by Simon Schama
Now Adams got his faith in the persuasive power of eloquence directly from his father John, the second President, who would drill him in Cicero and Pericles whether walking the farm tracks at Quincy or the canal footpaths in revolutionary Amsterdam. And John Adams, as lawyer, schoolmaster and politician, felt himself to be the guardian of a long tradition of inspirational rhetoric which went all the way back to the Calvinist sermons of Thomas Hooker and the Great Awakening performances of Jonathan Edwards. The power of that charismatic preaching came from the faith that eloquence was saved from egotism, in so far as the mouth that was its instrument was merely a sounding board for the word of God. Moses, of course, had been a stammerer before that word had touched him. Likewise the Great Awakeners were no more than the organ of some higher natural truth. For John Adams’s generation coming of age in the Boston of the 1760s, prophecy and politics became fused. It was not so much injustice that they saw in British policy as iniquity. In the unlikely figure of James Otis and the even unlikelier cause of writs of assistance – the legal warrants used by the British to search for contraband – Adams thought he heard and saw a vision of reborn civic virtue. Otis was then thirty-six, his style of speech as he argued against the writs before the heavily wigged and robed justices ‘quick and elastic’, ‘his apprehension as quick as his temper’. For Adams, his was the voice of the natural American; the lost voice of Ciceronian virtue. The fact that Otis’s ‘passions were painted in his face’ seemed to correspond precisely to Quintilian’s doctrine that the speaker must feel, emotively, the truth of what he utters if he is to persuade his listeners. Had Otis worn a virtuously dishevelled toga, he could not have won Adams more completely.
All the great orators of the revolutionary age – Sam Adams, Patrick Henry in Virginia, and the first great rhetorician of the post-revolutionary House of Representatives, the now-forgotten Harvard graduate Fisher Ames, said to be the most silver-tongued of all – were famous for their controlled flamboyance; the calculation of a manner that was said to be ‘natural’ or ‘easy’, but which managed to achieve often outrageous theatricality without being accused of affectation. They were hams – think of that invisible dagger Patrick Henry plunged over and again into his breast – but they were hams for liberty.
Winning ‘hearts and minds’, as Adams claimed had been the case, was not just the victory of liberty over imperial coercion; it was the vindication, as he and Jefferson believed, of classical republican rhetoric over brute military muscle. The critical role played by French military power – inconveniently the product of a self-interested Catholic despotism – was underplayed in favour of the legend of the mass mobilisation of the people through the sonorities of virtue. And the vocal Founding Fathers believed they were redeeming, among other things, the tradition of Greco-Roman eloquence itself, which in Britain had degenerated into ornamental disingenuousness. Latter-day Ciceros like Edmund Burke – significantly Irish, not English – had attempted to stop the rot. But public diction had decayed into luxury. For the austerely civic Americans it was, on the contrary, a necessity, their first line of defence. An entire generation thought of themselves as ‘Massacre’ orators, after the Boston Massacre (in which an accident was transformed by indignant oratory into an emblematic confrontation between innocence and occupation).
To that generation, American eloquence worked because it so obviously exemplified Quintilian’s definition of an orator as a good man who speaks well. They also subscribed to the Aristotelian assumption that the power of rhetoric was in inverse relationship to the self-sufficiency of brute force. Where that force was coercive, mouths and ears were shut. Sparta was taciturn; Athens eloquent. The ideal Athenian leader was the hero who spoke beautiful and impassioned truths – Pericles. But their American descendants also cherished the tradition because the power of eloquence presupposed the freedom to be persuaded; to be reasoned with; to be moved. Cicero’s natural theatre was the Senate in which those of like mind would literally stand together, and the job of the orator was, equally literally, to move them to a different position. A vote was, of course, a voice. For Cicero, for the Adamses, for Jefferson – and of course for the Lincoln of the Lincoln-Douglas debates – a republic which took the arts of persuasion seriously was not just a free state, but one which could contain difference of belief without resort to mutual extermination. The opposite to that humanely pluralist eloquence is commandment authorised by fiat or revelation and executed through coercion. Terror is, in every sense, dumb.
