Read Ebook: Talks on Talking by Kleiser Grenville

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Ebook has 113 lines and 16463 words, and 3 pages

glish are the simple, plain, exact, lucid, concise, trenchant, vigorous, impressive, lively, figurative, polished, graceful, fluent, rhythmical, copious, elevated, flexible, smooth, dignified, terse, epigrammatic, felicitous, euphonious, elegant, and lofty. Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, verbose, redundant, inflated, prolix, ambiguous, feeble, monotonous, loose, slip-shod, dry, flowery, pedantic, pompous, rhetorical, grandiloquent, artificial, formal, ornate, halting, ponderous, ungrammatical, vague, and obscure.

The qualities you should develop in your speaking voice are the pure, deep, round, flexible, resonant, musical, clear, sympathetic, smooth, sonorous, powerful, silvery, melodious, full, strong, natural, mellow, magnetic, expressive, carrying, and responsive. Endeavor to keep your voice free from such undesirable qualities as the harsh, breathy, sharp, rough, rigid, throaty, guttural, thin, shrill, nasal, unmusical, discordant, muffled, explosive, strained, inaudible, hollow, strident, sepulchral, and tremulous.

Your articulation should be clear, distinct, and correct. Avoid carelessness, lifelessness, mumbling, weakness, and exaggeration.

Your pronunciation should be clear-cut and accurate. Avoid mouthing, lisping, hesitation, stammering, pedantry, omission of syllables, and suppression of final consonants.

Your delivery in public speaking should be simple, sincere, natural, varied, magnetic, earnest, forceful, attractive, energetic, animated, sympathetic, authoritative, dignified, direct, impressive, vivid, convincing, persuasive, zealous, enthusiastic, and inspiring. Avoid that which is timid, familiar, violent, cold, indifferent, unreal, artificial, dull, sing-song, hesitating, feeble, unconvincing, apathetic, monotonous, pompous, formal, arbitrary, flippant, ostentatious, drawling, or languid.

Your gesture should be graceful, appropriate, free, forceful, and natural. Avoid all gesture which is unmeaning, angular, abrupt, constrained, stilted, or amateurish.

Your facial expression should be varied, appropriate, pleasing, and impassioned. Avoid the unpleasant, immobile, and unvaried.

Let your standing position be manly, erect, easy, forceful, and impressive. Avoid that which is weak, shifting, stiff, inactive, and ungainly.

THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IN SPEAKING

There is a well-defined prejudice against the importation of anything "theatrical" into the pulpit. The art of the actor is fundamentally different from the work of the preacher. At best the actor but represents, imitates, pretends, acts. The actor seems; the preacher is.

It is to be feared, however, that this prejudice has narrowed many preachers down to a pulpit style almost devoid of warmth and action. In their endeavor to avoid the dramatic and sensational, they have refined and subdued many of their most natural and effective means of expression. The function of preaching is not only to impart, but to persuade; and persuasion demands something more than an easy conversational style, an intellectual statement of facts, or the reading of a written message. The speaker must show in face, in eye, in arm, in the whole animated man, that he, himself, is moved, before he can hope successfully to persuade and inspire others.

The modified movements of ordinary conversation do not fulfil all the requirements of the preacher. These are necessary and adequate for the groundwork of the sermon, but for the supreme heights of passionate appeal, when the soul of the preacher would, as it were, leap from its body in the endeavor to reach men, there must be intensified life and action--dramatic action.

It is difficult to conceive of a greater tribute to a public advocate than that paid to Wendell Phillips by George William Curtis:

"The divine energy of his conviction utterly possest him, and his

'Pure and eloquent blood Spoke in his cheek, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say his body thought.'"

Poise is power, and reserve and repression are parts of the dignified office of the preacher, but carried too far may degenerate into weak and unproductive effort. Perfection of English style, rhetorical floridness, and profundity of thought will never wholly make up for lack of appropriate action in the work of persuading men.

The power of action alone is vividly illustrated in the touch of the finger to the lips to invoke silence, or the pointing to the door to command one to leave the room. The preacher might often find it profitable to stand before a mirror and deliver his sermon exclusively in pantomime to test its power and efficacy.

