CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY

For some time I have been besieged with requests to open a “Speakers’ Class” or “A School of Oratory,” or, as one ingenious correspondent puts it, a “Forensic Club.” With these requests it is impossible to comply for sheer lack of time.

I have decided, however, to embody in these pages the results of my own experience, and the best I have learned from the experience of others.

There are some things required in a good lecturer which cannot be imparted to a pupil by any teacher, and we may as well dispose of these.

One is a good voice. Modern methods, however, have done much to make the improvement of the voice possible. While it is probably impossible in the great majority of cases to make a very fine voice out of a very poor one, no one, with an average voice, need be afraid of the platform, for time and training will greatly increase its range and resonance. It is said that the great Greek orator, Demosthenes, developed his magnificent voice by shouting above the roar of the sea near which he lived, but it is probable that he had a better voice to begin with than the tradition represents. In the absence of sea waves, one’s voice may be tested and strengthened by trying to drown the noise of the electric cars at a street meeting. Most poor voices are produced in the upper part of the throat or, still worse, in the roof of the mouth, while deep and thrilling tones can only be obtained from further down. The transition from the upper throat or palate to the deeper tones is not nearly so difficult as might be supposed. Placing the hand across the chest during

practice will help to locate the origin of the sounds produced.

The one thing, however, which no training seems to create, but which is wholly indispensable in a good speaker, is that elusive, but potential something which has been named personal magnetism. This is probably only another way of saying that the great orator must also be a great man. His imagination and sympathy must be great enough to take possession of him and make him the mere instrument of their outpouring.

If nature has omitted these great qualities, no amount of training will create them. This is why, among the great number who wish to be speakers, only a few scale the heights.

But men with small personal magnetism and good training have done quite well, while others with large personal magnetism and no methods, have made a complete failure, and herein lies the justification for this volume.

CHAPTER II EXORDIUM

The part of a lecture which consumes the first ten or fifteen minutes is called the exordium, from the Latin word exordiri—to begin a web.

The invariable rule as to the manner of this part of a lecture is—begin easy. Any speaker who breaks this rule invites almost certain disaster. This rule has the universal endorsement of experienced speakers. Sometimes a green speaker, bent on making a hit at once, will begin with a burst, and in a high voice. Once begun, he feels that the pace must be maintained or increased.

Listeners who have the misfortune to be present at such a commencement and who do not wish to have their pity excited, had better retire at once, for when such a speaker has been at work fifteen minutes and should be gradually gathering strength like a broadening river, he is really beginning to decline. From then on the lecture dies a lingering death and the audience welcomes its demise with a sigh of relief. Such performances are not common, as no one can make that blunder twice before the same audience. He may try it, but if the people who heard him before see his name on the program they will be absent.

At the beginning, the voice should be pitched barely high enough for everybody to hear. This will bring that “hush” which should mark the commencement of every speech. When all are quiet and settled, raise the voice so as to be clearly heard by everybody, but no higher. Hold your energies in reserve; if you really have a lecture, you will need them later.

As to the matter of the exordium, it should be preparatory to the lecture. Here the lecturer “clears the ground” or “paves the way” for the main question.

If the lecture is biographical and deals with the life and work of some great man, the exordium naturally tells about his parents, birthplace and early surroundings, etc. If some theory in science or philosophy is the subject, the lecturer naturally uses the exordium to explain the theory which previously occupied that ground and how it came to be overthrown by the theory now to be discussed.

Here the way is cleared of popular misunderstandings of the question and, if the theory is to be defended, all those criticisms that do not really touch the question are easily and gracefully annihilated.

Here, if Darwin is to be defended, it may be shown that those witticisms, aimed at him, about the giraffe getting its long neck by continually stretching it, or the whale getting its tail by holding its hind legs too close in swimming, do not apply to Darwinism, but to the exploded theory of his great predecessor, Lamarck.

If Scientific Socialism is the question, it may be appropriately shown in the exordium that nearly all the objections which are still urged against it apply only to the Utopian Socialism which Socialist literature abandoned half a century ago.

In short, the lecturer usually does in the exordium what a family party does when, having decided to waltz a little in the parlor, they push the table into a corner and set back the chairs—he clears a space.

CHAPTER III BEGIN WELL

The Shakespearian saying that “all’s well that ends well” is only a half truth. A good lecture must not only end well; it must begin well.

The value of first impressions is universally recognized, and an audience will be much more lenient with flaws that may come later if its appreciation and confidence have been aroused at the commencement.

It is almost impossible to drive a nail properly if it was started wrong, and the skillful workman will draw it out and start it over again. But such a blunder in lecturing cannot be remedied—at least for that occasion. A stale or confused beginning haunts and depresses the mind of the speaker and makes his best work impossible. It also destroys the confidence of the audience, so that what comes later is likely to be underestimated.

This necessity is recognized not only by lecturers, but by all the great masters of poetry, fiction and music. Wilhelm Tell is best known by its overture and what could be more solemn and impressive than the opening bars of “El Miserere” in Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.”

