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Public Speaking

I >> Irvah Lester Winter >> Public Speaking




It is a compliment to a public speaker that the audience should discuss
what he says rather than his manner of saying it; more complimentary
that they should remember his arguments, than that they should praise
his rhetoric. The orator should seek to conceal himself behind his
subject. If he presents himself in every speech he is sure to become
monotonous, if not offensive. If, however, he focuses attention upon
his subject, he can find an infinite number of themes and, therefore,
give variety to his speech.


BOOKS, LITERATURE, AND THE PEOPLE

From "Essays in Application," with the permission of Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York, publishers.

BY HENRY VAN DYKE

Every one knows what books are. But what is literature? It is the ark
on the flood. It is the light on the candlestick. It is the flower
among the leaves; the consummation of the plant's vitality, the crown
of its beauty, and the treasure house of its seeds. It is hard to
define, easy to describe.

Literature is made up of those writings which translate the inner
meanings of nature and life, in language of distinction and charm,
touched with the personality of the author, into artistic forms of
permanent interest. The best literature, then, is that which has the
deepest significance, the most lucid style, the most vivid
individuality, and the most enduring form.

On the last point contemporary judgment is but guess-work, but on the
three other points it should not be impossible to form, nor improper to
express, a definite opinion.

Literature has its permanent marks. It is a connected growth, and its
life history is unbroken. Masterpieces have never been produced by men
who have had no masters. Reverence for good work is the foundation of
literary character. The refusal to praise bad work, or to imitate it,
is an author's personal chastity.

Good work is the most honorable and lasting thing in the world. Four
elements enter into good work in literature:--An original impulse--not
necessarily a new idea, but a new sense of the value of an idea. A
first-hand study of the subject and the material. A patient, joyful,
unsparing labor for the perfection of form. A human aim--to cheer,
console, purify, or ennoble the life of the people. Without this aim
literature has never sent an arrow close to the mark. It is only by
good work that men of letters can justify their right to a place in the
world. The father of Thomas Carlyle was a stonemason, whose walls stood
true and needed no rebuilding. Carlyle's prayer was, "Let me write my
books as he built his houses."


EDUCATION FOR BUSINESS

From an address before the New York Chamber of Commerce, 1890

BY CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT

Before we can talk together to advantage about the value of education
in business, we ought to come to a common understanding about the sort
of education we mean and the sort of business.

We must not think of the liberal education of to-day as dealing with a
dead past--with dead languages, buried peoples, exploded philosophies;
on the contrary, everything which universities now teach is quick with
life and capable of application to modern uses. They teach indeed the
languages and literature of Judea, Greece, and Rome; but it is because
those literatures are instinct with eternal life. They teach
mathematics, but it is mathematics mostly created within the lifetime
of the older men here present. In teaching English, French, and German,
they are teaching the modern vehicles of all learning--just what Latin
was in medieval times. As to history, political science, and natural
science, the subjects, and all the methods by which they are taught,
may properly be said to be new within a century. Liberal education is
not to be justly regarded as something dry, withered, and effete; it is
as full of sap as the cedars of Lebanon.

And what sort of business do we mean? Surely the larger sorts of
legitimate and honorable business; that business which is of advantage
both to buyer and seller, and to producer, distributor, and consumer
alike, whether individuals or nations, which makes common some useful
thing which has been rare, or makes accessible to the masses good
things which have been within reach only of the few--I wish I could say
simply which make dear things cheap; but recent political connotations
of the word cheap forbid. We mean that great art of production and
exchange which through the centuries has increased human comfort,
cherished peace, fostered the fine arts, developed the pregnant
principle of associated action, and promoted both public security and
public liberty.

