Page images
PDF
EPUB

INTRODUCTION.

RHETORIC, or the Art of Persuasion, is of such importance in the great concerns of society, that it is not surprising so much has been written on this subject in every age and nation, where the Arts and Sciences have been cultivated. The power of pleasing and persuading those whom we address has excited every faculty in the mind of man, to detect, if possible, the secret springs of that pleasure and persuasion which gives us such dominion over the feelings of our fellow creatures.

The ancients have left us everlasting monuments of their excellence in this art, and, in their endeavours to investigate the principles of it, have descended to such niceties as we think childish and insignificant: but that branch of Oratory which Demosthenes called the first, the second, and the third part of it, and which was so assiduously cultivated by the ancients-that, alas! perished with them, and left their compositions like a lifeless corpse, beautiful in death, but deprived of all that vigour and energy which agitated and astonished their wondering auditors. We hear at this distance but a faint echo of that thunder in Demosthenes, which shook the throne of Macedon to its foundations,

B

and are sometimes at a loss for that conviction in the arguments of Cicero, which balanced, in the midst of convulsions, the tottering republic of Rome.

This part of Rhetoric, which consists in pronunciation and action, and which may be called the Soul of Oratory, is, from its very nature, less capable of being communicated by writing, and has therefore been less improved by the joint labours of succeeding ages; and thus, while invention, disposition, and elocution, in the ancient sense of the word, have been cultivated by the moderns to the highest degree of perfection, Pronunciation or Delivery has scarcely attained a mediocrity. The importance, however, of this part of Oratory has induced several ingenious men to give the outlines of it upon paper, and to describe, as well as they were able, those variations of voice which the various structure and import of a sentence seemed to require. Numberless have been the attempts to mark to the eye some of those modifications of tone and inflexion which form the essence of a good enunciation. Pauses, dashes, notes of interrogation, exclamation, and parenthesis, are but so many attempts to facilitate the delivery of written language, and, if properly adapted, have undoubtedly a consi derable use. Nay, marking the emphatic words in a different character is sometimes found highly advantageous; but the most simple, the most marking, and the most useful method of all, seems hitherto to have been entirely neglected, and that is distinguishing the speaking voice into its two essential turns or inflexions, the rising and the falling. This neglect is the

more remarkable, as the want of some such distinction of the voice has unquestionably been the occasion that so little progress has been made in conveying the art of speaking upon paper, and teaching it by rules.

Almost all our writers on this subject, after giving rules for pausing, tell us there are cer tain tones and inflexions of voice which are of much more importance to the meaning of the words we read than the points we make use of, however judiciously adapted. But here they generally leave us. The Interrogation and Exclamation points, indeed, are said not only to require suitable pauses, but likewise an elevation of voice, and the Parenthesis a moderate depression of it. Mr. Perry, in his English Grammar, has gone so far as to tell us, that the Interrogation, when it does not begin with the relatives who, which, or what, or the adverbs how, where, when, &c. requires an elevation of voice; and an old writer; Charles Butler, of Magdalen College, Oxford, has, in his English Grammar, gone one step farther, and told us that this species of Interrogation not only requires an elevation but a different turn of voice. Here was a hint which one would have imagined would have set some grammarian at work to inquire what this turn of voice was; but more than a hundred years passed without any such inquiry; till the author of the present work, about twenty years ago, when he was preparing to give lessons at Oxford, and trying every method to gain some permanent modifications of the speaking voice, in order to form some certain rules for reading or adapting the voice to the structure and meaning of a sentence, he observed that

every word had necessarily either an upward or a downward turn, or continued in a monotone. This distinction he thought of such importance as to make him hope it might attract the notice of the public; and he accordingly introduced it, in a work called Elements of Elocution, but found no notice taken of it, till within these last three or four years, and then very imperfectly. About ten years ago he observed that these two turns, the upward and the downward, were sometimes united on the same syllable, or, as it may be called, in the same explosion of voice, and formed a compound turn, either beginning with the upward and ending with the downward, or vice versa, and these compound turns he called circumflexes. Here he began to flatter himself that he had made a discovery, and found means to bind that varying Proteus, the speaking voice; as he conceived that there was no tortuous or zigzag turn in speaking which might not be reduced to one of these modifications, and, consequently, that he had some permanent data on which to found a system of Rhetorical pronunciation.

It is to the novelty and utility of this distinction that the author claims the attention of the public. He has already written largely on it, but has still something to add. By the blessing of Providence he has lived long enough to see the truth of his principles universally assented to, and, in some instances, adopted in practice. The utility of them he is fully persuaded of by a thousand experiments; but of this the public at large are undoubtedly the best judges.

RHETORICAL GRAMMAR.

THAT part of Rhetoric which relates to composition has been so elaborately treated both by the ancients and moderns, that I shall in some measure invert the common order, and at first chiefly confine myself to that branch of it which relates to pronunciation and delivery. Preparatory to which, it will be necessary to settle the pronunciation of several letters, syllables, and words, which are not only often mispronounced by the younger class of pupils, but which are frequently little understood by those who are more advanced in the art. Without quoting Quintilian, we may easily conclude, that, if these first principles of speaking are not distinctly and accurately learned, whatever we acquire afterward must be faulty and erroneous. I shall therefore begin with settling the true pronunciation of those letters, syllables, and words, which are the most liable to be mistaken by the generality of readers and speakers.

« PreviousContinue »