PART ONE—
THE UNOBSERVED AND ALL OBSERVERS:
THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

The facts with which I deal here are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I make of them. If there is any novelty, it will, I hope, be illusory—generated by inferences traditionally inherent in the kinds of observations I will present, inferences I reject. My general topic in this book is a ticklish one: remarkable but almost universally unremarked ideational and stylistic anomalies, contortions and perversities in well-known, well-loved works of literature. Can unnoticed literary effects be called effects—that is, have they any effect? And, if so, what kind?

My first major particular topic, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, is a work I want to talk about because I love it, because most other people love it, because I so long wondered why, and because the Gettysburg Address is so short, so simple, and in such little need of the usual ministrations of an academic critic.

The version I work from appears to be the last one Lincoln made.^[1] I choose it not because it came last but because it is the one that has lasted—the one usually cut into buildings, framed on school walls, parodied, memorized, and reprinted:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

[1] All Lincoln quotations are from The Collected Works, ed. Roy P. Basler et al. (9 vols., New Brunswick, N.J., 1953–55); since that edition is arranged chronologically, I will identify items only by place and date. The Gettysburg Address was delivered on November 19, 1863.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Although I will talk only about the Gettysburg Address and its particulars, I present it here as a representative of all works of literature that are generally recognized as both great and so simple as to be lovable. I intend this study and the studies of Twelfth Night that conclude the book as preliminary, necessarily inconclusive steps toward an investigation of the staying power of literary warhorses.

The Gettysburg Address is a highly complex document. It is also demonstrably bizarre. Before I get on with the demonstration, however, I want to insist on a radical distinction between kinds of literary fact. The Gettysburg Address seems simple and straightforward. Therefore it is so. Any close reading that said otherwise would lie. What is true of a work and what is demonstrably true of it—what is only demonstrably true of it—are very different things. When one reads a line, sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter, or complete work and then goes back and rereads,

the second reading is a product of the first—not, as criticism seems often to suggest, a wholesomer substitute for it. Where there is anything puzzling in a work, the puzzle takes both literal and metaphoric precedence over any solution to it, and the puzzle is of the work in a way that a solution cannot be. It is unreasonable for a critic to change—or rather, pretend to change—the way we read a work.

The Gettysburg Address particularly recommends itself for my present purposes because it is a speech—conceived, like a play, to be spoken and heard—and because—unlike most classic orations and plays—its present currency continues in that form (most people who know the Gettysburg Address hear it before they read it). The Gettysburg Address also recommends itself because it lets me beg a question I very much want to beg, the question of second readings—investigative readings subsequent to the first, informed by knowledge of a word's, a phrase's, a clause's or a work's ultimate direction and places of ideational rest, readings often prompted by a desire to know how—and that—literary means accord with ideational ends revealed to a reader at what has proved to be the end of a syntactical unit—or of a larger logical one.

I do not mean to deny that such rethinkings of the particulars of literary units occur, but I doubt that close readings often occur outside classrooms or classroomlike situations—except for works that strike readers as puzzling during their first readings, works that present themselves as puzzles in the first place. I also think that the frequency of second readings by casual (by which I guess I mean "real") readers is exaggerated by noncasual readers for whom belief in the commonness of such exercises is prerequisite to acceptance of their own critical or scholarly theses. However, since experience of the Gettysburg Address has been and continues to be temporal (that is, one hears one syllable, then another, so that linguistic, ideational, and logical units emerge and dissolve as the speech proceeds), and since, aside from some juvenile trouble with Four score and seven, the Gettysburg Address

has not puzzled anyone but the occasional political scientist probing it for doctrine, my choice of example lets me admit to my prejudice without danger that it will skew my analysis.

