Читать книгу Delsarte System of Oratory - Delaumosne - Страница 31

Gesture must always precede speech. In fact, speech is reflected expression. It must come after gesture, which is parallel with the impression received. Nature incites a movement, speech names this movement. Speech is only the title, the label of what gesture has anticipated. Speech comes only to confirm what the audience already comprehend. Speech is given for naming things. Gesture asks the question, "What?" and speech answers. Gesture after the answer would be absurd. Let the word come after the gesture and there will be no pleonasm.

Priority of gesture may be thus explained: First a movement responds to the sensation; then a gesture, which depicts the emotion, responds to the imagination which colors the sensation. Then comes the judgment which approves. Finally, we consider the audience, and this view of the audience suggests the appropriate expression for that which has already been expressed by gesture.

The basis of this art is to make the auditors divine what we would have them feel.

Every speaker may choose his own stand-point, but the essential law is to anticipate, to justify speech by gesture. Speech is the verifier of the fact expressed. The thing may be expressed before announcing its name. Sometimes we let the auditors divine rather than anticipate, gazing at them in order to rivet their attention. Eloquence is composed of many things which are not named, but must be named by slight gestures. In this eloquence consists. Thus a smack of the tongue, a blow upon the hand, an utterance of the vowel u as if one would remove a stain from his coat. The writer cannot do all this. The mere rendition of the written discourse is nothing for the orator; his talent consists in taking advantage of a great number of little nameless sounds.

A written discourse must contain forced epithets and adjectives to illustrate the subject. In a spoken discourse a great number of adjectives are worse than useless. Gesture and inflection of the voice supply their place. The sense is not in the words; it is in inflection and gesture.