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.