"A speaker must possess a large-hearted regard for the welfare of his
audience," he writes, and here again we see Conwell explaining
Conwellism. "Enthusiasm invites enthusiasm," is another of his points of
importance; and one understands that it is by deliberate purpose, and
not by chance, that he tries with such tremendous effort to put
enthusiasm into his hearers with every sermon and every lecture that he
delivers.
"It is easy to raise a laugh, but dangerous, for it is the greatest test
of an orator's control of his audience to be able to land them again on
the solid earth of sober thinking." I have known him at the very end of
a sermon have a ripple of laughter sweep freely over the entire
congregation, and then in a moment he has every individual under his
control, listening soberly to his words.
He never fears to use humor, and it is always very simple and obvious
and effective. With him even a very simple pun may be used, not only
without taking away from the strength of what he is saying, but with a
vivid increase of impressiveness. And when he says something funny it is
in such a delightful and confidential way, with such a genial, quiet,
infectious humorousness, that his audience is captivated. And they never
think that he is telling something funny of his own; it seems, such is
the skill of the man, that he is just letting them know of something
humorous that they are to enjoy with him.
"Be absolutely truthful and scrupulously clear," he writes; and with
delightfully terse common sense, he says, "Use illustrations that
illustrate"--and never did an orator live up to this injunction more
than does Conwell himself. Nothing is more surprising, nothing is more
interesting, than the way in which he makes use as illustrations of the
impressions and incidents of his long and varied life, and, whatever it
is, it has direct and instant bearing on the progress of his discourse.
He will refer to something that he heard a child say in a train
yesterday; in a few minutes he will speak of something that he saw or
some one whom he met last month, or last year, or ten years ago--in
Ohio, in California, in London, in Paris, in New York, in Bombay; and
each memory, each illustration, is a hammer with which he drives home a
truth.
The vast number of places he has visited and people he has met, the
infinite variety of things his observant eyes have seen, give him his
ceaseless flow of illustrations, and his memory and his skill make
admirable use of them. It is seldom that he uses an illustration from
what he has read; everything is, characteristically, his own. Henry M.
Stanley, who knew him well, referred to him as "that double-sighted
Yankee," who could "see at a glance all there is and all there ever
was."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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