The body must be disciplined and cultivated as assiduously as the other instruments of the speaker. There is eloquence of attitude and action no less than eloquence of voice and feeling. A preacher drawing himself up to his full height, with a significant gesture of the head, or with flashing eye pointing the finger of warning at his hearers, may rouse them from indifference when all other means fail.

Sixty years ago the Reverend William Russell emphasized the importance of visible expression. He said of the preacher:

"His outward manner, in attitude and action, will be as various as his voice: he will evince the inspiration of appropriate feeling in the very posture of his frame; in uttering the language of adoration, the slow-moving, uplifted hand will bespeak the awe and solemnity which pervade his soul; in addressing his fellow men in the spirit of an ambassador of Christ, the gentle yet earnest spirit of persuasive action will be evinced in the pleading hand and aspect; he will know, also, how to pass to the stern and authoritative mien of the reproved of sin; he will, on due occasions, indicate, in his kindling look, the rousing gesture, the mood of him who is empowered and commanded to summon forth all the energies of the human soul; his subdued and chastened address will carry the sympathy of his spirit into the bosom of the mourner; his moistening eye and his gentle action will manifest his tenderness for the suffering: his whole soul will, in a word, become legible in his features, in his attitude, in the expressive eloquence of his hand; his whole style will be felt to be that of heart communing with heart."

Dramatic action gives picturesqueness to the spoken word. It makes things vivid to slow imaginations, and by contrast invests the speaker's message with new meaning and vitality. It discloses, too, the speaker's sympathy and identification with his subject. His thought and feeling, communicating themselves to voice and face, to hand and arm, to posture and walk, satisfy and impress the hearer by a sense of adequacy and completeness.

Henry Ward Beecher, a conspicuous example of the dramatic style in preaching, was drilled for three years, while at college, in voice-culture, gesture, and action. His daily practise in the woods, during which he exploded all the vowels from the bottom to the top of his voice, gave him not only a wonderfully responsive and flexible instrument, but a freedom of bodily movement that made him one of the most vigorous and virile of American preachers. He was in the highest sense a persuasive pulpit orator.

A sensible preacher will avoid the grotesque and the extremes of mere animal vivacity. Incessant gesture and action, undue emphasizing with hand and head, and all suggestion of self-sufficiency in attitude or manner should be guarded against. All the various instruments of expression should be made ready and responsive for immediate use, but are to be employed with that taste and tact that characterize the well-balanced man. Too much action and long-continued emotional effort lose force, and unless the law of action and reaction is applied to the preaching of the sermon the attention of the congregation may snap and the desired effect be utterly destroyed.

The face as the mirror of the emotions is an important part of expression. The lips will betray determination, grief, sympathy, affection, or other feeling on the part of the speaker. The eyes, the most direct medium of psychic power, will flash in indignation, glisten in joy, or grow dim in sorrow. The brow will be elevated in surprise, or lowered in determination and perplexity.

The effectiveness of the whisper in preaching should not be overlooked. If discreetly used it may serve to impress the hearer with the profundity and seriousness of the preacher's message, or to arrest and bring back to the point of contact the wandering minds of a congregation.

To acquire emotional power and dramatic action the preacher should study the great dramatists. He should read them aloud with appropriate voice and movement. He should study children, and men, and nature. He should, perhaps, see the best actors, not to copy them, but in order that they may stimulate his taste and imagination.

CONVERSATION AND PUBLIC SPEAKING

The ideal style of public speaking is, with very little modification, the ideal of good conversation. The practical age in which we live demands a colloquial rather than an oratorical style of public speaking. A man who has something to say in conversation usually has little difficulty in saying it. If he presents the facts he will speak convincingly; if he is deeply in earnest he will speak persuasively; and if he be an educated man his speech will have the unmistakable marks of culture and refinement.

This study of conversation, both our own and that of others, offers daily opportunity for improvement in accuracy and fluency of speech, of fitting words to the mouth as well as to the thought, and of forming habits that will unconsciously disclose themselves in the larger work of public speaking. Care in conversation will guard the public speaker from inflated and unnatural tones, and restrain him from transgressing the laws of nature even in those parts of his speech demanding lofty and intensified treatment.

