"Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence" Introduction

We used to be a Civilization...

Apr 15, 2023

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Oh… Once, great men lived here. Giants. Gods! Once… but long ago.
-Mako, from Conan the Barbarian (1982)

A few days ago at the thrift store I stumbled onto an extraordinary find. An intact Ten Volume hard cover, almost perfectly preserved, 1910 collection: Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence (first edition, printed 1910!)
(Internet Archive: Vol I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X).

The whole thing was only $50!? Canadian! It was only 5 dollars per Volume! It was only 2.50 per pound!!!

So this was obviously the the quickest thrift store buy I’d ever found…

And my god what an artifact.

If you care about ancient or roman history you can’t really engage in archeology as a hobbyist, unless you’re willing to dedicate 10+ years of your life to a doctorate and then try to divine meaning from pot fragments… likewise reading ancient texts you really have to learn a fair bit of the history and groundwork before anything you might read can really start to surprise you… everything is so bizarre and different that real perspective shifting insights, which should jump out when reading the Iliad, like “not one of the lords who gives speeches to Achilles ever appeals to a sense of duty Achilles might feel to the army he’s a part of”— these rarely if ever occurs to the junior student because everything about Achaean Greek culture is so weird and different, you can’t even notice how, or how dramatically, the people and characters are actually different…Until someone points it out.

No so with the Victorians and Edwardians! Prime artifacts they produced are still floating about in old buildings and used bookstores (despite the concerted efforts of librarians to destroy all trace of them (Farenheit 451 was contemporary non-fiction))

And when you pick up one of these artifacts you realize the Victorians and Edwardians are exactly like you. Their language, assumptions, motives, values are remarkably like yours, they walked the same grounds as you, and, if you’re in the American East or Europe, often attended the same schools. Often they held the same editions you’re holding… and yet they could not be more different.

And this everywhere and always immediately hits you in the face.

The entire Concept of Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence is a space alien absurdity to someone in the 21st century.

Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence
Representing the Advance of Civilization
As collected in
The World’s Best Orations
From the Earliest Period
To the present time

Obviously the entire “Advance of civilization” thing is PrObLeMaTiC to the modern academy and thus no publisher would ever print such a thing and the entire roster of Deans, Professors, and Lectures who served on the advisory council for the project would probably lose their jobs.

But Dr. Edward A Allen in particular would almost certainly be brought to a hearing over his introductory essay “The Oratory of the Anglo-Saxon Countries” which is a shockingly BASED ethnocentric and whiggish history of the English people: wherein he endorses the Anglo-Saxons as “The Freest People”, responsible for stopping the Roman entrance into Germania (endorsing every thing Tacitus ever wrote about the nobility of the Germanic peoples, to the eternal rage of every spiteful post-war scholar); before endorsing their basic right of nobility to drive the Celts to near extinction on the periphery of the British Isles (Get bent Scots and Irish); Their inherent nobility in resisting the Danish invasions, and then the Norman Yoke, all before throwing off the Stuarts in what Allen depicts as a noble populist revolt; only to do it all again and drive the natives to the periphery of North America; and then again for the American’s to throw off the Georgian Yoke in the revolution.

Now obviously starting a massive 10 volume collection of world rhetoric by telling Latin Europe, the native Celts, the Danes, the French, the old Catholic Aristocracy, the native Americans, and the British government itself to get fucked, because the Eternal Anglo cannot be tamed… is ~~based~~ a really damned bold move.

doubly so Of course when one considers modern scholars have contested for 70+ years that the Anglo-Saxon people don’t even exist! That they are a myth, that there was no migration of Germanic peoples to the British Isles, and that it is all fake incredibly problematic myth making race science… and then genetic testing proved all those modern scholars completely wrong and confirmed exactly what every historian from Bede to Allen knew was obvious because no primary source contested it (this is an equisite piece BTW).

So right from this introductory essay this work is doing fierce immediate combat with everything that has happened in academia and wider western civilization since its publication…. and right from the start it is winning.

