The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-07-07
ORATORY
BY DR. GEORGE E. slELLEN.

| Sucn questions are just as rational or | pertinent as to inquire whether we | have, or shall continue to have, poetry and poets. music and musicians, art
 and artists. And yet. at times, there
 rises from his oracular seat one who declares with unctuous fervor and with an air of supreme authority that the whole tribe of orators, big and small, is destined to disappear off the face
 of the earth, and felicitates mankind | upon so desirable a finality. Now. | there are orators and orators, just as | there are poets and poets. musicians | and musicians, artists and artists. It
 Is the discriminating taste and the cultivated ear which must determine the measure of entertainment and in- struction, and award the need of praise. The June issue of the Worlds Work. edited by a Southern man, MT. Walter H. Page. was Southern number in | honor of the Jamestown Exposition. Its exploitation of the phenomenal de- velopment of the South, industrially. commercially. and intellectually, since | the civil war must have brought | peculiar qualifications to every Southern reader, and some surprise to readers in other parts of the Uuion. Among the readable andssattractive articles of the Issue is one by Profess sor Edwin Mims. of the chair of Eng | fish literature in Trinity college. North Carolina. It is entitled "The South's s Intellectual Expression. The Artistic, Historical, and Economic Writing that Is Superseding the Old-Time Oratory." | By implication, if not by direct state nfent, Professor Mims. in his introduc- tion condemns .ae whole body of ante bellum Southern oratory and casts distrust or contempt upon the efforts | of the present-day speaker who essays | to deliver his message offhand, or without notes. Among other things l he says:
 Within the memory of even a yonng | man. the decline of the orators power
 in the South may be traced, and a cor responding increase in the power of the written word. MT. Joel Chandler Harris wrote in reply to an invitation
 to deliver an address at a Southern
 university: I would not make a speech for a million dollars An in- creasing number of men-men of power and influence-are not ashamed to make the same confession. The old
 time ranter' is hard to overcome. but 1t may be said that ten men now write
 their speeches to every one who did twenty years ago; heEce we have less emotionaiism. and a greater precision and accuracy in speaking"
 For a professor of English to speak disparagingly of oratory invites the suspicion that 1t is a plea. set up in ex- tenuation or Justification of the fact that the chairs of English in Southern
 colleges are devoting themselves almost, if not quite exclusively to at tempts to make of their students good writers and critics rather than etfec- tive speakers. Incidentally. the pro- fessors themselves practice with more ar hrff @A tx,I NF writing. and receive fairly good returns from the periodical press. Where an institution has no professorship of rhetoric and oratory, the training of students for credible appearance in public speaking logically devolves upon the professor of English, or Is wholly neglected. In their lifetime, many remember to have attended commence ment occasion where the latter habit was painfully in vogue.
 What is criticized as "ranting" in manner or sophomoric in style has its illustrations today no less than in the olden times:~ It is to be noticed among the leaders of educational thought and practice-strange to say. At the recent centennial celebration of a state university, the visiting president of a sister state institution indulged lavish ly in such an exhibition while convey thS ITOI1 the universities of the South. With what was intended to be grace of action and elegance of expression he spoke of the ancient in stitution as having been one where students for a hundred years had drunk deep at the fount of knowledge, as lingering by the Pierian spring and quenching intellectual thirst, as wor- shipping at the shrine of knowledge, and other platitudes usually brought in as evidence of the highly rhetorical, flowery. and ornate style of the old school of orators. In this enlightened day such a speech has It's admirers A seventeen-year- boy remarked that 1t was decidedly the speech of the occasion.
 While I join heartily with Professor Mims in condemning and ridiculinR so much of the stuff that, in the old-time and in the present, is labeled oratory am unwilling to cast any reflections directly or indirectly, on the truly great orators of a by-gone era or to admit that any other phase of intellectual activity will supplant oratorical effort. To name Seagent S. Prentiss and Jeff feson Davis, of Mississippi; Henry W. Hilliard and William L. Yancey, of Alabama; Robert Toombs and George F. Pierce. of Georgia; William c. Pres ton and Robert Y. Hayne, of South Carolina; Henry Clay and Henry B. Bascom. of Kentucky; William T. Has kell and Meredith P. Gentry, of Ten nessee. Is not only to pay tribute to oratorical genius. but to indicate the types of men who guided the con- science. stirred the intellect. and quickened- the hopes of the ante-bellum South. From the high vantage ground of the present 1t is easy to look back and say that in all their utterances they did not always show the pre- science of statemanship or clearly de- f.7A the path of duty; but the tremon- drous influence they exerted in national and ecclesiastical councils could have been wielded only by men who thought they saw and did the right as God had given them power of discernment and capacity of achievement.
 No, the age of oratory has not passed. despite glib assertions and confident belief With the wider and more critical intelligence of his audience, the orator appeals more to the reason and less to the emotions than in the long age when he sought to interest and instruct a cruder civilization. When the roll of Southern orators be- longing to the post-bellum epoch Is made up, it will contain no brighter names than those of Henry W. Grady and John T. Morgan, of Isadore Rayner and Joseph w. Bailey, of Edward W. Carmack and Edwin A. Alderman, ot Charles B, galloway and Thomas F. Gailor. The South. 1t must be con