Some easily remembered suggestions regarding conversation are these:

The value of correct conversation as a means to effective public speaking is realized by few men. Beecher said: "How much squandering there is of the voice!" meaning that this golden opportunity for improvement was generally disregarded. It is not too much to say, however, that if the sweet and gentle expression of the mother, the strong and affectionate tones of the father, and the spontaneous musical notes of the children, as heard in daily conversation, could be united in the voice of the minister and brought to the preaching of his sermon, there would be little doubt of its magical and enduring effect upon the hearts of men. The wooing tone of the lover is what the preacher needs in his pulpit style rather than the voice of declamation and denunciation.

The study of conversation serves to guide the public speaker not only in the free and natural use of his voice, enunciation, and expression, but also in his use of language. He will here learn to choose the simple word instead of the complex, the short sentence instead of the involved, the concrete illustration instead of the abstract. He will acquire ease, spontaneity, simplicity, and directness, and when he rises to speak to men he will employ tones and words best known and understood by them.

A preacher may spend too much time in study and solitude. If he does he will soon realize a distinct loss through lack of social intercourse with his fellow men. The faculties most needed in pulpit preaching are those very powers that are so largely exercised in ordinary conversation. The ability to think quickly, to marshal facts and arguments, to introduce a vivid story or illustration, to parry and thrust as is sometimes needed to hold one's own ground, and the general mental activity aroused in conversation, all tend to produce an interesting, vivacious, and forceful style in public speaking.

We should not underestimate the value of meditation and silence to the public speaker. These are necessary for original and profound thinking, for the cultivation of the imagination, and for the accumulation of thought. But conversation offers an immediate outlet for this stored-up knowledge, testing it as a finished product in expression, and projecting it into life and reality by all the resources of voice and feeling. This exercise is as necessary to the mind as physical exercise is to the body. Indeed, a full mind demands this relief in expression, lest the strain become too great.

The daily newspaper and the magazines should not be allowed to usurp the place of conversation. If the art of talking is rapidly dying out, as some assert, we should do our share to revive it. We may not again have the wit and repartee, the brilliant intellectual combats of those other days, but we can at least each have a cultivated speaking-voice, an interesting manner of expressing our ideas in conversation, and a refined pronunciation of our mother tongue.

A TALK TO PREACHERS

The aim of one who would interpret literature to others, by means of the speaking voice, should be first to assimilate its spirit. There can be no worthy or adequate rendering of a great poem or prose selection without a keen appreciation of its inner meaning and content. This is the principal safeguard against mechanical and meaningless declamation. The extent of this appreciation and grasp of the inherent spirit of thought will largely determine the degree of life, reality, and impressiveness imparted to the spoken word.

The intimate relationship between the voice and the spirit of the speaker suggests that one is necessary to the fullest development of the other. The voice can interpret only what has been awakened and realized within, hence nothing discloses a speaker's grasp of a subject so accurately and readily as his attempt to give it expression in his own language. It is this spiritual power, developed principally through the intuitions and emotions, that gives psychic force to speaking, and which more than logic, rhetoric, or learning itself enables the speaker to influence and persuade men.

The minister as an interpreter of the highest spiritual truth should bring to his work a thoroughly trained emotional nature and a cultivated speaking voice. It is not sufficient that he state the truth with clearness and force; he must proclaim it with such passionate enthusiasm as powerfully to move his hearers. To express adequately the infinite shades of spiritual truth, he must have the ability to play upon his voice as upon a great cathedral organ, from "the soft lute of love" to "the loud trumpet of war."

To assume that the study of the art of speaking will necessarily produce consciousness of its principles while in the act of speaking in public, is as unwarranted as to say that a knowledge of the rules of grammar, rhetoric, or logic lead to artificiality and self-consciousness in the teacher, writer, and thinker. There is a "mechanical expertness preceding all art," as Goethe says, and this applies to the orator no less than to the musician, the artist, the actor, and the litterateur.