If the preservation of a public life tolerant of difference is one reason why we should cherish eloquence, the second reason, scarcely less important, and the logical outcome of the first, is that it reconstitutes community without sacrificing liberty. If the founding fathers of public American speech were concerned, in the first instance, to use it to differentiate a free from a tyrannised society, their heirs in the nineteenth century worried about the republic falling apart, either in fratricidal division or into a mere aggregate of mutually conflicting interests.
The great moments of nineteenth-century public eloquence were when orators believed – and made their listeners believe – that for the duration of their discourse, using all the tools that Isocrates, Demosthenes, Cicero and Quintilian had given them – they could reconstitute a mere crowd, a gathering of individuals, into a community; and that that supra-individualist cohesion would survive their dispersal. This is what converted individual abolitionists into a shoulder-to-shoulder brethren; and what Frederick Douglass, who had learned some of his rhetorical magic from them and from his own reading and practising, took on his travels, not least to Britain in 1845–7 where, in Cork, Belfast, Dundee and London, he tried to persuade his listeners that they were part of an indivisible movement to extirpate an abomination from the face of the earth. The most sublimely enduring speech which took, as its mission, the attempt to remake national community over the partially buried bodies of those who had died for it, was of course Lincoln’s Gettysburg address – its two minutes preceded by Edward Everett’s two-hour performance. (It had been Everett, not Lincoln, who had been the star attraction and for whom the event had been postponed from 23 October 1863 to 19 November in order to give the Harvard President and ex-Secretary of State adequate time to prepare.)
Doomed to be remembered as Lincoln’s interminable warm-up act, Everett’s speech is, in fact, in its own way – a recitation of the narrative of the battle followed by an appeal for eventual reconciliation – not half bad. But arguably, one of the great and now completely forgotten moments when eloquence was summoned to mobilise national community took place here, at the Phi Beta Kappa Alpha chapter of Harvard, almost exactly 140 years ago, when George William Curtis – Harper’s journalist and war veteran – delivered the oration on 17 July 1862, a speech which we know was repeated at least forty times around New England that grave autumn. Curtis’s aim was to insist on the indivisibility of liberty and equality; to take away from the seceding states their claim to the rhetoric of freedom, which he characterised as fraudulent since it was inseparable from the preservation of slavery, and restore that rhetoric to true American nationality: an inclusive nationality based on the assumption of common humanity. To be American was to celebrate this. If this had never before been achieved, the enterprise only grew in significance:
The achievement of all other nations should be only wings to American feet that they may hasten to heights that Greeks and Romans, that Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans never trod. Were they wise? Let us be wiser. Were they noble? Let us be nobler. Were they just? Let us be juster. Were they free? Let our very air be freedom . . . Let those who will, despair of that perfect liberty with which God made us all free. But let us now, here, in the solemn moments which are deciding if there is to BE a distinctive America, resolve that even were the American system to fade from history, the American principle should survive immortal in our hearts . . .
Freedom, Curtis insisted, was the natural right of all, not some, men – and he
came out swinging against discrimination on grounds of sex as well as race. ‘We will never again forget, God help us,’ he ended, ‘that the cause of the United States is the cause of human nature, and the permanent life of the nation is the liberty of all its children.’
Now if this speech and its orator have been relegated to the realms of the unremarkable, perhaps it’s just because for the generations when eloquence was power, rhetoric of this degree of truth and power was actually unremarkable; or at least those who could practise it were, if not exactly two a penny, then thick on the ground. Can we say this of our own time? Is the question absurd when the ‘arts of communication’ (and God knows there are abundant seminars going by that name) presupposes the shortest of attention spans? Go to Widener Library and look under ‘elocution’ or ‘oratory’ and you will be led to the Miss Havisham of the public arts: tome after tome gathering dust; relics of a time when mastery of rhetoric was not just a sign of the educated citizen, but also the ladder, as Frederick Douglass found, of true social mobility. If you want to learn the arts of persuasion now, you go not to Cicero and Quintilian, but the Business School Library where you can pick up the latest technique of negative advertising. Some of the greatest of the twentieth-century rhetoricians saw this coming. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt waxed eloquent on the need, above all, to outlaw corporate money donated to political campaigns (as well as the critical need to regulate the accounting practices of big business and use state power to conserve the environment).