1—
The Gettysburg Address in 1863

Since I am aware of another danger, the danger of seeming to bite the hand at the end of my own arm, let me hasten to modify the foregoing assertions. There is ordinarily an exception to the rule that says it is unreasonable to change or try to change the way we read a work—a huge exception, one that for most literary scholars is bread and butter. It is altogether fitting and proper that a commentator enrich a work with such specific richness as it has lost in translation from one time or dialect or audience to another. If, like a responsible anthropologist, I properly assume that the Gettysburg Address, like any work chronologically or culturally foreign to my audience, includes what it was when written and first read, I do not add to or change the Gettysburg Address if I adjust my own audience in an effort to make it correspond more nearly to Lincoln's.

Thus I may usefully remind a socially secular twentieth-century audience that, for our great-great grandparents, Lincoln's carefully archaic phrase Four score and seven years would have carried pertinent resonances of "threescore and ten," the phrase from the Ninetieth Psalm by which the normal human life span was specified—a phrase still useful in graveside ceremonies. That reminder does not so much throw light on Lincoln's phrase as reillumine it.

The same is true of reminders to twentieth-century readers of the special urgency that the phrase all men are created equal, the Declaration of Independence generally, the declarers, July 4 of 1776 and July 4 of 1863 had for Lincoln's audience in November of 1863. The Declaration and that particular phrase from it had been staples of the decade of formal and informal debate that preceded the Civil War and continued into it. So too had been

the word fathers in reference to the framers and signers of the Declaration and the Constitution.^[2] As to the two Independence Days, reference to July 4, 1776 is inherent in the substance of Lincoln's first sentence and in the phrase from the Declaration quoted in it. Reference to July 4, 1863 was inherent in the occasion of the speech. July 4, 1863, less than five months before Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, was the day on which Lee withdrew his beaten army from Gettysburg and on which the northern cities heard the news that Vicksburg had fallen to Grant. In the speech preceding Lincoln's, Edward Everett had noted and decorously milked the poetic potential of the elegant coincidence of the great victories of the preceding summer with the Fourth of July.^[3]

I put the pertinence of July Fourth to the Gettysburg Address into a list of innocuous scholarly supplements to a modern reader's consciousness. It belongs there, but, unless the information is cradled very carefully, it can distort a modern reader's understanding. (In observance of what might be formulated as an academic Gresham's Law—"New old knowledge drives out old old knowledge"—I take it as a fact of historical criticism that even

[2] See, for example, Lincoln's Cooper Institute speech of February 27, 1860. He begins by quoting Stephen Douglas on "Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live"; he then goes on to work the word over for several pages. Edward Everett used fathers in that sense in the Gettysburg address that preceded Lincoln's.

[3] See p. 188 of the transcript of Everett's oration in Louis A. Warren's Lincoln's Gettysburg Declaration (Fort Wayne, Ind., 1964). At the end of his account of the battle, Everett refers to Lee's activities on July 4: "That day—sad celebration of the 4th of July for an army of Americans—was passed by him in hurrying off his trains" (Warren 199). Lincoln was, understandably, possessed by the Declaration and the supposed events of July 4, 1776; they are constant topics throughout his career. Had he needed any prompting to mention the Declaration, however, he could not have had it from Everett's speech. Lincoln's allusion to the Declaration occurs in the drafts written before he left Washington, and he could not have seen Everett's speech until he got to Gettysburg. The common belief that Lincoln had (and was photographed with) an advance copy of Everett's speech is authoritatively exploded by David C. Mearns in "Unknown at This Address," in Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address: Commemorative Papers, ed. Allan Nevins (Urbana, Ill., 1964), 118–33.

slightly arcane knowledge enlarges in the awareness of its possessor where it threatens to obliterate other pertinent data.) The pleasure Everett took in the coincidences of July 4 can be rekindled in twentieth-century students who, newly delighted with the coincidence of dates, can find themselves assuming that that coincidence loomed as large in the minds of Everett's and Lincoln's audience as in their own newly illuminated consciousnesses.

