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INTRODUCTION.

OCCASIONS FOR SPEAKING.

It is often said that oratory is on the decline. The occasions are rare, we are told, when there is a real demand for it. The newspaper, the magazine, and the popular novel have come, usurping the function performed by the orator of the olden time. When, as in our day, many can write and practically all can read, why should any speak? It is doubtless true that oratory -in the sense of heightened appeal to the feelings-is not so often heard as formerly. It has almost disappeared from legislative halls and has become less frequent in courts of law and in some other places where it once flourished. But in the meantime, in these and a thousand other places, public speech of a less pretentious and less ardent sort,-addressed primarily not to the feelings, but to the reason, has become almost a daily necessity. This increase in the number of situations calling for public address is due to the complexity of modern life. All of our professions and trades, all of our enterprises,-political, religious, philanthropic, educational, and social, even our pleasures and sports, are highly organized. Each has its stated meetings, each its occasions for the oral communication of ideas and feelings. There probably never was a time when these occasions were half so numerous as they are today. As a result, the art of public speech has become less of a profession, less, a matter of set -rules and formulæ, less

the possession of a particular class of people exclusively devoted to its cultivation, and more of a staple need of the many. A good reason, this, why every educated person should wish to learn more about it. Carlyle congratulated the English on the fact that they were a nation of poor speakers. He thought that the less talking there was, the greater would be the amount of useful work accomplished. But since some talking is inevitable in order that work may be directed into channels that are worth while, it seems a strange reason for pride in any nation, or in any individual, that the thing is done poorly. Carlyle's

friend, Emerson, had a better word for his countrymen, when he wrote that "if there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is in the United States. Here is room for every degree of it, on every one of its ascending stages, that of useful speech in our commercial, manufacturing, railroad, and educational conventions; that of political advice and persuasion on the grandest theatre, reaching, as all good men trust, into a vast future, and so compelling the best thought and noblest administrative ability that the citizen can offer. And here are the services of science, the demands of art, and the lessons of religion, to be brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people. Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and of character, to serve such a constituency ?"

KINDS OF PUBLIC ADDRESS.

In the quotation just given, Emerson suggests a classification of speeches. The principle of his classification is the relative importance of their subject-matter.

His first division includes utterances of immediate practical utility, utterances that deal with affairs and that deal with affairs mainly on the matter-of-fact basis; beginning with commerce, but rising successively to the larger interests involved in manufacturing, in the railroad problem, in education. His second division includes those utterances that touch our political interests. It is higher than the first because here we have to deal not merely with matters of fact, but with matters of national sentiment and aspiration; consequently there is here offered a broader field for the element of advice and persuasion. His third division includes those utterances that deal with man's most vital interests, speeches of which the end is to render science, art, or religion most serviceable, to make them a part of the life of every man. Here the field for the element of persuasion is widest. It is clear that Emerson's classification will apply equally well to written discourse and that it covers the field. It is as specific also as a classification of so many species can be made and remain a true classification. It would not be difficult to place any speech in one of Emerson's three divisions.

A classification on an entirely different principle was made by Aristotle. His principle of classification is the attitude of the audience toward the speech. Audiences, he says, are either judges of things done in the past, as are legal judges and juries; or they are judges of things proposed for the future, as are legislative or political assemblies; or they are judges of the speech itself considered merely as a work of art. Hence Aristotle classifies oratory as (1) judicial, or the oratory of the bar, the aim of which is the securing or protecting of personal rights by convincing and persuading judges and juries; (2) deliberative, or the oratory before con

ventions, assemblies, legislatures, and public meetings, political, religious, commercial, or educational; and (3) epideictic, or the oratory of display, now more frequently called occasional oratory, under which heading modern writers who follow Aristotle have put practically all secular speaking that is not easily classified as judicial or deliberative, the eulogy, the anniversary address, the dedicatory address, the popular lecture, the commencement address, the after-dinner speech, etc. To all this it is necessary to add (4) pulpit oratory, a species that has appeared since Aristotle wrote. The mere statement of this classification reveals its remoteness from modern life and its insufficiency as a classification of the multifarious public speaking of our day. The basis of the Aristotelian division is the mental attitude of the audience. But the psychology of audiences is not so simple a matter as this four-fold division assumes it to be. Emerson once called attention to the undoubted fact that every audience is composed of many audiences; that the speaker finds himself addressing now one, now another, of these lesser audiences; that very rarely, if ever, may a homogeneous state of mind be presumed in all listeners; that the very same listener may be successively in several mental attitudes during the same address. The principle by which orations are to be classified. cannot, then, be a principle based solely upon a homogeneous state of mind which probably does not exist. It is clear, too, that the state of mind appealed to by a deliberative oration may be, perversely enough, that which this classification assigns exclusively to judicial oratory. Modern pulpit oratory, also, may be, and often is, judicial or deliberative in spirit; it may look either to the past or to the future. The epideictic was thought

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