As a writer on rhetoric, Cicero not only shaped how people in Western society, to this day, express their ideas in speech, but also (as the examples from Shakespeare suggest) in writing—a distinction that people in ancient Rome were less likely to make than we are. Today “sounding out” text is what first graders do, and the expression “moves his lips when he reads” means “he’s stupid.” But in Cicero’s time, reading invariably meant reading aloud, as Ben Yagoda documents in his book The Sound on the Page (2004). In the ancient world, Yagoda writes, “a written text was like a play script, only in performance did the words come to life.” Indeed, silent reading was so rare that, even by the fourth century AD, Augustine, the early Christian theologian, was amazed at the sight of the bishop of Milan reading a book: “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still… he never read aloud.”3
For almost a millennium after that—until the early 1300s—reading still meant speaking a text aloud; that is until Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer began writing in the vernacular of their native tongues (instead of Latin). This brought written poetry and prose closer to everyday speech and led to greater private (which is to say, silent) imbibing of the written word; Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, in 1440, and the mass production of written material solidified the silent consumption of texts. But Cicero’s rhetorical rules for effective and persuasive speaking had been so thoroughly absorbed into writing by then that they informed the work of every writer in virtually every tongue, and still do. Alexander Pope’s poem “Sound and Sense,” written in 1711, is about how poetry (and indeed prose) succeeds only inasmuch as it evokes the sounds of speech, the particular way that voiced language mirrors the meaning of words. “ ’Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,” Pope writes, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense”—and he ingeniously uses the eight lines that follow to illustrate the point with an array of rhetorical strategies straight out of Cicero: multisyllabic words that make lines that describe speed move rapidly; one-syllable words that describe ponderous movement and make words move slow; consonants like s and z that whisper and sing for describing sweet sounds contrasted with x’s and f’s and percussive t’s that describe noise, plus a complex interweaving of alliterative and assonant sounds that hold the whole thing together and make it beautiful and memorable. For maximum effect, you should do like Augustine, and speak the lines aloud:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Thanks to Cicero and the other ancient writers on rhetoric, the best literature is always aimed at the ear and the speech centers. After all, Shakespeare began life as a voice artist—an actor—and wrote his plays purely to be heard, so much so that, as scholar G. Blakemore Evans notes,4 Shakespeare took no interest, in his lifetime, in his plays being properly printed in authoritative editions for readers, allowing them to circulate in quarto editions of vastly varying quality and accuracy, the “bad” quartos reconstructed from memory by literary pirates (with the expected omissions and mistakes); the “good” quartos, although printed for the use of Shakespeare’s theater company, often full of errors, typos, dropped lines. The First Folio edition (1623), which included the “authoritative” texts of all Shakespeare’s plays, was the initiative not of Shakespeare, but of two actors in his theater company—and not compiled and published until seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Clearly, for Shakespeare, the plays that we recognize as the zenith of written language, were composed purely for speaking. Keats was thinking about the sensuous dance of lips and tongue—not black marks on a page—when (in his ode to the mellifluous voice of the nightingale) he described a glass of wine with “beaded bubbles winking at the brim,” and even the most opaquely literary of twentieth-century modernists, like Joyce, wrote directly for the voice and ear: the polyglot punning of Finnegans Wake can only be deciphered if read aloud. Nabokov, who raised euphony to levels verging on purple prose, begins his most famous novel by evoking an erotic obsession through the sensual pleasure of moving the articulators (especially, of course, the tongue), while relying on the alliteration and assonance that Cicero said were critical to memorable, delightful speech: “The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”5
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Cicero’s influence on Western speech was not fully felt until the Renaissance when the complete text of On Oratory was discovered in 1421 in the town of Lodi, near Milan. In England, his precepts were avidly taken up because British parliamentary debate—the custom of the opposed political parties coming together, in public, to shout, fulminate, jeer at, and heckle one another—put great emphasis on the ability of politicians to organize and deliver arguments effectively. Cicero’s impact on public speech in America has been no less profound, although slower in adoption. “George Washington made a retiring and awkward speaker,” writes Carolyn Eastman, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a specialist in the cultural history of early America. “Thomas Jefferson could barely speak above a whisper, and the former lawyer John Adams was divisive and abrasive rather than persuasive.”6 But within a generation, American public speech was already starting to improve under the influence of the ancients. When, in 1805, Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams, was hired as the country’s first Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard (twenty years before he became the sixth U.S. president), he used his Harvard inaugural address to emphasize the supreme importance of Cicero and the other ancients to effective public speaking. “In the flourishing periods of Athens and Rome,” he said, “eloquence was power.”7
Even as John Quincy Adams was promoting classical rhetoric and oratory within the ivory tower, ordinary Americans were getting a galvanizing taste of the real thing. In 1808, three years into Adams’s appointment at Harvard, James Ogilvie, a Scottish-born elocution teacher in Virginia, noticed the massive popularity of public lectures across America—a form of mass entertainment that drew thousands of paying customers to theaters and outdoor venues to hear speeches, readings, debates. Ogilvie would go on to become the most popular of them all when he quit teaching to become an itinerant orator, traveling the country’s lyceum circuit, a hugely popular movement of the early nineteenth century that organized the various forms of “platform culture” into ticketed performances.8 Ogilvie spoke in a style that, Eastman says, “mixed emotion and reason in a mesmerizing swirl.” Newspapers advertised his upcoming appearances, thousands turned out to hear him (“from Georgia to Maine and from Tennessee to Québec”), and a raft of imitators began to mimic his oratorical style (and also his costume, which emphasized his debt to the ancient orators: a toga). Ogilvie also spoke at the Capitol, in addresses to President Madison and both houses of Congress—which helped to impress upon America’s political class the importance of Ciceronian rules of public address. Eastman says that Ogilvie’s influence would soon be seen in the emergence of oratorically gifted House and Senate leaders, among them Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and eventually, in the early summer of 1858, a candidate for U.S. senator from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln.9
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Lincoln’s public speeches would shape the United States to a greater degree than anyone’s before or since. Indeed, it says something about the momentousness of his influence as a speaker that the least of his accomplishments as an orator is to have invented a staple of the modern electoral campaign: the political debate.