On July 4, 1863 that audience had surely been very conscious of a poetic justice, but on November 19 that awareness was at least dormant enough for Everett's manner to suggest that he expected to be considered solemnly witty in ringing changes upon the historical accident of the date of the battle. I suspect that the dim suggestions of the two Fourths of July gave Lincoln's first sentence an extra feel of truth and feel of pertinence to its occasion, but no more—even though Lincoln's hearers were less than an hour from Everett's overt rhetorical exploitation of the coincidence. I would do my readers disservice if I let them believe that Lincoln's first sentence directed his audience's conscious attention to the complex and manifold pertinences of the Fourth of July and the occasion of the speech.

In that same, first sentence, nation calls for a simpler but similarly treacherous scholarly augmentation. In its political sense, nation still had some of its etymological meaning. As a label for the United States—a nation only in the metaphoric political sense of the word—nation still had the propagandistic force that the propagandists' success has lost for it; nation still asserted tribal, racial unity for the United States, the very unity that the United States so notably lacked. One might also point out gingerly that nation still had enough of its etymological meaning so that—as "a thing born"—it both extends Lincoln's natal metaphor and brings it down to a base of near literal solidity. However, Lincoln is using the word in its political sense—the sense in which we are used to hearing it—and a commentator must not allow his readers the fun of thinking that he and everyone else in this century has been misunderstanding nation in the Gettysburg Address.

Of the phrases that need or can stand historical reillumination, the touchiest and most interesting is under God, the phrase Lincoln inserted in the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address between the time of writing the drafts and the time of delivering the speech.^[4] In the context where Lincoln put it, under God

[4] The insertion seems to have been impromptu. The phrase first appears in stenographic transcriptions from Gettysburg and is awkwardly inserted between shall and have (see note 5 below). The insertion was probably made on the platform and may have had its seed in Everett's speech. Lincoln must have listened closely to Everett. In The Gettysburg Address (New York, 1963), Svend Petersen reports that "twice Everett inadvertently said 'General Lee' when he meant to say 'General Meade.' The President corrected him in a loud voice both times, but the orator evidently did not hear him the first time. When he was set right the second time, he made a correction" (20). Everett used the expression "under Providence," a periphrastic variant on under God and meaning "as a factor second only to Providence": "Victory does not always fall to the lot of those who deserve it; but that so decisive a triumph, under circumstances like these, was gained by our troops, I would ascribe, under Providence, to the spirit of exalted patriotism that animated them, and the consciousness that they were fighting in a righteous cause" (Warren 199). The conjunction in this one sentence of two idiomatic uses of "under"—"under circumstances" and "under Providence"—might have helped nudge Lincoln's mind toward the idiomatic use of under God that has since become standard. As a self-conscious rhetorician, listening to an acclaimed orator and fresh from touching up the speech he was himself about to deliver, Lincoln had reason to take note of the potential of the word under and the phrase under God . Everett's ample preamble—the first two thousand words of his oration—plays insistently, but gracefully and subtly, with the primary physical fact of graveyards. Listen to him evoke, and yet resist exploiting blatantly, the paradoxes with which Gettysburg invests "up," "down," "high," and "low," and their various kinds. This is the first sentence of Everett's address (particularly note the two uses of "beneath"): "Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature" (Warren 185). Everett continues to exercise the word "beneath" in succeeding paragraphs. He goes on loosing notions of physical position in a dense series of metaphors until he gets to the first of his major topics, a detailed account of the Battle of Gettysburg, and, when he reaches that, he immediately introduces the first of his contextually inevitable military uses of the word "under"; he refers to the Army of the Potomac under General Meade (in fact this first mention of Meade may well have been one of the two points where Everett's tongue slipped and the attentive Lincoln corrected him). (In Lincoln at Gettysburg [New York, 1992], Garry Wills rejects the idea that Everett's "under Providence" prompted Lincoln's under God [298, note 29], but the basis of that rejection appears to be Wills's rather arbitrary rejection [293, note 6] of the possibility that Lincoln revised his speech during the two hours of Everett's.)

