73 



ORATORY. 



ORATORY. 



carried on by different persons, and generally at a loss, they ceased 

 altogether. Though it would be unjust not to admit that, even 

 during this unfavourable interval, there were two or three seasons that 

 reflected some credit on the managers, in which ' The Messiah/ with 

 Mozart's added accompaniments, was first publicly produced in London, 

 and also Beethoven's ' Mount of Olives.' Of late years, chiefly through 

 the exertions of the Sacred Harmonic Society, oratorios have been 

 restored to more than their early popularity in this country, and are 

 probably performed with more power, feeling, and precision than at 

 any previous period. The oratorios of Mendelssohn have contributed 

 not a little to this work. [MENDELSSOHN, in Bioo. Div.] 



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 modem 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 as 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 paid "great 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 las 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 rise and fall in the pronunciation of 

 individual syllables are made by a concrete or continuous slide of the 

 voice as distinguished from the discrete notes produced on musical 

 instruments. They designated the pitch of vocal sounds 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 modem 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 last, 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 , 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 ere, 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 

 ning 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 dies away in the upper extreme of the tone, 



Second edition, 8ro, Philadelphia, 1833. See also Mr. Stccle's 'Essay 

 toward! Mtabtuhing the Melody and Mfa-urc of Speech, to be expressed and 

 perpetuated by peculiar nymbola,' London, 1775. The second edition was pub. 

 llnhcd in ir;9, with the title of Prosodia Rationalist Mr. Odell's work is 

 entitled ' An Essay on the Element*, Accents, and Prosody of the English 

 Language,' 12mo, London, 1805. 



laving 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 ranis/tiny 

 movement. This sound is called a concrete, or slide, to distinguish it 

 :rom 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 

 my 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 alao 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 movement,? 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. 



The succession of the seven sounds of any one series, to which the 

 octave is usually added, is called the Natural or Diatonic Scale. In 

 speech, as in music, it consists of five tones and two semitones, the 

 latter being the spaces between its third and fourth and its seventh 

 and eighth degrees. But a progression may also be formed by semi- 

 tones : these have only half the extent of pitch which the full tones 

 have : like them, they may be carried upwards or downwards, and 

 they often occur in the form of waves. They serve for the expression 

 of animal distress. 



But the succession of discrete sounds may be exhibited under still 

 more minute divisions. These consist of a transition from place to 

 place in pitch, over intervals much smaller than a semitone, each 

 point being, as it were, rapidly touched by a short and abrupt emission 

 of voice. This description may be illustrated by that noise in the 

 throat which is called gurgling, and by the neighing of a horse. The 

 analogy here regards principally the momentary duration, frequency, 

 and abruptness of sound, for the gurgling is generally made by a quick 

 iteration in one unvarying line of pitch, whereas in the scale now 

 under consideration each successive pulse of sound is taken at a 

 minute interval above the last, till the series reaches the octave. The 

 precise extent of these small intervals it is very difficult to estimate. 

 They may however be carried concretely through the wider interval 

 of the scale, provided they do not lose their distinctive character of 

 momentary time and abruptness of utterance. These concretes are 

 used both in laughter and in crying. In the descending scale, the 

 direction not only of the radicals but of the vanishes is downwards. 

 fatunatloH is the act of performing the movements of pitch through 

 the several scales. 



There are then four scales of pitch for the speaking voice : 



1. The Concrete, in which from the outset to the termination 

 of the voice there is no appreciable interval, or interruption of 

 continuity. 



2. The Diatonic, the transitions of which are principally by whole 

 t. ]!"-. 



3. The Semitonic, or Chromatic, consisting of an entire succession of 

 semitones. 



4. The Tmnuloui, consisting of minute intervals smaller than the 

 semitone. 



Concrete Scale. 



The alphabet is, in our grammars, usually divided into vowels, con- 

 sonants, mutes, and semivowels ; but it will be more useful to class the 

 elements according to their use in intonation. As the number of 

 these elementary sounds in the English language exceeds the literal 

 signs, and some of the letters are made to represent various sounds 

 without any rule of discrimination, it is necessary to use short 

 words of known pronunciation, containing the elementary sounds, 

 with the letters which represent them marked in italics. The ele- 

 ments of articulation are thirty-five, and they may be arranged under 

 three general heads. 



1. The first division embraces those sounds which display the pro- 

 perties of the radical and vanish in the most perfect manner. They are 

 twelve in number, and are heard in the usual sound of the separated 

 italics in the following words : o-ll, o-rt, <i-n, n-le, o-ur, /-sle, o-ld, cc-1, 



