t is a multiple being,
composed of sense and sentiment. The greater the numbers, the less
intelligence has to do. To seek to act upon an individual by gesture
would be absurd. The reverse is true with an audience; it is persuaded
not by reasoning, but by gesture.

There is here a current none can control. We applaud disagreeable things
in spite of ourselves--things we should condemn, were they said to us in
private. The audience is not composed of intellectual people, but of
people with senses and hearts. As sentiment is the highest thing in art,
it should be applied to gesture.

If the gestures are good, the most wretched speaking is tolerated. So
much the better if the speaking is good, but gesture is the
all-important thing. Gesture is superior to each of the other languages,
because it embraces the constituent parts of our being. Gesture includes
everything within us. Sound is the gesture of the vocal apparatus. The
consonants and vowels are the gesture of the buccal apparatus, and
gesture, properly so called, is the product of the myological apparatus.

It is not ideas that move the masses; it is gestures.

We easily reach the heart and soul through the senses. Music acts
especially on the senses. It purifies them, it gives intelligence to the
hand, it disposes the heart to prayer. The three languages may each
move, interest and persuade.

Language is a sort of music which moves us through vocal expression; it
is besides normal through the gesture of articulation. No language is
exclusive. All interpenetrate and communicate their action. The action
of music is general.

The mind and the life are active only for the satisfaction of the
heart; then, since the heart controls all our actions, gesture must
control all other languages.

Gesture is magnetic, speech is not so. Through gesture we subdue the
most ferocious animals.

The ancients were not ignorant of this all-powerful empire of gesture
over an audience. Therefore, sometimes to paralyze, sometimes to augment
this magic power, orators were obliged to cover their faces with a mask,
when about to speak in public. The judges of the Areopagus well knew the
power of gesture, and to avoid its seductions, they adopted the resource
of hearing pleas only in the darkness.

The sign of the cross made at the opening of a sermon often has great
effect upon good Catholics. Let a priest with his eyes concentric and
introspective make deliberately the sign of the cr