With this understanding of what we mean by education on the one hand
and business on the other, let us see if there can be any doubt as to
the nature of the relations between them. The business man in large
affairs requires keen observation, a quick mental grasp of new
subjects, and a wide range of knowledge. Whence come these powers and
attainments--either to the educated or to the uneducated--save through
practice and study? But education is only early systematic practice and
study under guidance. The object of all good education is to develop
just these powers--accuracy in observation, quickness and certainty in
seizing upon the main points of new subjects, and discrimination in
separating the trivial from the important in great masses of facts.
This is what liberal education does for the physician, the lawyer, the
minister, and the scientist. This is what it can do also for the man of
business; to give a mental power is one of the main ends of the higher
education. Is not active business a field in which mental power finds
full play? Again, education imparts knowledge, and who has greater need
to know economics, history, and natural science than the man of large
business?

Further, liberal education develops a sense of right, duty, and honor;
and more and more, in the modern world, large business rests on
rectitude and honor, as well as on good judgment. Education does this
through the contemplation and study of the moral ideals of our race;
not in drowsiness or dreaminess or in mere vague enjoyment of poetic
and religious abstractions, but in the resolute purpose to apply
spiritual ideals to actual life. The true university fosters ideals,
but always to urge that they be put into practice in the real world.
When the universities hold up before their youth the great Semitic
ideals which were embodied in the Decalogue, they mean that those
ideals should be applied in politics. When they teach their young men
that Asiatic ideal of unknown antiquity, the Golden Rule, they mean
that their disciples shall apply it to business; when they inculcate
that comprehensive maxim of Christian ethics, "Ye are all members of
one another," they mean that this moral principle is applicable to all
human relations, whether between individuals, families, states, or
nations.


THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN ORATORY

From the author's lectures on oratory, with his permission

BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

It is a singular fact that the three leaders of the revolution, in the
Massachusetts colony, John Adams, Sam Adams, and Oxenbridge Thatcher,
were all trained originally to be clergymen, and all afterwards
determined to be lawyers, and get their legal training in addition.
John Adams did it; Oxenbridge Thatcher did it. Sam Adams's parents held
so hard to the doctrine that the law was a disreputable profession that
they never allowed him to enter it. He went into business, but before
he got through, mixed himself up with legal questions more than the two
others put together. And what is more, and what has only lately been
brought out distinctly, there existed in the southern colonies
represented by Virginia very much the same feeling, only coming from a
different source. It was not a question of church membership or of
ecclesiastical training--the southern colonies never troubled
themselves very much about those things--but turned upon a wholly
different thing. The southern colonies were based on land ownership;
the aim was to build up a type of society like the English type, an
aristocratic system of landowners as in England. And these
miscellaneous men who, without owning large estates or large numbers of
slaves, came forward to try cases in court, were regarded with the same
sort of suspicion which the same class had to meet in Massachusetts.

Patrick Henry, the greatest of Virginians for the purpose for which
Providence had marked him out, was always regarded by Jefferson in very
much the same light in which Sam Adams was by his uncles, who were
afraid he wanted to be a lawyer. Henry was regarded as a man from the
people, an irregularly trained man. Jefferson, you will find,
criticizes his pronunciation severely. He talked about "yearth" instead
of "earth." He said that a man's "nateral" parts needed to be improved
by "eddication." Jefferson had traveled in Europe and talked with
cultivated men in other countries. He did not do that sort of thing,
and he, not being a man of the most generous or candid nature, always
tries to make us think that Patrick Henry was a nobody who had very
little practice. And it was not until the admirable life of him written
for the "American Statesmen" series by my predecessor in this
lectureship, Moses Coit Tyler, whose loss we so greatly mourn, that it
was clearly made out that, on the contrary, he had an immense legal
practice and was wonderfully successful in a great variety of cases.

So, both North and South, there was this antagonism to this new class
coming forward; and yet that new class stepped forward and took the
leadership of the American Revolution. Not that the clergy were false
to their duty. They did their duty well. There is a book by J. Wingate
Thornton, called "The Clergy of the American Revolution," which
contains an admirable and powerful series of sermons by those very
clergymen whom I have criticized for their limitations. They did their
part admirably, and yet one sees as time goes on that the lawyers are
taking matters into their own hands.

But the change was not always a benefit to the style of oratory. It was
a period of somewhat formal style; it was not a period when the English
language was reaching to its highest sources. You will be surprised to
find, for instance, in the books and addresses of that period how
little Shakespeare is quoted, how much oftener much inferior poets. In
Edmund Burke's orations he quotes Shakespeare very little; and Edmund
Burke's orations are interesting especially for this, that they are not
probably the original addresses which he gave, are literature rather
than oratory, and are now generally supposed to have been written out
afterwards.

Like Burke most of the orators of that period have a certain formal
style. When all is said and done, the clergy got a certain pithiness
from that terrific habit they had of going back every little while and
pinning down their thought with a text. One English clergyman of the
period compared his text to a horse block on which he ascended when he
wished to mount his horse, and then he rode his horse as long as he
wished and might or might not come back to that horse block again.
Therefore we see in the oratory of that time a certain formality.

Moreover, in the absence of the modern reporter, we really do not know
exactly what was said in the greatest speeches of that day. The modern
reporter, whose aim is to report everything that is said, and who
generally succeeds in putting in a great many fine things which haven't
occurred to the orators--the modern reporter was not known, and we have
but very few descriptions even of the great orations.


DANIEL WEBSTER, THE MAN

From the author's lectures on oratory, with his permission

BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

It happened to me, when I was in college, to be once on some business
at an office on State Street in Boston, then as now the central
business street of the place, in a second-story office where there were
a number of young men writing busily at their desks. Presently one of
the youths, passing by accident across the room, stopped suddenly and
said,--

"There is Daniel Webster!"

In an instant every desk in that room was vacated, every pane in every
window was filled with a face looking out, and I, hastening up behind
them, found it difficult to get a view of the street so densely had
they crowded round it. And once looking out, I saw all up and down the
street, in every window I could see, just the same mass of eager faces
behind the windows. Those faces were all concentrated on a certain
figure, a farmer-like, sunburned man who stood, roughly clothed, with
his hands behind him, speaking to no one, looking nowhere in
particular; waiting, so far as I could see, for nothing, with broad
shoulders and heavy muscles, and the head of a hero above. Such a brow,
such massive formation, such magnificent black eyes, such straight
black eyebrows I had never seen before.

That man, it appeared, was Daniel Webster! I saw people go along the
street sidling along past him, looking up at him as if he were the
Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World in New York harbor. Nobody
knew what he wanted, it never was explained; he may have been merely
waiting for some companion to go fishing. But there he was, there he
stands in my memory. I don't know what happened afterwards, or how
these young men ever got back to their desks--if they ever did.

For me, however, that figure was revealed by one brief duplicate
impression, which came in a few months afterwards when I happened to be
out in Brookline, a suburb of Boston, where people used to drive then,
as they drive now, on summer afternoons for afternoon tea--only,
afternoon tea not having been invented, they drove out to their
neighbors' houses for fruit or a cup of chocolate.

You have heard Boston perhaps called the "Hub of the universe." A lady,
not a Bostonian, once said that if Boston were the hub of the universe,
Brookline ought to be called the "Sub-hub." In the "sub-hub" I was
sitting in the house of a kinsman who had a beautiful garden; who was
the discoverer, in fact, of the Boston nectarine, which all the world
came to his house to taste. I heard voices in the drawing-room and went
in there. And there I saw again before me the figure of that day on
State street, but it was the figure of a man with a beamingly good-
natured face, seated in a solid chair brought purposely to accommodate
his weight, sitting there with the simple culinary provision of a cup
of chocolate in his hand.

It so happened that the great man, the godlike Daniel, as the people
used to call him, had expressed the very mortal wish for a little more
sugar in his chocolate; and I, if you please, was the fortunate youth
who, passing near him, was selected as the Ganymede to bring to him the
refreshment desired. I have felt ever since that I, at least, was
privileged to put one drop of sweetness into the life of that great
man, a life very varied and sometimes needing refreshment. And I have
since been given by my classmates to understand--I find they recall it
to this day--that upon walking through the college yard for a week or
two after that opportunity, I carried my head so much higher than usual
as to awaken an amount of derision which undoubtedly, if it had been at
West Point, would have led to a boxing match.

