Chapter 9
Would you like to know in what parts of your speech you are most likely to reveal inexperience or expertness, inaptitude or finesse? In the opening and the closing. There is an old saying in the theatre, referring, of course, to actors, that goes like this: “By their en trances and their exits shall ye know them.”
The beginning and the ending! They are the hardest things in almost any activity to manage adroitly. For example, at a social function aren’t the most trying feats the graceful entrance and the graceful leave-taking? In a business interview, aren’t the most difficult tasks the winning approach and the successful close?
The close is really the most strategic point in a speech; what one says last, the final words left ringing in the ears when one ceases—these are likely to be remembered longest. Beginners, however, seldom appreciate the importance of this coin of vantage. Their endings often leave much to be desired.
What are their most common errors? Let us discuss a few and search for remedies.
First, there is the man who finishes with “That is about all I have to say on the matter; so I guess I will stop.” That is not an ending. That is a mistake. It reeks of the amateur. It is almost unpardonable. If that is all you have to say, why not round off your talk, and promptly take your seat and stop without talking about stopping. Do that, and the inference that that is all you have to say may, with safety and good taste, be left to the discernment of the audience.
Then there is the speaker who says all he has to say, but he does not know how to stop. I believe it was Josh Billings who advised people to take the bull by the tail instead of the horns, since it would be easier to let go. This speaker has the bull by the frontal extremities, and wants to part company with him, but try as hard as he will, he can’t get near a friendly fence or tree. So he finally thrashes about in a circle, covering the same ground repeating himself, leaving a bad impression…
The remedy? An ending has to be planned sometime, doesn’t it? Is it the part of wisdom to try to do it after you are facing an audience, while you are under the strain and stress of talking, while your mind must be intent on what you are saying? Or does common sense suggest the advisability of doing it quietly, calmly, beforehand?
Even such accomplished speakers as Webster, Bright, Gladstone, with their admirable command of the English language, felt it necessary to write down and all but memorize the exact words of their closings.
The beginner, if he follows in their footsteps, will seldom have cause to regret it. He ought to know very definitely with what ideas he is going to close. He ought to rehearse the ending several times, using not necessarily the same phraseology during each repetition, but putting the thoughts definitely into words.
An extemporaneous talk, during the process of delivery, sometimes has to be altered very materially, has to be cut and slashed to meet unforeseen developments, to harmonize with the reactions of one’s hearers; so it is really wise to have two or three closings planned. If one does not fit, another may.
Some speakers never get to the end at all. Along in the middle of their journey, they begin to sputter and misfire like an engine when the gasoline supply is about exhausted; after a few desperate lunges, they come to a complete standstill, a breakdown. They need, of course, better preparation, more practice—more gasoline in the tank.
Many novices stop too abruptly. Their method of closing lacks smoothness, lacks finish. Properly speaking, they have no close; they merely cease suddenly, jerkily. The effect is unpleasant, amateurish. It is as if a friend in a social conversation were to break off brusquely and dart out of the room without a graceful leave-taking.
No less a speaker than Lincoln made that mistake in the original draft of his First Inaugural. That speech was delivered at a tense time. The black storm clouds of dissension and hatred were already milling overhead. A few weeks later, the cyclone of blood and destruction burst upon the nation. Lincoln, addressing his closing words to the people of the South, had intended to end in this fashion:
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of the civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I have a most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it. You can forbear the assault upon it I cannot shrink from the defence of it. With you and not with me is the solemn question of “Shall it be peace or a sword?”
He submitted his speech to Secretary Seward. Seward quite appropriately pointed out that the ending was too blunt, too abrupt, too provocative. So Seward himself tried his hand at a closing; in fact, he wrote two. Lincoln accepted one of them and used it, with slight modifications, in place of the last three sentences of the close he had originally prepared. The result was that his First Inaugural Address now lost its provocative abruptness and rose to a climax of friendliness, of sheer beauty and poetical eloquence:
I am loth to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot’s grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angel of our nature.
How can a beginner develop the proper feeling for the close of an address? By mechanical rules?
No. Like culture, it is too delicate for that. It must be a matter of sensing, almost of intuition. Unless a speaker can feel when it is done harmoniously, adroitly, how can he himself hope to do it?
However, this feeling can be cultivated; this experience can be developed somewhat, by studying the ways in which accomplished speakers have achieved it. Here is an illustration, the close of an address by the then Prince of Wales before the Empire Club of Toronto:
I am afraid, gentlemen, that I have departed from my reserve, and talked about myself a good deal too much. But I wanted to tell you, as the largest audience that I have been privileged to address in Canada, what I feel about my position and the responsibility which it entails. I can only assure you that I shall always endeavor to live up to that great responsibility and to be worthy of your trust.