must always have meant exactly what it means to us now.^[5]Under God says "guided by God" and—colored by specialized implications of under —"in the [quasi-military] service of God" and "under God's protection." However, when Lincoln used it that way in 1863, the phrase may have had something like the energy puns have. Under God was already a stock phrase in patriotic contexts, but its stock use was as a parenthetical disclaimer of patriotic idolatry and acknowledgment of the danger of forgetting or seeming to forget that God's authority supersedes man's and that allegiance and gratitude to the American political system take second place to allegiance and gratitude to God. The phrase was a parenthetic acknowledgment of God as the first cause of whatever effect a speaker was about to ascribe to some particular and apparent earthly agent. Louis Warren, who does not seem to notice the difference between Lincoln's Gettysburg use of under God and Lincoln's and his contemporaries' usual use of it, gives examples from a book popularly believed to have been a favorite of Lincoln's: Mason Weems's Life of Washington; for instance, Weems says that the American people were used to looking up to Washington "as, under God, their surest and safest friend" (Lincoln's Gettysburg Declaration, 112). When the Gettysburg Address was new, Lincoln's unusual use of the phrase under God probably carried some dim acknowledgment of the pertinence of its standard use to a speech that rises idolatrously above the topic of the Christian dead. At the same time, the phrase appropriated for the speech the appropriate ceremonial, religious considerations that the speech omits to include overtly. In doing that, under God is like shall not perish from the earth .

[5] There can have been no question about the matter for the audience that heard Lincoln at Gettysburg. There he said, "the nation shall, under God, have." In the versions he wrote out and allowed to be published soon after, he wrote the now-familiar "this nation, under God, shall have."

Like the first phrase of the Gettysburg Address, the last, shall not perish from the earth, is a biblical echo—but a complex one, one so complex that a critic who points it out is in danger of becoming infatuated with his own just perceptions and doing injustice to his own readers. The phrase "shall perish from the earth" occurs in Job 18:17: "His remembrance shall perish from the earth." No reference to any part of a book as much read as Job can be called arcane, but I think it unlikely that any of Lincoln's audience would have tied his final phrase to the words of one of Job's comforters. Rather, both phrases echo Moses' formulaic warning to Israel about breach of the law: "Ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to possess it" (Deuteronomy 4:26). Variations on those words recur throughout the Bible.^[6] What is most interesting about their echo in the Gettysburg Address is that they concern a chosen nation and a promised land. Shall not perish from the earth has the potential to confirm and sanctify Lincoln's assumption that the welfare of the living nation both supersedes and includes the welfare of the dead men whom Lincoln and his listeners had come there to celebrate. On the other hand, the locally pertinent words perish and earth cause the phrase, spoken about the nation, to allude to and specifically embrace the superseded topic of the soldiers who perished from the earth and lie beneath it at Gettysburg. Moreover, in the mere fact of sounding biblical (and continuing the more vaguely religious cast of the whole address), shall not perish from the earth appropriates the topic of the heavenly (rather than national) life hereafter so that Lincoln seems to have made the Christian graveside assertion he never makes (but which he taps for much of the optimistic energy in the body of the speech, energy available because any listener to a cemetery speech is ready to hear about the life to come).

[6] For instance, Deuteronomy 11: 17, Joshua 23 : 13, Psahns 10: 16, Ezekiel 25:7, Micah 7:2; also see John 3: 15, 16. Like Job 18:17, Esther 9:28 and Isaiah 26:14 connect echoes of Moses' threats with the topic of enduring memory.

As to the cast of the whole, the phrase "new birth of freedom," which appears in company with "under God," also contributes to the speech's religious "feel": Garry Wills points out that, behind the new birth Lincoln foresees, "there is the biblical concept of people 'born again' (John 3.3–7)" (Lincoln at Gettysburg , 88). Also note the last phrase of John 3: 16, the famous verse that follows shortly after the passage to which Wills directs our attention: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Like the "born again" elements in John 3: 7, "begotten son" in 3: 16 resonates with new birth and the other supernatural birth references in the Gettysburg Address. And the context of new birth endows Lincoln's shall not perish from the earth with distant echoes of John's "should not perish, but have everlasting life."