That was Daniel Webster, one of the two great lawyers of Boston--I
might almost say, of the American bar at that time.


THE ENDURING VALUE OF SPEECH

From the author's lectures on oratory, with his permission

BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

The Englishman, as far as I have observed, as a rule gets up with
reluctance, and begins with difficulty. Just as you are beginning to
feel seriously anxious for him, you gradually discover that he is on
the verge of saying some uncommonly good thing. Before you are fully
prepared for it he says that good thing, and then to your infinite
amazement he sits down!

The American begins with an ease which relieves you of all anxiety. The
anxiety begins when he talks a while without making any special point.
He makes his point at last, as good perhaps as the Englishman's,
possibly better. But then when he has made it, you find that he goes on
feeling for some other good point, and he feels and feels so long, that
perhaps he sits down at last without having made it.

My ideal of a perfect speech in public would be that it should be
conducted by a syndicate or trust, as it were, of the two nations, and
that the guaranty should be that an American should be provided to
begin every speech and an Englishman provided to end it.

Then, when we go a little farther and consider the act of speech
itself, and its relation to the word, we sometimes meet with a doubt
that we see expressed occasionally in the daily papers provided for us
with twenty pages per diem and thirty-two on Sunday, whether we will
need much longer anything but what is called sometimes by clergymen
"the printed word"--whether the whole form of communication through
oral speech will not diminish or fade away.

It seems to me a truly groundless fear--like wondering whether there
will ever be a race with only one arm or one leg, or a race of people
who live only by the eye or by the ear. The difference between the
written word and the spoken word is the difference between solitude and
companionship, between meditation and something so near action that it
is at least halfway to action and creates action. It is perfectly
supposable to imagine a whole race of authors of whom not one should
ever exchange a word with a human being while his greatest work is
being produced.

The greatest work of American literature, artistically speaking,
Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter," was thus produced. His wife records that
during the year that he was writing it, he shut himself up in his study
every day. She asked no questions; he volunteered no information. She
only knew that something was going on by the knot in his forehead which
he carried all that year. At the end of the year he came from his study
and read over to her the whole book; a work of genius was added to the
world. It was the fruit of solitude.

And sometimes solitude, I regret as an author to say, extends to the
perusal of the book, for I have known at least one volume of poems of
which not a copy was ever sold; and I know another of which only one
copy was sold through my betraying the secret of the author and
mentioning the book to a classmate, who bought that one copy.

Therefore, in a general way, we may say that literature speaks in a
manner the voice of solitude. As soon as the spoken word comes in, you
have companionship. There can be no speech without at least one person
present, if it is only the janitor of the church. Dean Swift in reading
the Church of England service to his manservant only, adapted the
service as follows: "Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth thee
and me in sundry places," etc.; but in that very economy of speech he
realized the presence of an audience. It takes a speaker and an
audience together to make a speech--I can say to you what I could not
first have said to myself. "The sea of upturned faces," as Daniel
Webster said, borrowing the phrase, however, from Scott's "Rob Roy"--
"the sea of upturned faces makes half the speech." And therefore we may
assume that there will always be this form of communication. It has,
both for the speaker and for the audience, this one vast advantage.


TO COLLEGE GIRLS

From "Girls and Education," by permission of, and by special
arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, authorized publishers of
this author's works.

BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS

I doubt whether any one has told more effectively what a college may do
for a girl's mind than Dr. Thomas Fuller. In his "Church History of
Britain" he gives a short chapter to "The Conveniency of She-Colleges."
(I once quoted this chapter at Smith College, and was accused of making
it up.) "Nunneries also," he observes, "were good She-Schools, wherein
the girls and maids of the neighborhood were taught to read and work;
and sometimes a little Latin was taught them therein. Yea, give me
leave to say, if such feminine foundations had still continued, haply
the weaker sex might be heightened to a higher perfection than hitherto
hath been attained. That sharpness of their wits, and suddenness of
their conceits, which their enemies must allow unto them, might by
education be improved into a judicious solidity."

