Few species of composition seem so antiquated, so little available for any practical purpose today, as the oratory in which the generation of our grandparents delighted. The type of discourse which they would ride miles in wagons to hear, or would regard as the special treat of some festive occasion, fills most people today with an acute sense of discomfort. Somehow, it makes them embarrassed. They become conscious of themselves, conscious of pretensions in it, and they think it well consigned to the museum. But its very ability to inspire antipathy, as distinguished from indifference, suggests the presence of something interesting.

The student of rhetoric should accordingly sense here the chance for a discovery, and as he begins to listen for its revealing quality, the first thing he becomes aware of is a “spaciousness.” This is, of course, a broad impression, which requires its own analysis. As we listen more carefully, then, it seems that between the speech itself and the things it is meant to signify, something stands—perhaps it is only an empty space—but something is there to prevent immediate realizations and references. For an experience of the sensation, let us for a moment go back to 1850 and attune our ears to an address by Representative Andrew Ewing, on the subject of the sale of the public lands.

Despite the allusions to geographical localities, does not the speaker seem to be speaking in vacuo? His words do not impinge upon a circumambient reality; his concepts seem not to have definite correspondences, but to be general, and as it were, mobile. “Spread-eagle” and “high-flown” are two modifiers with which people have sought to catch the quality of such speech.

In this work we are interested both in causes and the moral quality of causes, and when an orator appears to speak of subjects without an immediate apperception of them, we become curious about the kind of world he is living in. Was this type of orator sick, as some have inferred? Was he suffering from some kind of auto-intoxication which produces insulation from reality? Charles Egbert Craddock in her novel Where the Battle Was Fought has left a satirical picture of the type. Its personification is General Vayne, who holds everything up to a “moral magnifying glass.” “Through this unique lens life loomed up as a rather large affair. In the rickety courthouse in the village of Chattalla, five miles out there to the south, General Vayne beheld a temple of justice. He translated an office-holder as the sworn servant of the people. The State was this great commonwealth, and its seal a proud escutcheon. A fall in cotton struck him as a blow to the commerce of the world. From an adverse political fortune he augured the swift ruin of the country.”[147] There is the possibility that this type was sick with a kind of vanity and egocentricity, and that has frequently been offered as a diagnosis. But on the other hand, there is the possibility that such men were larger than we, with our petty and contentious style, and because larger more exposed in those limitations which they had. The heroes in tragedies also talk bigger than life. Perhaps the source of our discomfort is that this kind of speech comes to us as an admonition that there were giants in the earth before us, mighty men, men of renown. But before we are ready for any conclusion, we must isolate the cause of our intimation.

As we scan the old oratory for the chief offender against modern sensibility, we are certain to rank in high position, if not first, the uncontested term. By this we mean the term which seems to invite a contest, but which apparently is not so regarded in its own context. Most of these are terms which scandalize the modern reader with their generality, so that he wonders how the speaker ever took the risk of using them. No experienced speaker interlards his discourse with terms which are themselves controversial. He may build his case on one or two such terms, after giving them ad hoc definitions, but to multiply them is to create a force of resistance which almost no speech can overcome. Yet in this period we have speeches which seem made up almost from beginning to end of phrases loose in scope and but weakly defensible. Yet the old orator who employed these terms of sweeping generality knew something of his audience’s state of mind and was confident of his effect. And the public generally responded by putting him in the genus “great man.” This brings us to the rhetorical situation, which must be described in some detail.

We have said that this orator of the old-fashioned mold, who is using the uncontested term, passes on his collection of generalities in full expectation that they will be received as legal tender. He is taking a very advanced position, which could be undermined easily, were the will to do so present. But the will was not present, and this is the most significant fact in our explanation. The orator had, in any typical audience, not only a previously indoctrinated group, but a group of quite similar indoctrination. Of course, we are using such phrases for purposes of comparison with today. It is now a truism that the homogeneity of belief which obtained three generations ago has largely disappeared. Such belief was, in a manner of conceiving it, the old orator’s capital. And it was, if we may trust the figure further, an initial asset which made further operations possible.