The genius of Dickens shines most clearly in his opening pages, and his right to be ranked with Juvenal as a satirist could be easily established by the first chapter of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” Sir Walter Scott would rank as one of the world’s greatest wits if he had never written anything but the exploits of “Dick Pinto,” which serve as an introduction to “The Bride of Lammermoor.”

The opening lines of Keats’ first long poem, “Endymion,” are immortal, and the first line of that passage has become an integral part of the English language:

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness, but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of deep peace and health and quiet breathing.”

The first stanza of the first canto of Scott’s “Marmion” gives a picture of Norham castle that never leaves the memory. Milton’s greatest poem, “Paradise Lost,” a poem which fascinated the imagination of the great utopian, Robert Owen, at the age of seven, has nothing in all its sonorous music that lingers in the mind like its magnificent opening lines, and one searches in vain through the interminable length of Wordsworth’s “Excursion” for a passage equal to the first.

No lecturer who aims high should go upon a platform and confront an audience, except in cases of great emergency, without having worked out his opening sentences.

Floundering is fatal, but many an otherwise capable speaker “flounders around” and “hems” and “haws” for the first ten or fifteen minutes, as a matter of course.

If his auditors are strange, they get restless and disgusted, and some of them go out. If they know him, they smile at one another and the ceiling and wait with more or less patience until he “gets started.” If it is a meeting where others are to speak, by the time he “gets started” the chairman is anxiously looking at his watch and wondering if he will have as much trouble to “get done.”

A lecturer should remember that an audience resents having its time wasted by a long, floundering, meaningless preamble, and it is sure to get even. Next time it will come late to avoid that preliminary “catch as catch can” performance or—it will stay away.

CHAPTER IV SPEAK DELIBERATELY

William Ewart Gladstone, one of the most generally admired orators the English house of commons ever listened to, spoke at an average of 100 words a minute. Phillips Brooks, the brilliant American preacher, maintained a rate of 215 words a minute and was a terror to the stenographers engaged to report him.

He succeeded as a speaker, not because of his speed, but in spite of it; because his enunciation was perfect and every word was cut off clear and distinct. But very few men succeed with such a handicap, and Brooks would have done much better if he could have reduced his speed 40 per cent.

The average person in an audience thinks slowly, and the lecturer should aim to meet the requirements of at least a large majority of those present, and not merely those in the assembly who happen to be as well informed as the lecturer, and could therefore keep pace with him, no matter how rapidly he proceeds. New ideas need to be weighed as well as heard, and the power of weighing is less rapid than the sense of hearing. This is why a pause at the proper place is so helpful.

A young lecturer had in his audience on one occasion a veteran of the platform, and was on that account anxious to do his best. This situation, as all new speakers know, is very disconcerting, and after the young aspirant had rushed through his opening argument pretty well, as he thought, lo, his memory slipped a cog and he waited in silence, what seemed to him an age, until it caught again. Then he continued to the end without a stop. After the meeting the veteran came forward to shake hands. “Have you any advice for me?” said the young man, that awful breakdown looming large in his mind.

“Yes,” said the senior, “cultivate the pause.”

One of the lecturer’s most valuable assets is variety of pace, and this is almost entirely lost by the speaker whose speed is always high. Observe two men arguing in conversation where there is no thought of art or oratory. Where the remarks are of an explanatory nature the words come slowly and carefully. When persuasion becomes the object, deliberation is thrown aside and words begin to flow like a mountain freshet, and if the speaker has natural capacity he concludes his point with a grand rush that carries everything before it.

When a speaker carefully selects his words and it is clear to the audience that he is deliberately weighing and measuring his sentences, his listeners are unconsciously impressed with a sense of their importance.

Of course, deliberation may be overdone, and if the audience once gets the impression that the speaker is slow and does not move along more quickly because he cannot, the effect is disastrous.

Deliberation is closely akin to seriousness and the lecturer who has no great and serious question to present should retire from the platform and try vaudeville.

It is just here that the Socialist has a great advantage, for his theme is the most serious and tremendous that ever occupied the mind of man.

CHAPTER V PERORATION

The close of a lecture is called the peroration—the word oration prefixed by the Latin preposition “per.” “Per” has several meanings, one of them being “to the utmost extent” as in peroxide—a substance oxidized to the utmost degree.

This is probably the sense in which it is used in peroration, for the close of a lecture should be oratory at its utmost.

The speaker who has failed to observe the previous rules about “beginning easy,” and “speaking deliberately” will pay the penalty here. If he has spoken rapidly, he will be unable to increase the pace—at least, sufficiently to get the best results.

If he has spoken too loudly and kept nothing in reserve, his voice will refuse to “rise to the occasion.”

The manner of the peroration has two essentials, an increase of speed, and a raising of the voice. These two things go naturally together; as the words come more quickly the voice tends to rise apparently automatically, and this is as it should be.

The peroration has the nature of a triumph. The question has been fought out in the main body of the lecture, the opposing positions have been overthrown, and now the main conclusion is victoriously proclaimed and driven home.

Even if an element of pathos enters into the peroration, it is a mistake to allow the voice to weaken. If it takes a lower note, it must make up in strength and intensity what it loses in height. Anything else is sure to prove an anticlimax.

