VI

THE RHETORIC OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

There is no better way to cultivate oratorical style than to study the models of the world's great orators. We shall find some of the distinctive qualities of their speeches in their use of word, phrase, idiom, metaphor, and illustration. If "style is the man," then we may study the man and his method through his language.

The ultimate object of the oration is to convince and persuade men. It is to move men to action. Quintilian, in his treatise on the education of an orator, refers to the many celebrated definitions of oratory before his time, such as, "oratory is the art of persuading," "the power of persuading by speaking," "the leading of men by speaking to that which the speaker wishes," "the power of finding out whatever can persuade in speaking," "to say all that ought to be said in order to persuade," "the power of saying on every subject whatever can be found to persuade, ""the power of finding whatever is persuasive in speaking,” “the power of discovering and expressing, with elegance, whatever is credible on any subject whatever." Quintilian contents himself with the definition that "Oratory is the art of speaking well," and adds that "Its object and ultimate end must be to speak well."

The difference between an oration and an essay should be clearly defined. An oration is based upon a brief, or out

line, with all its divisions distinctly indicated in the speaker's mind. It is prepared for the ear, while the essay is intended for the eye. In the one case the speaker may repeat his thought as often as he thinks necessary to accomplish his purpose; in the other, the reader may reread such portions as are not clear to him. The oration may have a wide range of thought, while the essay must strictly observe unity and method throughout. The oration, furthermore, is designed to appeal directly to the emotions, and consequently is more vivid and varied than the essay. First, let us read an extract from Ruskin's essay, "Modern Painters":

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered if once in three days, or thereabouts, a great, ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist of dew. And instead of this there is not a moment of any day of our lives when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty that it is quite certain that it is all done for us and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to

feel them if he be always with them: but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not

"Too bright or good

For human nature's daily food;"

it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together, almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations: we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet; and another, it has been windy; and another, it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall, white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south and smote upon their summits until they melted and moldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail nor the

drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature which can only be addrest through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep and the calm and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is understood; things which the angels work out for us daily and yet vary eternally, which are never wanting and never repeated, which are to be found always, yet each found but once; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given. These are what the artist of highest aim must study; it is these, by the combination of which his ideal is to be created; these, of which so little notice is ordinarily taken by common observers that I fully believe, little as people in general are concerned with art, more of their ideas of sky are derived from pictures than from reality, and that if we could examine the conception formed in the minds of most educated persons when we talk of clouds, it would frequently be found composed of fragments of blue and white reminiscences of the old masters.

Fundamental qualities of an effective oratorical style are simplicity and directness. These are the natural expression of sincerity. A good speaker despises rhetorical tricks and artificiality. He uses as far as possible pure Saxon words, gives preference to words that are short and concrete, and avoids ambiguity and circumlocution.

Thoughts, not words, should be great. A man should speak not in a literary style, but in the language of the people. Beecher well says: "Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth." To insure simplicity of language, one should have a definite purpose before him, both in writing and delivering his speech. A man who is thoroughly in earnest

is never grandiloquent. The speeches of Abraham Lincoln are models of unaffected simplicity. His Farewell Speech, delivered at Springfield, Ill., February 11, 1861, is a characteristic example:

MY FRIENDS: No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I can not succeed. With that assistance, I can not fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

The speaker's style should be clear and compact, but never so concise as to be obscure. Every student should carefully read Herbert Spencer's essay on "The Philosophy of Style," in which he says:

Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts the greater will be the effect produced. In either case, whatever force is absorbed by the machine is deducted from the result. A reader or listener has at each moment but a limited amount of mental power available. To recognize and interpret the symbols presented to him, requires part of this power; to arrange and combine the images suggested requires a further part; and only that part which remains can be used for realizing the thought conveyed. Hence, the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the