Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/35

16 (a) The voice should be pure: e. g., free from rasping "throatiness" nasal twangings, and whimpering. Obstmc- tionSy or rather, impurities of voice of (a) PuBiTY this sort are due largely to sheer habit. We tend to lose our appreciation of the things with which we are most familiarly associated : so, many persons never listen to their own voices; and so they never know their vocal defects. In order to correct these faults, one must be made conscious of them. Intelligent crit- icism, then, becomes almost an absolute necessity ; and it must be followed with patient practice. (b) The voice should have strength. He who speaks must be heard. If he is not heard, what is the use of his speaking f In this connection it must be borne in (b) Stbength mind that the voice of the speaker must overcome the distracting hack- ing and coughing usually accompanying any coming together of a large number of people. Even above the attentive audi- ence rises a subdued but almost ceaseless din more or less op- posing the voice of the speaker. But he simply must be heard. To demand that the speaker be heard easily is not a whit more than to demand clearness in the composition to be read. In this connection it should be remembered that public discourse must be ** caught on the wing.*' No opportunity is afforded the hearer mentally to go back over a part he did not hear dis- tinctly. He must *'keep up** with the speaker all the while. On the other hand, composition for private reading may be re- traced again and again with a view to understanding it. (c) The third quality in the voice is flexibility, or perhaps better, variety. Public speech, like every other art, should have no place for monotony. The use (c) Flexibility of one note over and over again, the constant repetition of a series of notes, "the pounding along humdrum fashion" through an address — these "singsongs" are to the audience very conducive to sleep. One of the best ways to secure variety is to shift the voice between sentences; i. e., to change the pitch. A sentence is a thought more or less complete. In writing we separate