The Young Man and the World Part 15

The greatest feat of modern speech, in its immediate effect, was Henry Ward Beecher's speech to the Liverpool mob. A gentleman who heard that speech told me that, notwithstanding the pandemonium that reigned around him, Beecher did not shout, nor speak at the top of his voice, a single time during that terrible four hours.

It is true that aeschines spoke of Demosthenes' delivery of his "Oration on the Crown" as having the ferocity of a wild beast. I do not see how that can be, however, because Demosthenes selected Isaeus as his teacher for the reason that Isaeus was "business-like" in method.

This, however, is common to the voices of nearly all great speakers; they have a peculiar power of penetration that carries them much farther than the shout and halloo of the loudest-voiced person. They have, too, a singularly touching and tender quality, which, in a sensuous way, captivates and holds the hearers. James Whitcomb Riley has this quality in his voice when reciting. Edwin Booth had it. All great actors have it. Every true orator has it. It touches you strangely, thrills you, affects you much as music does.

It is a remarkable thing that there _is neither wit nor humor in any of the immortal speeches_ that have fallen from the lips of man. To find a joke in Webster would be an offense. The only things which Ingersoll wrote that will live are his oration at his brother's grave and his famous "The Past Rises before Me like a Dream." But in neither of these productions of this genius of jesters is there a single trace of wit.

There is not a funny sally in all Burke's speeches. Lincoln's Gettysburg address, his first and second inaugurals, his speech beginning the Douglas campaign, and his Cooper Union address in New York, are perhaps the only utterances of his that will endure.

Yet this greatest of story-tellers since aesop did not deface one of these great deliverances with story or any form of humor.

The reason for this is found in the whole tendency of human thought and feeling--in the whole melancholy history of the race--where tears and grief, the hard seriousness of life and the terrible and speedy certainty of our common fate of suffering and of death, make somber the master-cord of existence. And the great orator must reflect the deeper soul of his hearers.

So all the immortal things are serious, even sad.

It is so with speech--I mean the speech that affects the convictions and understanding of men. I am excluding now that form of speech which belongs to the same cla.s.s, though not of so high an order, as the theatrical exhibition.

Excepting only Lincoln, the Middle West has produced no greater man than Oliver P. Morton; and few men in our history have had greater power upon an audience both in the immediate and permanent effect of his speeches than did Indiana's great Senator. It is related of him that while a very young man he made a speech so rich in humor and scintillant of wit that it attracted the attention of the whole commonwealth.

Morton, however, was not pleased or flattered. He was alarmed. He feared that what he knew to be his weighty abilities would be held lightly by his fellow citizens. From that time on this Cromwell of the forum never "told a story" or attempted to amuse his hearers in any way.

Of course, if your mental armory is naturally heavily stocked with the various forms of fun, you are not to be blamed for employing the weapons with which Nature has equipped you and which Nature has peculiarly fitted you to use--although Morton deliberately let them rust. But, generally speaking, it is a distinct descent from the high plane of your address to excite the laughter of your audience. When you do so, you confess that you are not able to hold the attention of your hearers by the sustained and unbroken strength of your argument.

You admit that you are either so dull in your thought or indifferent in your convictions that you know you are wearying your auditors and must rest them by some mental diversion.

Where there is an earnestness of thought (and earnestness is only another name for seriousness) there will always be the same quality in manner--an impressiveness in bearing and delivery. This is inconsistent with merriment of delivery, which robs speech of a certain weight and intrinsic worth. It is also inconsistent with the voice of storm and the hurricane manner.

And men in deadly earnest do not talk loudly. It has been my fortune to see men angry and aroused to the point of killing; they were intense, but quiet. I have also seen that bravado and drunken boisterousness which thought it imitated, and meant to imitate, genuine rage; it was always strident and violent, never dangerous, never sincere. The same thing is true in speech.

There have only been two or three roarers in effective oratory--Mirabeau, by all accounts (though anything can be forgiven a man who can make such speeches as the great Frenchman made), and Demosthenes, if aeschines is to be believed, which I think he is not to be in this particular. He was only excusing his own defeat, and he had to attribute it to delivery. (I think any unprejudiced mind will agree that aeschines made the better argument.) All the other great speakers have, even in their most intense pa.s.sages, and in situations where life and death were involved, been comparatively quiet so far as mere volume of sound is concerned.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the first great speaker I ever heard. It was Robert G. Ingersoll, delivering a lecture in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1884. He had an audience which would have inspired eloquence in almost any breast. He came on the stage alone, and was very carefully, even elegantly attired, to the smallest item of his grooming.

