CHAPTER XII

FORCE

Argument of the Chapter.-Changes in the degree of force, known as touch, chiefly affect the emotional responses of listeners. A common misconception is that sustained intensity makes for good speaking, whereas the best ends are served by variety of the degree of force. Aspects of force that affect speaking are form and stress, ways in which force is applied to words and syllables.

I. DEGREES OF FORCE

The second of the elements of tone making is force, the element that has to do with the loudness or quietness of the sound made by the voice. A study of force must not be understood to be a study only of how to make more noise, how to use a bigger and more powerful voice. For though most novices need to develop greater vocal power, yet a study of force as a factor in carrying meaning is just as much taken up with quietness as with loudness. Meaning is every whit as much dependent on mild tones as on loud. It is the contrast between loud and quiet that makes force a factor in the carrying of thought, not noise or volume alone.

Touch.-In describing the effect of force in expression we may profitably borrow a term from the sister art of music-touch. Touch carries the double idea of variety and skill, prime requisites in the application of Force to the use of the voice. Just as some piano players have a touch like a blacksmith and others the touch of a gold beater, some speakers and readers strike their notes with a thump like a pile driver and others like the falling of the rain. To be effective for all possible occasions, one ought to possess both the heavy and the light; neither is necessarily a defect nor necessarily a virtue. Command of each is very much to be desired both for public address and for interpretation and acting.

FORCE AND EMOTIONAL RESPONSE

Force Is Chiefly Total Reaction. The factor of force is all a matter of general bodily participation; that is, true emotional reaction. Force is, by the psychologist and physicist, called intensity. Intensity in the use of one set of muscles always tends to radiate into other sets. The man who feels the need of shouting is by the nature of his attitude intense-much tensed up. Examination would show that the muscles of his neck, back, arms, and legs are much tightened. What more to be expected, then, than that his abdomen should also show intensity and should expel air at an intensity calculated to make much noise? Force is thus highly charged with emotional meanings, with general attitudes, and total bodily dispositions.

Coming from such a condition in the speaker, it produces imitatively the same type of reaction in the listener. When we hear a loud noise of any kind our reaction is total and intense; when we hear a sound soft and gentle we react with very little intensity and with only slight reverberation in the muscles distant from those of the ears. We prefer most of the time freedom from great noises, being much happier when quiet. Noises wear us out; they keep us at work all over the body; whereas a little at a time of total bodily work is plenty. Noises are strong stimulants and easily bring the listener to a state of numbness. Consequently continuous shouting, in a small room where it strikes each listener hard and noisily, so agitates him all over and so thoroughly wears him out that he has no mechanism left for the differentiations and discriminations needed for activity of an intellectual nature.

A sermon or a campaign speech shouted from start to finish -especially where there are no opposing noises-leaves no intellectual impression, no disposition to catch refinements of meaning: the only thing carried being a general feeling, a total attitude. Yet frankness compels us to note that many audiences delight in just this vagueness and grossness of emotionality; they are none too capable of fine distinctions, and seldom get from a public meeting anything but the

most hazy and expansive of attitudes. Ask them how they enjoyed the "effort," and they will rhapsodize over its beauties and charms and power; but ask them just what the speaker said, and they cannot tell. No wonder so many hopeful preachers and politicians and lyceum lights go wrong; the defects of the listeners invite them to it. Yet there is a path between the Scylla of overintellectualized hush and the Charybdis of popularized bombast; and it is highly worth finding.

It is found in a sense of balance for touch, for the right degree of force. Some words are to be shouted, necessarily; very good, so handle them; do not fail to give them all the intensity they need. But select them with care and do not inflict injuries of violence upon the others, those needing gentler treatment. In conversation less than half the syllables need a hard blow; the majority are touched only hard enough to be distinct. In public address for small gatherings no more in number are stressed, but the blow is enough harder always to fit the size of the audience and the acoustic properties of the hall. The same applies pretty generally to interpretation.

