, the great
masters have enriched the world with miracles of art. Aided by this law
the course followed in this work, may be easily understood.

Since eloquence is composed of three languages, we divide this work into
three books in which voice, gesture and speech are studied by turns.
Then, applying to them the great law of art, our task is accomplished.

The advantages of this method are easily understood. There is given a
type of expression not taken from the individual, but from human nature
synthetized. Thus the student will not have the humiliation of being the
slave or ape of any particular master. He will be only himself. Those
who assimilate their imperfect natures to the perfect type will become
orators. _Fiunt Oratores._

Success having attended the first efforts, let the would-be orator
assimilate these rules, and his power will be doubled, aye increased a
hundredfold. And thus having become an orator, a man of principle, who
knows how to speak well, he will aid in the triumph of religion, justice
and virtue.

Part First.

Voice

Chapter I.

Preliminary Ideas--criterion of the Oratorical Art.

Let us note an incontestable fact. The science of the Art of Oratory has
not yet been taught. Hitherto genius alone, and not science, has made
great orators. Horace, Quintilian and Cicero among the ancients, and
numerous modern writers have treated of oratory as an art. We admire
their writings, but this is not science; here we seek in vain the
fundamental laws whence their teachings proceed. There is no science
without principles which give a reason for its facts. Hence to teach and
to learn the art of oratory, it is necessary:

1. To understand the general law which controls the movements of the
organs;

2. To apply this general law to the movements of each particular organ;

3. To understand the meaning of the form of each of these movements;

4. To adapt this meaning to each of the different states of the soul.

The fundamental law, whose stamp every one of these organs bears, must
be kept carefully in mind. Here is the formula:

The sensitive, mental and moral state of man are rendered by the
eccentric, concentric or normal form of the organism.[1]

Such is the first and greatest law. There is a second law, which
proceeds from the first and is similar to it:

Each form of the organism becomes triple by borrowing the form of the
two others.

It is in the application of these