His address was in ma.n.u.script, and imperfectly committed to memory. He laid it down on a little table at the back of the stage (returning to it occasionally to refresh his memory), and then, in a very natural and matter-of-fact way, walked to the footlights, and, looking the audience frankly in the eyes, began without an instant's hesitation, and in a voice precisely as if he were talking to a friend.

But he was as dramatic at his climaxes as Edwin Booth ever was in Hamlet. His face paled, or seemed to pale; his hands clinched with a desperate energy, and the whole att.i.tude of the man was that of one in awful wrath. Yet his voice was not raised above the common current of the evening's address--if anything, it was lower. While the mature mind cannot endure Ingersoll's rhetoric, it must be acknowledged that his manner of delivery (except when his levity made him coa.r.s.e) was nearly equal to that of Wendell Phillips. Still, in his intense pa.s.sages Ingersoll was almost fiercely earnest. And Plutarch tells us that Cicero's friends feared he would kill himself by bursting a blood-vessel, with such intense energy did he speak.

Both of these men had that instinctive taste of the great speaker which Shakespeare has described better than any one else in literature, when he makes Hamlet tell the players not to "mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.

Nor do not saw the air too much--your hand thus: but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of pa.s.sion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig pated fellow tear a pa.s.sion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise: I could have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it."

When I was a very young boy I saw a fist-fight which impressed me as powerfully as any lesson I ever learned at school. An overtall and powerful man, about forty years old, had become angry at a medium-sized but very compact man of about the same age. As his pa.s.sion increased his violence grew, until finally he was shouting his denunciations. The little man stood quietly alert.

Finally, with a great volume of sound, the big man rushed upon the little one with arms swinging in the air, and I looked with interest and curiosity to see the smaller man either run or be demolished. He did neither. His fists were raised quickly but intensely before him, and when the big man was almost upon him, it seemed to me that his right hand did not shoot out farther than ten or twelve inches; but it did shoot out, and the result was as if the big man had been shot, sure enough.

He fell like a slaughtered ox, but rose and came on again, only again to be knocked down. This continued for three or four times, for the giant was "game"; but finally he was "thrashed to a standstill," as the expression has it.

It was a great lesson in life and a great lesson in speaking, which is only a phase of life. The victor came to the point. He did not dissipate his energies. It is so in the manner of speaking. The greatest contrast to the perfect method of Ingersoll which I ever beheld in a man of equal eminence was in the delivery of a lecture by Joseph Cook.

He came on the stage with ostentatious impressiveness. He sat some time before he was introduced, seeming vast and overpowering--a very Matterhorn of consequence. After introduction he stood with one hand thrust in the breast of his tightly b.u.t.toned frock coat, and looked tremendously all over the audience for perhaps an entire minute.

Everybody was awed; he looked so great. We all said to ourselves, "What a mighty man this is!"

And when that effect had been produced upon us, the first and great point of effectiveness had been destroyed: the speaker had made us think about himself, his manner, his appearance, his personality. All the evening we had to wade through that slough, trying to follow his thought. And this reminds me of a saying of one of the most astute politicians and most capable public men of recent development:

"The surest sign that a man is not great is that he strives to look great."

I think that the best speech I ever heard for obedience to the rules of art was an address of about ten minutes by a young Salvation Army officer on the streets of Chicago. I listened with amazement. He was perhaps twenty-three years of age, with delicate, clear-cut features, sensitive mouth, and marvelously intelligent eyes. I was just pa.s.sing the group as he stepped into the circle that always surrounds these noisy but sincere enthusiasts.

He took off his cap, and in a low, perfectly natural, and very sweet voice, speaking exactly as though he were having a conversation with his most confidential friend, he began: "You will admit, my friends, that human happiness is the problem of human life." And from this striking sentence he went on to another equally moving, showing, of course, that happiness could not be secured by traveling any of the usual roads, but only the straight and narrow path which the Master has marked out.

It was as simple as it was sincere. And it was as conversational as it was quiet. Before he had finished, his audience had gathered into itself every pedestrian who pa.s.sed during his discourse--business man, professional man, working man, or what not.