A blind man listening to that talk would feel that it was ended. It isn’t left dangling in the air like a loose rope. It isn’t left ragged and jagged. It is rounded off, it is finished.
The famous Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick spoke in the Geneva Cathedral of St. Pierre the Sunday after the opening of the sixth assembly of the League of Nations. He chose for his text: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Note the beautiful and lofty and powerful way in which he brought his sermon to a close:
We cannot reconcile Jesus Christ and war—that is the essence of the matter. That is the challenge which to-day should stir the conscience of Christendom. War is the most colossal and ruinous social sin that afflicts mankind; it is utterly and irremediably unchristian; in its total method and effect it means everything that Jesus did not mean and it means nothing that he did mean; it is a more blatant denial of every Christian doctrine about God and man than all the theoretical atheists on earth ever could devise. It would be worth while, would it not, to see the Christian Church claim as her own this greatest moral issue of our time, to see her lift once more as in our fathers’ days, a clear standard against the paganism of this present world and, refusing to hold her conscience at the beck and call of belligerent states, put the kingdom of God above nationalism and call the world to peace? That would not be the denial of patriot ism but its apotheosis.
Here to-day, as an American, under this high and hospitable roof, I cannot speak for my government, but both as an American and as a Christian I do speak for millions of my fellow citizens in wishing your great work, in which we believe, for which we pray, our absence from which we painfully regret, the eminent success which it deserves. We work in many ways for the same end—a world organized for peace. Never was an end better worth working for. The alternative is the most appalling catastrophe mankind has ever faced. Like gravitation in the physical realm, the law of the Lord in the moral realm bends for no man and no nation: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”
But this collection of speech endings would not be complete without the majestic tones, the organ-like melody of the close of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. The late Earl Curzon, of Keddleston, Chancellor of Oxford University, declared that this selection was “among the glories and treasures of mankind… the purest gold of human eloquence, nay, of eloquence almost divine”:
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said that ‘’the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
You have just read what is, in my opinion, the most beautiful speech ending ever delivered by the lips of mortal man… Do you agree with my estimate? Where, in all the range of speech literature, will you find more humanity, more sheer loveliness, more sympathy?
“Noble as was the Gettysburg Address,” says William E. Barton in Life of Abraham Lincoln, “this rises to a still higher level of nobility… It is the greatest of the addresses of Abraham Lincoln and registers his intellectual and spiritual power at their highest altitude.”
“This was like a sacred poem,” wrote Carl Schurz. “No American President had ever spoken words like these to the American people. America had never had a president who had found such words in the depths of his heart.”
But you are not going to deliver immortal pronouncements as President in Washington or as Prime Minister in Ottawa or Canberra. Your problem, perhaps, will be how to close a simple talk before a group of social workers. How shall you set about it? Let us search a bit. Let us see if we cannot uncover some fertile suggestions.
Summarize Your Points
Even in a short talk of three to five minutes a speaker is very apt to cover so much ground that at the close the listeners are a little hazy about all his main points. However, few speakers realize that. They are misled into assuming that because these points are crystal clear in their own minds, they must be equally lucid to their hearers. Not at all. The speaker has been pondering over his ideas for some time. But his points are all new to the audience; they are flung at the audience like a handful of shot. Some may stick, but the most are liable to roll off in confusion. The hearers are liable, like Iago, to “remember a mass of things but nothing distinctly.”
Some anonymous Irish politician is reported to have given this recipe for making a speech: “First, tell them that you are going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them that you have told them.” Not bad, you know. In fact, it is often highly advisable to “tell them that you have told them.” Briefly, of course, speedily—a mere outline, a summary.
Here is a good example. The speaker was a traffic manager for one of Chicago’s railways:
In short, gentlemen, our own back dooryard experience with this block device, the experience in its use in the East, in the West, in the North—the sound operating principles underlying its operation, the actual demonstration in the money saved in one year in wreck prevention, move me most earnestly and unequivocally to recommend its immediate installation on our Southern branch.
You see what he has done? You can see it and fed it without having heard the rest of the talk. He has summed up in a few sentences, in sixty-two words, practically all the points he has made in the entire talk.
Don’t you feel that a summary like that helps? If so, make that technique your own.
Appeal for Action
The closing just quoted is an excellent illustration of the appeal-for-action ending. The speaker wanted something done: a block device installed on the Southern branch of his road. He based his appeal for it on the money it would save, on the wrecks it would prevent. The speaker wanted action, and he got it. This was not a mere practice talk. It was delivered before the board of directors of a certain railway, and it secured the installation of the block device for which it asked.
A Terse, Sincere Compliment
The great state of Pennsylvania should lead the way in hastening the coming of the new day. Pennsylvania, the great producer of iron and steel, mother of the greatest railroad company in the world, third among our agricultural states—Pennsylvania is the keystone of our business arch. Never was the prospect before her greater, never was her opportunity for leadership more brilliant.
