The Art of Public Speaking
call "forehanded." The real solution of the problem of what to do with
an empty head is never to let it become empty. In the artesian wells of
Dakota the water rushes to the surface and leaps a score of feet above
the ground. The secret of this exuberant flow is of course the great
supply below, crowding to get out.
What is the use of stopping to prime a mental pump when you can fill
your life with the resources for an artesian well? It is not enough to
have merely enough; you must have more than enough. Then the pressure of
your mass of thought and feeling will maintain your flow of speech and
give you the confidence and poise that denote reserve power. To be away
from home with only the exact return fare leaves a great deal to
circumstances!
Reserve power is magnetic. It does not consist in giving the idea that
you are holding something in reserve, but rather in the suggestion that
the audience is getting the cream of your observation, reading,
experience, feeling, thought. To have reserve power, therefore, you must
have enough milk of material on hand to supply sufficient cream.
But how shall we get the milk? There are two ways: the one is
first-hand--from the cow; the other is second-hand--from the milkman.
_The Seeing Eye_
Some sage has said: "For a thousand men who can speak, there is only one
who can think; for a thousand men who can think, there is only one who
can see." To see and to think is to get your milk from your own cow.
When the one man in a million who can see comes along, we call him
Master. Old Mr. Holbrook, of "Cranford," asked his guest what color
ash-buds were in March; she confessed she did not know, to which the old
gentleman answered: "I knew you didn't. No more did I--an old fool that
I am!--till this young man comes and tells me. 'Black as ash-buds in
March.' And I've lived all my life in the country. More shame for me not
to know. Black; they are jet-black, madam."
"This young man" referred to by Mr. Holbrook was Tennyson.
Henry Ward Beecher said: "I do not believe that I have ever met a man
on the street that I did not get from him some element for a sermon. I
never see anything in nature which does not work towards that for which
I give the strength of my life. The material for my sermons is all the
time following me and swarming up around me."
Instead of saying only one man in a million can see, it would strike
nearer the truth to say that none of us sees with perfect understanding
more than a fraction of what passes before our eyes, yet this faculty of
acute and accurate observation is so important that no man ambitious to
lead can neglect it. The next time you are in a car, look at those who
sit opposite you and see what you can discover of their habits,
occupations, ideals, nationalities, environments, education, and so on.
You may not see a great deal the first time, but practise will reveal
astonishing results. Transmute every incident of your day into a subject
for a speech or an illustration. Translate all that you see into terms
of speech. When you can describe all that you have seen in definite
words, you are seeing clearly. You are becoming the millionth man.
De Maupassant's description of an author should also fit the
public-speaker: "His eye is like a suction pump, absorbing everything;
like a pickpocket's hand, always at work. Nothing escapes him. He is
constantly collecting material, gathering-up glances, gestures,
intentions, everything that goes on in his presence--the slightest look,
the least act, the merest trifle." De Maupassant was himself a millionth
man, a Master.
"Ruskin took a common rock-crystal and saw hidden within its stolid
heart lessons which have not yet ceased to move men's lives. Beecher
stood for hours before the window of a jewelry store thinking out
analogies between jewels and the souls of men. Gough saw in a single
drop of water enough truth wherewith to quench the thirst of five
thousand souls. Thoreau sat so still in the shadowy woods that birds and
insects came and opened up their secret lives to his eye. Emerson
observed the soul of a man so long that at length he could say, 'I
cannot hear what you say, for seeing what you are.' Preyer for three
years studied the life of his babe and so became an authority upon the
child mind. Observation! Most men are blind. There are a thousand times
as many hidden truths and undiscovered facts about us to-day as have
made discoverers famous--facts waiting for some one to 'pluck out the
heart of their mystery.' But so long as men go about the search with
eyes that see not, so long will these hidden pearls lie in their shells.
Not an orator but who could more effectively point and feather his
shafts were he to search nature rather than libraries. Too few can see
'sermons in stones' and 'books in the running brooks,' because they are
so used to seeing merely sermons in books and only stones in running
brooks. Sir Philip Sidney had a saying, 'Look in thy heart and write;'
Massillon explained his astute knowledge of the human heart by saying,
'I learned it by studying myself;' Byron says of John Locke that 'all
his knowledge of the human understanding was derived from studying his
own mind.' Since multiform nature is all about us, originality ought not
to be so rare."[8]
_The Thinking Mind_
Thinking is doing mental arithmetic with facts. Add this fact to that
and you reach a certain conclusion. Subtract this truth from another and
you have a definite result. Multiply this fact by another and have a
precise product. See how many times this occurrence happens in that
space of time and you have reached a calculable dividend. In
thought-processes you perform every known problem of arithmetic and
algebra. That is why mathematics are such excellent mental gymnastics.
But by the same token, thinking is work. Thinking takes energy. Thinking
requires time, and patience, and broad information, and clearheadedness.
Beyond a miserable little surface-scratching, few people really think at
all--only one in a thousand, according to the pundit already quoted. So
long as the present system of education prevails and children are taught
through the ear rather than through the eye, so long as they are
expected to remember thoughts of others rather than think for
themselves, this proportion will continue--one man in a million will be
able to see, and one in a thousand to think.
But, however thought-less a mind has been, there is promise of better
things so soon as the mind detects its own lack of thought-power. The
first step is to stop regarding thought as "the magic of the mind," to
use Byron's expression, and see it as thought truly is--_a weighing of
ideas and a placing of them in relationships to each other_. Ponder this
definition and see if you have learned to think efficiently.
Habitual thinking is just that--a habit. Habit comes of doing a thing
repeatedly. The lower habits are acquired easily, the higher ones
require deeper grooves if they are to persist. So we find that the
thought-habit comes only with resolute practise; yet no effort will
yield richer dividends. Persist in practise, and whereas you have been
able to think only an inch-deep into a subject, you will soon find that
you can penetrate it a foot.
Perhaps this homely metaphor will suggest how to begin the practise of
consecutive thinking, by which we mean _welding a number of separate
thought-links into a chain that will hold_. Take one link at a time, see
that each naturally belongs with the ones you link to it, and remember
that a single missing link means _no chain_.
Thinking is the most fascinating and exhilarating of all mental
exercises. Once realize that your opinion on a subject does not
represent the choice you have made between what Dr. Cerebrum has written
and Professor Cerebellum has said, but is the result of your own
earnestly-applied brain-energy, and you will gain a confidence in your
ability to speak on that subject that nothing will be able to shake.
Your thought will have given you both power and reserve power.
Someone has condensed the relation of thought to knowledge in these
pungent, homely lines:
"Don't give me the man who thinks he thinks,
Don't give me the man who thinks he knows,
But give me the man who knows he thinks,
And I have the man who knows he knows!"
_Reading As a Stimulus to Thought_
No matter how dry the cow, however, nor how poor our ability to milk,
there is still the milkman--we can read what others have seen and felt
and thought. Often, indeed, such records will kindle within us that
pre-essential and vital spark, the _desire_ to be a thinker.
The following selection is taken from one of Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis's
lectures, as given in "A Man's Value to Society." Dr. Hillis is a most
fluent speaker--he never refers to notes. He has reserve power. His mind
is a veritable treasure-house of facts and ideas. See how he draws from
a knowledge of fifteen different general or special subjects: geology,
plant life, Palestine, chemistry, Eskimos, mythology, literature, The
Nile, history, law, wit, evolution, religion, biography, and
electricity. Surely, it needs no sage to discover that the secret of
this man's reserve power is the old secret of our artesian well whose
abundance surges from unseen depths.
_THE USES OF BOOKS AND READING[9]_
Each Kingsley approaches a stone as a jeweler approaches a casket to
unlock the hidden gems. Geikie causes the bit of hard coal to unroll
the juicy bud, the thick odorous leaves, the pungent boughs, until
the bit of carbon enlarges into the beauty of a tropic forest. That
little book of Grant Allen's called "How Plants Grow" exhibits trees
and shrubs as eating, drinking and marrying. We see certain date
groves in Palestine, and other date groves in the desert a hundred
miles away, and the pollen of the one carried upon the trade winds
to the branches of the other. We see the tree with its strange
system of water-works, pumping the sap up through pipes and mains;
we see the chemical laboratory in the branches mixing flavor for the
orange in one bough, mixing the juices of the pineapple in another;
we behold the tree as a mother making each infant acorn ready
against the long winter, rolling it in swaths soft and warm as wool
blankets, wrapping it around with garments impervious to the rain,
and finally slipping the infant acorn into a sleeping bag, like
those the Eskimos gave Dr. Kane.
At length we come to feel that the Greeks were not far wrong in
thinking each tree had a dryad in it, animating it, protecting it
against destruction, dying when the tree withered. Some Faraday
shows us that each drop of water is a sheath for electric forces
sufficient to charge 800,000 Leyden jars, or drive an engine from
Liverpool to London. Some Sir William Thomson tells us how
hydrogen gas will chew up a large iron spike as a child's molars
will chew off the end of a stick of candy. Thus each new book
opens up some new and hitherto unexplored realm of nature. Thus
books fulfill for us the legend of the wondrous glass that showed
its owner all things distant and all things hidden. Through books
our world becomes as "a bud from the bower of God's beauty; the
sun as a spark from the light of His wisdom; the sky as a bubble
on the sea of His Power." Therefore Mrs. Browning's words, "No
child can be called fatherless who has God and his mother; no
youth can be called friendless who has God and the companionship
of good books."
Books also advantage us in that they exhibit the unity of
progress, the solidarity of the race, and the continuity of