Should we trust eloquence? As we enter another presidential election year, with its quadrennial reminder that eloquence has all but disappeared from American politics, this may sound like a purely academic question. It is customary to blame television, with its demand for artificial naturalness, for the decline of public speaking. Howard Dean in 2004 was the most recent politician to learn that what sounds like passion on the stump comes across as mere screaming on the news.

But in fact, the American hostility to eloquence goes back much further than the television age. Not since William Jennings Bryan has a politician risen to fame as a great orator; not since Webster and Clay has the U.S. Congress been a nursery of eloquence. It is as though American democracy itself harbors some suspicion of lofty speech, in keeping with its eternal bias toward the pragmatic and the accessible.

There is, in fact, a good and venerable argument for keeping eloquence out of our public discourse. It can be found as far back as Plato’s “Gorgias,” the dialogue in which Socrates challenges the sophist and rhetorician Gorgias to define and defend his art. Surely, Socrates argues, when it comes to any political debate, the person whose advice is most valuable is the expert, the one who knows most about the problem in question. “When walls have to be built or harbors or docks to be constructed,” Socrates points out, the Athenians turn to a master builder; “when generals have to be chosen and an order of battle arranged,” they consult a military man. What subject, then, is a good orator like Gorgias expert in?

After long debate, Socrates forces Gorgias to admit that he has no real knowledge or expertise. “The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know.” And in the wrong hands, that power of persuasion can easily lead to injustice. “Rhetoric,” Socrates concludes, “according to my view, is the ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics.”

In his extended essay “On Eloquence” (Yale University Press, 208 pages, $27.50), the literary critic Denis Donoghue deals only glancingly with political rhetoric. But he says enough about it to make clear that he shares this Socratic disdain. “Rhetoric has an aim,” he writes, “to move people to do one thing rather than another. Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ is a work of rhetoric. So is ‘The Communist Manifesto’…. So is every papal encyclical, every homily, every speech in Parliament or Congress.” As this catalog suggests, what bothers Mr. Donoghue about rhetoric is not its content, but precisely the fact that it can be used to decorate any cause. As Gorgias admitted, rhetoric is designed to coerce and manipulate; it is an enemy of freedom.

That is why Mr. Donoghue is so keen, in his opening chapter, to segregate rhetoric from eloquence, which he passionately loves. The difference, he proposes, is that eloquence thrives on the very freedom that rhetoric undermines. It can enjoy this freedom because “eloquence, as distinct from rhetoric, has no aim: it is a play of words or other expressive means.” Eloquence is purely gratuitous: It is born out of the writer’s unselfish delight in language, and it has no purpose but to communicate that delight to the reader.

If rhetoric is political, Mr. Donoghue insists, eloquence is aesthetic, in the rigorously abstract sense championed by the 19th-century critic Walter Pater (whose biography Mr. Donoghue has written). When Mr. Donoghue insists that “the main attribute of eloquence is its gratuitousness: its place in the world is to be without place or function, its mode is to be intrinsic,” he is consciously echoing Pater’s famous formula: “art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” In the same introduction to “The Renaissance,” Pater also wrote, “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” By that standard, Mr. Donoghue has had a very successful life, and “On Eloquence” is its appropriate record: not a memoir but a collage of quotations, from all periods and genres, which have brought him ecstasy. “It can’t be bad to enlighten its pages,” he writes, “with flashes from many sources, noises, sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”

If this sounds slightly defensive, that is because the very notion of aesthetic bliss — apolitical, unrhetorical, with no design on the reader and no power to harm — is very unfashionable in the academy where Mr. Donoghue has spent his career. Several generations of students and professors have been trained to read suspiciously, as though literature were an instrument of domination instead of an escape from it. “The politics of Yeats’s last poems — was he a Fascist? Conrad versus Chinua Achebe — was Conrad complicit with Imperialism?” These, Mr. Donoghue writes, are the fashionable subjects in English departments, leaving little room for what he calls “the qualities of writing I care about … aesthetic finesse, beauty, eloquence, style, form, imagination, fiction, the architecture of a sentence, the bearing of rhyme, pleasure, ‘how to do things with words.'”

“On Eloquence,” then, has a resigned, elegiac tone, as though Mr. Donoghue were tired of defending his approach to literature, and wanted simply to share the souvenirs he has accumulated from a lifetime of reading. Already in his college years, he writes, he had decided that “If eloquence is a factor added to life, what it mainly says is that nothing necessarily coincides with itself: in passing from existence to expression, there is always the possibility of enhancement.” The first kind of “enhancement” he encountered, as a pupil at a Christian Brothers school in Northern Ireland, was the sonority of Latin, and he devotes a chapter to “The Latin Factor” in English eloquence. He offers long quotations from Thomas Browne, the 17th-century master of Latinity: “And therefore restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations, seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly.”

Browne is a good litmus test for literary taste: If you don’t enjoy his self-delighting, constantly exfoliating prose, you can’t really enjoy English literature. Yet if Browne offers the classic pleasures of eloquence — copiousness, invention, facility, strength — Mr. Donoghue also recognizes that there are other brands of literary pleasure that renounce all these resources. His use of the word “eloquence” to describe aesthetic power, in fact, leads him into a certain perplexity when he comes to modern literature. Since World War I, eloquence has been precisely what serious writers flee. The clipped sentences of Hemingway, the fragmented verse of Eliot, the elective mutism of Beckett: These are the masterpieces of anti-eloquence, the style these writers invented to deal with 20th-century catastrophe.

To accommodate them, Mr. Donoghue must expand the definition of eloquence almost beyond recognition. He finds eloquence in the
silence of Bartleby the scrivener, in Stevens’s “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” in Flaubert’s disillusioned descriptions of provincial France. The accumulation of examples, many famous, some obscure, finally overwhelms Mr. Donoghue’s thesis, such as it is. Eloquence, it turns out, is not simply “sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” — just as Prospero’s island was not nearly as innocent as his description makes it sound. Literature is not only delightful, it is often wounding, discomfiting, and challenging; it does not just enhance language, but estranges and chastens it; it strategizes not just to produce beauty, but to discover truth. This ambiguity, and not its alleged harmlessness, is what separates literary language from political rhetoric. The highest kind of eloquence is not so much, as Mr. Donoghue concludes, “a promise of another kind of happiness,” as it is a determination to capture reality in words, no matter what the cost.

akirsch@nysun.com