“And so, my dear young friend, I would say to you:  Open up your heart; sing as you skate; sing inharmoniously if you will, but sing!  A man may skate with all the skill in the world; he may glide forward with incredible deftness and curve backward with divine grace, and yet if he be not master of his emotions as well as of his feet, I would say—­and here Fate steps in—­that he has failed.”

* * * * *

There is, of course, plenty of good advice in the Stevenson book.  But it is much better as pure reading matter than as advice to the young idea or even the middle-aged idea.  It may have been all right for Stevenson to “play the sedulous ape” and consciously imitate the style of Hazlitt, Lamb, Montaigne and the rest, but if the rest of us were to try it there would result a terrible plague of insufferably artificial and affected authors, all playing the sedulous ape and all looking the part.

On the whole, the Stevenson book makes good reading and Miss Klickmann gives good advice.

LVIII

“THE EFFECTIVE SPEAKING VOICE”

Joseph A. Mosher begins his book on “The Effective Speaking Voice” by saying: 

“Among the many developments of the great war was a widespread activity in public speaking.”

Mr. Mosher, to adopt a technical term of elocution, has said a mouthful.  Whatever else the war did for us, it raised overnight an army of public speakers among the civilian population, many of whom seem not yet to have received their discharge.  It is the aim of Mr. Mosher’s book to keep this Landwehr in fighting trim and aid in recruiting its ranks, possibly against the next war.  Until every nation on earth has subjected its public speakers to a devastating operation on the larynx no true disarmament can be said to have taken place.

* * * * *

In the first place there are exercises which must be performed by the man who would have an effective speaking voice, exercises similar to Walter Camp’s Daily Dozen.  You stand erect, with the chest held moderately high. (Moderation in all things is the best rule to follow, no matter what you are doing.) Place the thumbs just above the hips, with the fingers forward over the waist to note the muscular action.  Then you inhale and exhale and make the sound of “ah” and the sound of “ah-oo-oh,” and, if you aren’t self-conscious, you say “wah-we-wi-wa,” slowly, ten or a dozen times.

“The student should stop at once if signs of dizziness appear,” says the book, but it does not say whether the symptoms are to be looked for in the student himself or in the rest of the family.

* * * * *

The author does the public a rather bad turn when he suggests to student speakers that, under stress, they might use what is known as the “orotund.”  The orotund quality in public speaking is saved for passages containing grandeur of thought, when the orator feels the need of a larger, fuller, more resonant and sounding voice to be in keeping with the sentiment.  Its effect is somewhat that of a chant, and here is how you do it: