The purpose of a gesture is to carry your thought and feeling into the minds and

hearts of your hearers; this it does by emphasizing your message, by

interpreting it, by expressing it in action, by striking its tone in either a

physically descriptive, a suggestive, or a typical gesture--and let it be

remembered all the time that gesture includes _all_ physical movement, from

facial expression and the tossing of the head to the expressive movements of

hand and foot. A shifting of the pose may be a most effective gesture.

 

What is true of gesture is true of all life. If the people on the street turn

around and watch your walk, your walk is more important than you are--change it.

If the attention of your audience is called to your gestures, they are not

convincing, because they _appear_ to be--what they have a doubtful right to be

in reality--studied. Have you ever seen a speaker use such grotesque

gesticulations that you were fascinated by their frenzy of oddity, but could not

follow his thought? Do not smother ideas with gymnastics. Savonarola would rush

down from the high pulpit among the congregation in the _duomo_ at Florence and

carry the fire of conviction to his hearers; Billy Sunday slides to base on the

platform carpet in dramatizing one of his baseball illustrations. Yet in both

instances the message has somehow stood out bigger than the gesture--it is

chiefly in calm afterthought that men have remembered the _form_ of dramatic

expression. When Sir Henry Irving made his famous exit as "Shylock" the last

thing the audience saw was his pallid, avaricious hand extended skinny and

claw-like against the background. At the time, every one was overwhelmed by the

tremendous typical quality of this gesture; now, we have time to think of its