CHAPTER XDELIVERY
Let your speech have form and body. When you have prepared your brief, you have indeed articulated a skeleton which may be beautiful in its logical symmetry although not as yet clothed in flesh and blood. But do not destroy that beauty by losing, when you begin to speak, all your sense of form and arrangement. Do not let your spoken argument be simply unrelated chunks of thought. Keep your transitions in thought clear. I do not mean that you should parade each step consciously before your audience and label each section neatly and appropriately. Let your argument all travel forward to a climactic end. “Many speakers approach the end of their work as if it were a dreaded leap into oblivion, and, after trying again and again to close, end abruptly or trail off in less and less audible sentences till the gavel falls.”
As to your method of delivery, as to how to learn to speak, the best advice I can give you is to learn to speak by speaking. Don’t try to force your voice or your gestures; let them both be easy and natural. The human voice is capable of wonderful things; itstones may be rich and mellow or harsh and rasping. Learn to listen to your own voice as to that of another.
Breathing.—The secret of successful public speaking is to use your voice from the diaphragm up, not from the throat. By that statement, I mean that you should do your talking with a column of vibrating air the base of which rests upon the muscles at the base of the lungs. You must, then, breathe deeply, filling the lower portion of the lungs. Let the great muscles of the diaphragm push forth your voice; do not try to crowd it out by using those of the upper part of the chest. Hold your chest motionless. The skillful speaker can fill a vast auditorium with a rich resonant voice—and, all the time, keep the upper chest muscles inactive, the upper parts of the chest motionless.
For the speaker’s chest to rise and fall, for him to squeeze his chest together as he might squeeze an orange, may show emotion, but it doesn’t show good sense. If you use the muscles of the throat and neck, you will soon injure your voice; to speak effectively, you must let the lower part of the lungs do the work. It will, if it is given half a chance.
These directions may seem to call for a difficult feat of internal gymnastics. They don’t. Correct breathing is easier than the other sort!
You will be surprised to find vocal powers which you never realized existed before. You will also bechagrined to find, I fear, that you occasionally use tones which rasp and grate, which strain the muscles, parch the throat and distress generally not only the speaker but alas! the hearer as well. Cultivate those tones which are flexible and resonant and discard those which grate and strain. Use your singing tones and don’t be afraid to open your mouth and let your voice have a chance.
But don’t get monotonous in your work. You will find, in practice, many rich mellow tones of many keys and pitches. Just because one sounds good to you—and it may be everything you think it is—don’t use it to the point of monotony. I heard a lady read some charming verse of her own composition the other evening. The poems were in every way pleasing—they were much above the ordinary. But she pitched her voice in one key and one tone all the way through the verse, her comment, her introduction, everything, all in the same tone from beginning to end! The effect was marred. There was no break in the smooth voice from start to finish. As one of her hearers remarked: “I could stand those canary bird tones in the verses but she should have given us a rest in the rest of it.”
As to your gestures and your bearing on the platform, the same rule applies; be easy and natural. Remember that after all, speaking is little more than talking. If you can assist your public speech by gestures which help your meaning, emphasizing certainpoints or, as it were, marking off certain phrases, why, gesture. But don’t wave your arms for the mere sake of doing so. As one teacher of debating said “You may do anything on the platform you would do anywhere else in the company of ladies and gentlemen.” You must of course so conduct yourself physically that you will not distract the attention of your audience from what you are saying; you wish to help your thought, not hinder it.
But always be yourself—be natural. It is better to be a real William Smith or even a real Bill Smith than an imitation Daniel Webster. Study Webster and Calhoun and Root and Bryan. Get all the illustrations and aid you can from their methods in debate; but remember after all you must be yourself. When you were created the mold was thrown away. No two natures are alike, no two persons have the same powers. You can’t be someone else if you want to be.