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FORMALITY, PRIMNESS, RIGIDITY.

One effect of manner, which impairs the life of pulpit eloquence, is formality of style. A professional, ceremonious intonation, and a technical, measured solemnity of mien and action, are the characteristics of this mode of delivery. The speaker's whole aspect, his voice, and his gestures, are, in consequence of this fault, thrown, apparently, into a mechanical mould which has left its impress on the whole man, and prevents the possibility of his expressing himself with a natural, life-like effect.

Preachers of this class are distinguished by a marble fixedness of features, an habitual upturned eye, a heavy, hollow, and uniform tone, a rigid and laborious style of movement and action. This stereotype manner precludes everything like adaptation to change of circumstances or of subject. The man becomes, in such cases, too much of an automaton, to impart spiritual or intellectual life to others. He kills rather than awakens sympathy: he renders himself incapable of arousing or interesting the mind. His fixed formality of manner converts devotion into ceremony, and worship into soulless routine: it renders preaching an unmeaning and unprofitable piece of

custom.

Solemnity and decorum are, undoubtedly, the aim of the speaker, in all such instances of manner. But the mechanical and labored style, and the literal character of the whole affair, produce, unavoidably, an exterior rather than an interior effect. The origin of the fault of formality, seems to be the general impression, stamped in early life, that the pulpit is necessarily associated with certain looks and tones. The preacher himself yields unconsciously to the influence of such impressions, and complies with it, in his manner of speaking. The result is that he moulds his style into a decorous gravity, or a deep solemnity, more than into an earnest and living expres

sion of his personal sentiments. He assumes, unintentionally, an air and an utterance which are not, properly, his own, but part and parcel of his profession.

The study of elocution prescribes the easy and certain remedy for such habits, by accustoming the speaker to analyze his tones, and trace distinctly the difference between the mode of voice which betrays a factitious utterance, and that which comes warm and true from the heart, with the inspiration of the moment fresh upon it. The preparatory discipline in elocution would enable the student to awaken and vivify his voice, and modulate its expression into the natural variations of personal feeling, without which there can neither be life nor eloquence in speech.

Formality, in the case of some speakers, assumes the feeble form of primness of manner, with its sparing voice, precise articulation, nice emphasis, fastidious inflection, meagre tone, and mincing gesture. This prudery of style is not unfrequently exemplified in the pulpits of New England, in consequence of the anxious precision and exactness of habit which are so general as local traits. The speaker's whole manner seems, in consequence of this tendency, to be weighed and given out with the most scrupulous and cautious regard to rigorous accuracy of effect in petty detail. Elocution becomes, in such cases, a parallel to the transplanted tree, trimmed of all its natural life and beauty, and, for the time, resembling, in its quaintnes and rigidity, rather a bare pole, than a product of vegetable nature.

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The result of such a manner is to anatomize and kill feeling, not to inspire it: the head is, in this way, allowed to take the place of the heart. Exact discrimination and subtle nicety of intellect, preponderate, usually, in the effect of such speaking on the hearer: his affections are left unmoved: he is unconscious, throughout the discourse, of one manly impulse or strong impression. The prim, guarded, neutralizing manner of the preacher,

seems, in such instances, the appropriate style of coldness and scepticism, rather than of a warm and living faith.

The fault of undue precision of manner, may be traced partly to the influence of undue anxiety about mere literal exactness, partly to the absence of manly force and independence of character, and partly to faulty education, which has led the speaker to pay more regard to the effect which he produces on the understanding and the judgment, than that which he exerts on the moral sympathies of his audience.* The last of these influences accustoms the school-boy to precision and point of emphasis, and speciality of inflection, more than to earnest energy of utterance and impressive emotion. Early habit, thus directed, leads the student and the preacher to a corresponding mode of address, and involves all the defects of an over-pruned manner, with its unavoidable results of cool and fastidious preciseness, which offers nothing to the heart, and therefore leaves undone the great business for which the preacher addresses mankind.

Formality of manner in speaking, is sometimes caused, in part, by an unbending rigidity of habit, which is plainly legible in the unyielding features, stiff postures, and stiff gestures, of some preachers. These faults of habit in address, are partly owing to false impressions regarding manly firmness and dignity, partly to the want of free and genial and extensive intercourse with the world, and partly to an early culture deficient in the means of imparting flexibility and grace to the mental and bodily faculties.

It is a matter of frequent observation among the people

* An impressive lesson on the futility of mere preciseness, used to be given by a popular lecturer on local peculiarities of character, to his audiences at the West, in a humorous delineation, in which two worthy Eastern deacons were represented as discussing, at great length, and with much earnestness, the comparative significance of the synonymous terms rules and regulations. The parties, after much expenditure of logic, "concluded upon the whole, that 'rules' would best apply to a canal, and 'regulations' to a railroad."

of other countries, and a fact noted also by English writers, themselves, that the characteristic manner of the English, is ungainly and rigid, in comparison with that of other nations. A sullen taciturnity of habit, a surly brevity of reply, a constrained stiffness of posture and motion, and a confined, reluctant gesture, are the predominating national traits in daily intercourse. The New Englander

seems to inherit a full share of the hereditary stiffness and constraint, though not of the taciturnity and bluffness of the family stock. This feature of the common lineage, becomes haughtiness in the Englishman. But in the New Englander it degenerates into mere rigidity and unmeaning stiffness.

A genial early culture, and a wide intercourse with mankind, tend equally to render the human being plastic and flexible they give him the power and the spirit of self-adaptation; they give him ease and fluency in address, and the power of eliciting sympathy from others. But the general defect of established modes of education, is that, from the absence of due provision for the development of man's social and moral nature, youth is left destitute of appropriate aids to the formation of exterior manner in the daily communications of private life, and in the act of public speaking.

Hence it happens that we so often see the juvenile speaker on the academic stage, rigid in posture, and awkward in movement and action. The want of early training leaves him utterly deficient in the natural ease and grace of a cultivated and polished youth. His body seems nailed to the floor, his members galvanized into metallic stiffness, his head glued to his neck, his eye motionless in its socket, his arm pinioned to his side. His whole visible mien and movement are those of an ill-adjusted machine. His voice, too, possesses the same inflexible character, in its monotonous utterance.

A degree of this style continues to exert its injurious influence on the college student and the professional man.

A rigid, inflexible air, and a mechanical stiffness in gesture, are, accordingly, in many instances, the habitual style of the speaker in the pulpit. These faults unavoidably attract the attention of the audience to the preacher's personal manner, more than to his subject; as a messenger of ungainly, rigid manner and aspect, presents himself, rather than his message, to those whom he accosts. And, even when the mind has become somewhat enured to the fault of manner, there is still a hinderance caused by it, in regard to any effectual access to the feelings. Men naturally refuse to yield the sympathy of the heart to a speaker whose manner is so inappropriate in point of judgment and taste. The stiff attitude and inflexible. features do not solicit and win attention; and the rigid arm and rigid hand are incapable of executing a motion which shall come as an appeal to the heart.

The correctives for rigid habit in a speaker's manner, are, in part, to be sought in the cultivation and refinement of taste, by which the mind is guarded against every uncouth and repulsive effect in expression. An excellent remedial influence will always be derived from habitual contact with the ease and polish of elevated society. The meliorating influence of the fine arts should ever be solicited by the student whose purpose is to addict himself to public speaking. But the express study of gesture, as a part of elocution, will exert the most direct influence on manner and habit. It will lead the student to discern the character and effect of every attitude and action of the body. It will teach him that there is no escape from the impression which external manner produces; that the speaker who neglects this part of elocution, incurs the effects of inappropriateness and awkwardness, and, sometimes, of self-contradiction, in the discrepance between the style of his gesture and the language of his tongue; that he who flatters himself with the hope of escaping inappropriate manner by avoiding action, gives, by his statue-like and motionless posture, the lie to any earnest

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