The feminine mind, with its quick intuitions and unsteady logic, may
keep the intuitions and gain a firmness which makes it more than
transiently stimulating. The emotional mind has its charm, especially
if its emotions are favorable to ourselves.

In some things it may be well that emotion is greater than logic; but
emotion _in logic_ is sad to contend with, sad even to contemplate--and
such is too often the reasoning of the untrained woman. Do not for a
moment suppose that I believe such reasoning peculiar to women; but
from the best men it has been in great measure trained out.

In a right-minded, sound-hearted girl, college training tends toward
control of the nervous system; and control of the nervous system--
making it servant and not master--is almost the supreme need of women.
Without such control they become helpless; with it they know scarcely a
limit to their efficiency. The world does not yet understand that for
the finest and highest work it looks and must look to the naturally
sensitive, whether women or men. I remember expressing to the late
Professor Greenough regret that a certain young teacher was nervous.
His answer has been a comfort to me ever since. "I wouldn't give ten
cents for any one who isn't." The nervous man or woman is bound to
suffer; but the nervous man or woman may rise to heights that the
naturally calm can never reach and can seldom see. To whom do you go
for counsel? To the calm, no doubt; but never to the phlegmatic-never
to the calm who are calm because they know no better (like the man in
Ruskin "to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose because he
does not love it"). You go to the calm who have fought for their
calmness, who have known what it is to quiver in every nerve, but have
put through whatever they have taken in hand.

There are numberless sweet and patient women who never studied beyond
the curriculum of the district school, women who help every one near
them by their own unselfish loveliness; but the intelligently patient,
the women who can put themselves into the places of all sorts of
people, who can sympathize not merely with great and manifest griefs,
but with every delicate jarring of the human soul--hardest of all, with
the ambitions of the dull--these women, who must command a respect
intellectual as well as moral, reach their highest efficiency through
experience based on college training.

College life, designed as it is to strengthen a girl's intellect and
character, should teach her to understand better, and not worse,
herself as distinguished from other beings of her own sex or the
opposite, should fortify her individuality, her power of resisting, and
her determination to resist, the contagion of the unwomanly.
Exaggerated study may lessen womanly charm; but there is nothing loud
or masculine about it. Nor should we judge mental training or anything
else by scattered cases of its abuse. The only characteristics of women
that the sensible college girl has lost are feminine frivolity, and
that kind of headless inaccuracy in thought and speech which once
withheld from the sex--or from a large part of it--the intellectual
respect of educated men.

At college, if you have lived rightly, you have found enough learning
to make you humble, enough friendship to make your hearts large and
warm, enough culture to teach you the refinement of simplicity, enough
wisdom to keep you sweet in poverty and temperate in wealth. Here you
have learned to see great and small in their true relation, to look at
both sides of a question, to respect the point of view of every honest
man or woman, and to recognize the point of view that differs most
widely from your own. Here you have found the democracy that excludes
neither poor nor rich, and the quick sympathy that listens to all and
helps by the very listening. Here too, it may be at the end of a long
struggle, you have seen--if only in transient glimpses--that after
doubt comes reverence, after anxiety peace, after faintness courage,
and that out of weakness we are made strong. Suffer these glimpses to
become an abiding vision, and you have the supreme joy of life.


THE ART OF ACTING

From an address to the students of Harvard University, 1885. Published
in "The Drama; Addresses by Henry Irving," William Heinemann, London,
publisher, 1893

BY HENRY IRVING

What is the art of acting? I speak of it in its highest sense, as the
art to which Roscius, Betterton, and Garrick owed their fame. It is the
art of embodying the poet's creations, of giving them flesh and blood,
of making the figures which appeal to your mind's eye in the printed
drama live before you on the stage. "To fathom the depths of character,
to trace its latent motives, to feel its finest quiverings of emotion,
to comprehend the thoughts that are hidden under words, and thus
possess one's self of the actual mind of the individual man"--such was
Macready's definition of the player's art; and to this we may add the
testimony of Talma. He describes tragic acting as "the union of
grandeur without pomp and nature without triviality." It demands, he
says, the endowment of high sensibility and intelligence.

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