Walker, John. Elements of Elocution.
After giving several lectures on English pronunciation at Oxford, Walker was asked to write this volume: not a “florid harangue” on the advantages of good reading (most likely a stab at Sheridan’s polemical lectures) but rather “some plain practical rules” that would aid in instruction. While his insights would hardly seem practical to a twenty-first-century reader, Walker’s Elements of Elocution was one of the most widely used and influential manuals of the late eighteenth-century elocution movement. Walker defines elocution as “that pronunciation which is given to words when they’re arranged into sentences and form discourse” (3). Elocution differs from pronunciation (his other area of expertise) in its focus on not single words, but words “in dependence on each other for sense” (3). His most explicit intervention in conversations on oral delivery and the art of speaking is his definition of the “two inflections of the voice” (72). He claims that the primary division of speaking sounds is into “upward and downward slides of the voice” (72) and his manual includes instructions on how to use these two slides or inflections in various types of sentences.
While Walker presents his method as a new discovery, the voice’s “slides” had, as elocutionists like James Rush have pointed out, already been discussed in Steele’s Melody and Measure of Speech at the time of Walker’s publication. Most useful to me is Walker’s thorough discussion of the voice and body in the dramatic “Passions.” His writing here is also not entirely original; he himself admits his indebtedness to James Burgh’s writing on the passions in The Art of Speaking (1761). Walker claims that imitating his description of a passion would “awaken an original feeling of them in the breast of the reader” (315). He describes what Derrida would later call the “auto-affection” of speech in his critique of the metaphysics of presence: “the speaker, like the performer on a musical instrument, is wrought upon by the sound he creates; and, though active at the beginning, at length becomes passive, by the sound of his own voice on himself.” In speaking, then, he meets the passion “as it were, half way” (311), and passively experiences the passion instead of creating it. In this way, Walker markets his volume as not only an elocution manual, but also a sympathy manual, with tools for imitating and, hence, experiencing a variety of emotional states through the audition of one’s own vocal tones.
