tie, to show their expletive nature, and the equal relation of each of them to their CO113111011 antecedent. Thus: " There is still something I to add, to alter, or to reject." In the following sentence from the same essay, no comma occurs, but the reader will nevertheless divide the period into at least three modulative clauses:" "The blaze of truth and liberty I may at first dazzle and bewilder I nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage." Here the first section contains tire subject of the sentence, tire second the predicate, and the third the object, with its dependent clauses. it is to be observed that •the object " nations" is separated from its governing verb " bewilder," only because the former is itself the governing antecedent to a new but subordinate sen tence.