The difficulty in dealing with the relation of shall not perish from the earth and the Bible is that the specificity of the evidence can overwhelm its presenter and lead him to posit an audience as finely tuned to biblical echoes as his research has recently and temporarily made him. (In fact, a searcher might fall into a superficially persuasive source study if he came upon Isaiah 26: 12–21—a passage that, for an eager student of Lincoln, is so startlingly reminiscent of the language and topics of the Gettysburg Address that such a student could come to believe that the Gettysburg Address is, was, or should have been reminiscent of it when heard by someone other than an eager student of Isaiah 26:12–21.)

Snatches of the Gettysburg Address are so familiar to modern readers that they can feel about it as people do who find Hamlet quite good, but too full of quotations. A critic can perform a useful service if he tells such a reader that to some extent the speech must always have seemed full of quotes. It contains one real quotation, the one from the Declaration. It also repeats and echoes formulas that Lincoln used regularly (for instance, this sentence from Lincoln's speech on the Dred Scott decision sounds like a casual parody of the Gettysburg Address but was delivered

more than six years earlier, on June 26, 1857: "Three years and a half ago, Judge Douglas brought forward his famous Nebraska bill"). Lincoln scholars have long hoped to find a specific source for the prepositional triad in government of the people, by the people, for the people; they have not found one,^[7] but the number of similar locutions they have come up with testifies both to the cause and the justice of their search. (Warren presents a selected catalogue of analogues proposed by scholars "attempting to find an early combination of these three prepositions" [116]. The most notable and most popular candidates are a sentence from Justice Marshall's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland [1819]^[8] and a fragment from Daniel Webster's Reply to Hayne [1830].^[9] Marshall or Webster or both could have inspired Theodore Parker's definition of a democracy as "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people" [1850].^[10] Actually, the strongest

[7] Mark Womack points out to me that The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (New York, 1993) gives the following s.v. "Bible": "The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People" and cites its source as the "General Prologue to the Wycliffe Translation of the Bible (1384)." The Columbia Dictionary's confidence about the date and its apparent indifference to the distinction between the early version of the Wycliffite Bible and the later one are surprising. I have not found the quoted sentence in any printed text of any of the Wycliffite prologues.

[8] "The People's government; made for the People; made by the People; and answerable to the People."

[9] "The government of the Union . . .is, emphatically and truly, a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit."

[10] The quoted passage is from "The Slave Power," a speech to the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston, May 29, 1850. All my quotations from Parker are from the Centenary Edition of his works [16 vols., Boston, 1907–11]; the "all the people" passage is from vol. 11 [n.d.], 250. Parker regularly used variations on the phrase; I count eighteen printed instances. The most notable of those for tracers of the lineage of Lincoln's "of-by-for" phrase is in a sermon Parker preached on July 4, 1858. This is from the Lincoln biography first published in 1889 by Lincoln's abolitionist friend and law partner William Henry Herndon, a regular correspondent of Parker's: "On my return [from a trip to the East Coast] . . .I brought with me additional sermons and lectures by Theodore Parker, who was warm in his commendation of Lincoln. One of these was a lecture on 'The Effect of Slavery on the American People,' which was delivered in the Music Hall in Boston, and which I gave to Lincoln, who read and returned it. He liked especially the following expression, which he marked with a pencil, and which he in substance afterwards used in his Gettysburg Address: 'Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people'" (William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Abraham Lincoln [2 vols., New York, 1909], 2:65).

