CHAPTER XVII
RHETORIC
It is the function of language to convey ideas. Ideas are the real foundation of good lecturing and words must always be subordinate.
The English Parliamentarian, Gladstone, had the reputation of being able to say less in more time than any man who ever lived. The difference between a good and a bad use of words is well illustrated in the discussion between Gladstone and Huxley on Genesis and Science. Of course everybody knows now that Gladstone was annihilated, in spite of the cleverness with which, when beaten, he would, in Huxley’s phrase, “retreat under a cloud of words.”
Grandiloquence will produce, in the more intelligent of your audience, an amused smile, and while it is well to have your hearers smile with you, they should never have reason to smile at you.
Here again, a great deal depends on what you have been reading. In the use of good, clear, powerful English, Prof. Huxley is without a peer, and his “collected essays” will always remain a precious heritage in English literature. For an example of the exact opposite, take the magazines and pamphlets of the so-called new thought, which at bottom is neither “new” nor “thought.” In reality it is made up of words, words, and then—more words.
I read a fifteen hundred word article, in a new thought magazine, by one of its foremost prophets, and nowhere from beginning to end, was there a single tangible idea, nothing but a long drawn out mass of meaningless jargon.
“Thus spake Zarathustra” is the same thing at its best. As an example of a style to be carefully avoided the following is in point. It is also a rara avis; a gem of purest ray. It is taken from the local Socialist platform of an Arizona town: