by Simon Schama
His last cause, motivated by the certainty that any kind of nuclear exchange would presage the end of human history, was the diplomatic campaign fought doggedly but fruitlessly between 1953 and 1955 to defuse the Cold War. His last speech to the House of Commons before retiring as Prime Minister, ostensibly devoted to a White Paper on Defence, was prepared with excruciating care and was full of dark visions fitfully lit by flashes of optimism, the ‘zigzag lightning’ which Asquith had identified as the sign of his genius. Its rhythmically intoned peroration sounded, as Churchillian rhetoric had so many times before, the mighty chimes of his call to perseverance: ‘Never flinch; never weary; never despair.’ It’s the achievement of Roy Jenkins’s book to let us hear this voice again; to liberate the man from the mausoleum.
Churchill as Orator
Guardian, 20 April 2007
It was well after midnight on 7 February 1787 when Richard Brinsley Sheridan, MP, got up in the House of Commons to flay the hide off Warren Hastings, the impeached governor of Bengal.
The chamber was packed to the rafters, notwithstanding the fifty-guinea price for tickets. By the time Sheridan was done, it was six in the morning and no one had moved.
But virtuoso marathons of oratory weren’t at all unusual in that distant golden age of eloquence (and they were a lot more fun than the Castro all-nighter).
Arguing for law reform in 1828, another celebrated silver-tongue, Henry Brougham, clocked six hours and three minutes and again no one budged. But then they both knew their spellbinding craft backwards.
Brougham had written essays on oratory (his favourite being Demosthenes) and at Edinburgh University had heard the great master of rhetoric, Hugh Blair, whose published lectures supplemented Cicero’s De Oratore as the two great primers of studied eloquence, ancient and modern.
Sheridan took his stagecraft into the chamber, fulfilling Cicero’s ideal that the orator should resemble Rome’s star tragedian Roscius: ‘When people hear he is to speak all the benches are taken . . . when he needs to speak silence is signalled by the crowd followed by repeated applause and much admiration. They laugh when he wishes, when he wishes they cry.’
When did you last hear a speech that good? Tony Blair’s epideictic performance at the Labour-party conference last year won admiration even from his foes, but by and large the digital age is cool to rhetoric and, as the enthronement of the blogger suggests, prizes incoherent impulse over the Ciceronian arts of the exordium and the peroration.
State of the Nation addresses to the US Congress – that theatre of sob-sisters and ra-ra patriotism – most usually confuse passion with sentimentality, and since they are worked up by industrial teams of speechwriters, lack one of the elements thought indispensable to great oratory: integrity of personal conviction, the sound of what Cicero, following the Greeks, called ethos.
The robotically choreographed antics in which Democrats and Republicans alternate standing ovations every five minutes is the opposite of the free-spirited audiences Cicero had in mind submitting themselves to the persuader’s art.
True public eloquence presupposes a citizen-audience gathered into a republic of listening. But our oral age is iPodded for our customised egos, an audience of one. Headphone listening seals us off, cuts connections.
Then there is that peculiarly British thing about grandiloquence, happier, for the most part, absorbing it in the theatre than in the public realm, where, as Winston Churchill found for most of his career, it was thought a symptom of his showy shallowness, his inconstancy, his addiction to hyperbole; in short, everything a man of sound policy was not.
But of course, speeches were what he did supremely well. Self-conscious that he’d never been through the upper-class nursery of eloquence, the Oxbridge Unions, Churchill fed off the great tradition of British politicians who had prevailed over the laws of understatement and pragmatic sobriety.
He communed with Cromwell, Chatham, Burke and Fox, Brougham, Macaulay and Gladstone, studying their master speeches for instruction on the oral economy of vehemence; when to let pathos, the appeal to passion, rip, and when, as Hugh Blair insisted, to make it retreat. And in one moment, the catastrophic late spring of 1940, this lifetime of rhetorical education and mercurial performance finally paid off.
Churchill’s words went to war when Britain’s armed forces seemed to be going under and had less wordy politicians like Halifax scurrying for a compromise with the triumphant Axis.
But, though he felt ‘physically sick’ at the Cabinet meeting of 26 May, when the horrifying magnitude of the German sweep to the Channel, coupled with King Leopold’s Belgian capitulation, was sinking in, Churchill was adamant.
‘No such discussions are to be permitted’ was his response to suggestions to evacuate the royal family to some distant dominion of the empire.
When Kenneth Clark proposed taking the cream of the National Gallery’s collection to Canada, Churchill shot back: ‘No. Bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them.’
The rehearsal for his great performance in the House of Commons on 4 June was to the full Cabinet (helpfully minus Halifax) in which Churchill passionately declaimed, ‘We shall go on and we shall fight it out here or elsewhere and if at the last the long story is at an end it were better it should end, not through surrender but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.’ (Hugh Dalton added that Churchill had actually said ‘when each of us lies choking in his own blood’.)
Ministers thumped fists on the table; some rose and patted him on the back. Defeatism – for the moment – had been held at bay. The long speech to the House of Commons a week later was meant to pre-empt any further thoughts of compromise with the ‘Nahzies’ (a wonderfully, calculatedly dismissive pronunciation) and to turn the mood of the country from despair to resolution.
Josiah Wedgwood thought it was worth ‘a thousand guns and a thousand years’ and he was right. It embodied both ethos (noble candour) and pathos (vehement passion) in equal degree and its inspirational persuasion depended fundamentally on one rhetorical tactic: honesty.
Unusually, Churchill dispensed with an introductory exordium and went straight to his narrative of the German blitzkrieg on the north, as if he were writing one of his military histories.
No one minded the mixed metaphor ‘the German eruption swept like a scythe stroke’. Interspersed amid the lengthy storytelling was heroic relief, albeit in tragic mood: the futile four days of resistance in Calais (ordered by him). ‘Cheers’ reported the Guardian.
Then followed, in Churchill’s instinctively archaic manner, what he thought would have been – and what still sounded like – ‘hard and heavy tidings’ of the encirclement. He trowelled on the despair, ‘the whole root and core and brain of the British army . . . seemed about to perish on the air’. But the ‘about’, of course, allowed his transition to the ‘miracle of deliverance’ account of Dunkirk for which Churchill switched tenses, consciously emulating the Chorus from Henry V: ‘Now suddenly the scene is clear and the crash and thunder has if only for a moment died away.’
‘Wars are not won by evacuations,’ he cautioned, but then followed another of his romances of the ‘island home’; the valiant airmen compared to whom ‘the Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders – they all fall back into the prosaic past’.
Each time Churchill appeared to be describing calamity, he made sure to punctuate it with gestures of improbable defiance. There had been ‘a colossal military disaster’, but ‘we shall not be content with a defensive war’ (cheers).
He could not guarantee there would be no invasion, but he summoned up the Clio again to remind the House that Napoleon too had been a victim of that delusion.
Even that might have gone differently had the winds in the Channel veered differently. But as the great speech moved to its unforgettable peroration, Churchill was giving all who heard it and beyond the sense of historical vocation, a calling against tyranny, that he felt so deeply himself. ‘We cannot flag
or fail’, and from his Cabinet speech: ‘We shall go on to the end’, followed by the incantatory lines: ‘We shall fight on the seas and oceans’, and the rest. To hear the recording of the speech is to be amazed all over again at the fine-tuning of the performance since Churchill deliberately lowers his pitch for much of the ‘we shall fight’ repetitions, in softly heroic lament, a reproach, perhaps, to the unhinged vocal histrionics of his arch-enemy.
Only with ‘we shall never surrender’ did the voice suddenly produce a mighty Churchillian growly roar; the full-throated resonance of the roused beast.
It is still magically easy to conjure him up: the glasses down the nose; the bottom lip protruding in pouty determination, shoulders stooped, his very un-Ciceronian body language of patting both hands, all five fingers extended, against his chest, then, as Harold Nicolson reported, down his stomach all the way to his groin.
Standing like that, he looked, Nicolson wrote, like ‘a solid, obstinate ploughman’ as if the earth of Britain itself defied the worst that Hitler could throw at it.
Nicolson’s wife, Vita Sackville-West, wrote to him that even when recited by a news announcer, the speech sent ‘shivers’ (of the right kind) ‘down my spine’.
The reason, she wrote, ‘why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases, that one feels the whole massive backing of powerful resolve behind them, like a fortress, [is that] they are never words for words’ sake’.
She was right. They were words for everyone’s sake. They were the lifeboat and the blood transfusion. They turned the tide.
The Fate of Eloquence in the
Age of The Osbournes
Phi Beta Kappa Oration, Harvard University, 3 June 2002
The extraordinary honour of being asked to deliver the oration to the Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and so become part of a tradition that runs from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Anthony Appiah, was only slightly qualified by being misinformed by the Dean of Undergraduate Education that her own Phi Beta Kappa orator had been Kermit the Frog. Now since I manifestly lack both the philosophical depth of Kermit and the wisecracking irreverence of Appiah, I wondered what could have possessed whichever guardians of the chapter to imagine that I could do the job? To another Harvard graduate I wondered out loud, in fact, and he gave me the answer, which I’m still not sure is a compliment. ‘You do,’ he said, ‘have a certain way with the spoken word.’
Quite what that way might be remains to be seen, or heard, but I’m prepared to concede that this might be so, since I was told this at a very early age by my father who thought that, however I’d come by it, I’d got what in Britain was called the ‘gift of the gab’. He had it himself in abundant measure, having done his time as a soapbox orator in Hyde Park and the East End of London in the 1930s, where he carried on talking and talking as Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts pelted him with rotten eggs and the occasional rock. ‘A Jew’s ultimate weapon is his mouth,’ he insisted, even though my mother added that the ultimate weapon was, just occasionally and of course temporarily, disarmed by its collision with a large hairy fascist fist.
I was about ten when I began to be drilled in the bootcamp of public rhetoric, beginning with a trip to the theatre to see Richard Burton play Henry V. Though there were no Harfleurs in our neck of London to attack, a few weeks later there I was, in grey flannel short trousers, perched perilously on a chair in our living room waving a broom handle around, and lustily urging the troops to hurl themselves against the breach ‘or fill the walls up with our English dead’. When this was recited at our elementary-school concert, between items understandably thought more suitable, or at least less bloodthirsty, for ten-year-olds, the reaction, when I finished, was one of stunned silence broken by furious applause from my actor-manager father. Some years earlier I had responded to all this voice-work by hitting him where I knew it would hurt most. I went on speech strike, going Trappist – for about five months, I seem to recall, remaining defiantly taciturn through a procession of speech therapists and psychotherapists, verbalising only to the gardener and swearing him to silence.
There are those who will tell you I’ve not shut up since. But this precocious sense of being afflicted with a pretty much incurable case of logorrhoea has actually left me with mixed feelings about the condition. On the one hand, it’s hard not to relish the exhilaration of doing one’s thing as a language animal. ‘Nothing is so akin to our natural feelings as the rhythms and sounds of voices,’ says Cicero in De Oratore, ‘they rouse and inflame us, calm us and soothe us and often lead us to joy and sadness.’ ‘SPEECH! Speech!’ wrote one of the greatest of all its American practitioners, Frederick Douglass, reflecting how he himself had been virtually reborn and certainly emancipated through his own dawning self-consciousness of being a natural orator, and how he had gone on to revolutionise public diction: ‘the live, calm, grave, clear, pointed, warm, sweet, melodious human voice . . . humanity, justice, liberty demand the service of the living voice.’ But it’s precisely those for whom eloquence at the service of truth is an indispensable condition of a free society who are also most likely to fret at its apparent atrophy. The eloquent, of course, have been complaining about this at least since Quintilian (in the second century ad). Rhetoric that was both beautiful and virtuous, they lamented, was degenerating into either self-serving demagoguery, florid ornamentalism or the stumblings and mumblings of the inarticulate – Osbournes in togas – all of which heralded, in the most pessimistic view, the onset of a kind of slavery; the captivity of the powers of speech and the freedom of audience by the forces of diction-management. Listen to a culture flooded by platitude or vastly amused by grunts of dopey incoherence, they would say, and you will hear the bleating of the doomed.
