PUBLIC SPEAKING
"And the common people heard him gladly," for "he taught them as one having authority." These sentences reveal the very heart of effective speaking. Considered from the human view-point alone, the Son of Mary was the prince of speakers. He alone has delivered a perfect address—the Sermon on the Mount.
The two other speeches that approach it are Paul's appeal to the Athenians on Mars Hill, and the speech of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. These have no tricks, no devices, no tinsel gilt. They do not attempt to "split the ears of the groundlings," and yet they are addressed to the commonest of the world's common people.
Imagination, reason, and that peculiar human quality in speech which defies analysis as much as the perfume of the rose, but which touches the heart and reaches the mind, are blended in each of these utterances in perfect proportion.
But, above all, each of these model speeches which the world has thus far produced teaches. They instruct. And, in doing this, they assert. The men who spoke them did not weaken them by suggesting a doubt of what they said. This is common to all great speeches.
Not one immortal utterance can be produced which contains such expressions as, "I may be wrong," or, "In my humble opinion," or, "In my judgment." The great speakers, in their highest moments, have always been so charged with aggressive conviction that they have announced their conclusions as ultimate truths. They have spoken as persons "having authority," and therefore "the common people have heard them gladly."
All of this means that the two indispensable requisites of speaking are, first, to have something to say, and, second, to say it as though you mean it. Of course one cannot have something really to say—a lesson to teach, a message to deliver—every fifteen minutes. Very well, then; until one does have something to say, let one hold one's peace.
Carlyle's idea is correct. He thought that no man has the right to speak until what he has to say is so ripe with meaning, and the season for his saying it is so compelling, that what he says will result in a deed—a thing accomplished now or afterwhile. In the prophetic old Scotchman's iron philosophy there was no room for anything but deeds.
If such instruction is needed; if a great movement requires the forming and constructive word to interpret it and give it direction; if a movement in a wrong direction needs halting and turning to its proper course; if a cause needs pleading; if a law needs interpretation; if anything really needs to be said—the occasion for the orator, in the large sense of that word, has arrived. Therefore when he speaks "the common people will hear him gladly"; they will hear him because he teaches, and does it "as one having authority."
Whenever a speaker fails to make his audience forget voice, gesture, and even the speaker himself; whenever he fails to make the listeners conscious only of the living truth he utters, he has failed in his speech itself, which then has no other reason for having been delivered than a play or any other form of entertainment.