The key word in Parker's many uses of the formula was "all." Parker commonly used the phrase in contexts where he was contrasting the principles asserted in the Declaration to those inherent in any government that tolerated slavery. For instance, what follows the paragraph defining democracy as "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people" in "The Slave Power" is a paragraph beginning, "That is one idea; and the other is, that one man has a right to hold another man in thraldom." And this is the original context of the sentence Lincoln is said to have marked in the 1858 Music Hall sermon: "Theocracy, the priest power; monarchy, the one-man power; and oligarchy, the few-men power—are three forms of vicarious government over the people, perhaps for them, not by them. Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people." Lincoln's variant on Parker's formula leaves out "all." It matters a lot, I think, that, by echoing an abolitionist formula Lincoln both espoused the idealism of Parker and other single-minded prewar champions of freedom for slaves (people loud in their impatience with any suggestion that slavery might be tolerated a few years more for the sake of saving the Union, people whose indisputably noble policies were inherently divisive) and, by omitting the pointed insistence on all, produced a phrase that really unifies, one that implies no distinction, moral or otherwise, between former slaves and former slave owners or, in the future, between former enemies in the Civil War.

confirming echo behind the triad is probably the form and substance of the last clause of the Lord's Prayer: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.")

More important, the speech is so meticulously repetitious that within its own brief course it becomes its own authoritative base. Most important, the distinction between Lincoln's audience and us is effectively erased by a phenomenon that also figures in the modern identities of such things as Hamlet , "Kubla Khan," The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , and the Song of Songs: phrases from the Gettysburg Address have so far invaded American consciousness that even a child first hearing it hears it strengthened and confirmed by echoes of itself. At this point in its history, the par-

ticulars of the Gettysburg Address itself have taken over the enriching functions of the now-unheard allusions and echoes that vouched for its breadth, profundity, and respectability in 1863.

2—
Perversity

However cautiously one manages the business of historical reillumination, the fact remains that what is restored by a scholar is not of the modern reader's ordinary experience of the work, and—in the case of classics still vital in the everyday experience of casually bookish people—was presumably not a part of the early experience of the illuminating scholars, who presumably knew and loved such works before that knowledge and love led them to know, show, and tell all about them. Such works have the capacity to hold an audience unfit and many. Such works may be buffeted by time and fashion, but they persist; they may be sustained by accidents of curriculum, but they survive when those supports are withdrawn. Why?

I do not pretend to a right to answer that question here, where I will call so few works in witness. I have, of course, looked at and thought hard about a lot of works that have the same sort of apparently special staying power as the Gettysburg Address and Twelfth Night —the most (and most consistently) popular Shakespearean tragedies, nursery rhymes comparable to the ones I talked about in the introduction (the few everybody knows, as opposed to the many always included in collections but rarely remembered), "Kubla Khan," Pride and Prejudice, the Song of Songs, and so on. That reading and thinking draws me toward the following generalizations, which I do not so much propose as admit to harboring.

Great works of art are daredevils. They flirt with disasters and, at the same time, they let you know they are married forever to particular, reliable order and purpose. They are, and seem often to work hard at being, always on the point of one or another kind of incoherence—always on the point of disintegrating

and/or of integrating the very particulars they exclude—always and multifariously on the point of evoking suggestions of generally pertinent but locally impertinent auxiliary assertions and even saying things they cannot want to say, things irrelevant or antipathetic to their arguments or plain untrue. For instance, Lincoln's patriotic context keeps conceived in Liberty in check, but, because of the conjunction it makes between a word with potential to refer to sexual engendering and a word that regularly means "license," the phrase strains toward impertinence.^[11] I think also that dangerous energy derives to from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion from the pairing of "to take" and "to give" and from the almost infinitely distant idea of grave robbing, an idea that cannot be imagined ever to have emerged to the consciousness of an auditor or reader.

