You must also make your audience hear you; and this requires, not a loud, high-pitched voice, but—unless dramatic expression requires otherwise—your middle or conversational pitch, with fulness of voice, that shall give you power. Your own mind will regulate this for you, if you will direct your attention to the persons in the back part of the hall, and speak in middle pitch, so that they may hear. | Avoid high pitch.| Many speakers make the mistake of using a high pitch, and render their speech very ineffective by so doing. You will call to mind the fact, that, when we say we cannot hear a speaker, it is not that we do not hear the sound of his voice, but that we cannot understand the words. Bearing this in mind, you will see that perfect articulation is what is wanted, and that fulness added to your voice in middle pitch will make the voice reach, will require less effort, and will produce better effect.
Feeling.
Having made your audience understand and hear, you must then make them feel. To do this as public reader, actor, clergyman, lawyer, teacher, orator, lecturer, you must yourself feel what you have to say, and, forgetting every thing else in your subject, concentrate your whole being in your utterance and action. Then you will be effective, and you will carry your audience with you. And you will fail in proportion as you fail to lose your own personality in your subject. "The heart giveth grace unto every art;" and of no art is this more true than of elocution. You may have all the graces of elocution which practice will give you; yet, in the effect these will produce,—if the will, acting alone, not being guided by mind and heart, prompts the utterance,—something will be lacking, of which learned and unlearned alike will be conscious.
Be natural.
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin," and cultivated and uncultivated alike will feel it; and this "touch of nature" you will show if you enter into what you have to say with mind, heart, and soul. Your voice will vary in all the elements of emotional expression, and you will be natural.
Mechanical speaking.
When speaking in public, do not try to remember the first rule of elocution. Leave it all behind you when you come before the audience. Speak from your thought and feeling, and be sure you are thoroughly familiar with what you have to say. Be sure you understand it yourself before you try to make others understand. | Words without meaning.|You can read words, calling them off mechanically, or you can speak words from memory very mechanically, and not have a clear idea of the meaning the words convey while you speak them. But do not do this. Always think the thought, as you read or speak, in the same manner as you would if speaking extempore. You can express your thought clearly by thinking it as you speak; but at the same time there may be no expression of emotion. | Thought without feeling.| You may have thought without feeling; but you must impress your thought by feeling. When you read, your mind gets the thought through the words, and from that thought comes feeling; but, when you speak your own thoughts, the feeling creates the thought. In reading, you think, and then feel; but, in speaking your thought, you feel, and then think. When you read, then, or speak from memory, if you will let thought create feeling before you speak, you will avoid mechanical reading and speaking, and be effective in conveying the thought and feeling both together.
Feeling without thought.
You can convey emotion without a definite thought; and this is as bad as either words without meaning, or thought without feeling. This arousing the feelings without guiding them by definite thought is the province of the art of music. Elocution is superior to music for the reason that it guides both thought and feeling, for certainly it is better that mind and feeling should work together, than either alone.