Let the minister stand up for even five minutes each day, with chest and abdomen well expanded, and pronounce aloud the long vowel sounds of the English language, in various shades of force and feeling, and shortly he will observe his voice developing in flexibility, resonance, and power. For it should be remembered that the voice grows through use. Let the minister cultivate, too, the habit of breathing exclusively through his nose while in repose, fully and deeply from the abdomen, and he will find himself gaining in health and mental resourcefulness.

For the larger development of the spiritual and emotional powers of the speaker, a wide and varied knowledge of men and life is necessary. The feelings are trained through close contact with human suffering, and in the work of solving vital social problems. The speaker will do well to explore first his own heart and endeavor to read its secret meanings, preliminary to interpreting the hearts of other men. Personal suffering will do more to open the well-springs of the heart than the reading of many books.

Care must be had, however, that this cultivating of the feelings be conducted along rational lines, lest it run not to faith but to fanaticism. There is a wide difference between emotion designed for display or for momentary effect, and that which arises from strong inner conviction and sympathetic interest in others. Spurious, unnatural feeling will invariably fail to convince serious-minded men.

"Emotion wrought up with no ulterior object," says Dr. Kennard, "is both an abuse and an injury to the moral nature. When the attention is thoroughly awakened and steadily held, the hearer is like a well-tuned harp, each cord a distinct emotion, and the skilful speaker may evoke a response from one or more at his will. This lays him under a great and serious responsibility. Let him keep steadily at such a time to his divine purpose, to produce a healthful action, a life in harmony with God and a symphony of service."

The emotional and spiritual powers of the speaker will be developed by reading aloud each day a vigorous and passionate extract from the Bible, or Shakespeare, or from some great sermon by such men as Bushnell, Newman, Beecher, Maclaren, Brooks, or Spurgeon. The entire gamut of human feeling can be highly cultivated by thus reading aloud from the great masterpieces of literature. The speaker will know that he can make his own words glow and vibrate, after he has first tested and trained himself in some such manner as this. Furthermore, by thus fitting words to his mouth, and assimilating the feelings of others, he will immeasurably gain in facility and vocal responsiveness when he attempts to utter his own thoughts.

Music is a powerful element in awakening emotion in the speaker and bringing to consciousness the mysterious inner voices of the soul. The minister should not only hear good music as often as possible, but he should train his ear to recognize the rhythm and melody in speech.

For the fullest development of this spiritual power in the public speaker there should be frequent periods of stillness and silence. One must listen much in order to accumulate much. Thought and feeling require time in which to grow. In this way the myriad sounds that arise from humanity and from nature can be caught up in the soul of the speaker and subsequently voiced by him to others.

The habit of meditating much, of brooding over thought, whether it be our own or that of others, will tend to disclose new and deeper meanings, and consequently deeper shades and depths of feeling. The speaker will diligently search for unwritten meanings in words; he will study, whenever possible, masterpieces of painting and sculpture; he will closely observe the natural feeling of well-bred children, as shown in their conversation; and in many other ways that will suggest themselves, he will daily develop his emotional and spiritual powers of expression.

The science of preaching is important, but so, too, is the art of preaching. A powerful pulpit is one of the needs of the times. A congregation readily recognizes a preacher of strong convictions, broad sympathies, and consecrated personality. An affectionate nature in a minister, manifesting itself in voice, face, and manner, will attract and influence men, while a harsh, rigid, vehement manner will as easily repel them.

It is to be feared that many sermons are written with too much regard for "literary deportment on paper," and too little thought of their value as pulsating messages to men.

The preacher should train himself to take tight hold of his thought, to grip it with mental firmness and fervor, that he may afterward convey it to others with definiteness and vigor. Thoughts vaguely conceived and held tremblingly in the mind will manifest a like character when uttered. Into the writing of the sermon put vitality and intensity, and these qualities will find their natural place in delivery. Thrill of the pen should precede thrill of the voice. The habit of Dickens of acting out the characters he was depicting on paper could be copied to advantage by the preacher, and frequently during the writing of his sermon he might stand and utter his thoughts aloud to test their power and effectiveness upon an imaginary congregation.

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