Herbert's "Enchanting Language": The Poetry of a Cambridge Orator

Abstract

Herbert's "Enchanting Language":The Poetry of a Cambridge Orator Helen Wilcox In 1787, Henry Headley asserted in his Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry that "he who now takes up the poems of Herbert would little suspect that he had been public orator of an university."1 Yet the plain historical facts are that George Herbert, author of The Temple (1633) and the most popular devotional poet of the seventeenth century, was also a highly regarded Cambridge University Orator between 1618 and 1628. This paper is an attempt to understand why Herbert's poems and the very idea of oratory have been (and to some extent still are) kept separate in the minds of readers and critics. As part of this series of articles reconsidering Herbert in his Cambridge contexts, I wish to explore the extent to which Herbert the devotional poet and Herbert the Cambridge orator were indeed doing different work with their "enchanting language."2 In order to complement the other articles in this issue of the George Herbert Journal, therefore, the focus of my study will not be on Herbert's involvement with the politics of religion or of state during his Cambridge years, but on his attitudes to what we might term the politics of language. I It is fair to say that orators and oratory were not always viewed in a very positive light during the English Renaissance. In Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, the disreputable coward and braggart Parolles (whose name, not coincidentally, is related to the French for "words") is described as a "good drum . . . but a naughty orator" (5.3.249). What the courtier Lafew means by the phrase "naughty orator" is very clear in the context of the play, since Parolles has told extravagant lies in several attempts to get himself out of trouble after losing the regimental drum. In addition to being unreliable, if not downright dangerous, oratory was seen as a hollow art, as the reference to Parolles as a "drum" also implies. It was commonly assumed that oratorical rhetoric remained at the level of expression and ornament, and was thereby empty of any argument. Francis Bacon attacked the kind of education [End Page 53] which concentrated on the skills of classical oratory, referring to the "first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter."3 Bacon's criticism suggests that orators are concerned with language as the dress of ideas, and not with the ideas themselves. However, the wording of this comment by Bacon also reminds us of a fundamental anxiety about rhetoric as "study." Dorothy Osborne, commenting on the style of letters (in which she herself excelled), claimed that they should be "free and Easy as ones discourse, not studdyed, as an Oration."4 There is a sense here that oratory is learnt rather than felt, and thus that it is an aspect of art rather than nature. Margaret Cavendish wrote of her distrust of "Formal Orators, that speak Premeditated Orations," and contrasted this with another, distinctly preferable, category whom she termed "Natural Orators, that can speak on a Sudden upon any subject, whose Words are as Sweet and Melting as Manna from Heaven."5 It is notable that, since "Natural" or unstudied oratory is associated with a divine gift, orations that are "Premeditated" are by implication linked with a lack of integrity or an absence of genuine emotion. This suspicion of oratory as divorced from sincerity is a commonplace of more recent times than the Renaissance. In 1905 Yeats rejected the kind of drama that seeks to "convince others" rather than to give expression to "emotion," claiming that in such circumstances "all would be oratorical and insincere."6 As recently as 2003, a character in Jane Stevenson's novel The Empress of the Last Days is led to observe that the English have a habit of confusing "sincerity with inarticulacy."7 The more unpolished and rhetorically inept speakers are, he implies, the more likely their listeners are to trust them. The polished linguistic skills of an orator, far from convincing an audience with persuasive rhetoric, are assumed to be deceptive, a dangerous disguise for insincerity and the cloak of empty...