If we knew how this capital is accumulated, we would possess one of the secrets of civilization. All we know is that whatever spells the essential unity of a people in belief and attachment contains the answer. The best we can do at this stage is look into the mechanism of relationship between this level of generality and the effectiveness of a speech.

We must keep in mind that “general” is itself a relative modifier, and that the degree of generality with which one may express one’s thoughts is very wide. One may refer, for example, to a certain event as a murder, a crime, an act, or an occurrence. We assume that none of these terms is inherently falsifying, because none of them is in any prior sense required. Levels of generality do not contradict one another; they supplement one another by bringing out different foci of interest. Every level of generality has its uses: the Bible can tell the story of creation in a few hundred words, and it is doubtless well that it should be told there in that way. Let us therefore take a guarded position here and claim only that one’s level of generality tells something of one’s approach to a subject. We shall find certain refinements of application possible as we go on.

With this as a starting point, we should be prepared for a more intensive look at the diction of the old school. For purposes of this analysis I shall choose something that is historically obscure. Great occasions sometimes deflect our judgment by their special circumstances. The passage below is from a speech made by the Honorable Charles J. Faulkner at an agricultural fair in Virginia in 1858. Both speaker and event have passed into relative oblivion, and we can therefore view this as a fairly stock specimen of the oratory in vogue a hundred years ago to grace local celebrations. Let us attend to it carefully for its references.

A modern mind trained in the habit of analysis will be horrified by the number of large and unexamined phrases passing by in even this brief excerpt. “Permanent power of any nation”; “earlier and middle ages”; “cast a dazzling splendor across the pathway of time”; “proud and ephemeral destiny”; “noble sentiments which rendered the Roman name more illustrious”; and “high standards of moral virtue” are but a selection. Comparatively speaking, the tone of this oration is fairly subdued, but it is in the grand style, and these phrases are the medium. With this passage before us for reference, I wish to discuss one matter of effect, and one of cause or enabling condition.

It will be quickly perceived that the phrases in question have resonances, both historical and literary, and that this resonance is what we have been calling spaciousness. Instead of the single note (prized for purposes of analysis) they are widths of sound and meaning; they tend to echo over broad areas and to call up generalized associations. This resonance is the interstice between what is said and the thing signified. In this way then the generality of the phrase may be definitely linked with an effect.

But the second question is our principal interest: how was the orator able to use them with full public consent when he cannot do so today?

I am going to suggest that the orator then enjoyed a privilege which can be compared to the lawyer’s “right of assumption.” This is the right to assume that precedents are valid, that forms will persist, and that in general one may build today on what was created yesterday. What mankind has sanctified with usage has a presumption in its favor. Such presumption, it was felt, instead of being an obstacle to progress, furnishes the ground for progress. More simply, yesterday’s achievements are also contributions to progress. It is he who insists upon beginning every day de novo who denies the reality of progress. Accordingly, consider the American orator in the intellectual climate of this time. He was comfortably circumstanced with reference to things he could “know” and presume everyone else to know in the same way. Freedom and morality were constants; the Constitution was the codification of all that was politically feasible; Christianity of all that was morally authorized. Rome stood as an exemplum of what may happen to nations; the American and French Revolutions had taught rulers their necessary limitations. Civilization has thought over its thousands of years of history and has made some generalizations which are the premises of other arguments but which are not issues themselves. When one asserts that the Romans had a “high standard of moral virtue which made them the easy masters of their race,” one is affirming a doctrine of causality in a sweeping way. If one had to stop and “prove” that moral virtue makes one master, one obviously would have to start farther down the ladder of assumption. But these things were not in the area of argument because progress was positive and that meant that some things have to be assimilated as truths. Men were not condemned to repeat history, because they remembered its lessons. To the extent that the mind had made its summations, it was free to go forward, and forward meant in the direction of more inclusive conceptions. The orator who pauses along the way to argue a point which no one challenges only demeans the occasion. Therefore the orator of the period we have defined did not feel that he had to argue the significance of everything to which he attached significance. Some things were fixed by universal enlightened consensus; and they could be used as steps for getting at matters which were less settled and hence were proper subjects for deliberation. Deliberation is good only because it decreases the number of things it is necessary to deliberate about.

