CHAPTER XI

THE GRAND DIVISIONS OF THE DISCOURSE

We may our ends by our beginnings know.

All's well that ends well."

DENHAM, Of Prudence.
SHAKESPEARE.

From the days of the Greek rhetoricians and orators, certain grand divisions have been recognized in the structure of a public discourse. The most satisfactory partition seems to be a fourfold one: (a) introduction, (b) statement, (c) discussion, (d) peroration. Sometimes the second is merged with the third division.

This general arrangement will naturally be in the mind while the working outline is being formed, so that a harmonious progress of thought may be preserved throughout.

1. The Introduction 1

Not every address requires an introduction. It is always foolish "to preface something in particular by at least a paragraph of nothing in particular, bearing to the real matter in hand a relation not more inher

1 See Modern American Oratory, Ringwalt, pp. 55-60.

ently intimate than that of the tuning of violins to a symphony." 1

When, however, the introduction is properly used, it is designed to put the audience in possession of such facts or ideas as will secure to the speaker sympathetic attention and confidence. In rare cases, the orator may be compelled even be compelled even to placate hostility.2 Hence the opening words of a discourse should be brief, manly, modest, moderate, frank, and tactful. Many an unhappy orator has been compelled to bring into play all his resources of power in order to win back from his hearers the sympathy and confidence which he forfeited while speaking the introductory sentences he was fortunate in regaining so much as a part of what he had lost. A careful study of public assemblies will yield golden rewards to him who would learn the way of approach to an audience.3

The appended introductions may well be studied as revealing the practice of great orators.

Daniel Webster's deliberative oration, "In Reply to Hayne," begins with this beautiful allusion: An

"When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course." The orator then applies the illustration to the debate upon which he has entered.

1 English Composition, Wendell, p. 167. 2 See p. 151.

8 See p. 149.

Wendell Phillips thus begins his popular lecture on "Toussaint l'Ouverture":—

"I have been requested to offer you a sketch of one of the most remarkable men of the last generation, the great Toussaint l'Ouverture. My sketch is at once a biography and an argument,- a biography of a negro statesman and soldier, and an argument in behalf of the race from which he sprang."

Henry W. Grady began his great after-dinner oration on "The New South" by making a quotation:

"There was a South of slavery and secession — that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom -that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour.' These words, delivered from the immortal lips of Benjamin H. Hill, at Tammany Hall, in 1866, true then, and truer now, I shall make my text tonight."

Such questions
But since the

Judge Jeremiah S. Black prefaced his forensic oration on "The Right to Trial by Jury" with these words: "May it please your Honors: I am not afraid that you will underrate the importance of this case. It concerns the rights of the whole people. have generally been settled by arms. beginning of the world no battle has ever been lost or won upon which the liberties of a nation were so distinctly staked as they are upon the results of this argument. The pen that writes the judgment of the court will be mightier for good or for evil than any sword that ever was wielded by mortal arm."

2. The Statement

The office of this division is to set forth in clear, concise, exact words the end proposed by the discourse, the proposition to be proved, the precise nature of the subject, or the speaker's attitude toward his theme, in a word, in the statement the orator declares his platform and defines his position.

Sometimes it may seem desirable to reserve the statement for later announcement, or even to omit it entirely.

Frequently the introduction and statement are deftly interwoven, as in some of the instances quoted under "The Introduction," and occasionally an orator will use no other introduction than a simple statement, as did Webster in the Dartmouth College Case:

"The general question is, whether the acts of the legislature of New Hampshire of the twenty-seventh of June and of the eighteenth and twenty-sixth of December, 1816, are valid and binding on the plaintiffs without their acceptance or assent."

The following, from Ruskin's lecture on "Turner and his Works," is both an introduction and a statement:

"My object this evening is not so much to give you any account of the works or the genius of the great painter whom we have so lately lost (which it would require rather a year than an hour to do), as to give you some idea of the position which his works hold with respect to the landscape art of other periods, and of the general condition and prospects of the landscape art of

the present day. I will not lose time in prefatory remarks, as I have little enough at any rate, but will enter abruptly on my subject."

Such statements place the hearer at once in the clear, and favorably dispose him toward the frankness of the

orator.

Sometimes speakers include in the introduction-statement an announcement of the main heads or propositions of the discourse, as the following from Prof. Huxley: —

"The subject to which I have to beg your attention during the ensuing hour is 'The Relation of Physiological Science to Other Branches of Knowledge.'

[Here follows a paragraph of personal explanation.]

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Regarding Physiological Science, then, in its widest sense, as the equivalent of Biology, the Science of Individual Life, we have to consider in succession:

"I. Its position and scope as a branch of knowledge. "2. Its value as a means of discipline.

"3. Its worth as practical information.

"4. At what period it may best be made a branch of education." "1

But this is too formal a method for brief platform efforts, and valuable only when it is highly necessary to keep clearly before the audience both the main proposition and the body of argument by which it is to be sustained. The same end is usually better attained by a rapid summary in the beginning of the peroration.

1 Huxley, V. p. 72, quoted by J. M. Hart, Handbook of English Composition.