Читать книгу Delsarte System of Oratory - Delaumosne - Страница 25

Table of Contents

Gesture is the direct agent of the heart, the interpreter of speech. It is elliptical discourse. Each part of this definition may be easily justified.

1. Gesture is the Direct Agent of the Heart.--Look at an infant. For some time he manifests his joy or sorrow through cries; but these are not gesture. When he comes to know the cause of his joy or sorrow, sentiment awakens, his heart opens to love or hatred, and he expresses his new emotion not by cries alone, nor yet by speech; he smiles upon his mother, and his first gesture is a smile. Beings endowed only with the sensitive life, have no smile; animals do not laugh.

This marvelous correspondence of the organs with the sentiment arises from the close union of soul and body. The brain ministers to the operations of the soul. Every sentiment must have its echo in the brain, in order to be unerringly transmitted by the organic apparatus.

Ex visu cognoscitur vir. ("The man is known by his face.") The rôle of dissimulation is a very difficult one to sustain.

2. Gesture is the Interpreter of Speech.--Gesture has been given to man to reveal what speech is powerless to express. For example: I love. This phrase says nothing of the nature of the being loved, nothing of the fashion in which one loves. Gesture, by a simple movement, reveals all this, and says it far better than speech, which would know how to render it only by many successive words and phrases. A gesture, then, like a ray of light, can reflect all that passes in the soul.

Hence, if we desire that a thing shall be always remembered, we must not say it in words; we must let it be divined, revealed by gesture. Wherever an ellipse is supposable in a discourse, gesture must intervene to explain this ellipse.

3. Gesture is an Elliptical Language.--We call ellipse a hidden meaning whose revelation belongs to gesture. A gesture must correspond to every ellipse. For example: "This medley of glory and gain vexes me." If we attribute something ignominious or abject to the word medley, there is an ellipse in the phrase, because the ignominy is implied rather than expressed. Gesture is then necessary here to express the value of the implied adjective, ignominious.

Suppress this ellipse, and the gesture must also be suppressed, for gesture is not the accompaniment of speech. It must express the idea better and in another way, else it will be only a pleonasm, an after conception of bad taste, a hindrance rather than an aid to intelligible expression.