Consequently when we wonder how he could use such expressions without trace of compunction, we forget that the expressions did not need apology. The speaker of the present who used like terms would, on the contrary, meet a contest at every step of the way. His audience would not swallow such clusters of related meanings. But at that time a number of unities, including the unity of past and present, the unity of moral sets and of causal sets, furnished the ground for discourse in “uncontested terms.” Only such substratum of agreement makes possible the panoramic treatment.

We can infer important conclusions about a civilization when we know that its debates and controversies occur at outpost positions rather than within the citadel itself. If these occur at a very elementary level, we suspect that the culture has not defined itself, or that it is decayed and threatened with dissolution. Where the chief subject of debate is the relative validity of Homoiousianism and Homoousianism, or the conventions of courtly love, we feel confident that a great deal has been cached away in the form of settled conclusions, and that such shaking as proceeds from controversies of this kind, although they may agitate the superstructure, will hardly be felt as far down as the foundations. I would say the same is suggested by the great American debate over whether the Constitution was a “constitution” or a “compact,” despite its unfortunate sequel.

At this stage of cultural development the commonplaces of opinion and conduct form a sort of textus receptus, and the emendations are confined to minor matters. Conversely, when the disagreement is over extremely elementary matters, survival itself may be at stake. It seems to me that modern debates over the validity of the law of contradiction may be a disagreement of this kind. The soundness of a culture may well be measured by this ability to recognize what is extraneous. One knows what to do with the extraneous, even if one decides upon a policy of temporary accommodation. It is when the line dividing us from the extraneous begins to fade that we are assailed with destructive doubts. Disagreements over the most fundamental subjects leave us puzzled as to “where we are” if not as to “what we are.” The speaker whom we have been characterizing felt sure of the demarcation. That gave him his freedom, and was the source of his simplicity.

When we reflect further that the old oratory had a certain judicial flavor about it, we are prompted to ask whether thinking as then conceived did not have a different status from today’s thinking. One is led to make this query by the suggestion that when the most fundamental propositions of a culture are under attack, then it becomes a duty to “think for one’s self.” Not that it is a bad thing to think; yet when the whole emphasis is upon “thinking for one’s self,” it is hard to avoid a feeling that certain postulates have broken down, and the most courage we can muster is to ask people, not to “think in a certain direction,” but to “think for themselves.” Where the primary directive of thinking is known, the object of thinking will not be mere cerebral motion (as some exponents of the policy of thinking for one’s self leave us to infer), but rather the object of such thinking, or knowledge. This is a very rudimentary proposition, but it deserves attention because the modern tendency has reversed a previous order. From the position that only propositions are interesting because they alone make judgments, we are passing to a position in which only evidence is interesting because it alone is uncontaminated by propositions. In brief, interest has shifted from inference to reportage, and this has had a demonstrable effect upon the tone of oratory. The large resonant phrase is itself a kind of condensed proposition; as propositions begin to sink with the general sagging of the substructure, the phrases must do the same. Obviously we are pointing here to a profound cultural change, and the same shifts can be seen in literature; the poet or novelist may feel that the content of his consciousness is more valid (and this will be true even of those who have not formulated the belief) than the formal arrangement which would be produced by selection, abstraction, and arrangement. Or viewed in another respect, experiential order has taken precedence over logical order.

