On John Bright and Byron and Biblical rhetoric

Yesterday (recall), I used the occasion of my reading George Macaulay Trevelyan’s (1913) The Life Of John Bright to introduce readers to my quite general admiration for John Bright (1811 – 1889), the nineteenth century ‘radical’ or liberal politician and social reformer. In the future. I’ll say more about why his liberalism is worth recovering.

Today, I want to digress on his character as a rhetorician. In his own age he was famous for his oratory, which was honed ‘in the field’ agitating for the Anti-Corn Law League.

I am myself a huge admirer of his (Rochdale) speeches in the context of the American civil war which I think of as the pre-eminent expressions of liberalism as a creed. But in his own age, Bright became quite famous as a parliamentary speaker. And this fame was cemented by his ‘Angel of Death’ speech in the Commons of February 23, 1855. This speech was occasioned by the prospect of peace during the Crimean war. By this time Bright’s initially rather lonely opposition to the disastrous war had already come to be seen as prescient by many. And his biographer (Trevelyan) notes that he had switched toward a more conciliary tone “in contrast to the Philippic” the year before (p. 243).

Unlike in the modern house, in those days MPs would sometimes have much more time to develop their views. And speeches that lasted a number of hours were not uncommon. The whole speech can be re-read here. This is worth reading because it also gives a sense of Bright’s fundamentally anti-millenarian outlook in foreign policy. While his anti-militarism is familiar enough, Bright’s more general outlook has non-trivial status quo bias in foreign affairs—he is against both war-prone balance of power foreign policy and against “dreams” that include wild plans to redraw the map of Europe (p. 486). His is not, for good and ill, a Wilsonian foreign policy emancipating oppressed national minorities.

But he does see — and this is characteristic of his more general significance — foreign and domestic policy as themselves intertwined, and shaping/shaped by economic and social forces. The idea that nineteenth century liberalism has a one-sided focus on the economy is just very misleading. And he views the miscalculations of British foreign policy through the lens of aristocratic class rule (and greed). For him the rise of British military adventurism is itself an expression of class interest in mercantile empire. In fact, just before the most famous part of the speech, he notes that there is a rising class hostility toward the aristocrats that this may generate revolutionary fervor. (Bright himself favors more gradual and rational change.)*

But the key passage that I am about to quote switches gears and notes that death is the great equalizer among the three classes (noble, wealthy, and poor and lowly): I quote from Trevelyan’s excerpt:

I am certain that many homes in England in which there now exists a fond hope that the distant one may return — many such homes may be rendered desolate when the next mail shall arrive. The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the firstborn were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and the two sideposts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on; he takes his victims from the castle of the noble, the mansion of the wealthy, and the cottage of the poor and the lowly, and it is on behalf of all these classes that I make this solemn appeal. (p. 244; cf. p. 490 in Speeches.)

The English are explicitly compared to the Egyptians being visited by the worst of the godsent plague. (And by implication Palmerston is like the proud Pharao.) And in a daring move, Bright (himself marked by his Quaker background) presents himself not as a Moses or Aaron on behalf of an oppressed people, but as a supplicant on behalf of the stricken people of once-proud England to their ruler (stubborn Palmerston). In the Hebrew Bible Egypt is the paradigmatic empire, and (against the usual identification with the Israelites) Bright asks his audience to imagine themselves as if they were the Egyptians.

Philosophers often like to pretend that they know how to speak truth to power. Bright himself reports, not without a touch of vanity, that when at dinner, after, the already rising Disraeli (“Dizzy”) “came and sat down beside me, and he said," Bright, I would give all that I ever had to have made that speech you made just now." And I just said to him, "Well, you might have made it if you had been honest."' (p. 245)

I want to draw out two interesting features of Bright’s rhetorical move here. First, in the Bible text Pharao ignores Mozes’ warning (as Bright surely expected Palmerston to do with his supplication), and Pharao’s heart is (to quote the King James version) “hardened” after the slaying of the first born. So, Bright is not merely conciliatory; he is trying to mark or taint Palmerston as a doomed Pharao into the future. This works because Palmerston’s character traits known to Bright’s audience fits this move.

Second, in the original Bible narrative of Exodus the ‘angel of death’ is absent. In so far as there is a Biblical angel of death at all it is, it is, in fact, the product of apocrypha and Rabbinic discussions. Interestingly enough, in the Koran, Azrael is explicitly mentioned (but also not in the context of the punishment of Pharao and the first-born.)

Now, I am not a Quaker historian so I have no idea what role the angel of death plays in Quaker imagery. I don’t think Bright was especially interested in Islam. We do know Bright was a reader of Milton, but in Paradise Lost, Milton lets Jehovah do his own killing without the intermediation of an angel of death (“Jehovah, who in one Night when he pass'd/From Egypt marching, equal'd with one stroke/Both her first born and all her bleating Gods.”) Trevelyan implies, however, that Bright also frequently evoked Byron (p. 424).

In fact, Byron mentions the Angel of Death in one his more famous short poems (1815), "The Destruction of Sennacherib,” published in Hebrew Melodies. This was a popular collection during the nineteenth century. And I would not be surprised if Bright had a copy with him on his enthusiastic visit to the Holy land in 1835/6.

This trip was quite consequential to Bright’s interpretation of what he later called the ‘despotism’ of Turkish rule. (The Turks were Britain’s nominal allies against Russia during the Crimean war.) Anyway, we know that during his trip he loved comparing the scenes he encountered in the hills of Judea with Biblical descriptions.

Among the many other motifs, Byron plays with is the doubleness of the Biblical description of particular, concrete places in time and what we may call transcendent significance. So, I speculate that Bright inscribed Byron’s tropes into his own speech. (Bright himself is reported as claiming, “I was lying awake in bed in the morning, thinking of my speech and of all the calamities which the war had brought about, when suddenly the idea, without being sought for by me, flashed upon my mind.”)

And the reason why I think Byron shaped Bright’s rhetoric here is that like Byron, Bright emphasizes the wings of the Angel of death in the context of unfolding war.**

Let me quote the first few stanzas:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

I’ll be curious to hear if my readers have other suggestions.

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*The story is more complicated because Trevelyan notes Bright’s awareness that the rising middle class that he represents is being lured into the imperial projects. And his own desire to extend the franchise toward working classes is, in part, based on his hope that they can balance these.

** And, perhaps, there was a further association lurking here between Assyrians with the conquering Russians in Crimea.