It was the management of persuasion in the interests of corporations which struck Roosevelt as most ominous for the fate of democracy. Implicit in his anxieties was the prophecy of synthetic eloquence; not the mobilisation of active, participatory citizenship, but its opposite: its convenient abdication to professional opinion-formers. Of course there is nothing wicked about professional speechwriters. The Greeks had rhetores who for payment produced speeches for public orators. Andrew Jackson’s best stuff was written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. And Samuel Rosenmann turned them out for Franklin Roosevelt. But there is, I think, a difference between the collaboration of say, Seward and Lincoln, on drafts of his speeches, and the industrial fabrication of purpose-designed speeches, produced by White House Nibelungen toiling in the mines of rhetorical gold – eight full-time writers for Ronald Reagan and a complete staff of fourteen. If we were to take a contemporary check on Cicero’s famous five constituents of oratory, what would we find? An inventio – the main idea dreamed up and carefully monitored by the staff; dispositio – the arrangement, tailor-made for television and punctuated by gestures to ‘real-life’ heroes inserted into the gallery; memoria – supplied by the invisible teleprompter; actio – style, the oxymoronic down-home gravitas, studded with reassuring simplicities; and finally elocutio – delivery, finely judged to reassure that the incumbent can complete sentences, but equally finely judged to make them short. ‘I want four-letter words,’ demanded Lyndon Johnson of Richard Goodwin, ‘and paragraphs four sentences long.’
And who is to say that they are wrong? If I’m right that the survival of eloquence is the condition of both a free political society and a coherent community, we do need to cherish it. But we also need to hot-wire it to contemporary diction, without, I hasten to say, turning into the kind of political rap parodied by Warren Beatty’s last film: a public discourse that lies somewhere between Demosthenes and Ozzy Osbourne. And one of the most powerful qualities of such a discourse will be, as Lincoln knew at Gettysburg, knowing just when to stop.
Performing
Richard II
Almeida programme, 2002
The word ‘theatre’, in our modern sense of a playhouse, makes its debut in English literature in Act V, Scene II of Richard II. Reporting on the drastically different reception given by Londoners to the ascendant Bolingbroke and the fallen Richard, the Duke of York thinks of them as competing performers:
As in a theatre, the eyes of men
After a well-grac’d actor leaves the stage
Are idly bent on him that enters next
Thinking his prattle to be tedious
Even so, or with much more contempt, men’s eyes
Did scowl on Richard.
And this is apt because Richard II is intensely concerned with the performance of sovereignty: the relationship between stage presence and authority. The play asks its lead to act the part of someone who is, himself, acutely conscious of the need to act, and who, in his Big Moments, is overcome, not so much by stage fright as by a paralysing insight into his own mortal humanity. On the battlements of Flint castle in Act III, York is momentarily struck by the fact that, despite his dire predicament, Richard still looks the part of a king: ‘his eye, / as bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth, /Controlling majesty; alack, alack, for woe, / That any harm should stain so fair a show.’ But after thundering at the presumptuous Northumberland and delivering one of the play’s many accurate prophecies that his deposition would inaugurate generations of slaughter, the grass bedewed ‘with faithful English blood’, Richard collapses, almost incomprehensibly, into a vision of his own annihilation, buried beneath the king’s highway ‘where subjects’ feet / May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head’. Flooded with a sickening understanding of the false consciousness of majesty, Richard, whose entire life up to that point had been conditioned by it, surrenders the crown to Bolingbroke who (until the very last lines of the play) is plainly not much bothered by self-knowledge. In York’s chilling account of the London procession, it is evident that Bolingbroke has become an overnight impresario of political bullshit, marketing his fake humility before the adoring throng.
