INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

ON

DECLAMATION.

THE PROMINENT PRINCIPLES OF GESTURE.

DECLAMATION, as an academic exercise designed to prepare the student for the practice of public speaking, includes, properly, a course of training in gesture, or the attitude and action of the body, as well as the cultivation and discipline of the voice. The necessity of educational training is as great, obviously, in the former of these departments of oratory as in the latter. In both cases, the actual business of public life calls on the individual to do what he has not been accustomed to, in the relations of private life, viz.-to exert his vocal organs and his whole bodily action on a much larger scale, and in a much more forcible style of expression, than occurs in the communications of the domestic or the social circle. It is this unwonted demand upon his energies that embarrasses, and impedes, and, perhaps, utterly baffles the novice in public speaking; and it is to do away such hindrances that academic exercises are prescribed, by which the young speaker may become accustomed to the new circumstances in which he is placed, when endeavoring so to mould his voice, and regulate his bodily attitude and action, as to attain full utterance and appropriate gesture, when addressing a numerous audience in a large apartment.

The inspiration of genius may enable a highly favored individual to break through all restraints, and intuitively do what reflection, and study, and careful practice prescribe. But it is only such individuals who can rationally claim the indulgence

of dispensing with cultivation. The greatest and the best speakers of ancient and modern times, of European or American birth, have uniformly placed their reliance on assiduous application and thorough training. The teacher, or the author, who decries educational culture in speaking,-although he may be personally a model of eloquence and of scholarship as distinguished as Whately himself,-unfortunately misleads those whom he should guide, and favors that "generous neglect" of which ignorance and indolence are ever so fond. Nor can the student ever fall into an error more absurd or more fatal than that nature, without cultivation, will eventuate otherwise, in the intellectual field untilled, than in the thorns and thistles of the waste, or the weeds of the sluggard's garden. "Give me the thing to say," said once a self-confident youth, solicited to pay attention to his elocution, "and I will find the way to say without the aid of elocution!" So thought not Demosthenes, nor Cicero, nor Chatham, nor Fox, nor Clay, nor Webster. Day and night, and year after year, it was their study, their strenuous endeavor, to find the way to say the thing which was already familiar to the mind. None of these great orators undervalued instruction; and one of the most distinguished of them searched the world to find it.

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The student of noble aims and true ambition will never despise that branch of self-culture which gives him readiest and surest access to the minds of his fellow-men, for sympathy and mutual benefit, for intellectual and moral progress, and associated effort in every form of social and benevolent action, whether in the relations of private or of public life.

The volume to which the present remarks are designed as an introduction, being properly limited to the furnishing of materials for exercises in declamation, and the number of works on the vocal part of elocution being large, while that of manuals on gesture is comparatively small; it was deemed preferable to restrict the following suggestions to the visible part of oratory, that which has to do with the attitude and action of public speaking. This course seemed the more advisable on account