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the elocution movement in America had given rise to “debating clubs” whe
re, for the entertainment and edification of audiences, the participants engaged in disputation on the model of the British Parliament, with one side taking the role of the “government,” the other the “loyal opposition,” and arguing current topics in science, the arts or politics. Lincoln, however, invented the political campaign debate when as a little known country lawyer and former one-term congressman, and underdog challenger for the U.S. Senate, he challenged to a vocal showdown the well-known, well-funded, two-term Democratic incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. After doggedly following Douglas on campaign stops around Illinois (and jumping onstage to address whatever stragglers still remained after Douglas, the “main attraction,” had quit the stage), Lincoln finally managed to goad Douglas into direct debate. In a letter of July 1858, he proposed that he and Douglas “divide time, and address the same audiences”—that is, share the campaign stage and block out chunks of time to vocally duke it out. It had never been done before. Douglas, as the well-known front-runner, had everything to lose, Lincoln (a virtual unknown) everything to gain, but Douglas recognized that he might be seen as weak or fearful should he spurn Lincoln’s challenge. Besides which, Douglas had every right to assume that he would prevail.
Douglas possessed a big, commanding baritone and used it with confidence and great oratorical flourish. Lincoln’s voice, in contrast, was famously reedy and high-pitched, his delivery sometimes halting. The journalist Horace White, who wrote an eyewitness account of the debates, described Lincoln as having a voice “almost as high-pitched as a boatswain’s whistle.”10 (Others called it “shrill,” “sharp,” and even “unpleasant.”)11 Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Lincoln in the 2012 Spielberg film, has spoken of “finding” this voice through researching Lincoln’s character, studying his speeches, and considering his acts—thus arriving at a voice that seems not a surface “impression,” but instead a deep-dyed aspect of Lincoln’s character—a “kind of a fingerprint of the soul,” as Day-Lewis put it to Oprah in an interview about the movie.12 It’s impossible to say how close Day-Lewis’s “Lincoln” voice is to the real thing: the first recording device did not appear until 1877, twelve years after his assassination. For my part, though, I could never hear, in my “mind’s ear,” Lincoln’s reportedly high, thin voice until Day-Lewis’s squeaky barn-door hinge interpretation; now it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
Lincoln’s pitch and timbre were not his only seeming vocal handicaps in his face-off with Douglas. Lincoln’s off-the-cuff speechmaking left some things to be desired: “his words did not flow in a rushing, unbroken stream like Douglas’,” White wrote. “He sometimes stopped for repairs before finishing a sentence.… After getting fairly started, and lubricated, as it were, he went on without any noticeable hesitation, but he never had the ease and grace and finish of his adversary.”13 But as the debates proceeded, from late summer through early fall, Lincoln’s perceived weaknesses began to look more like strengths: his high, piercing voice penetrated to the back of the ever-growing crowds (while Douglas, perhaps pushing too hard to be heard, suffered an ill-timed attack of laryngitis in the final two debates). Even the pauses and hesitations in Lincoln’s speech might have been advantageous, perhaps communicating, paralinguistically, a thoughtfulness and authenticity in contrast with Douglas’s more “flowing,” facile, and slick oratory: as a politician, you can be, perhaps, too eloquent.
