Now comes the all-important question, What is this power? You say this is a subtle, mysterious, indefinable power. Yes, subtle and mysterious to a degree, but I hope not indefinable. If so, we are at the ultimate, as above, and hence at the end. Now, some patience here. Generically, this divides itself into knowledge, power, and function. 1. Knowledge. The speaker must know human nature, or so much of human nature at least as to read his audience. Are they susceptible of being moved by exalted motives; as patriotism, philanthropy, moral or social reform? Are they mercenary and susceptible only to gain, with display and grosser pleasures? Are they lower, living almost wholly in the sensuous and sensual, concerned about eating, drinking, and the animal passions and desires? The speaker knowing this, knows enough to know that very different motives-moving force-must be applied to these different classes. 2. He must know that the psychologic, hence oratoric law, the motive-moving force which he wants to exist and work in them, must exist and work in himself. If he wants them to feel for suffering humanity or a suffering community or individual, he must feel first. Two laws here: (a) Feeling begets feeling; (b) strength of feeling leads, rules. Herein, then, we find a second factor or element, namely, feeling. He feels first and stronger and they follow. This law is primal and universal. No escape from it. No magnetism without it. He touches the keynotes and they respond. Here is the analogy in music. If you strike a given note in an instrument, every instrument in the room having the same key will respond. If we take the poet's idea of the "human soul as a harp of a thousand strings," the magnetic orator would only need to touch the desired chord in his own soul, and the same chord in his auditors would respond. Hence if he strikes the chord patriotism, he gets patriotism in response; if heroism, heroism; if grief, the responsive note comes muffled with sighs and sprayed with tears. 3. A third factor is imagination. This works both in the speaker and the audience. If the speaker can, through his imagination, clearly see the scene he would paint whether of joy or sorrow, success or failure - he can thereby make his audience see more clearly, and through their ears, as a consequence, can move them more effectually. The imagination is the faculty that makes the absent present, the unreal real, giving to "airy nothing a local habitation and a name "-hence a potential factor in the work of the orator. We do not elaborate this here, as it will appear later. 4. Expression or Delivery.-This is function. It hardly needs argument to show that the medium of thought or emotion should be so happy as to transmit its message in the most perfect manner possible. The organs of expression are a machine, and like other machines, often much of the power is lost in transmission. If a thought, feeling or image as it lives in the brain or soul of the speaker measuring 100, measures only 60 when it reaches the audience, it has lost 40 in its transmission-40 by the friction in the apparatus of delivery. Important as this is, we think it too well understood to need elaboration. So far, then, we have seen the ingredients or factors of magnetism to be: (1) Knowledge of audience; (2) power of feeling in self, and that first and strong; (3) imagination helping both speaker and audience; (4) expression, delivery. Now comes the question so often asked, Is magnetism a gift or a development? General answer, both. God gives the germ; you, I, each makes the development. This is the old law of mental growth, namely, exercise gives develop ment. The question may come further, How? Look back through the factors, then turn to your psychologies and there see the law of the how. Each faculty must be exercised on its proper object, and in conformity to its proper laws. Here may be added, as stated above, concerning imagination in its relation to feeling, of which the average text in psychology gives little or nothing. Here is the law as we apprehend it— the mind turns to a subject that appeals to the feelings, and the feelings are naturally awakened by reflection; but they are strengthened if the imagination comes to your aid and paints the scene more real than reflection can. The scene, the image, lives and glows as it could not under mere reflection, and as consequence, the feelings are affected in like degree. Indeed, feeling and imagination are reciprocal in their action. Imagination heightens feeling and feeling quickens imagination. Try it. That little anticipated evil stirs the feelings, and imagination begins to paint the causes, conditions, results, and the feelings arouse and become boisterous, and imagination, quickened by feeling, comes back with darker colors — till you are driven to distress that can be relieved only by finding the facts or dismissing the whole by sheer force of will. The wings of imagination fan anew the flame of feeling, the warmth of feeling quickens the wings of imagination. Conclusion: 1. Knowledge of audience. 2. Feeling in self strong enough to lead audience. 3. Imagination vivid enough to make audience see through their ears. 4. Expression so perfect that the subjective 100 shall be the nearest possible the objective, expressed, 100. LAWS: All these inborn or God-given, but all, as other faculties, susceptible of cultivation, development. These, |