Studies and Problems for Developing the Reading and Speaking By S. S. Curry, Ph.D., Litt.D. President of the School of Expression, Author of "The Province of etc. NEW YORK Boston The Expression Company Pierce Building, Copley Square A WORD ON THE POINT OF VIEW The Muse of Eloquence and the Muse of Liberty, it has been said, are twin sisters. A free people must be a race of speakers. The perversion or neglect of oratory has always been accompanied by the degradation of freedom. The importance of speaking to a true national life, and to the forwarding of all reforms, can hardly be overestimated; but it is no less necessary to the development of the individual. Expression is the manifestation of life, and speaking in some form is vitally necessary for the assimilation of truth and the awakening to a consciousness of personal power. Since the invention of printing, the written word has been overestimated in education, and living speech has been greatly neglected. Recent discoveries of the necessity of developing the motor centres have revived interest in the living voice. With this revival of interest the inadequacy of modern elocutionary methods has come to be realized. Such methods have been based usually upon imitation and artificial or mechanical analysis, and consist of mere rules founded upon phraseology, the modulations of the voice being governed by rules of grammar or rhetoric instead of by the laws of thought. Neither the nature nor functions of the voice modulations have been recognized. An able college graduate, and head of an educational institution, once acknowledged to me that he had never thought of a voice modulation as having a distinct meaning of its own with power to change even the meaning of a phrase. This book outlines the results of some earnest endeavors to study anew the problem of developing the voice and body and improving reading and speaking. The attempt has been made to find psychological causes, not only of |