The object of an oration made on the conditions obtained a hundred years ago was not so much to “make people think” as to remind them of what they already thought (and again we are speaking comparatively). The oratorical rostrum, like the church, was less of a place for fresh instruction than for steady inculcation. And the orator, like the minister, was one who spoke from an eminent degree of conviction. Paradoxically, the speaker of this vanished period had more freedom to maneuver than has his emancipated successor. Man is free in proportion as his surroundings have a determinate nature, and he can plan his course with perfect reliance upon that determinateness. It is an admitted axiom that we have rules in one place so that we can have liberty in another; we put certain things in charge of habit so as to be free in areas where we prize freedom. Manifestly one is not “free” when one has to battle for one’s position at every moment of time. This interrelationship of freedom and organization is one of the permanent conditions of existence, so that it has been said even that perfect freedom is perfect compliance (“one commands nature by obeying her”).

In the province we are considering, man is free to the extent that he knows that nature is, what God expects, what he himself is capable of. Freedom moves on a set of presuppositions just as a machine moves on a set of ball bearings which themselves preserve definite locus. It is when these presuppositions are tampered with that men begin to grow concerned about their freedom. One can well imagine that the tremendous self-consciousness about freedom today, which we note in almost every utterance of public men, is evidence that this crucial general belief is threatened. It is no mere paradox to say that when they cry liberty, they mean belief—the belief that sets one free from prior concerns. A corroborating evidence is that fact that nearly all large pleas for liberty heard today conclude with more or less direct appeals for unity.

We may now return to our more direct concern with rhetoric. Since according to this demonstration oratory speaks from an eminence and has a freedom of purview, its syllogism is the “rhetorical syllogism” mentioned by Demetrius—the enthymeme.[149] It may not hurt to state that this is the syllogism with one of the three propositions missing. Such a syllogism can be used only when the audience is willing to supply the missing proposition. The missing proposition will be “in their hearts,” as it were; it will be their agreement upon some fundamental aspect of the issue being discussed. If it is there, the orator does not have to supply it; if it is not there, he may not be able to get it in any way—at least not as orator. Therefore the use of the rhetorical syllogism is good concrete evidence that the old orator relied upon the existence of uncontested terms or fixations of belief in the minds of his hearers. The orator was logical, but he could dispense with being a pure logician because that third proposition had been established for him.

These two related considerations, the accepted term and the conception of oratory as a body of judicious conclusions upon common evidence, go far toward explaining the quality of spaciousness. Indeed, to say that oratory has “spaciousness” is to risk redundancy once the nature of oratory is understood. Oratory is “spacious” in the same way that liberal education is liberal; and a correlation can be shown between the decline of liberal education (the education of a freeman) and the decline of oratory. It was one of Cicero’s observations that the orator performs at “the focal point at which all human activity is ultimately reviewed”; and Cicero is, for connected reasons, a chief source of our theory of liberal education.[150]

Thus far we have rested our explanation on the utility of the generalized style, but this is probably much too narrow an account. There is also an aesthetic of the generalization, which we must now proceed to explore. Let us pause here momentarily to re-define our impression upon hearing the old orator. The feature which we have been describing as spaciousness may be translated, with perhaps a slight shift of viewpoint, as opacity. The passages we have inspected, to recur to our examples, are opaque in that we cannot see through them with any sharpness. And it was no doubt the intention of the orator that we should not see through them in this way. The “moral magnifying glass” of Craddock’s General Vayne made objects larger, but it did not make them clearer. It rather had the effect of blurring lines and obscuring details.

We are now in position to suggest that another factor in the choice of the generalized phrase was aesthetic distance. There is an aesthetic, as well as a moral, limit to how close one may approach an object; and the forensic artists of the epoch we describe seem to have been guided by this principle of artistic decorum. Aesthetic distance is, of course, an essential of aesthetic treatment. If one sees an object from too close, one sees only its irregularities and protuberances. To see an object rightly or to see it as a whole, one has to have a proportioned distance from it. Then the parts fall into a meaningful pattern, the dominant effect emerges, and one sees it “as it really is.” A prurient interest in closeness and a great remoteness will both spoil the view. To recall a famous example in literature, neither Lilliputian nor Brobdingnagian is man as we think we know him.

