Public Speaking | Page 5

to argue that this vocal method, this forming of a public
speaking voice and style, cannot be rightly gained from the teachers; it
must be acquired through the exercise of each man's own will; if a man
finds he is going wrong he must will to go right--as if many men had
not persistently but unsuccessfully exercised their will to this very end.
It is so easy, and so attractive, to resolve all problems into one idea.
President Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton University, once said that he
always avoided the man or the book that proclaimed one idea for the
correcting of society's ills. These ideas on which books or essays are
written are too obviously fallacious to need extended comment; the
wonder is that they are often quoted and commended as being
beneficial in their teaching. If we want to row or sprint or play golf, we
do not simply go in and do our utmost; we apply the best technical skill
to the art; we seek to learn how, from the experience of the past, and
through the best instructors obtainable. Both common sense and
experience show that the use of the human voice in the art of speaking
is not the one thing, among all things, that cannot be successfully
taught. The results of vocal teaching show, on the contrary, from
multitudes of examples, from volumes of testimony, that there are few
branches of instruction wherein the specially trained teacher is so much
needed, and can be so effective as in the art of speaking.
In an experience extending over many years, an experience dealing
with about all the various forms of public speaking and vocal teaching,
the present writer has tried many methods, conducted classes on several
different plans, learned the needs, observed the efforts, considered the
successes and failures, of many men and women of various ages and of
many callings. The constant and insistent fact in all this period of
experience has been that skillful, technical instruction, as such, is the

one kind of instruction that should always be provided where public
speaking is taught, and the one that the student should not fail to secure
when it is at hand. Other elements in good speech-making may, if
necessary, be obtained from other sources. The teacher of speaking
should teach speech. He should teach something else also, but he
should, as a technician, teach that. The multitude of men and women
who, in earlier and later life, come, in vocal trouble, to seek help from
the experienced teacher, and the abundance of testimony as to the
satisfactory results; the repeated evidences of failure to produce rightly
trained voices wholly by so-called inspirational methods; the frequent
evidences of pernicious vocal results from the forcing of young voices
in the overintense and hasty efforts made in preparing for prize
speaking, acting, and debating,--all these may not come to the
understanding of the ordinary observer; they may not often, perhaps,
come within the experience of the exceptionally gifted individuals who
are usually cited as examples of distinguished success; they cannot
impress themselves on educators who have little or no relation with this
special subject; they naturally come into the knowledge and experience
of the specially trained teacher of public speaking, who is brought into
intimate relations with the subject and deals with all sorts and
conditions of men. Out of this experience comes the strong conviction
that the teacher of public speaking should be a vocal technician and a
vocal physician, able to teach constructively and to treat correctively,
knowing all he can of all that has been taught before, but teaching only
as much of what he knows as is necessary to any individual.
For the dignity and worth of the teaching, the teacher of speaking
should be trained, and should be a trainer, as has been indirectly said, in
some other subject--in English literature or composition, in debating,
history, or what not. He should be one of the academic
faculty--concerned with thought, which speech expresses. He should
not, for his other subject, be mainly concerned with gymnastics or
athletics; he should not, for his own good and the consequent good of
his work, be wholly taken up merely with the teaching of technical
form in speaking. He should not be merely--if at all--a coach in inter-
collegiate contests; nor should his service to an institution be adjudged
mainly by the results of such contests. He should be an independent,
intellectually grown and growing man, one who--in his exceptionally

intimate relations with students--will have a large and right influence
on student life. The offer recently held out by a university of a salary
and an academic rank equal to its best, to a sufficiently qualified
instructor in public speaking, was one of the several signs of a sure