ORATORY. The principal design of oratory is to convince or persuade. It contemplates the investigation of truth only as a secondary object. Assuming as its basis certain supposed or admitted principles or facts, its aim is, by presenting these in the form best adapted to win the assent of the understanding and impress the heart, to deter from or incline to a particular mode of resolution and action. This, the chief end of oratory, ought never to be left out of sight in any disquisition on that subject, inasmuch as upon it the general theory of the art is founded.
The oratorical art has been always held in high estimation ; among the ancient Greeks, as among the rudest savages, the possession of eloquence has ever conferred a high degree of power on its possessor. Eloquence, however, does not consist in the observance of artificial rules ; such rules are rather deduced from an examination of the qualities of eloquence, which depends upon peculiar mental powers, and is included in what is often termed genius, such as has distinguished many of the orators of antiquity, and some of modern times. The practice of reading, of delivery, and the improvement of the memory, should be diligently attended to by the orator. This constitutes the art of elocution, of which we now propose to treat.
Elocution is that pronunciation which is given to words when they are arranged into sentences and form discourse. It includes the tones of voice, the utterance, and enunciation of the speaker, with the proper accompaniments of countenance and gesture. The art of elocution therefore may be defined to be that system of rules which teaches us to pronounce written or extemporaneous composition with justness, energy, variety and ease ; and agreeably to this definition, good reading or speaking may be considered as that species of delivery which not only expresses the sense of the words so m to be barely understood, but at the same time gives them all the force, beauty, and variety of which they are susceptible.
The Greeks and Romans attention to the study of elocution, and there can be no doubt that their most celebrated orators attained to a high degree of excellence in this branch of their art; but they have left nothing on record which shows that they had made a minute analysis of the speaking voice. They did indeed distinguish its different qualities by such terms as hard, smooth, sharp, clear, hoarse, full, slender, flowing, flexible, shrill, and rigid. They were sensible to the alternations of heavy and light in syllabic utterance : they knew the time of the voice, and regarded its quantities in pro nunciation : they gave to loud and soft appropriate places in speech : they perceived the existence of pitch, or variation of high and low ; and noted further that the the and fall In the pronunciation of individual syllables are made by a concrete or continuous elide of the voice as distinguished from the discrete notes produced on inusical inatruments. They designated the pitch of vocal mounds by the term accent, making three kinds of accents, the acute, the grave, and the circumflex, which signified severally the rise, the fall, and the turn of the voice, or union of acute and grave on the same syllable. But
beyond this they did not go, and it was left to modern inquirers to give that clear and full description of the elements of speech, on which alone any definite instruction can be founded. For the advance which has been made in elocutionary science in modern times we are indebted to the useful labours of Steele, Odell, Walker, Thelwall, Chapman, Smart, and Rush, especially to the hut, who has done much to perfect what was begun by others, and whose • Philosophy of the Human Voice '* contains a more minute and satisfactory analysis of the subject than is to be found in any other work. From his book chiefly we shall borrow the substance of this article.
When the letter a, as heard in the word day, is pronounced simply as an alphabetic element, without intenseness or emotion, and as if it were a continuation and not a close of utterance, two sounds are heard continuously successive : the first has the nominal sound of this letter, and issues from the organs with a certain degree of fulness; the last is the element e, as heard in eve, which gradually diminishes until its close. During the pronunciation, the voice rises, by the concrete or continuous movement, through the interval of a tone, the beginning of the a and the termination of the e being severally the inferior and superior extremes of that tone. This sound commences full and somewhat abruptly, and gradually decreases in its upward movement, till it finally dice away in the upper extreme of the tone, having the increments of time and rise, and the decrement of fullness, equally progressive. The first portion therefore, or base of this sound, is called the radical movement, and the second portion the vanishing movement. This sound is called a concrete, or slide, to distinguish it From musical sounds, which (in their pure character) continue for a given space of time on a certain point of the scale, and then leap, as it were (discretely), to another point either higher or lower. These slides may extend through the space of a tone, or they may be carried up to any point on the scale to which the voice can attain, those intervals which are the most distinctly recognisable by the ear and the most easy of execution being the tone (or second), the third, the fifth, and the octave. The direction also which they take may be either upwards or downwards, the full opening radical however always occupying the first place, and the vanish the second. It also frequently happens that there is a union of the upward and downward, or of the downward and upward movemeutA on the same syllable : these are called wares or circumflexes; they may rise and fall through the extent of a tone, or of a third, or of any wider interval of the scale ; they are then called direct waves : or they may fall and rise through the same extent of pitch, being then called indirect waves ; they may be equal, having their constituent rise and fall through the same extent of pitch ; or they may be unequal, having either the ascent or the descent longer than the other part.