Works of the caliber of the Gettysburg Address often include half-formed relevant assertions that dissolve in passage. When Lincoln says that The world . . .can never forget what they did here, the next phrase, It is for us the living, sets off into—and thus can

[11] See John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), 66:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty ..." is seldom considered an allusive text.... But the implicit contrasts set up a powerful pair of tropes, and either lack of appropriate access to scripture or exigetical pudeur has passed them over. They might be sketched out as follows: (1)" Whereas in the beginning, at Our Father's command, the earth brought forth grass  . . .(Genesis 1: 12), a mere fourscore and seven years ago brought forth on this piece of earth a new nation" and (2) "Whereas man is conceived in sin, this nation was conceived in liberty." The rhythm of "fourscore . . .forth" makes us notice the ellipsis of 'fore(—fathers), but the ellipsis itself makes the forebears into secular forms of pater noster . Thus the two tropes make a new, but no longer young, nation into a natural, unfallen, new-Adamic being. In the Gettysburg Address, even the word nation is accompanied by biblical resonances.

In a note Hollander adds "perhaps the canceled words upon this continent in the first draft of the Gettysburg Address indicate Lincoln's awareness of the biblical tradition."

carry us into—the assertion that "It is for us the living that they did it." (For there ends up having meant "incumbent upon," but—even though the phrase reads "It is for us" and not "It was for us—for can momentarily and provisionally say "on behalf of.") And for a fraction of a second, the fraction before in vain, the speech actually says we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died .^[12]

What my tentative generalizations point to—and what most of the rest of this book will talk about and recommend for your approval—is perversity. That is not surprising. After all, all the standard devices of literary art—devices like alliteration, rhyme, meter, and metaphor—have perversity as a common denominator. Each of them adds a usually gratuitous and potentially distracting and counterproductive extra system of coherence that rivals—and advertises the limitations of—the narrative, po-

[12] Lincoln's speeches suggest that he was aware to a degree unusual even in writers of his caliber of the fact that sentences emerge one syllable at a time to the minds of their hearers and that sentences therefore can carry with them traces of shadow sentences that bloom in passage and vanish. Consider the following examples.

The reminiscence of Mark 3:25 from which Lincoln's "House Divided" speech (Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858) gets its nickname occurs about a hundred words in: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." What I want to consider are the two sentences that innnediately follow that one. The first starts with a momentarily complete assertion: "[ believe this government cannot endure." As a result the completed sentence ("I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free "), carries with it a dire warning from which it also retreats. And this is the next sentence as it would have been without its last word, the word "divided": "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved —I do not expect the house to fall —but I do expect it will cease to be."

The emphasis and punctuation here are those of the most authoritative surviving text of the speech, that of the Illinois State Journal . It is apparently Lincoln's own. In his anthology of Lincoln texts, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (1946; New York, 1962), Roy R. Basler says "Horace White's account of the printing of this version, as given by Herndon, specifies that the Journal text was set up from the manuscript and the final proofread by Lincoln himself" (381). The emphasis and punctuation matter because the comma after "endure" suggests that Lincoln paused in a deliberate manner after "I believe this government cannot endure" and because stress on "cease" before "to be" would have promised continuation.

lemic, or other ideationally essential organization of the work. The extra systems, counterproductive to a work's substantive purpose, are commonly and wonderfully productive of that work's larger essence, wonderfully productive of the simultaneously easy and complex experiences that the works we value enable in us.

It should not be surprising either that I pay attention to perversities that do not call for attention. All criticism, casual, deliberate, amateur, and professional, has traditionally valued works in which substantively incidental devices are unobtrusive, works that seem—and therefore are—straightforward.

The simple, straightforward Gettysburg Address is full of small gratuitous stylistic perversities that complicate—but do not weaken—our perceptions of the continuity and connection that syntax, logic, and phonetic patterning assert. Ostentatious repetitions in the Gettysburg Address are simultaneously ostentatiously imperfect, and related words (like take and gave in take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave ) appear in paired constructions but are used in senses that are not immediately related. Similarly, very different phrases are illogically related. For instance, the word dedicate always has potential as a muted, bizarre, and complex oxymoron: a verb indicative of purposeful beginning that could be—and that novices in the English tongue sometimes mistake for—a synonym of "to kill," "to make dead"; in the Gettysburg Address the first syllable of dedicate echoes and is echoed in the word dead and in the idea of dying at the same time that Lincoln is exploiting, extending, and insisting on the full measure of the word's forward-looking optimism.

