Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/789

Rh these silent but fascinating appeals to the eye. In all these and in many other ways the eye and the hand are called into ceaseless and intelligent use, while the ear and the tongue are idle.

There are, or at least there were, three good old arts involving the use of the ear and the tongue—namely, music, oratory, and conversation. If, as the Greeks believed, the highest good be the harmonious exercise of all our powers, there are no other arts whose loss or deterioration at the present time society could so ill afford. Of these, music is the first in worth and fortunately has suffered least thus far from the decline of the organs upon which it depends. But music, although carried to a high degree of perfection by specialists, has no longer its former place in the home and in the life of the people. Musical instruments are many, and a kind of solitary, eye-and-hand music is common enough. Contrast also the influence of the opera and theatre. The people prefer to go to the latter to see rather than to the former to hear. Notice, too, the tendency to make both the theatre and the opera spectacular to meet the popular demand for something to please the eye, so that we go even to the opera to see rather than to hear. When Richard Wagner substituted the "musical drama" for the opera, it was not merely an innovation in music nor a union of all the arts of the stage, but rather a surrender of the language of sound to the language of form.

In its three most distinctive fields, oratory is suffering a considerable deterioration. These are the pulpit, the bar, and the legislative hall. The preacher no longer tells his hearers what he knows, but reads to them what he himself has read from the commentary or the review. The widely bemoaned decadence of the pulpit is not alone due to the decay of theologies, but also to the loss of that on which its vitality depends—power to speak and to listen. Listening, too, is a lost art. At church we are often engaged in an intent review of our own mental images; in conversation we are not so busied apprehending what is said as considering what we shall say. When we wish, therefore, to attend to and remember an address or lecture, we find both difficult. In the practice of law oral pleading has been superseded to a considerable extent by the type-written brief. In our legislative assemblies the machinery of the caucus and committee-room has taken the place of the direct oral appeal.

The last of our voice arts is conversation. A recent writer in The New Review, in an article on Talk and Talkers of To-day, calls in question the "commonplace of social criticism" that conversation is a lost art, and instances Mr. Charles Villiers, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, Mr. Morley, and Lord Salisbury as talkers who may be compared with Sydney Smith, Macaulay, Lord Derby, and Bishop Wilberforce. But one might well ask whether