A Guide to Spontaneity in Speech

"All art must be preceded by a certain mechanical ex-pertness," says Goethe, and this is particularly applicable to the subject of elocution. There should be long and patient practice of mechanical exercises for developing accuracy, flexibility, and facility in the use of the voice and vehicles of expression. The highest art is to conceal art, however, and a time comes when the student should abandon his "rules" and "exercises" and yield himself wholly to the thought and feeling to be expressed. If he has been well-trained, the members of expression will perform their work promptly and correctly with little conscious effort on his part. The speaker must test and criticize over and over again the work of his voice, gesture, and expression, until he is thoroughly satisfied as to its accuracy and dependableness. To produce his effects spontaneously there must be freedom from restraint and external force, though the will should so dominate as to promptly check any violations of harmony or naturalness.

The essential qualities of spontaneity are expression instead of repression, freedom rather than restraint, unity, earnestness, concentration, and naturalness.

EXAMPLES

1. Give us, oh, give us, the man who sings at his work! He will do more in the same time,-he will do it better,-he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars are said to make harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation in its powers of endurance. Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly joyous, a spirit all sunshine, graceful from very gladness, beautiful because bright.

CARLYLE

2. A hurry of hoofs in a village street,

A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark, And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet:

That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
"Paul Revere's Ride." LONGFELLOW.

3. The sea, the sea, the open sea,
The blue, the fresh, the ever free;
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth's wide regions round;
It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies,
Or like a cradled creature lies.
I'm on the sea, I'm on the sea,
I am where I would ever be,
With the blue above and the blue below,
And silence wheresoever I go.
If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.
"The Sea." BARRY CORNWALL .

4. "Yo-ho, my boys!" said Fezziwig; "no more work to-night, Christmas Eve, Dick! Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's have the shutters up before a man can say Jack Robinson! Clear away, my lads, and let's have lots of room here!"

Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn't have done, or couldn't have done, with old Fezziwig standing by. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off as if it were dismissed from public life forevermore. The floor was swept and watered, lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire, and the warehouse was as snug and warm and dry and bright a ball-room as you could desire to see upon a winter night. In came a fiddler with a music-book and walked up to the lofty desk and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomachaches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast, substantial smile. In came the two Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and amiable. In came the six young followers, whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook with her brother's particular friend, the milkman. In they all came anyhow and everyhow! Away they all went, twenty couples at once, hands half round and back again the other way, up the middle and down again, round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up at the wrong place, new top couple starting off again as soon as they got there, all top couple at last with not a bottom one to help them.

When this result was brought about old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, specially provided for that purpose. And there were more dances, and then there were forfeits, and then there were more dances, and there was cake and there was negus, and there was a great piece of cold roast, and there was great piece of cold boiled, and there were mince pies and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the roast and boiled, when the fiddler struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley!" Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig, top couple too with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them, three or four and twenty pairs of partners, people who were not to be trifled with, people who would dance and had no notion of walking.

But if there had been twice as many, or four times as many, old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As for her, she was worthy of being his partner in every sense of the term. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves, they shone in every part of the dance. You couldn't have predicted at any given moment where they would have turned up next, and when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had been all through the dance, advance and retire, turn your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread the needle and back again to your own place, Fezziwig cut, cut so deftly that he appeared to wink with his legs. At eleven o'clock the domestic ball broke up. Then old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig stood one on either side of the door, and shaking hands with each of their guests individually as he or she went out wished him or her "A Merry Christmas!"

DICKENS.