8. Singing is the voice modulated or composed of a series of appreciable tones.

Part Second.

Gesture.

Chapter I.

Of Gesture in General.

Human word is composed of three languages.  Man says what he feels by inflections of the voice, what he loves by gesture, what he thinks by articulate speech.  The child begins with feeling; then he loves, and later, he reasons.  While the child only feels, cries suffice him; when he loves, he needs gestures; when he reasons, he must have articulate language.  The inflections of the voice are for sensations, gesture is for sentiments; the buccal apparatus is for the expression of ideas.  Gesture, then, is the bond of union between inflection and thought.  Since gesture, in genealogical order, holds the second rank in human languages, we shall reserve for it that place in the series of our oratorical studies.

We are entering upon a subject full of importance and interest.  We purpose to render familiar the heart language, the expression of love.

We learn dead languages and living languages:  Greek, Latin, German, English.  Is it well to know conventional idioms, and to ignore the language of nature?  The body needs education as well as the mind.  This is no trivial work.  Let it be judged by the steps of the ideal ladder we must scale before reaching the perfection of gesture.  Observe the ways of laboring men.  Their movements are awkward, the joints do not play.  This is the first step.

At a more advanced stage, the shoulders play without the head.  The individual turns around with a great impulse from the shoulders, with the leg raised, but the hand and the rest of the body remain inert.  Then come the elbows, but without the hand.  Later come the wrist-joint and the torso.  With this movement of the wrist, the face becomes mobilized, for there is great affinity between these two agents.  The face and hand form a most interesting unity.  Finally, from the wrist, the articulation passes to the fingers, and here is imitative perfection.  If we would speak our language eloquently, we must not be beguiled into any patois of gesture.

Gesture must be studied in order to render it faultlessly elegant, but in such a thorough way as not to seem studied.  It has still higher claims to our regard in view of the services it has rendered to humanity.  Thanks to this language of the heart, thousands of deaf-mutes are enabled to endure their affliction, and to share our social pleasures.  Blessed be the Abbe de l’Epee, who, by uniting the science of gesture to the conventional signs of dactyology, has made the deaf hear and the dumb speak!  This beneficent invention has made gesture in a twofold manner, the language of the heart.