Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 122.djvu/66

60 Pages formerly uniform to the verge of monotony are now diversified by photographs, diagrams, Cartoons, and a dozen other graphic features. The photogravure sections of the Sunday papers have already been prophetically christened ' newspapers without words.' It would be interesting to know the amount of time given to them weekly by the American public, as compared with other sections of equal size especially by the women, who are perhaps more sensitive than men to coming changes in the spiritual atmosphere.

However that may be, can anyone doubt that we are nearer the beginning than the end of a process that is steadily increasing the appeal of the printed page to the eye? Possibly the weekly news film of the moving-picture house gives us a hint of that far-off something into which the newspaper of the present is destined to evolve.

And there are indications of an analogous change on the public platform. Oratory, in the old sense, it is generally admitted, is dead. There are still places the United States Senate, for instance, and certain pulpits where speeches are yet made; but nobody takes them very seriously. The kind of public utterance that is taken seriously is the lecture by the chemist or physicist, where the apparatus and experiments do the real talking; by the economist or sociologist, who relies far more on exhibits, diagrams, and graphs than on words, to get his thought across; by the traveler or explorer, whose tongue has become the tip of a pointer touching a screen ; or by any of a score of other speakers who talk predominantly through things and pictures rather than language.

And I spoke of sermons. The Catholic Church continues to flourish, for one reason, I imagine, because language was never its primary medium of expression. And the Quakers, whose specialty is silence, still survive. Even some of the other churches, if they have sufficiently good music and architecture, attract their worshipers. But the failure of the extreme Protestant attempt to make language the main medium of religious utterance is pretty accurately measured by the steady decline in length of sermon and ministerial prayer, and the gradual return, even in churches of highly anti-Catholic tradition, to various forms of ritualism. Straws show which way the wind blows. Trivial as it seems, I pro- pose, therefore, this test of the relationship of church and language: go to a service where the minister preaches a preliminary sermon to the children, illustrated by a brick, or a clock, or a silver dollar (which he holds up in the flesh, so to speak, before the audience), and watch every eye concentrated, not on the speaker, but on the object in his hand; and then, when the sermon prop- er comes, conveyed exclusively in lan- guage, watch the eyes fixed, just as in- tently as before, on vacancy.

And speaking of the church reminds us of the theatre. While the churches (at least the hortatory churches) stag- nate, the theatres flourish. Well have not a hundred authorities on the drama told us that the secret of making a play consists precisely in eliminating language? Whoever, when a theatrical piece has been in rehearsal, has seen a bit of stage business suddenly render a page of dialogue superfluous, has received one of the most impressive les- sons art can offer concerning the rela- tion of language and expression. And what pantomime does toward abolish- ing language by its appeal to the eye, the voice seeks to do through its appeal to the ear. Intonation and inflection, in the theatre, may become as potent eliminators of language as action and gesture are. Considered from this angle, what is