Most important to Lincoln’s performance in the Douglas debates, however, was the righteousness that fueled his tone. For the topic of all seven debates concerned an issue consuming the Union as it expanded westward: whether the new territories should make slavery legal. Lincoln considered slavery morally repugnant and completely contradictory to the Declaration of Independence and its foundational democratic premise that “all men are created equal.” These convictions fired his voice with what White called a “moral superiority and blazing earnestness that came from his heart and went straight to those of his listeners.”14 Douglas, meanwhile, argued that his vision of democracy was correct because it gave the issue of slavery to the states to decide, by democratic vote. (This was a cover. Douglas had made his repulsive moral position of white supremacy clear in a speech earlier that summer—a speech that, indeed, helped spur Lincoln’s determination to take him on in live debate: “I am free to say to you that in my opinion this government of ours is founded on the white basis. It was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.”)15
Although Lincoln won the popular vote, he lost the election to Douglas through the vagaries of districting and vote-counting. However, the debates, which had been witnessed in person by tens of thousands and followed by millions more in extensive newspaper coverage, instantly propelled Lincoln to national prominence. Two years later, in 1860, he published the debates and the book became a bestseller and a major promotional tool for his presidential campaign, launched that same year. When he won, Lincoln said he was “accidentally elected” because of his debates with Douglas.16 Accident or no, the debates marked a moment when a single speaking voice changed the course of American history, giving rise to a presidency that freed the slaves, prompted the succession of the Southern states that then launched a civil war, and resulted ultimately in the Union victory that prevented the breakup of the nation. Lincoln’s remarkable presidency also led ultimately to his assassination—but not before he delivered a speech less than two years before his death in which he mused that “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” Today, historians describe this speech of a mere 272 words as “the most eloquent articulation of the democratic vision ever written”17—a memorial address for the Civil War dead at Gettysburg.
Lincoln, whose public speeches tended to an American plain-style, began the Gettysburg Address with a rare rhetorical flourish—“Four score and seven years ago”—a choice that E. B. White, in The Elements of Style, says was clearly driven, not by literary considerations, but oratorical ones, those involving the voice, and dictated by the ear. “The President could have got into his sentence with plain ‘Eighty-seven,’ ” White says, “a saving of two words and less of a strain on the listeners’ powers of multiplication.”18 But by “skirting the edge of fanciness,” White says, Lincoln “achieved cadence”—and (I would add) gave a fitting sense of momentousness to that span of years since the founding fathers fitted their signatures to the Declaration of Independence and its foundational idea—the idea that fueled Lincoln’s entire political career and that Thomas Jefferson had memorialized in the words: “all men are created equal.”
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Even as Ogilvie, Douglas, and Lincoln were using Ciceronian rules of rhetoric and oratory to shape political speech and debate in America, another strain of address was influencing the “platform culture” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the sermon. Ancient rules of rhetoric and oratory had long informed preaching in many religions. So closely did Christian sermonizing of the thirteenth century adhere to classical rules of oratory, Cicero’s image (as well as that of “Rhetoric”) is carved into the facade of Chartres Cathedral.19 The synagogue sermons and Talmudic disputations of Judaism derive directly from Cicero’s rules of oratory and debate, as does the Passover Seder, a ceremonial service at the beginning of the high holidays whose “script” follows the precise structure Cicero laid out for legal addresses, beginning with an Exordium (introduction), followed by Narration (in which facts are enumerated), Partition (a breakdown of proofs to come), Confirmation (summary of evidence), and a Conclusion (that recaps the argument).20 Preaching in Islam also uses Greek and Roman rhetorical models (Aristotle’s writing on rhetoric and oratory were translated into Arabic in the eighth century), but Islam also views classical models of preaching with some suspicion, because philosophy is considered incompatible with religion, and the Prophet Muhammad’s eloquence was “unsurpassable.”21 Nevertheless, the sermons delivered by imams employ many of the devices described by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian for provi
ding pleasure and persuasion in preaching, including the use of alliteration, antithesis, and hyperbole.22
The Roman Catholic oratory that so terrifies Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a model of Ciceronian rhetoric. Father Arnall’s minutely detailed depiction of hell (the stink, putrefaction, burning pain, piled corpses, devouring worms, and unending physical and mental torture) are drawn directly from Dante’s Inferno, which was written in the fourteenth century and based on classic rhetoric. But a still more visceral, emotional style of Christian oratory had also arisen, in the early 1730s in Britain, among Protestant evangelical preachers whose sermons stressed the importance of spiritual rebirth and the speaker’s personal salvation. Known as “fire-and-brimstone” or “hellfire” sermons, they arose in direct reaction to the Enlightenment and the drift away from the church toward rationality and science. Imported to the North American colonies by British missionaries in the early eighteenth century, when church membership had drastically declined, this exceedingly emotional preaching style spurred a wave of revivalism, a passionate Puritan religiosity known as the First Great Awakening. The most famous of these revivalist sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” was written and delivered by pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards, and subsequently published in 1741. Like Dante in the Inferno (and Father Arnall in A Portrait), Edwards depicts Hell as a real place where sinners will end up—the difference being Edwards’s characterization of hell’s proximity and immanence, and of God, not as loving Father, but as a vengeful entity almost eager to consign humanity to hell:
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