Thus it can be a sign not only of philosophical ignorance but also of artistic bad taste to treat an object familiarly or from a near proximity. At the risk of appearing fanciful we shall say that objects have not only their natures but their rights, which the orator is bound to respect, since he is in large measure the ethical teacher of society. By maintaining this distance with regard to objects, art manages to “idealize” them in a very special sense. One does not mean by this that it necessarily elevates them or transfigures them, but it certainly does keep out a kind of officious detail which would only lower the general effect. What the artistic procedure tends to do, then, is to give us a “generic” picture, and much the same can be said about oratory. The true orator has little concern with singularity—or, to recall again a famous instance, with the wart on Cromwell’s face—because the singular is the impertinent. Only the generic belongs, and by obvious connection the language of the generic is a general language. In the old style, presentation kept distances which had, as one of their purposes, the obscuring of details. It would then have appeared the extreme of bad taste to particularize in the manner which has since, especially in certain areas of journalism, become a literary vogue. It would have been beyond the pale to refer, in anything intended for the public view, to a certain cabinet minister’s false teeth or a certain congressman’s shiny dome. Aesthetically, this was not the angle of vision from which one takes in the man, and there is even the question of epistemological truthfulness. Portrait painters know that still, and journalists knew it a hundred years ago.

It will be best to illustrate the effect of aesthetic distance. I have chosen a passage from the address delivered by John C. Breckinridge, Vice-President of the United States, on the occasion of the removal of the Senate from the Old to the New Chamber, January 4, 1859. The moment was regarded as solemn, and the speaker expressed himself as follows:

At the close of the address, he said:

We shall hardly help noting the prominence of “opaque” phrases. “Proofs of stability and improvement”; “noble public buildings”; “treasures of science and the arts”; “this flourishing city”; “a thousand memories”; “this beautiful site”; and “structures reared by man” seem outstanding examples. These all express objects which can be seen only at a distance of time or space. In three instances, it is true, the speaker mentions things of which his hearers might have been immediately and physically conscious, but they receive an appropriately generalized reference. The passage admits not a single intrusive detail, nor is anything there supposed to have a superior validity or probativeness because it is present visibly or tangibly. The speech is addressed to the mind, and correspondingly to the memory.[152] The fact that the inclusiveness was temporal as well as spatial has perhaps special significance for us. This “continuity of the past with the present” gave a dimension which our world seems largely to have lost; and this dimension made possible a different pattern of selection. It is not experiential data which creates a sense of the oneness of experience. It is rather an act of mind; and the practice of periodically bringing the past into a meditative relationship with the present betokens an attitude toward history. In the chapter on Lincoln we have shown that an even greater degree of remoteness is discernible in the First and Second Inaugural Addresses, delivered at a time when war was an ugly present reality. And furthermore, at Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke in terms so “generic” that it is almost impossible to show that the speech is not a eulogy of the men in gray as well as the men in blue, inasmuch as both made up “those who struggled here.” Lincoln’s faculty of transcending an occasion is in fact only this ability to view it from the right distance, or to be wisely generic about it.

We are talking here about things capable of extremes, and there is a degree of abstraction which results in imperception; but barring those cases which everyone recognizes as beyond bounds, we should reconsider the idea that such generalization is a sign of impotence. The distinction does not lie between those who are near life and those who are remote from it, but between pertinence and impertinence. The intrusive detail so prized by modern realists does not belong in a picture which is a picture of something. One of the senses of “seeing” is metaphorical, and if one gets too close to the object, one can no longer in this sense “see.” It is the theoria of the mind as well as the work of the senses which creates the final picture.

One can show this through an instructive contrast with modern journalism, particularly that of the Time magazine variety. A considerable part of its material, and nearly all of its captions, are made up of what we have defined as “impertinences.” What our forensic artist of a century ago would have regarded as lacking significance is in these media presented as the pertinent because it is very near the physical manifestation of the event. And the reversal has been complete, because what for this artist would have been pertinent is there treated as impertinent since it involves matter which the average man does not care to reflect upon, especially under the conditions of newspaper reading. Thus even the epistemology which made the old oratory possible is being relegated.