With these words, Charles Schwab closed his address before the Pennsylvania Society of New York. He left his hearers pleased, happy, optimistic. That is an admirable way to finish; but, in order to be effective, it must be sincere. No gross flattery. No extravagances. This kind of closing, if it does not ring true, will ring false, very false. And like a false coin, people will have none of it.
A Humorous Close
“Always leave them laughing,” said George Cohan, “when you say good-by.” If you have the ability to do it, and the material, fine! But how? That, as Hamlet said, is the question. Each man must do it in his own individual way.
One would hardly expect Lloyd George to leave a gathering of Methodists laughing when he was talking to them on the ultrasolemn subject of John Wesley’s Tomb; but note how cleverly he managed it. Note, also, how smoothly and beautifully the talk is rounded off:
I am glad you have taken in hand the repair of his tomb. It should be honored. He was a man who had a special abhorrence of any absence of neatness or cleanliness. He it was, I think, who said, “Let no one ever see a ragged Methodist.” It is due to him that you never can see one. (Laughter.) It is a double unkindness to leave his tomb ragged. You remember what he said to a Derbyshire girl who ran to the door as he was passing and cried, “God bless you, Mr. Wesley.” “Young woman,” he answered, “your blessing would be of more value if your face and apron were cleaner.” (Laughter.) That was his feeling about untidiness. Do not leave his grave untidy. If he passed along, that would hurt him more than anything. Do look after that. It is memorable and sacred shrine. It is your trust. (Cheers.)
Closing with a Poetical Quotation
Of all methods of ending, none are more acceptable, when well done, than humor or poetry. In fact, if you can get the proper verse or poetry for your closing, it is almost ideal. It will give the desired flavor. It will give dignity. It will give individuality. It will give beauty.
Rotarian Sir Harry Lauder closed his address to the American Rotarian delegates at the Edinburgh convention in this fashion:
And when you get back home, some of you send me a postcard. I will send you one if you do not send me one. You will easily know it is from me because there will be no stamp on it. (Laughter.) But I will have some writing on it, and the writing will be this:
“Seasons may come and seasons may go,
Everything withers in due course, you know,
But there is one thing still blooms as fresh as the dew,
That is the love and affection I still have for you.”
That little verse fits Harry Lauder’s personality, and no doubt it fitted the whole tenor of his talk. Therefore, it was excellent for him. Had some formal and restrained Rotarian used it at the end of a solemn talk, it might have been so out of key as to be almost ridiculous. The longer I teach public speaking, the more clearly I see, the more vividly I feel. that it is impossible to give general rules that will serve on all occasions. So much depends upon the subject, the time, the place, and the man. Everyone must, as Saint Paul said, “work out his own salvation.”
I was a guest at a farewell dinner given in honor of the departure of a certain professional man from New York City. A dozen speakers stood up in tum, eulogizing their departing friend, wishing him success in his new field of activity. A dozen talks, and only one ended in an unforgettable manner. That was one that closed with a poetical quotation. The speaker, with emotion in his voice, turned directly to the departing guest, crying: “And now, good-by. Good luck. I wish you every good wish that you can wish yourself!
I touch my heart as the Easterns do:
May the peace of Allah abide with you.
Wherever you come, wherever you go,
May the beautiful palms of Allah grow.
Through days of labor and nights of rest,
May the love of Allah make you blest.
I touch my heart as the Easterns do:
May the peace of Allah abide with you.”
Mr. J. A. Abbott, Vice President of the L.A. D. Motors Corporation of Brooklyn, spoke to the employed of his organization on the subject of Loyalty and Cooperation. He closed his address with the ringing verse from Kipling’s Second Jungle Book:
Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back—
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
If you will go to the public library in your town and tell the librarian that you are preparing a talk on a certain subject and that you wish a poetical quotation to express this idea or that, she may be able to help you find something suitable in some reference volume such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
The Power of a Biblical Quotation
If you can quote a passage from Holy Writ to back up your speech, you are fortunate. A choice biblical quotation often has a profound effect. The well-known financier, Frank Vanderlip, used this method in ending his address on the Allied Debts to the United States:
If we insist to the letter upon our claim, our claim will in all probability never be met. If we insist upon it selfishly, we realize in hatreds but not in cash. If we are generous, and wisely generous, those claims can all be paid, and the good we do with them will mean more to us materially than anything we would conceivably be parting with. “For whosoever will save his life shall Jose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.”
The Climax
The climax is a popular way of ending. It is often difficult to manage and is not an ending for all speakers nor for all subjects. But, when well done, it is excellent. It works up to a crest, a peak, getting stronger sentence by sentence. A good illustration of the climax will be found in the close of the prize-winning speech on Philadelphia in Chapter III.
Lincoln used the climax in preparing his notes for a lecture on Niagara Falls. Note how each comparison is stronger than the preceding, how he gets a cumulative effect by comparing its age to Columbus, Christ, Moses, Adam, and so on:
It calls up the indefinite past. When Columbus first sought this continent—when Christ suffered on the cross—when Moses led Israel through the Red Seanay, even when Adam first came from the hands of his Maker; then, as now, Niagara was roaring here. The eyes of that species of extinct giants whose bones fill the mounds of America have gazed on Niagara, as ours do now. Contemporary with the first race of men, and older than the first man, Niagara is as strong and fresh to-day as ten thousand years ago. The Mammoth and Mastodon, so long dead that fragments of their montrous bones alone testify that they ever lived, have gazed on Niagara—in that long, long time never still for a moment, never dried, never frozen, never slept, never rested.
Wendell Phillips employed this selfsame technique in his address on Toussaint L’Ouverture. The close of it is quoted below. This selection is often cited in books on public speaking. It has vigor, vitality. It is interesting even though it is a bit too ornate for this practical age. This speech was written more than half a century ago. Amusing, isn’t it, to note how woefully wrong were Wendell Phillips’ prognostications concerning the historical significance of John Brown and Toussaint L’Ouverture “fifty years hence when truth gets a hearing”? It is as hard evidently to guess history as it is to foretell next year’s stock market or the price of lard.
I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. “No Retaliation” was his great motto and the rule of his life; and the last words uttered to his son in France were these: “My boy, you will one day go back to Santo Domingo, forget that France murdered your father.’’ I would call him Cramwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his dominions.
You think me a fanatic to–night, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion for the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Lafayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L’Ouverture.
When the Toe Touches
Hunt, search, experiment until you get a good ending and a good beginning. Then get them close together.
The speaker who does not cut his talk to fit in with the prevailing mood of this hurried, rapid age will be unwelcome and, sometimes, positively disliked.
No less a saint than Saul of Tarsus sinned in this respect. He preached until a chap in the audience, “a young man named Eutychus,” went to sleep and fell out of a window and all but broke his neck. Even then Saul may not have stopped talking. Who knows? I remember a speaker, a doctor, standing up one night at the University Club, Brooklyn. It had been a long banquet. Many speakers had already talked. It was two o’clock in the morning when his turn came. Had he been endowed with tact and fine feeling and discretion, he would have said half a dozen sentences and let us go home. But did he? No, not he. He launched into a forty-five minute tirade against vivisection. Long before he was half way through, his audience were wishing that he, like Eutychus, would fall out of a window and break something, anything, to silence him.
Mr. Lorimer, when editor of the Saturday Evening Post, told me that he always stopped a series of articles in the Post when they were at the height of their popularity, and people were clamoring for more. Why stop then? Why then of all times? “Because,” said Mr. Lorimer, “the point of satiation is reached very soon after that peak of popularity.”
The same wisdom will apply, and ought to be applied, to speaking. Stop while the audience is still eager to have you go on.
The greatest speech Christ ever delivered, the Sermon on the Mount, can be repeated in five minutes. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address has only ten sentences. One can read the whole story of creation in Genesis in less time than it takes to peruse a murder story in the morning paper… Be brief! Be brief!
Doctor Johnson, Archdeacon of Nyasa, wrote a book about the primitive peoples of Africa. He lived among them, observed them, for forty-nine years. He relates that when a speaker talks too long at a village gathering, or the Gwangwara, the audience silences him with shouts of “Imetosha!” “lmetosha!”—”Enough!” “Enough!”
Another tribe is said to permit a speaker to hold forth only so long as he can stand on one foot. When the toe of the lifted member touches the ground, finito. He has come to an end.
And the average audience, even though they may be more polite, more restrained, dislike long speeches just as much.
So be warned by their lot,
Which I know you will not,
And learn about speaking from them.
Summary
- The close of a speech is really its most strategic element. What is said last is likely to be remembered longest.
- Do not end with: “That is about all I have to say on the matter; so I guess I will stop.” Stop, but don’t talk about stopping.
- Plan your ending carefully in advance as Webster, Bright, and Gladstone did. Rehearse. Know almost word for word how you are going to close. Round off your talk. Don’t leave it rough and broken like a jagged rock.
- Seven suggested ways of closing:
a. Summarizing, restating, outlining briefly the main points you have covered.
b. Appealing for action.
c. Paying the audience a sincere compliment.
d. Raising a laugh.
e. Quoting a fitting verse of poetry.
f. Using a biblical quotation.
g. Building up a climax.
5. Get a good ending and a good beginning; and get them close together. Always stop before your audience wants you to. “The point of satiation is reached very soon after the peak of popularity.”
