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Show 5· SOMEWHAT HISTORICAL By the eighties, itinerant teachers had crossed the Rockies and holding large classes. Their work was received enthusiastically in every community. These students of Rush taught his system, for It soon be a certain sum, to everybody, everywhere, in six weeks. came unfashionable not to have studied elocution. Senators, clergy and men, lawyers, fathers, wives, grandmothers, children, all gath ered by the hundreds to recite in concert "The Bells," with set gestures and definite positions of feet, which had been added by James E. Murdock. Many went out to teach the subject after such a six week's course, or appeared on the lyceum platform. Even the universities employed their instructors of speech for only a few were weeks or months of the year. James E. Murdock. Upon James E. Murdock, an actor-student of Dr. Rush, fell the mantle of his master, and religiously he bore Mr. Murdock left no his message to the world. to the science of art exemplify of speech, but merely new found contribution literary bits to the classifications under the "Five General Divisions" and the many subdivisions and multitudinous ramifications that Dr. Rush had made. to gesture. Mr. Murdock also gave some formal directions as Murdock's book 4 was soon --' followed by a score or more of other elocution books. Fulton and Trueblood. The best of these books were those by Professors Robert 1. Fulton, and Thomas C. Trueblood. work 5 was Their last published in the 1890's when the philosophy of Francois Delsartewas the-craze of the elocutionary world, and was sweeping the United States the Rush analysis had done fifty years in Trueblood, great honesty and with infinite undertook to and harmonize the principles of Dr. pains, amalgamate over before. as Fulton and Rush and Delsarte. But it is impossible to mix the unmixable. Dr. Rush himself must have seen the dawn of a reason, or cause for his physiological elements of quality, time, pitch, force, and abruptness. He must .have beheld the handwriting of a mental philosophy-(psychology), on the wall, for he says at the end of his third edition: "Here I conclude the cursory view of the physiologi cal function of song and recitation; having avoided therein, every4 5 ' Analytical Elocution-Van Antwerp/Btagg & 'Co., 1884. Fulton and Trueblood, Practical Elocution-Ginn and Co. |
