November 28, 2005
Lincoln and Banality Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST Frederic Schwarz says that the thoughts Lincoln expressed in the Gettysburg Address are banal, trite, and obvious, and that it is the words and the concision that make them powerful. Okay, no argument, although I’m reminded of the old joke that the trouble with Shakespeare is he’s so full of clichés. However, I think he has stumbled on the very definition of poetry. Many of our best-loved poems express nothing terribly original in what they say; it is how they say it that strikes us so powerfully and stays with us so long. It is the poet’s business to find the sublime in the obvious. In that sense, Lincoln was a poet. Everett’s oration is prose through and through. (Although, to be fair to Everett, while we have his words we do not have his performance. He was universally regarded as the great orator of his day, which is precisely why he was at Gettysburg.) Speaking of memorization, the only thing I can remember being required to memorize in school was the “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech that comes near the end of Macbeth. Forty-odd years later I can still remember it and find myself reciting it often (although I prefer Shakespeare’s even more concise take on this same theme from The Tempest, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”). But while I was only once required to memorize something, I often did so for the sheer fun of it. Memorization was one of the mental gymnastics I always so much preferred to the physical kind. State capitals, the kings of England, Presidents of the United States, and yards and yards of poetry and song lyrics (of the Gilbert and Sullivan and Broadway variety) still rattle around my head. There is one thing especially I remember learning because I wanted it to rattle around my head. I was 10 or 12 years old and my brother and I were watching on television an old Charles Laughton movie called Ruggles of Red Gap, in which he plays an English butler who finds himself transported to the nineteenth-century American West for plot reasons that need not concern us. During a typically American raucous celebration of July Fourth, the very proper Laughton character recites a speech that brings the town’s citizens to a hushed silence, not to mention two young boys sitting in a dark room. I was so moved by Laughton’s rendition of the speech that I went to the library, found a copy of it, and memorized it right then and there. It was the Gettysburg Address.
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