Are we ourselves in that peril? Are we a culture washed in cacophonic fury, but signifying not a whole lot? Can Eminem or a gangsta rapper get away with what they get away with because the barked and shouted violence mocks and deafens any kind of response? Are we (as distinct from the licensed manufacturers of presidential rhetoric) even capable – especially in a moment of danger – of articulating to ourselves, to the nation, to the world, just what it is that’s worth arguing over, fighting for or defending? Is the designed discontinuity of contemporary life – the indispensability of programmed obsolescence; fashion-turnover; the machinery of the market; the obsession with speed (faster, computer, faster); with instant drive-through gratification (I want that cheeseburger and I want it NOW); with the disposable over the durable; the strobe-lit subliminally registered broken-faceted reception of sensation – hopelessly incompatible with the voiced thoughtfulness we need if we are to figure out what it is exactly that holds us together against terror? If we can only articulate the meaning of calamity through the waving of flags and choruses of ‘America the Beautiful’, does this mean that tragedy has a short shelf-life? Would it have been better for all of you – made even better citizens of you – if you had been required to take not Expository Writing, but Expository Speaking?
It’s a fair bet your forebears of Phi Beta Kappa thought so. For the chapter/fraternity was established as a community of spoken thought and debate; for the express purpose of sustaining classical scholarly values inside and, more urgently, outside the academy. An American scholar, it optimistically presupposed, was someone for whom the pursuit of knowledge was conditional not on escape from the contamination of the public world, but active engagement with it. Browse the forbidding pages of the published Phi Beta Kappa orations – not just at Harvard, but at Chicago, Columbia, Cornell – and you’ll step into an ongoing Platonic symposium on civic virtue. Now this kind of wisdom does not, of course, come in soundbites. A roughly calculated average running time for those orations was, I would say, an hour and a half (so those of you nodding off at the back, count yourself lucky that my masters today shackled me to twenty-five minutes). On the other hand, those nineteenth-century brethren of yours were treated, quite often, to really scintillating, opening exordia. Try this zinger from Harvard’s best –
President Charles Eliot in 1888: ‘I purpose to examine some parts of the experience of the American Democracy with the intention of suggesting the answers to certain theoretical objections which have been urged against democracy in general and of showing, in part, what makes the strength of the democratic form of government . . .’
Eliot’s turgid earnestness was actually out of character with Harvard’s traditions – especially Phi Beta Kappa traditions – which perhaps more than anywhere else in the young Republic personified the truism that, as the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory from 1806 to 1809, John Quincy Adams, put it, ‘eloquence is power’. Adams believed that the young Republic was in an historical state of political grace – something he could dream about in post-revolutionary eastern Massachusetts – akin to fifth-century Athens or the halcyon years of the Roman Republic; where voices which allied rhetoric to virtue could prevail over faction and brute force. ‘Where prejudice [has] not acquired an uncontrolled ascendancy,’ he wrote, ‘the voice of eloquence will not be heard in vain.’ Though, like most of his generation of Harvard graduates, Adams had been trained in rhetoric through the works of Hugh Blair and the eighteenth-century Scot Lord Kames, his own manual for modern orators turned away from the belletristic manner back to what he thought of as a neo-Ciceronian flinty vernacular; designed to plead before the courts or sway a crowd. The tragedy of his life was that although he was nicknamed ‘Old Man Eloquent’ and although he looked as though you could set his bust alongside Demosthenes and Cato the Elder, and although his speaking style was with ‘kindled eyes and tremulous frame’, the organ itself was apparently shrill and piercing. In an age of the honey-smooth oratory of the young Daniel Webster and John Calhoun, Adams’s presidential speeches, which sounded fine when he rehearsed them before the Cabinet – his Farewell to Lafayette or the panegyric to the Erie Canal – seemed barked at, rather than voiced to, the public. And as a President who stood accused of getting the office by a back-door Electoral College manoeuvre, John Quincy was a perfect target for the oncoming Andrew Jackson, who made an issue precisely of Adams’s high-pitched classical diction, targeting it with his own populist anti-highfalutin Hickory-Military vernacular. A century and more before the equally glistening dome of Adlai Stevenson (the spiritual descendant of Adams) was attacked as eggheadedly un-American by another no-nonsense ex-general, Dwight Eisenhower, Adams too suffered from seeing what he’d always imagined to be the virtues of the detached, incorruptible proconsul stood on their head as symptoms of effete loftiness.