For oratory, impersonation, and acting the ratio shifts, varying according to the intensity of the speaker's feelings, the temper of the audience, and the size of the gathering. Some oratory must be by shouts only, a shout for every syllable; Webster, addressing a great outdoor throng on Bunker Hill, must have shouted on almost every syllable; Lincoln and Douglas must have been pretty intense in every word in their great debates; Bryan in the Coliseum could not have captured the convention without making each sound one of great volume and intensity. Impersonators and actors sometimes represent characters of fiction or drama whose mood calls for a shout in every utterance-Lear defying the thunder, William Tell addressing the mountain peaks, Sir Toby Belch airing his grievances.

FALSE NOTIONS ABOUT FORCE

Range of Touch.-There are some interesting notions concerning force entertained by different types of extremists.

One type assumes that the only way to be effective in speech is to shout all the time. The ministry and the stump seem to have almost a monopoly of this theory, though the bar occasionally steals their thunder, as it were. We are all familiar with the brother who starts his sermon with much more voice than is necessary, then very quickly turns on all the power he has, and never lets down until the "lastly," sometimes even assaulting Heaven in his closing prayer. And we have heard the campaigner who, inflated with the importance of his mission as a savior of his country, puts on the full diapason at the start and never relents in his ardor till his concluding "I thank you."

But these types, absurd as they seem, are no more so in reality than the other which assumes that because quietness is a virtue in the parlor and at the dinner table, or in the library, study, and laboratory-where such men spend most of their time-therefore it must be the chief commendation of a public speaker. This notion seems to be most prevalent in academic circles, where the quiet, restrained soul holds sway and gentleness and lightness of touch are the greatest of virtues. Many a college lecturer who gets along well enough in his classroom and in the committee gathering, wonders why he fails when he goes out among the unelect. Usually he ascribes the result to the ignorance and lack of taste of the uninitiated; but more often probably it is his own failure to employ the methods that would carry his meaning to the people he is addressing. For any meaning that comes to them must come on their terms; there is no escaping this. It is for this reason that words of deep consequence or wisdom of tremendous weight are so often lost on a mixed audience.

The man who is really skilled in speaking and is accustomed to taking the crowd on their own terms-of hearing and receiving-almost always has a strong voice and always uses a tone louder at least than he would think of using in private conversation. The ideal is to command all degrees of power, but to exercise great delicacy of touch. A strong voice is decidedly not a mark of grossness or of pompousness, any more than gentle, quiet tones are necessarily a

sign of weakness. The speaker who is fully competent to express such meanings as his purpose and the occasion call for can thunder, if he needs to, and then in turn can purr or coo as gently as the classic sucking dove. Any criticism of his use of force must rest entirely upon his good or bad sense in fitting his touch to the meaning he wishes to carry.

VARIETY NEEDED

Application of Degrees of Force.-Changes of force serve both in the expressing of logical meanings and in showing how the speaker feels about his thoughts. The logical meaning of a sentence can be helped greatly by uttering some of the words and syllables with more noise than others. Most of those who read this are unaware of the frequency with which they bring out certain ideas by means of shouting the word that represents it. Take the utterance, "This is no time for ceremony." If you will note carefully as you read this aloud, you will discover that you use a variation of force that can be represented as follows: "This is no time for CERemony." Or another, "You may also remember this, that we Saxons were slaves about four hundred years, sold with the land, and our fathers never raised a FINger to END that slavery." Eliminating considerations of pitch and time-which enter into the emphasis suggested herestill the carrying of the right meaning of these sentences compels an increase of force on the syllables and words accented. The very requirements of accentuation call for an added volume of sound on the accented syllable, so common is the need for variety in force.

But it is in the carrying of emotional attitudes that force is most important. So obvious is this and so well recognized that it is superfluous to offer printed illustrations. The reason we have so much bombast on the public platform is that the speaker allows his feelings to run away with his self-control, and he shows his predicament by making too much noise. Or the speaker, wishing to show himself a man of great earnestness and devotion to his cause, turns on all his motive power and blows his bellows at full capacity, giving that familiar picture characterized in the words, "full