[37] Adolphe Monod, himself a distinguished master of the art of delivery, gives some good hints on it in a paper on _The Eloquence of the Pulpit_, translated and published as an article in _The British and Foreign Evangelical Review_, January, 1881:--
"In general, people recite too quickly, far too quickly. When a man speaks, the thoughts and feelings do not come to him all at once; they take birth little by little in his mind. It is necessary that this labour and this slowness appear in the reciting, or it will always come short of nature. Take time to reflect, to feel, and to allow ideas to come, and hurry your recitation only when constrained by some particular consideration."...
"Talk not in the pulpit. An exaggerated familiarity would be a mistake nearly as great as declamation: it happens more seldom; it is, nevertheless, found in certain preachers, those especially who have not studied. The tone of good conversation, but that tone heightened and ennobled, such appears to me the ideal of pulpit delivery."...
"In order to rise above the tone of conversation, the majority of preachers withdraw too far from it. They swell their delivery, and declaim instead of speaking. Now, when bombast comes in, nature goes out."
In regard to the first of these extracts I should say that many Scotch speakers fail through lack of _pace_ in the delivery. The interest is lost in the pauses between the sentences. A slow delivery is only effective when a thought is obviously being born, for which the audience is kept intently waiting.
But the most remarkable thing in the article is the following quotation from Talma, the actor:--
"We were rhetoricians and not characters. What scores of academical discourses on the theatre, how few simple words! But by chance I found myself one evening in a drawing-room with the leaders of the party of the Gironde. Their sombre countenance, their anxious look, attracted my attention. There were there, written in visible letters, strong and powerful interests. They were men of too much heart for those interests to be tarnished by selfishness; I saw in them the manifest proof of the danger of my country. All come to enjoy pleasure; not one thinking of it! They began to discuss; they touched on the most thrilling questions of the day. It was grand! Methought I was attending one of the secret councils of the Romans. 'The Romans must have spoken like these,' said I. 'Let the country be called France or Rome, it makes use of the same intonations, speaks the same language: therefore, if there is no declamation here before me, there was no declamation down there, in olden times; that is evident!' These reflections rendered me more attentive. My impressions, though produced by a conversation thoroughly free from bombast, deepened. 'An apparent calm in men agitated stirs the soul,' said I; 'eloquence may then have strength, without the body yielding to disordered movements.' I even perceived that the discourse, when delivered without efforts or cries, renders the gesture more powerful and gives the countenance more expression. All these deputies assembled before me by chance appear to me much more eloquent in their simplicity than at the tribune, where, being in spectacle, they think they must deliver their harangue in the way of actors--and actors as we were then--that is, declaimers, full of bombast. From that day a new light flashed on me; I foresaw my art regenerated."