The matter of the peroration should consist of the main conclusion of the lecture, and should begin by gathering together the principal threads of the discourse which should lead to that conclusion.

The necessity for a peroration, or strong finish, is recognized in music, the drama, and everything presented before an audience. Most band selections end in a crash, the majority of instruments working at full capacity. Every musical comedy concludes with its full cast on the stage singing the most effective air. Every vaudeville performer strives to reach a climax and, where talent breaks down, refuge is sought in some such miserable subterfuge as waving the flag or presenting a picture of the bulldog countenance of Theodore Roosevelt.

The entertainer, however, appeals to prevailing opinions and prejudices; he gives the audience what they want. The lecturer should be an instructor and his theme may be a new and, as yet, unpopular truth, and it is his duty to give the audience what they should have.

Therefore the peroration should be full of that persuasive eloquence which will lead the audience to a favorable consideration of the positions which have been carefully and judiciously presented in the body of the lecture.

CHAPTER VI READ WIDELY

I had just concluded a lecture in Grand Junction, Colo., over a year ago, when a burly railroad man stepped forward and introduced himself. I forget his name, but remember well what he said. Here it is, about word for word:

“I was an engineer years ago, as I am today, but in those days Debs was my fireman. Having a little better job than he, I naturally thought I was the smarter man. We used to sleep in the same room. We would both turn in all tired from a long trip and I would be asleep before you could count ten. After I had slept three or four hours I would wake up about two in the morning and there would be Debs with a candle, shaded so as not to disturb me, reading away at a book as if everything depended on his understanding all there was in it. Many a time he only got one or two hours’ rest before going to work again.

“I told him he was a d—d fool, and I thought he was. I still believe there was a d—d fool in that room, but I know now that it wasn’t Debs.”

Every man who ever did anything really worth while on the lecture platform has something like that in his life story, and it is usually connected with his earlier years.

The biography of every great speaker or writer has usually this passage or one equal to it in the early pages: “He was an omnivorous reader.” Professor Huxley in his brief, but charming autobiography in the first essay of the first volume of his “collected essays,” speaking of his early youth, says, “I read everything I could lay my hands upon.”

The speaker who has learned to sneer at “book learning” is foredoomed to failure and will spare himself many humiliations by retiring at once.

A conversation between four or five men came to my notice in which the subject was the translation into English of the second volume of Marx’s “Capital.” One man said: “I don’t care if it is never translated.” Then a Socialist speaker, who was present, stepped forward and said: “Shake hands on that.” This same speaker was at that time engaged for nearly a year’s work. The trip proved a failure and he went back into the shops and probably blamed everything and everybody except the real cause—his own attitude on the question of knowledge.

Neglecting to read, in a lecturer, is something more than a mistake—it is a vice. Its real name is laziness. As well expect good bricklaying from a man too lazy to lift a brick.

The idea of a man teaching something he himself does not know is grotesque, and yet, I have known at least three-score who felt divinely appointed to perform that very task.

These remarks have no application in the case of those who, wishing to become lecturers, are determined to do everything in their power to acquire the proper qualifications, but only to those who think that because they have once persuaded an audience to listen to them, they now know everything necessary to be known.

A self-satisfied, ignorant man on a lecture platform is an anomaly that, fortunately, is never long continued, for the process of “natural selection” weeds him out.

I met a boy of eighteen the other day with a thumb-worn copy of Dietzgen’s “Positive Outcome of Philosophy” under his arm. This is the material from which lecturers are made.

CHAPTER VII READ THE BEST

I met him at Napa, Cal., after the meeting. His name was Mueller; a tall, fine old German. He had been through the Bismarck “exception law” persecution and was well informed in all that related to that period. I asked him how it came about that the German movement was so well posted and unified.

He answered, “Well, Bismarck did that for us. You see, before Bismarck interfered, we were all split up into little inside factions, as it is here, to some extent, now. That was because we had scores of papers, each teaching its own particular brand of Socialism. Every little business man who became a Socialist and had a little money in the bank started a paper and gave the world his notion of Socialism. Bismarck changed all that; he put them all out of business in a single day. Then the Socialists had only one paper, published outside Germany, on very thin paper, and mailed in sealed envelopes. This paper was edited by Bernstein, one of the ablest Marxian scholars, and this uniform reading of sound literature was a very powerful factor in clarifying the German Socialist movement.”

A lecturer must get his data from the very best authorities. He must get his knowledge of “natural selection,” not from the pages of some ill-informed pamphleteer, but from “The Origin of Species.” His statements as to what constitutes the Socialist philosophy should be based on a careful study of Marx, Engels and the other writers who have produced Socialism’s classic literature, and not on some ten-cent pamphlet by a new convert, published, not on its merits, but because the author had money enough to get it printed.

The Japanese in this country show their superiority in this respect. I had a friend in San Francisco who was a bookseller, who told me it was quite impossible to sell a Jap a book on any subject unless it was by the greatest authority on that particular question. I had charge of the Socialist literature of Local San Francisco nearly a year, and during that period the only books bought by the Japs were works by Marx, Engels and Labriola.