But outside of the Immediate politics of the publishers, the very idea of Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence is absurd to us in this year of our lord 2023.

Orations?

Oratory is pretty much a dead art. The idea that great speeches could somehow change the world seems laughably quaint now, something adult-cartoons like South Park use as an absurd 4th Wall Break/Dues Ex Machina to wrap up a 20 minute episode.

You’ll read historical accounts of some great speech defining an era, or being recorded by eager hands that it might be printed, purchased, and read across a country or oceans, or actively moving a crowd or parliament such that history is changed by the speech… And it’s almost completely incomprehensible to anyone today.

Sure we’ll read or watch Shakespeare and experience Marc Antony launch a coup by moving the crowds, or we’ll watch a Hollywood movie and see Aragorn, or some lesser character rally an army…

But these are fantastical stories for children. This isn’t Hollywood. Speeches don’t move history. It’s not some impassioned words by whatever State Department asset before congress that determines whether the American military will start a “police action” or whether we’ll have “Diplomacy”… its whether Raytheon and Lockheed Martin donated enough to right politicians last cycle.

And, in the back of our mind, we pretty much believe this is how its always been.

Sure historians might say Marc Antony actually did rally a crowd that was against him, or a a king rally a failing army; But we find it far more plausible to imagine they placed their chosen men and thugs to enforce their will, or that they bribed the right people at the right time.

HBO’s exceptional Rome replicates the entire events of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Milius and the writers left Antony’s speech out entirely! Whether it really was as exceptional event as the historians relate or if the thuggish (yet charming) Marc Antony merely made a violent ploy… who’s to say, serious historical fiction certainly wasn’t going to try to replicate anything like that.

Because whereas Dr. Allen, or Justice Brewer the editor, or the Rt Honorable Augustine Birrell, who took time off from administering Ireland to write the Introduction… whilst they, and the entire Victorian/Edwardian era might believe in Eloquence! the power and nobility of oratory, and the noble pursuit of rhetorical artistry…

We 21st century Elizabethans and now Caroleans… We certainly don’t.

“The World’s best orations from the earliest period to the present time”

could you imagine those words being written today? What an obscenity and crime against creation those words would be to type, let alone to follow through on the concept and actually bind 10 exceptionally made volumes according to that mandate? To take the greatest words ever said pver the past 3000 years… and then plop them down next to speeches given by the fail-children of our own era.

They actually did this!

Winston Churchill makes a brief appearance in volume 3 right before Cicero, Marcus Tulius! (Its alphabetical) Then a rather obscure 36 year old politician they plucked out one of his speeches from 1909, and stuck it in a volume to be published in 1910.

Included throughout are these gorgeous full color illustrations, including great paintings, photographs, and artifacts such as the above early Medieval Manuscript of Cicero

Imagine for one second if this was published today… If you actually gave a band of academics and (shudders) Jurists the opportunity to pick a young politician and score political points and patronage by carving their names next to the legends. Could you imagine if, reading the works in order, after legendary poet John Milton (of Paradise Lost fame) but before Pericles’ On the Cause of Athenian Greatness we must first read through the O section, and subject ourselves to the sniveling sounds of Beto O’Rourke? Imagine finishing with the orations of the great English romantic philosopher Edmund Burke and reading his short beautiful speech on the fall of Marie Antoinette and with her all the noble chivalry of old Europe, to be moved over 200 years later by the depth of feeling… then to turn the page, and gaze upon the fathomless nothings of Pete Buttigieg. Imagine reading William Makepeace Thackery’s excellent talks and after-dinner speeches on the English novel and the nature of Authorship and creativity… Only to turn the page to read the end, and have the easy after-dinner delight ruined by seeing the hectoring tantrums of Greta Thornberg on the reverse page. Perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s fleeting working-class pretensions might make appearance? Maybe some Military Industrial sycophancy from Dan Crenshaw?

In 1910 they could select a young current politician -someone still active in governance- and say that he was so impressive and so deserving of watching, that his speeches and political opinions should rank in a volume that includes Julius Caesar! (Volume 3 having the Cs). And they were so right in their assessment, so right to pick Churchill, that a mere 40 years later historians could debate whether it wasn’t Churchill that had the greater impact on military and political history (“would not some other Roman simply have taken the imperial crown?” they might ask).

There is a norm now of waiting on the parts of our current chroniclers, to “let history judge” the merit of contemporary politicians and figures… as if the utter lack of any merit wasn’t apparent at first glance.

Even our national leaders and great statesmen are complete wrecks.

I was shocked to find a great number of fellow Canadians in the pages Crowned Masterpieces. First prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald makes an appearance being compared to Otto Von Bismark for his feat in unifying the Canadian colonies, his 1872 Speech On the Treaty of Washington serving not only to give us an insight into the man’s oratory, but also a rather surprising insight into the period… we see the British and Canadians concerned that the American government, having subjugated the Southern states in their rebellion, might decide to subjugate the whole of North America and invade whilst the union army was still under arms for reconstruction.

Another famous Prime minister makes an appearance. Robert Borden, not even a prime minister yet in 1910, is given 4 speeches on the future of Liberty and Democracy, and Canada, his great rival, Then Prime Minister Sir. Wilfred Laurier is given 4 as well. And both are very impressive in their conduct.

But now imagine if you would… them including a recent Canadian prime minister it this work… Imagine if they included Justin Trudeau? What a moment in the history of “peoplekind” that might. Imagine them including Stephen Harper! (the prime minister before Justin) a man whose explicit media tactic was to edit his speeches to remove any evocative or memorable line and thus make them as boring and unlistenable as possible… given not a soul was ever actually going to listen to them, (or even could if they wanted to pre-social media) and thus making them as dull as possible, and delivering them in as bored a manner as any human has ever summoned, allowed him to avoid a soundbite from a hostile media. (See: Paul Wells’ The Longer I’m Prime Minister)

Or swinging back to the US: Imagine if they included an opposition leader like Hillary Clinton harassing young people to “Pokemon-Go-to-the-polls”. Imagine Joe Biden imortalized for all time with his evocative “Come on man!” and his “You know you know the thing”.

Imagine the bottomless wells of shame that might accompany turning the page and meeting, what might actually be one of rare significant English speeches of the 21st century… The 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech by George W. Bush. A speech that within the fisrst 2 minutes has already invoked the shameful detention and torture program at Guantanamo bay as a victory… Whose entire purpose and concept was a lie! Even in front of the loved ones of the 9/11 slain, George Bush insinuated and implicated responsibility and culpability to three regimes which had no connection to either the Taliban, Al-Queda, Bin Laden, or the 9/11 highjackers.]: North Korea is completely divorced from any cultural or geostrategic relevance to 9/11. Iran is a Shia regime in eternal Cold Holy-War with Sunni extremists. And Iraq was a secular Baathist country, committed to nationalist Pan-Arab socialism!

Not only were Iran and Iraq not allied in any Axis, they were mortal enemies! Having killed hundreds of thousands of each other in 80s. And both were enemies of Saudi Arabia which was actually funding and enabling Wahhabist Sunni extremism, and actually had connections to most every hijacker.

And then of course there is Trump…Dear god, Trump. For better or worse the most important orator of our era.

What the hell hap… Oh right, the 20th Century.

In a short 100 years, we went from a time when young British politicians and minor colonial officials like Canadian prime ministers, could be expected to, and did, exercise a skill of thought and speech to place them next to the greatest orators of all time, to perhaps the most braindead and insufferable elite to ever exist… And in retrospect, its kind of easy to see why.

The elite of 1910, as impressive in their imperial glory as they might have been, were not saved by their silvered tongues… far from it. Their speeches on duty and national honor only served to lock them into the then bloodiest war in human history within 5 years.

Far from delivering a future for Freedom and Democracy within Canada, the prime minister Borden would become one of the worst tyrants to ever stalk the western hemisphere…. bringing the draft, the concentration camp, and selective women’s suffrage to Canada: Explicitly to drown out the men who did not want to be drafted; women who had male family members in the war could vote, women whose male family members were not fighting but would be drafted could not (Ya, that’s the real reason they gave women the right to vote: to make it easier enslave men for foreign wars).

This was replicated across the nations of the world. Churchill’s youth, eloquence, and military glory did not prevent his Gallipoli campaign from going disastrously… and even as all the old imperial elites collapsed on themselves in shame, failure, hipocrisy, and impotence… a new insurgent intellectual class, endowed with nearly as much education or self educated came to the fore in the form of the socialist revolutionaries. Legendary speakers and thinkers: Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, then later Moa, Ho Chi Minh, Castro… all came to the fore famed for their oratical stylings…

And failed even worse than the old imperialists, creating new depravities of human misery incomparable in their depths.

And then of course the greatest orator of all time stepped onto the world’s stage:

Adolf Hitler

There probably isn’t a more persuasive case to be made for the power of oratory than that of Hitler. Indeed, if all the figures of Crowned Masterpieces were to have designed a poster child for oratory’s potency and world changing power they would have wished a figure such as Hitler…

(what’s the line? “There are only two tragedies: not getting what you want and getting it”)

Seriously the biography of the man is absurd! A failed artist who’s variably homeless, with no family or political connections and what basic support network he has is across the border in Austria… Spends years in the trenches not even rising above the rank of corporal (despite earning some significant metals), comes out temporarily blinded by poison gas, the economy and currency collapses so he’s basically broke again…

And then within 15 years of starting over from zero, without even a university education or anything to show for his military career, he’s chancellor of Germany.

Seriously, If you wrote the man as an anime protagonist the opening scene would be him meeting some devil and making a deal to get super powers. But, ignoring the history channel documentaries to the contrary, the man wasn’t communing with the occult to gain his mysterious success… he was reading old books. Many accounts of Hitler, including his own, have him travelling with a duffel bag full of books… Classical texts, history, theory…

Hitler was perhaps the greatest case study in the power of a classical education and self-directed study, as well as its weaknesses (should have studied logistics and naval warfare (every other battle would have been decided if he’d won the battle of the Atlantic))

And to this day post war education is built around preventing anyone from learning the lessons he learnt (which now extends to 2+2=4 in some classrooms).

Of course no American, English, or German school boys learns anything resembling classical military history any more, no one studies classical languages, even geography is notably lacking —though there in the American case, its seems geography isn’t taught so that Americans might be compliant with their wars instead of concluding, as every generation of Americans did pre-1945… that Eurasia is entirely irrelevant to them.

The western world responded to the Nazis by burning down all the cultural institutions of western civilization, since some aspect of western civilization must have been to blame… somehow.

Of course, of these, oratory was amongst the few where you could make a very strong case it was directly responcible for the Nazis, and any counter- arguments involve suggesting a meaningless inevitability to WW2, due to alliances and European competition (just like WW1), which doesn’t play well when you’ve just spent a war demonizing the enemy as evil incarnate….

So ever since oratory has been consistently demonized, politicians have consistently veered far away from the oratorical, and the only place one can still hear powerful speeches, statements that change the entire scope of political arrangements, and shift the very nature of the listening people… are in fiction. In the speeches of our cultures villains. Our heroes are consistently confused and impotently sputtering in the face of these speeches, but heroically, are unmoved from the original loyalties, and can be depended on to commit violence in the name of the status quo and the preestablished system of loyalties… even after the villain has so articulately shown why these loyalties are frauds, the whole thing vastly more complex, and their scheme vastly more humane than the authority figures our heroes remain loyal to despite feeling intense doubts (gee I wonder why this is the pattern of thoughts Hollywood wants to train into every American viewer).

And of course even this is an insufficient explanation…If oratory is some form of deprave weapon that Hitler made breakthroughs in or mastered beyond any other… well usually when a decisive new technology or weapon comes to the fore (or at least for 3000 of years of European history) obscene resources are poured into studying and mastering it… just as the rise of the military sciences formed the basis for many of the first private and public schools (famously Napoleon was raised at a military school… and basically all European elite had such an education, with lots of study of parabolas and trigonometry so they’d make able captains and artillery officers).

A full explanation would have to go into why the American empire so uniquely is hellbent on stagnation… it’d have to explain how uniquely America’s greatest invention, nuclear power, it has set about trying to uninvent… and how the American bureaucratic state wages eternal low level, mostly cold, warfare upon the voting public in eternal terror that the demos might one day wield power and threaten the very foundation of “Democracy”…

It makes sense the American education system, state and media have set about trying to destroy oratory… They did it to nuclear power, they did it to the personal flying machine (a “flying car” operable by teenagers and run off a 100-400hp engine, was a hallmark of WW1 Arial battles), and they did it to the great early 20th century breakthroughs in oratory. Lest the hegemony the bureaucracy has won through war might be threatened by the populous… thus the strange reality that in a “popular” democracy, no figure is more despised than the “Populist”… Ie. The person who thinks “government by the people” should be… government by the people.

(yes yes whatever…Trump lost the popular vote, you’re so very special, pat yourself on the back. As if the American bureaucracy would have recognized him as the legitimate voice of the people had he won 70% of the vote… they don’t attack you as a dangerous “populist” because they fear you’re unpopular)

Trump

The great orange Spector that’s hung over this essay and looms over American life in general.

He’s not an especially impressive orator, as far as I can tell, by historical standards, nothing he’s done has been spellbinding or world shifting. Richard II of England ended a Peasant revolt merely with his own speech and demeanor at 14… none of Trump’s speeches have approached that immediate power, and certainly not Marc Antony’s. Despite the rampant Hitler comparisons Trump speeches are not yet so powerful they refuse to subtitle them on the history channel, nor have they been expunged from YouTube, google and most platforms the way Hitler’s taped speeches have…Trump’s addresses still get aired on television, even at the height of the Trump panic they were aired… even if the entire media ecosystem did have a nervous breakdown around the general nothing-burger that was Jan 6th (coordinated? group think? Who knows)

No, what makes Trump unique isn’t his great oratical stylings and power… Its that he’s playing the game at all.

Trump is maybe the only politician active today to actually use rhetoric and oral communication, language, the way its meant to be used.

Imagine the most important moments in a person’s life… falling in love, proposing marriage, learning you’re going to have a kid, the breakout job offer or promotion, meeting a personal hero, winning a great competition or contest, achieving some great physical feat, publishing your book or breakout piece… There’s one very big emotion that animates all of these moments: Nervousness.

There is a drama to all these moments, you don’t actually know if your boyfriend will propose or your girlfriend say yes, you don’t know why your boss or a major client wants to speak with you, you don’t know if you’ll succeed in summiting Everest or if your book will be any good or if you’ll just die or only reveal your innate mediocrity (same thing)…

What you do and say reveals things about yourself, and things about the other person, and alters your relationship forever… and of course you don’t know how it will do it, because if you knew and understood then the interaction wouldn’t do it, it’d already be the case…. This revelation of character this human drama, its spellbinding, there’s a reason people will spend hundreds, thousands, or even 10s of thousands of hours over a lifetime just observing the fictional drama of such interactions. Hell snoops and eavesdroppers get a thrill out of just overhearing these moments in other people’s lives…

So naturally our politicians, our greatest professionally trained, managed, and competitively selected speakers do absolutely everything they can to avoid having the slightest element of this in their speeches or addresses. If you have listened to a mainstream politician and been surprised at the speech that came out of their mouth, then you were either really underinformed or they really REALLY fucked up.

This, more than even their stilted bizarre delivery or obvious evasions and lies, is what makes them so inherently revolting and unlistenable.

Remember Steven Harper, the Canadian prime minister who actively edited his speeches to make them as boring and instantly forgettable as possible? He was actually sort of honest with his listeners. His goal was to communicate nothing and leave no impression, and atleast a certain set of boomer dads who wanted their taxes low and news uneventful kind of respected it. The modern politician is vastly worse: focus testing, committee deciding, and blandly delivering the inevitable conclusions… But they have the fucking GUAL to act as if you should be interested or respect them.

They have the fucking temerity to suck every spontaneous instance, every personal decision, every personal principle out of the addresses whicj they have had ghost written by Harvard educated 24 year olds who know they’re replaceable and have been trained to be replaceable… And then they get out there and expect you to be moved and cheer them. These people don’t write their own speeches, nor make the decisions about what’s in them, nor even the people who actually write them… Yet they get out there and openly demand their audiences treat them as if they’re Churchill, as if they’re brave decisive leaders, as if they’re breaking glass ceilings by their will and determination instead of their networks and who they sleep with… Pokémon Go to the Polls!

But Trump? Say what you will about him… No Aid wrote: “They’re murderers. They’re rapists. And some I assume are good people.” No staffer came up with “Many such cases” or “bigly”.

He’s not a classically educated rhetorician to rival the greats of the 18 and 19th century… but by god you know who the man is, and you’re getting who he is. You aren’t wondering what his personality is like off stage. None of the rest of our politicians are capable of this: uniformly they’re personality-less careerists with no beliefs of their own who’d wilt if put in front of an audience and asked to ab lib it. They certainly would not have the strength of will or conviction to misstep, say what they actually believe in the worst possible way, and then double or triple down such that their “blunder” would become the basis of a career defining gambit. their personalities and mannerisms certainly could never define a culture.

Trump is not the superior rhetorician, he’s lacking in a ton of areas, most notably any depth of philosophical ethos that might make his moment lasting or impactful upon the nation (contrast someone like Napoleon or Lenin whose ideas and ethos were conquering nations decades after they’d died)… but he’s actually playing in the same field as the classical rhetoricians. His style and ethos, and especially his personal branding and cultivation of a distinctive voice, its something to behold.

I’ve often heard people say that “Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man” but the thing is Trump has built and designed and chosen this persona. You watch interviews with him from the 80s and he’s just sorta a New York businessman but more so, he was a sex icon for a while… The gold plated everything, the board games of himself, the WWE appearances, the “You’re fired” line, as if he’s Mister Burns… these are all things he’s consciously cultivated, he’s chosen over 30+ years to become this person and put in a lot of effort to do it. He Flanderized himself the way everyone on the internet is slowly learning to do, but he did that in the 80s and 90s… And there’s a lot to that that is very classically relevant, you think of the cults of Alexander or Caesar, Caesar acting as his own publicist during his wars in Gaul and later the civil wars, or how Napoleon and Wellington cultivated public images even into songs sung by their own soldiers…

Perhaps he is practising more of the ancient art than you might think. He’s certainly defining the entire political/cultural moment, that’s now looking like a decade+ event….

But Anyway…

I’m deeply fascinated by just the fact of Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence, it’s up there with my 1950s copy of The Machiavellians by James Burnam for insane bargain basement booksale/thriftstore finds (it was 50cents when copies were selling for $300 on ebay).

But more than that its a complete window into both the early 1900s, and all the eras it covers. These are amazing primary sources, but because they were speeches given, they’re more like lesser essays in terms of prominence, stuff both immediate, potent, revealing, exceptional… and yet you’d never in a million years wind up randomly reading 99% of them were they not all collected in together. I have barely scratched the slightest surface, its literally 20lbs of raw book.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Every week or so I’m going to read one of the people included and write a short article on what I read… THis should be very easy bonus content to get up to regular blog posting I want to be doing… and since its lesser writing, mostly a reaction to what I’ve read and prompt for discussion…. This will be easy regular content and good fodder for discussion, especially since the whole thing’s on archive and I can link the relevant speeches.

Will paywall the occasional one, but really just want content on Substack somewhere between 10k word super essays and mere links or open threads… who knows maybe 5-10 years from now I’ll have done the whole thing and have to start selling my 10 volume commentaries to accompany the original. We can dream.

Til next time,

Stay crowned you eloquent masterpieces.