THE THE STRENGTH OF NATURAL DELIVERY HE advantage of the natural manner (that is, the manner which one naturally falls into who is really speaking in earnest, and with a mind exclusively intent on what he has to say), may be estimated from this consideration; that there are few who do not speak so as to give effect to what they are saying. Some, indeed, do this much better than others; some have, in ordinary conversation, an indistinct or incorrect pronunciation, an embarrassed and hesitating utterance, or a bad choice of words; but hardly anyone fails to deliver, when speaking earnestly, what he does say so as to convey the sense and the force of it much more completely than even a good reader would, if those same words were written down and read. The latter might, indeed, be more approved; but that is not the present question, which is, concerning the impression made on the hearers' minds. It is not the polish of the blade that is to be considered, or the grace with which it is brandished, but the keenness of the edge, and the weight of the stroke. On the contrary, it can hardly be denied that the elocution of most readers, when delivering their own compositions, is such as to convey the notion, at the very best, not that the preacher is expressing his own real sentiments, but that he is making known to his audience what is written in the book before him; and, whether the composition be professedly the reader's own or not, the usual mode of delivery, though grave and decent, is so remote from the energetic style of real natural speech as to furnish, if one may so speak, a kind of running comment on all that is uttered, which says: "I do not mean, think, or feel, all this; I only mean to recite it with propriety and decorum"; and what is usually called fine reading only superadds to this (as has been above remarked) a kind of admonition to the hearers that they ought to believe, to feel, and to admire, what is read. The principles here laid down may help to explain a remarkable fact which is usually attributed to other than the true causes. The powerful effects often produced by some fanatical preachers, not superior in pious and sincere zeal, and inferior in learning, in good sense, and in taste, to men who are listened to with comparative apathy, are frequently considered as a proof of superior eloquence, though an eloquence tarnished by barbarism and extravagant mannerism. But may not such effects result, not from any superior powers in the preacher, but merely from the intrinsic beauty and sublimity, and the measureless importance of the subject? Why, then, it may be replied, does not the other preacher, whose subject is the very same, produce the same effect? The answer is, because he is but half attended to. The ordinary measured cadence of reading is not only in itself dull, but is what men are familiarly accustomed to. Religion itself, also, is a subject so familiar, in a certain sense (familiar, that is, to the ear), as to be trite, even to those who know and think little about it. Let but the attention be thoroughly roused, and intently fixed on such a stupendous subject, and that subject itself will produce the most overpowering emotion. And not only unaffected earnestness of manner, but, perhaps, even still more, any uncouth oddity, and even ridiculous extravagance, will, by the stimulus of novelty, have the effect of thus rousing the hearers from their ordinary lethargy. So that a preacher of little or no real eloquence will sometimes, on such a subject, produce the effects of the greatest eloquence by merely forcing the hearers (often, even by the excessively glaring faults of his style and delivery) to attend to a subject which no one can really attend to unmoved. From the "Elements of Rhetoric." |