We must take notice in this connection that the lavish use of detail is sometimes defended on the ground that it is illustration. The argument runs that illustration is a visual aid to education, and therefore an increased use of illustration contributes to that informing of the public which journals acknowledge as their duty. But a little reflection about the nature of illustration will show where this idea is treacherous. Illustration, as already indicated, implies that something is being illustrated, so that in the true illustration we will have a conjunction of mind and pictorial manifestation. But now, with brilliant technological means, the tendency is for manifestation to outrun the idea, so that the illustrations are vivid rather than meaningful or communicative. Thus, whereas today the illustration is looking for an idea to express, formerly the idea was the original; and it was looking, often rather fastidiously, for some palpable means of representation. The idea condescended, one might say, from an empyrean, to suffer illustrative embodiment.

To make this difference more real, let us study an example of the older method of illustration. The passage below examined is from an address by Rufus Choate on “The Position and Function of the American Bar as an Element of Conservatism in the State,” delivered before the Law School in Cambridge, July 3, 1845.

We note in passing the now familiar panorama. One must view matters from a height to speak without pause of such things as “occupation and culture of a new world,” “conquest of independence,” and “fundamental and permanent organic law.” Then we note that when the orator feels that he must illustrate, the illustration is not through the impertinent concrete case, but through the poeticized figment. At the close of the passage, where the personification of liberty is encountered, we see in clearest form the conventionalized image which is the traditional illustration. Liberty, sitting up in her golden and purple cloud, descends “to walk in brightness by the weary ploughman’s side.” In this flatulent utterance there is something so typical of method (as well as indicative of the philosophy of the method) that one can scarcely avoid recalling that this is how the gods of classical mythology came down to hold discourse with mortals; it is how the god of the Christian religion came into the world for the redemption of mankind; it is how the logos is made incarnate. In other words, this kind of manifestation from above is, in our Western tradition, an archetypal process, which the orators of that tradition are likely to follow implicitly. The idea is supernal; it may be brought down for representation; but casual, fortuitous, individual representations are an affront to it. Consequently the representations are conventionalized images, and work with general efficacy.

This thought carries us back to our original point, which is that standards of pertinence and impertinence have very deep foundations, and that one may reveal one’s whole system of philosophy by the stand one takes on what is pertinent. We have observed that a powerful trend today is toward the unique detail and the illustration of photographic realism, and this tendency claims to be more knowledgeable about reality. In the older tradition which we set out to examine, the abstracted truth and the illustration which is essentially a construct held a like favor. It was not said, because there was no contrary style to make the saying necessary, but it was certainly felt that these came as near the truth as one gets, if one admits the existence of non-factual kinds of truth. The two sides do not speak to one another very well across the gulf, but it is certainly possible to find, and it would seem to be incumbent upon scholars to find, a conception broad enough to define the difference.

One further clue we have as to how the orator thought and how he saw himself. There will be observed in most speeches of this era a stylization of utterance. It is this stylization which largely produces their declamatory quality. At the same time, as we begin to infer causes, we discover the source of its propriety; the orator felt that he was speaking for corporate humanity. He had a sense of stewardship which would today appear one of the presumptions earlier referred to. The individual orator was not, except perhaps in certain postures, offering an individual testimonial. He was the mouthpiece for a collective brand of wisdom which was not to be delivered in individual accents. We may suppose that the people did not resent the stylizations of the orator any more than now they resent the stylizations of the Bible. “That is the way God talks.” The deity should be above mere novelties of expression, transparent devices of rhetoric, or importunate appeals for attention. It is enough for him to be earnest and truthful; we will rise to whatever patterns of expression it has pleased him to use. Stylization indicates an attitude which will not concede too much, or certainly will not concede weakly or complacently. As in point of historical sequence the language of political discourse succeeded that of the sermon, some of the latter’s dignity and self-confidence persisted in the way of formalization. Thus when the orator made gestures toward the occasion, they were likely to be ceremonious rather than personal or spontaneous, the oration itself being an occasion of “style.” The modern listener is very quick to detect a pattern of locution, but he is prone to ascribe it to situations of weakness rather than of strength.

