Course XXXIII - Teaching 5: Ideas, Order, Forms and Words in the Speech

The orator should find arguments and present them duly arranged, embellish them with words, and express them with decency and decorum. All this has been called invention, disposition, elocution and pronunciation.
Invention: it is to find ideas and arguments for your future speech. How to find them? What source can you apply to? Why your understanding many times refuses to do this service?
Certain author said, everything is fruitless to fruitless and uneducated spirits, everything is superficial to superficial spirits, and everything is a chaos to dark spirits. Measure of beings and objects in relation to soul lays in soul itself. So, the privilege of meditation and mood consists in finding more important relationships in things and in representing them by means of forms equivalent to this greatness. The same object represented by a mean pen or language acquires sublime forms in another language or pen.
You should acquire certain knowledge by reflecting usually on things and beings. A continuous and profound consideration about matter to deal with, they all are sources of invention to get resources. An external reading is like non-assimilated food: they do not nurture your soul. Your reflection must be in abundance on every selected page. Otherwise, ideas become fleeting and nothing will remain in your memory, from which the orator will get, later, material for his speech. Then, meditation will refine and guide the said reflective material.
Here is the work and fruit of oratorical invention: approach to the object, consideration of its entire dimensions, selection of proper ideas, their composition and decomposition successively, discovery of the most attractive point of view for their presentation, and finally, their expression though a plan and forms of enunciation.
“Disposition” has been previously considered in relation to parts of an harangue, and “elocution”, in connection with tropes and figures. See pronunciation rules.
Pronunciation: perhaps nothing is more important than pronunciation in any speech. Someday, to the question about which was the main part in oratory, Demosthenes replied: “Pronunciation”. “And after pronunciation?”, they asked again, he said: “Pronunciation”. “But, after pronunciation?”, they insisted for the third time, and here is the third Demosthenes’ reply: “Pronunciation”. Of course, this Athenian orator had serious personal motives to give such extreme opinion. But he rightly referred in an exclusive way to this element of measure and sonority.
Here is the difference between hearing an orator and reading his printed speech is extraordinary later. Printed word is hardly a shadow of a vibrating word that has been vividly conveyed.
Tone, inflection and gesture contribute a lot to thought, or rather expand and clarify it, and an orator endowed with good pronunciation often gives heat where by logic heat is absent, and produces harmony where rhetorically you need it because naturally it is non-existent. So also the best speech, if improperly pronounced, is not attractive. You call a woman beautiful, but according to a tone of ceremony, vehemence or gibe, this word will mean mere courtesy, live passion or pungent irony The same sentence duly pronounced on a tribune and read later, even thoroughly copied, will stop being the same thing. Why? Because action, which is a language coming to help another language, and also tone, voice modulation, gesture and facial expression sometimes all of them are powerful allied that are duly used by an orator, and cannot be translated into paper where you can just get a dead copy in comparison with a live and fiery picture painted in the speech. So, eloquence of action is much more persuasive than eloquence of words.
Let us consider separately tone, inflection and celerity related to voice.
Tone: as a rule, in the beginning a speech should not take such high tone as later because it is not proper to begin loudly certain discussion that now is still and peaceful.
Inflection: human voice is an instrument with different chords for every emotion. A joyful chord is related to abundant, light, enthusiastic and live word. After an acute sorrow, there are hardly articulated sounds that end up as a mournful cry; a profound pain asks for a language of heat and movements; and finally happy impressions are translated into sweet, still and affective word. Here declamation, as a try, becomes extremely useful and is recommended.
Celerity: as a rule, an especially emotive word is faster at the end of sentences. You can know exactly this remark. Language is a thought reflection and gets from it inspiration, momentum and excitation. Language should be faster or broken according to more or less slow vibrations, or more or less live vibration received from inside; and as these vibrations are always faster at the end of sentences, it is indispensable for your tongue to follow the celerity conveyed by your soul. Apparently thought follows the same gravitation laws of physical bodies; its movement is faster when is about to end up. Light pauses may be proper at the end of an important sentence.
Generally speaking, you should not speak so rapidly that you lose words, not so slowly that the audience, being impatient, remains mentally or physically absent. All this should also be fit to nature of the speech: celerity with thick philosophical concepts should not be the same as in political meetings.
Gesture: it is a useful means to make notice and feel what you say. Many times it reveals aspects that have not been expressed by words. But you should use it with parsimony and much measure.
Remember that your face is faithful reflection of the truth or falsehood of your sayings; above all, this is quite true in relation to your eyes.
The rest of movement should not be of the whole body –action should start from your arm. You use especially the right arm, and your left arm should not remain motionless. An orator should stay erect, somewhat inclined forward, because in this way his body remain more free and easy.
Also perpendicular movements, namely, in straight line upward-downward, which as Shakespeare says in Hamlet, “cut the air with your hand”, should be checked because they are good seldom. Oblique movements are generally the most graceful. Also you should avoid quite sudden and rapid movements.
This outer form, called “eloquentia corporis”, is quite significant and should not be overlooked. But you should not forget certain necessary measure and constant self-examination during the speech, to avoid exaggeration or a cold attitude in disagreement with your words.
Of course, all these licenses and rules refer to an ordinary orator and, therefore, they are also valid in connection with him and ordinary circumstances, places and events; so these licenses and rules should be according to them.
People moved by vocation, Initiates, mystics, scholars and saints of all times have established, according to nature and circumstances of their mission, their own law, method and discipline. Naturally, these cases are always exceptional, and never can be taken as the “type” to pose from it the whole didactic aspect. But many times even these beings have followed certain method and synthesis of an experience takes for granted some rule, in order to avoid improper delays.
The kind of communication established between a great political o religious orator and his audience or devotees, was not at all as the communication between Gandhi and his skeptic Parisian audience, according to remarks of a direct spectator.
In a cram-full hall, Gandhi gave his own notion about non-violence. Serene, with no hesitation, he answered all questions, which might be embarrassing for anyone. His presence, endowed with spirit, accurateness, sincerity and unalterable patience, was the true essence of his doctrine. Gradually that little and ugly man conquered the audience: he would not use usual recipes of classical oratory, he spoke with extreme simplicity, without eloquence or oratorical tricks, his voice never was loud, and his timbre, even though quite pleasant, did not have any particular qualities.
Communication between him and this audience is established through a way that is not ordinary; so, in speaking of his faith in the truth, non-violence and love, and repeating more ordinary axioms that two and two give four, Gandhi’s audience was in a blaze; his sayings were not spectacular, and the quality of his word did not depend on language, even though his English was quite fluent and recommendable.