ugh perhaps
somewhat arbitrary rules laid down by teachers of elocution'. The
basis of it is the need of being heard and understood, together with
the experience that style B will not answer that purpose. The main
service, no doubt, of a teacher of elocution is to instruct in the
management of the voice (clergyman's sore throat is a recognized
disease of men who use their voice wrongly); but a right pronunciation
is almost equally necessary and important.

Now if public speakers really have to learn something different from
their habitual pronunciation, Mr. Jones is right in making a separate
style of it, and he is also justified in the degraded forms of his
style B, for those are what these speakers have to unlearn; nor is any
fault to be found with his diligent and admirable analysis.

These two practical considerations expose the situation sufficiently:
we may now face the triple-tongued dragon and exhibit how a single
whiff of common sense will tumble all his three heads in the dust.

[Sidenote: The natural right method.]

The insideoutness, topsy-turviness, and preposterousness of Mr. Jones'
method is incredible. In the natural order of things, children would
be taught a careful 'high standard' articulation as a part of their
elemental training, when in their pliant age they are mastering the
co-ordinations which are so difficult to acquire later. Then when they
have been educated to speak correctly, their variation from that full
pronunciation is a natural carelessness, and has the grace of all
natural behaviour, and it naturally obeys whatever laws have been
correctly propounded by phoneticians; since it is itself the phenomena
from which those laws are deduced. This carelessness or ease of speech
will vary naturally _in all degrees_ according to occasion, and being
dependent on mood and temper will never go wrong. It is warm and alive
with expression of character, and may pass quite unselfconsciously
from the grace of negligence to the grace of correctness, for it has
correctness at command, having learned it, and its carelessness has
not been doctored and bandaged; and this ease of unselfconsciousness
is one of the essentials of human intercourse: a man talking fluently
does not consider what words he will use, he does not often remember
exactly what words he has used, nor will he know at all how he
pronounces them; his speech flows from him as his blood flows when his
flesh is wounded.

[Sidenote: What M