Talk to a Young Preacher on Elocution.
ELOCUTION is to the thought what the musket is to the ball. More. The musket is useless without the ball. Elocution gets on alone often. Some public speakers have nothing but elocution, and succeed; accomplish something. This is an indisputable fact, and it is a high tribute to elocution. It proves everything that we want proven in favor of elocution. It is of a piece with the trite truth, that music, modulated intonation, simple sound, has singular, prodigious power. It soothes the savage breast. It is irresistible to the civilized, no less. Study to sound well. If you excel in thought and tone both, you shall do wonders. But you may fail in the first, only, and yet succeed. You may still excel in the second. As audiences are at present, it is better thus than contrariwise. If you have the rare gift of a good voice, the rest is easy. If you are deficient in natural voice, you ought, by this time, to have an effective acquired voice. By exercise, by persevering, patient practice of the voice, it can be improved and educated indefinitely. First get a good voice, then learn how to use it. I have no ultra notions about elocution. I think it is a gift of nature, as music is, and song. I believe that orators, as well as poets, are born, and that once born, they are irrepressible. But he who sets about it, can acquire largely in the way of an impressive, moving, influential, public voice. And it is an obligation most binding on the preacher, to make the most of his voice. Now there have been preachers who have lived and died, without being as much as distinctly heard; and there are preachers who are dead while they live, because they are not distinctly heard. A considerable portion of the discourse is lost to the audience through indolence, or nervous rapidity of utterance. It is not from every pulpit that you can hear every word of a brief text, even. It is grumbled or rattled out with a slovenliness shockingly inconsistent with the speaker's professed belief in regard to it. There are not many preachers who stand up straight, and utter their texts and chapters of Scripture with a vigor of voice and deliberation that will simply send them into the ears of their hearers, much less impress the hearts of the same. An indifferent discourse, declaimed with deliberation and distinctness, will be vastly more effective than a superior sermon, mumblingly pronounced. There is a great deal of funnel-fashion delivery. The sentence is uttered in the shape of a funnel, with the big end before. Everybody hears the first of it, nobody hears the last of it. This prevailing defect is inexcusable. You can be heard, every word, if you wish to be. Therefore see that you obtain a round, full, slow, clean way of enunciating words. Pronounce your text, your theme, and the salient points of your discourse, with a deliberation and emphasis commensurate with their relative importance. Repeat, whenever an important word is likely to be lost through somebody's provoking cough. An audience will soon listen attentively to a speaker who shows real anxiety to be heard. The repetition of a sentence or paragraph renders it a thousand-fold more adhesive. Learn to converse with an audience. Conversation is the basis of all oratory. Take the modulations and intonations of your every-day talk, for your guide in public speaking. You never talk monotonously; see that you do not speak monotonously in public. You talk with animation and versatility; exhibit these attractive qualities to the great congregation. You do not yell, bawl, or bellow, in the face of your audience. You do not chant your "how d' do's," and "fine days," and "good bys;" do not chant your addresses to the promiscuous assembly. The holy twang is a nuisance. Address the assembly precisely as you would address a single member of it in private conversation. An increase of voice, and of care to be heard, are all that are necessary to the man who has the root of the matter of oratory in him. I asked a lady of culture and discernment what she thought of our finest American orator, he of the "silver tongue." She replied that he reminded her of "an elegant gentleman conversing with his friends." The description is perfect. It should be the description of the preacher. Alas! it is the description of lamentably few preachers. Some of them remind me of a Niagara Falls conversing with its friends. And so on. There are astonishingly few theological graduates who can stand up before a group of their fellow beings in the audience room, and speak to it with even the grace and naturalness that they speak to a group of their acquaintances in the drawing-room. What are called "natural orators" are artistic orators. The highest art is the best nature. Perfect art and perfect nature are identical. Your natural orator is an artist; your perfect artist is a naturalist. Have you not heard in commendation of the natural flowers, "O, I thought they were artificial!" as well of the artificial flowers, "O I thought they were natural!" Show some of this art-nature in the pulpit. If you must murder something, murder your sermon. But keep the Scriptures, I beseech you, from mangling at the hands of your tongue. Use art, nature, leisure, deliberation, downright elocution, in the reading of your chapter. Study hard, long, laboriously, to make the most of our high, strange, mystic art of speech, in the recitation of Holy Writ. This is an utterly uncultivated field.—Keynote in N. Y. Examiner.