Of course oratory of the broadly ruminative kind is acceptable only when we accredit someone with the ability to review our conduct, our destiny, and the causes of things in general. If we reach a condition in which no man is believed to have this power, we will accordingly be impatient with that kind of discourse. It should not be overlooked that although the masses in any society are comparatively ill-trained and ignorant, they are very quick to sense attitudes, through their native capacity as human beings. When attitudes change at the top of society, they are able to see that change long before they are able to describe it in any language of their own, and in fact they can see it without ever doing that. The masses thus follow intellectual styles, and more quickly than is often supposed, so that, in this particular case, when a general skepticism of predication sets in among the leaders of thought, the lower ranks are soon infected with the same thing (though one must make allowance here for certain barriers to cultural transmission constituted by geography and language). This principle will explain why there is no more appetite for the broadly reflective discourse among the general public of today than among the élite. The stewardship of man has been hurt rather than helped by the attacks upon natural right, and at present nobody knows who the custodians (in the old sense of “watchers”) are. Consequently it is not easy for a man to assume the ground requisite for such a discourse. Speeches today either are made for entertainment, or they are political speeches for political ends. And the chief characteristic of the speech for political ends is that it is made for immediate effect, with the smallest regard for what is politically true. Whereas formerly its burden was what the people believed or had experienced, the burden now tends to be what they wish to hear. The increased reliance upon slogans and catchwords, and the increased use of the argument from contraries (e.g., “the thing my opponent is doing will be welcomed by the Russians”) are prominent evidences of the trend.[154]

Lastly, the old style may be called, in comparison with what has succeeded, a polite style. Its very diffuseness conceals a respect for the powers and limitations of the audience. Bishop Whatley has observed that highly concentrated expression may be ill suited to persuasion because the majority of the people are not capable of assimilating concentrated thought. The principle can be shown through an analogy with nutrition. It is known that diet must contain a certain amount of roughage. This roughage is not food in the sense of nutriment; its function is to dilute or distend the real food in such a way that it can be most readily assimilated. A concentrate of food is, therefore, not enough, for there has to be a certain amount of inert matter to furnish bulk. Something of a very similar nature operates in discourse. When a piece of oratory intended for a public occasion impresses us as distended, which is to say, filled up with repetition, periphrasis, long grammatical forms, and other impediments to directness, we should recall that the diffuseness all this produces may have a purpose. The orator may have made a close calculation of the receptive powers of his audience and have ordered his style to meet that, while continuing to “sound good” at every point. This represents a form of consideration for the audience. There exists quite commonly today, at the opposite pole, a syncopated style. This style, with its suppression of beats and its consequent effect of hurrying over things, does not show that type of consideration. It does not give the listener the roughage of verbiage to chew on while meditating the progress of the thought. Here again “spaciousness” has a quite rational function in enforcing a measure, so that the mind and the sentiments too can keep up with the orator in his course.

Perhaps this is as far as we can go in explaining the one age to another. We are now in position to realize that the archaic formalism of the old orator was a structure imparted to his speech by a logic, an aesthetic, and an epistemology. As a logician he believed in the deduced term, or the term whose empirical support is not at the moment visible. As an aesthetician he believed in distance, and that not merely to soften outline but also to evoke the true picture, which could be obscured by an injudicious and prying nearness. As an epistemologist he believed, in addition to the foregoing, that true knowledge somehow had its source in the mind of minds, for which we are on occasion permitted to speak a part. All this gave him a peculiar sense of stature. He always talked like a big man. Our resentment comes from a feeling that with all his air of confidence he could not have known half as much as we know. But everything depends on what we mean by knowing; and the age or the man who has the true conception of that will have, as the terms of the case make apparent, the key to every other question.