We are now in position to suggest that another factor in the choice of the generalized phrase was aesthetic distance. There is an aesthetic, as well as a moral, limit to how close one may approach an object; and the forensic artists of the epoch we describe seem to have been guided by this principle of artistic decorum. Aesthetic distance is, of course, an essential of aesthetic treatment. If one sees an object from too close, one sees only its irregularities and protuberances. To see an object rightly or to see it as a whole, one has to have a proportioned distance from it. Then the parts fall into a meaningful pattern, the dominant effect emerges, and one sees it “as it really is.” A prurient interest in closeness and a great remoteness will both spoil the view. To recall a famous example in literature, neither Lilliputian nor Brobdingnagian is man as we think we know him. Thus it can be a sign not only of philosophical ignorance but also of artistic bad taste to treat an object familiarly or from a near proximity. At the risk of appearing fanciful we shall say that objects have not only their natures but their rights, which the orator is bound to respect, since he is in large measure the ethical teacher of society. By maintaining this distance with regard to objects, art manages to “idealize” them in a very special sense. One does not mean by this that it necessarily elevates them or transfigures them, but it certainly does keep out a kind of officious detail which would only lower the general effect. What the artistic procedure tends to do, then, is to give us a “generic” picture, and much the same can be said about oratory. The true orator has little concern with singularity—or, to recall again a famous instance, with the wart on Cromwell’s face—because the singular is the impertinent. Only the generic belongs, and by obvious connection the language of the generic is a general language. In the old style, presentation kept distances which had, as one of their purposes, the obscuring of details. It would then have appeared the extreme of bad taste to particularize in the manner which has since, especially in certain areas of journalism, become a literary vogue. It would have been beyond the pale to refer, in anything intended for the public view, to a certain cabinet minister’s false teeth or a certain congressman’s shiny dome. Aesthetically, this was not the angle of vision from which one takes in the man, and there is even the question of epistemological truthfulness. Portrait painters know that still, and journalists knew it a hundred years ago. It will be best to illustrate the effect of aesthetic distance. I have chosen a passage from the address delivered by John C. Breckinridge, Vice-President of the United States, on the occasion of the removal of the Senate from the Old to the New Chamber, January 4, 1859. The moment was regarded as solemn, and the speaker expressed himself as follows: