The Art of Public Speaking

them down to be rescued by his comrades. "Bravo, fireman!" shouts the crowd. A crash breaks through the uproar of crackling timbers. "Look alive, up there! Great God! The roof has fallen!" The walls sway, rock, and tumble in with a deafening roar. The spectators cease to breathe. The cold truth reveals itself. The fireman has been carried into the seething furnace. An old woman, bent with the weight of age, rushes through the fire line, shrieking, raving, and wringing her hands and opening her heart of grief. "Poor John! He was all I had! And a brave lad he was, too! But he's gone now. He lost his own life in savin' two more, and now--now he's there, away in there!" she repeats, pointing to the cruel oven. The engines do their work. The flames die out. An eerie gloom hangs over the ruins like a formidable, blackened pall. And the noon of night is passed. --ARDENNES JONES-FOSTER. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 1. Write two paragraphs on one of these: the race horse, the motor boat, golfing, tennis; let the first be pure exposition and the second pure description. 2. Select your own theme and do the same in two short extemporaneous speeches. 3. Deliver a short original address in the over-ornamented style. 4. (_a_) Point out its defects; (_b_) recast it in a more effective style; (_c_) show how the one surpasses the other. 5. Make a list of ten subjects which lend themselves to description in the style you prefer. 6. Deliver a two-minute speech on any one of them, using chiefly, but not solely, description. 7. For one minute, look at any object, scene, action, picture, or person you choose, take two minutes to arrange your thoughts, and then deliver a short description--all without making written notes. 8. In what sense is description more _personal_ than exposition? 9. Explain the difference between a scientific and an artistic description. 10. In the style of Dickens and Irving (pages 234, 235), write five separate sentences describing five characters by means of suggestion--one sentence to each. 11. Describe a character by means of a hint, after the manner of Chaucer (p. 235). 12. Read aloud the following with special attention to gesture: His very throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the tie, for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr. Pecksniff, "There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me." So did his hair, just grizzled with an iron gray, which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleek though free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state of widower, and dangling double eye-glass, all tended to the same purpose, and cried aloud, "Behold the moral Pecksniff!" --CHARLES DICKENS, _Martin Chuzzlewit_. 13. Which of the following do you prefer, and why? She was a blooming lass of fresh eighteen, plump as a partridge, ripe and melting and rosy-cheeked as one of her father's peaches. --IRVING. She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November pippin, and no more mysterious than a window-pane. --O. HENRY. Small, shining, neat, methodical, and buxom was Miss Peecher; cherry-cheeked and tuneful of voice. --DICKENS. 14. Invent five epithets, and apply them as you choose (p. 235). 15. (_a_) Make a list of five figures of speech; (_b_) define them; (_c_) give an example--preferably original--under each. 16. Pick out the figures of speech in the address by Grady, on page 240. 17. Invent an original figure to take the place of any one in Grady's speech. 18. What sort of figures do you find in the selection from Stevenson, on page 242? 19. What methods of description does he seem to prefer? 20. Write and deliver, without notes and with descriptive gestures, a description in imitation of any of the authors quoted in this chapter. 21. Reexamine one of your past speeches and improve the descriptive work. Report on what faults you found to exist. 22. Deliver an extemporaneous speech describing any dramatic scene in the style of "Midnight in London." 23. Describe an event in your favorite sport in the style of Dr. Talmage. Be careful to make the delivery effective. 24. Criticise, favorably or unfavorably, the descriptions of any travel talk you may have heard recently. 25. Deliver a brief original travel talk, as though you were showing pictures. 26. Recast the talk and deliver it "without pictures." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 19: _Writing the Short-Story_, J. Berg Esenwein.] [Footnote 20: For fuller treatment of Description see Genung's _Working Principles of Rhetoric_, Albright's _Descriptive Writing_, Bates' _Talks on Writing English_, first and second series, and any advanced rhetoric.] [Footnote 21: See also _The Art of Versification_, J. Berg Esenwein and Mary Eleanor Roberts, pp. 28-35; and _Writing the Short-Story_, J. Berg Esenwein, pp. 152-162; 231-240.] [Footnote 22: In the Military College of Modena.] [Footnote 23: This figure of speech is known as "Vision."] CHAPTER XXI INFLUENCING BY NARRATION The art of narration is the art of writing in hooks and eyes. The principle consists in making the appropriate thought follow the appropriate thought, the proper fact the proper fact; in first preparing the mind for what is to come, and then letting it come. --WALTER BAGEHOT, _Literary Studies_. Our very speech is curiously historical. Most men, you may observe, speak only to narrate; not in imparting what they have thought, which indeed were often a very small matter, but in exhibiting what they have undergone or seen, which is a quite unlimited one, do talkers dilate. Cut us off from Narrative, how would the stream of conversation, even among the wisest, languish into detached handfuls, and among the foolish utterly evaporate! Thus, as we do nothing but enact History, we say little but recite it. --THOMAS CARLYLE, _On History_. Only a small segment of the great field of narration offers its resources to the public speaker, and that includes the anecdote, biographical facts, and the narration of events in general. Narration--more easily defined than mastered--is the recital of an incident, or a group of facts and occurrences, in such a manner as to produce a desired effect. The laws of narration are few, but its successful practise involves more of art than would at first appear--so much, indeed, that we cannot even touch upon its technique here, but must content ourselves with an examination of a few examples of narration as used in public speech. In a preliminary way, notice how radically the public speaker's use of narrative differs from that of the story-writer in the more limited scope, absence of extended dialogue and character drawing, and freedom from elaboration of detail, which characterize platform narrative. On the other hand, there are several similarities of method: the frequent combination of narration with exposition, description, argumentation, and pleading; the care exercised in the arrangement of material so as to produce a strong effect at the close (climax); the very general practise of concealing the "point" (denouement) of a story until the effective moment; and the careful suppression of needless, and therefore hurtful, details. So we see that, whether for magazine or platform, the art of narration involves far more than the recital of annals; the succession of events recorded requires a _plan_ in order to bring them out with real effect. It will be noticed, too, that the literary style in platform narration is likely to be either less polished and more vigorously dramatic than in that intended for publication, or else more fervid and elevated in tone. In this latter respect, however, the best platform speaking of today differs from the models of the preceding generation, wherein a highly dignified, and sometimes pompous, style was thought the only fitting dress for a public deliverance. Great, noble and stirring as these older masters were in their lofty and impassioned eloquence, we are sometimes oppressed when we read their sounding periods for any great length of time--even allowing for all that we lose by missing the speaker's presence, voice, and fire. So let us model our platform narration, as our other forms of speech, upon the effective addresses of the moderns, without lessening our admiration for the older school. _The Anecdote_ An anecdote is a short narrative of a single event, told as being striking enough to bring out a point. The keener the point, the more condensed the form, and the more suddenly the application strikes the hearer, the better the story. To regard an anecdote as an illustration--an interpretive picture--will help to hold us to its true purpose, for a purposeless story is of all offenses on the platform the most asinine. A perfectly capital joke will fall flat when it is dragged in by the nape without evident bearing on the subject under discussion. On the other hand, an apposite anecdote has saved many a speech from failure. "There is no finer opportunity for the display of tact than in the introduction of witty or humorous stories into a discourse. Wit is keen and like a rapier, piercing deeply, sometimes even to the heart. Humor is good-natured, and does not wound. Wit is founded upon the sudden discovery of an unsuspected relation existing between two ideas. Humor deals with things out of relation--with the incongruous. It was wit in Douglass Jerrold to retort upon the scowl of a stranger whose shoulder he had familiarly slapped, mistaking him for a friend: 'I beg your pardon, I thought I knew you--but I'm glad I don't.' It was humor in the Southern orator, John Wise, to liken the pleasure of spending an evening with a Puritan girl to that of sitting on a block of ice in winter, cracking hailstones between his teeth."[24] The foregoing quotation has been introduced chiefly to illustrate the first and simplest form of anecdote--the single sentence embodying a pungent saying. Another simple form is that which conveys its meaning without need of "application," as the old preachers used to say. George Ade has quoted this one as the best joke he ever heard: Two solemn-looking gentlemen were riding together in a railway carriage. One gentleman said to the other: "Is your wife entertaining this summer?" Whereupon the other gentleman replied: "Not very." Other anecdotes need harnessing to the particular truth the speaker wishes to carry along in his talk. Sometimes the application is made before the story is told and the audience is prepared to make the comparison, point by point, as the illustration is told. Henry W. Grady used this method in one of the anecdotes he told while delivering his great extemporaneous address, "The New South." Age does not endow all things with strength and virtue, nor are all new things to be despised. The shoemaker who put over his door, "John Smith's shop, founded 1760," was more than matched by his young rival across the street who hung out this sign: "Bill Jones. Established 1886. No old stock kept in this shop."