The fight above described suggests the key to the matter as well as the manner of speaking. The American audience properly demands, above everything else, that the speaker get to the point. Our lives are so rapid; the telephone, telegraph, and all the instantaneous agencies of our neurotically swift civilization have made us so quick in seeing through propositions; a hundred years of universal education have produced a mentality so electric in its rapidity, that effective oratory has been revolutionized within a decade.

Burke would not be tolerated now. It is doubtful, even, if Webster would. The public has already tired of the lilt of Ingersoll's redundant rhetoric, pleasing as was its music. The effective speech to-day is a statement of conclusions.

The listeners, with a celerity inconceivable, sum up the argument on either side of the proposition you announce, and accept or reject it by a process of unconscious mental cerebration.

The most successful speech of to-day would be one of Emerson's essays rearranged in logical order--if such a thing were possible. Therefore, in matter, the statement is the form of address now most effective.

Recall the opinion of Senator McDonald--the greatest natural lawyer I ever knew--that the best argument in a case always is the statement of the case.

In form, the sentences should be short; in language, the words should be as largely as possible Anglo-Saxon. These are the words of the people you address, therefore they are most influential with them.

Also, therefore, your best method of getting Anglo-Saxon is to mingle with and talk with the common people. The next best method is to read the Bible, the King James translation of which is undoubtedly the purest fountain of English that flows in all the world of our literature.

What nonsense the repeated statement that public speaking has had its day, that the newspaper has taken its place, and all the rest of that kind of talk. Public speaking will never decline until men cease to have ears to hear. How hard it is to read a speech; how delightful to listen!

Speaking is Nature's choicest method of instruction.

It begins with mother to child; it continues with teacher to pupil; it continues still in lecturer or professor to his student (for the universities are all going back to the old oral method of instruction); and it still continues in all the forms of effective human communication.

The newspapers are a marvelous influence, but they are not everything, and they do not supply everything. For example, it is commonly supposed that they, absolutely and exclusively, mold and control public opinion. But they do not. When all has been said, the most powerful public opinion, after all, is that from-mouth-to-mouth public opinion--that living, moving opinion--which spreads from neighbor to neighbor, and has fused into it the vitality of the personality of nearly every man--yes, and woman; don't forget that--in the whole community.

And the philosophy which underlies this is what makes public speaking immortal. The Master understood this very well, and that is why He chose to speak by word of mouth rather than by writing epistles. The Saviour never wrote a single epistle--no, not even a single word. He _spoke_ His message.

Think of a gospel announced to the world in cold type! Absurd, is it not? It may be repeated in that form, but its initial power must come from the spoken word and vital personality of its author. But Christ's addresses were not "extemporaneous." All His life He had been preparing His few sermons--lessons.

The great speakers to whom I have listened have confirmed certain conclusions upon the subject of speaking at which I arrived while in college. It seemed to me that the college method of speaking was wrong because it was irrational--that the studied gestures, the "cultivated"

voice, the staccato impressiveness, were all artificial devices to attract the attention of an audience to these things, instead of to the thought of the address.

a.n.a.lysis of the problem convinced me that an audience is only a larger person--a great collective individuality--and therefore that whatever, in manner and matter, will please, persuade, and convince a person, will have the same effect upon an audience. Hence one readily deduces that a simple, quiet, but direct, earnest address; a straightforward, unartificial honest manner, without tricks of oratory, is the most effective method of lodging truth in the minds of one's hearers.

Any affectation, any mannerism, detracts from the thought because it calls the attention of the listener to the mannerism or affectation, when his whole attention should be monopolized by the thought. Read Herbert Spencer on the "Philosophy of Style," and apply his reasoning to the delivery of an address, and you have the rationale of the art of speaking, as well as of speech, put with that wonderful thinker's unerringness.

The method commonly employed in preparing speeches is incorrect. That method is, to read all the books one can get on the subject, take all the opinions that can be procured, make exhaustive notes, and then write the speech.

Such a speech is nothing but a compilation. It is merely an arrangement of second-hand thoughts and observations and of other people's ideas. It never has the power of living and original thinking.

The true way is to take the elements of the problem in hand, and, without consulting a book or an opinion, reason out from these very elements of the problem itself your solution of it, and then prepare your speech.

After this, read, read, read--read comprehensively, omnivorously, in order to see whether your solution was not exploded a hundred years ago--aye, a thousand--and, if it was not, to fortify and make accurate your own thought. Read Matthew Arnold on "Literature and Dogma," and you will discover why it is necessary for you to read exhaustively on any subject about which you would think or write or speak.