Whilst he, from one side to the other turning,
Bare-headed, lower than his proud steed’s neck,
Bespake them thus ‘I thank you countrymen.’
From very early on in its performance history, King Richard II spoke to an issue on contemporaries’ minds: the difficult contrivance of ‘majesty’ – a title which the historical Richard was the first English king to require of his subjects. Too little of it, and the country as well as the person was demeaned; too much, and the country would be governed by megalomania rather than justice. ‘I am Richard the Second Know ye not that?’ Elizabeth told the antiquary and geographer William Lambarde when he presented her with his Pandecta, a compilation of rolls and muniments stored in the Tower of London. The utterance sounds oracular, but it was actually delivered in a rare moment of touching vulnerability. A few months before, the aged queen had survived a botched rebellion, led by her sometime favourite the Earl of Essex. He had gone to the block, but the crisis must still have been very much on her mind for when her gaze caught Richard II’s name on Lambarde’s list of kings, she reminded him that one of Essex’s supporters, Gellie Meyrick, had paid to have the play performed ‘forty times in streets and open houses’ as a way of softening up the public for a deposition. It’s possible that this was not Shakespeare’s version, since the astrologer Simon Forman reported in 1611 having seen a Richard II which, unlike Shakespeare’s play, featured scenes from the Peasants’ Revolt. But Elizabeth was defensive enough about the whole subject of the ill-starred king to send Sir John Haywarde, whose history of Henry IV contained an account of the deposition, to prison for his pains in 1599.
Not surprisingly, then, as long as the Queen was alive, Shakespeare took care to publish the play without the great deposition scene in Act IV. But he would certainly have been aware when he was writing the play in the mid-1590s that many contemporaries thought the catalogue of miseries in that dreadful decade to be a replay of the 1390s. Once again, England seemed militarily weak with a new Armada in the offing. Once again, punitive taxes were being imposed while a succession of catastrophic harvests had sent food prices sky-high. There were food riots in London and other towns in 1596. And once again England seemed ruled by a sovereign who had lost touch with reality, preferring to listen to the drooling encomia of court flatterers while Faerie-Land was sewn with gibbets. In
the same year that Shakespeare probably completed the play – 1596 – a man in Kent was arrested for declaring it would ‘never be a merry world until her Majesty was dead’. No one could hear John of Gaunt’s bitter death-bed complaint about an England ‘leas’d out’ and its king become ‘landlord of England’ without thinking of the furious protests against monopolies and patents sold off by the crown in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign.
But if the Queen had ignored her low-boiling point long enough to read, or actually see, Shakespeare’s play, she could hardly have taken it as a blank cheque for deposition.
Following Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (in their second augmented edition) Shakespeare dutifully goes through the case for his removal – the arbitrary dispossession of the Lancastrian inheritance, and the indulgence of flatterers who are said to have come between Richard and his conjugal duty to sire an heir. (There’s not a shred of evidence, other than his childlessness, that the historical Richard was gay, although I suppose any monarch who commissions a cookbook and insists that his courtiers eat with their spoons was bound to be thought suspiciously un-English.) But except perhaps for his jocular callousness towards the dying John of Gaunt (in reality a far more detested figure than the King), Shakespeare is at his least convincing when labouring to turn Richard into a ruthless land-grabber who deserves his come-uppance. Disaster falls on England and on the King for nothing much more serious than bad refereeing, bad timing (the Irish expedition) and for having the cheek to use the Lancastrian inheritance to finance it. As soon as matters go swiftly downhill, the play picks up pace and persuasiveness. Much more compelling than the extended ‘sceptred isle’ travel-bureau panegyric orated by Gaunt is its rhetorical bookend: the Bishop of Carlisle’s apocalyptic vision of the fatal consequences of usurpation: a country drowning in blood: