Edmund Burke’s Rhetoric of Character

Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric presents itself as “the first full-length study” to focus on the full range of Burke’s writings and published speeches in order to propose a theory of Burke’s “rhetoric of character” (3). Because Burke did not theorize in any systematic way about his own rhetorical practices, Bullard generates his account of Burke’s rhetorical art through a close reading of his rhetorical performances and by an attempt, in the first two chapters, to locate Burke’s practice within two intriguing contexts—“The Ethical Turn in Early Modern Rhetoric, 1600–1760,” and the evolution of “Rhetoric in Ireland, 1693–1765.” This approach is designed to persuade us that Burke’s rhetoric of character is an ethical project that remains consistent throughout his oeuvre. The interconnections between rhetoric, character, and ethics derive, of course, from the classical analysis of rhetoric as consisting of “pathos,” “ethos,” and “logos.” Ethos, as originally articulated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, involves the speaker representing his own character (as sincere, virtuous, knowledgeable, authoritative, and so on), along with convincing character sketches of other political figures and of the audience itself. Bullard claims that Burke’s rhetorical art is ethical in this sense because it is based on the ethos of his own character rather than the pathos and logos of persuasion.

The most innovative aspects of Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric are the attempts in chapters 1 and 2 to relate Burke’s rhetorical art to debates about rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chapter 1 explores “an ethical turn in writing about rhetoric during the seventeenth century” that “is seldom discussed by historians of criticism” (28). It develops a fascinating reading of a range of texts, from Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) to Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762–63), that would interest anyone concerned with rhetoric in the period, even if the chapter’s intricacies and byways are not always directly related to Burke. The core claim, however, is that this ethical turn, originating in readings of classical treatises such as those of Aristotle and Cicero, is “at the heart of Burke’s rhetoric of character: that orators are best able to secure a good moral character in the minds of their audience by demonstrating their understanding of what moral character is” (28).

Chapter 2 makes an important contribution to our understanding of political debates about the curriculum of Trinity College in the first half of the eighteenth century, though Bullard admits that we do not have much direct evidence about Burke’s education there in the 1740s. Irish writing about rhetoric emerged in response to the perceived limitations of the orators in the Irish Parliament. While Swift severely criticized rhetoric in general, and Irish statesmen in particular, other Irish writers—from Robert, Viscount Molesworth to Thomas Sheridan—published pioneering books on rhetoric, proposing that “Trinity College should provide practical training in the use of the English vernacular for the purposes of political deliberation, legal representation and religious instruction” (53). Bullard suggests that Molesworth’s Account of Denmark (1692) set the tone in following “the Ciceronian dictum that good speaking is always an expression of personal vírtu” (60); however, he does not explore the apparent paradox of proposing that good speaking is also an art that can be taught. Thomas Leland’s A Dissertation on the Principles of Human Eloquence (1764) acknowledges the problem by claiming “that the tropes and figures of rhetoric ‘are in themselves the real, natural, and necessary result of real passion and emotion,’ though like any other sign they may be simulated by deceit” (70). If the natural rhetorical signs of passion may be feigned, if rhetoric might be an art, then Burke’s ethical rhetoric of character might be more problematic than Bullard is willing to admit. Bullard shows that part of Burke’s extracurricular education in rhetoric at Trinity College came through the debating club that he convened as an undergraduate, the “Academy...