For a related example, consider the beginning of the second sentence of paragraph 3: The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here . The parenthetically asserted inclusion of the living among the brave men whose deeds at Gettysburg are unforgettable and the latent ambiguity of thus far in the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced give the speech a genuinely mystical aura that has all the advantages that

orators on similar occasions always fail to get in overt hyperboles by which the dead are said to go on fighting in their surviving comrades. Moreover, but in another dimension of understanding, the allusion to the Battle of Gettysburg is more vivid than it would be if the word struggled were not in company with living and dead; that parenthetical modifier presents a pair of opposites, and—although the terms of opposition are not those in which warring armies are opposed—the mere fact of opposition enlivens struggled . In the same sentence the phrase to add or detract, as specifier of our poor power, carries extra testimony of poverty because the pair echoes and suggests a related idiom describing a particularly humble power, the power "to add and subtract," the arithmetical skill of a grammar-school child.

In the next sentence little note, nor long remember echoes the physics of the larger processes by which Lincoln equates opposites in the same actions that assert distinction between them. The phonic relations of little note, nor, and long are an emblem of those processes: the unifying alliterative pattern is chiasmic l, n, n, l . Similarly, but in another dimension, little note, a negative idea expressed positively, is in parallel with nor long remember, a negation of a positive idea (the smooth operation of the parallel is probably largely enabled by the presence in note of the ideationally dormant sound of negation, which is echoed in both the sound and the sense of nor ). Little and long, likened by alliteration and by the negating action of nor upon long, are distinguished semantically (they are not quite parallel opposites; one measures mass, the other extension; here, where both are adverbial and metaphoric, little measures abstract degree, and long measures duration). The paired halves of little note, nor long remember also relate ideationally (and therefore primarily) in yet another set of terms—action (note ) and duration of action (long remember ).

The most effective and efficient agents for extra actions and counteractions in language are the little words indicating function, relationship, or ideational equivalence. They can unobtrusively suggest that there is more to be designated—suggest so

even as they successfully complete the function of designating a selected and closed relationship among a selected and exclusive group of things. They do their job of constructively blurring the distinctions they establish (thus making a genuinely and effectively particular assertion reach for infinity) by means of only subliminally perceived improprieties or quickly abandoned temporary gestures toward other assertions.

The various uses of the syllable for in the Gettysburg Address are a good example. If Lincoln cannot be said to be dedicated to the preposition for, he is dedicated to its sound. The fors are so strong at the start of the speech that it is often remembered as beginning "Four score and seven years ago our fore fathers brought forth." As the sense of the words that surround the word fathers dictates its particular, specialized sense, so the sounds of Four and forth can press the sound of "forefathers" upon the memory.

After the first sentence the sound for recurs seven times, and never to quite the same effect. The for of forget is obviously foreign to the preposition, as is the for sound in before (which echoes the theme of the first clause of the speech and specifically echoes the "fore" that is ideationally present but phonetically absent in fathers ).

Of the five prepositional uses of for, two are semantically identical and mean "incumbent upon"—so clearly identical that they are used in ostentatiously twin constructions: It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced and It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us . On the other hand, the likeness of the two phrases is countered by an equally eloquent unlikeness. The elements of the first are repeated in the second, but the duplication is muted by internal chiasmus. It is rather for us echoes but incidentally contorts It is for us . . .rather . And here dedicated replaces dedicated here . The general process continues when unfinished work is and is not repeated in great task remaining before us .

The other three uses of the preposition are variants of for meaning "in behalf of." The first indicates the possessors of the graves: final resting place for; the second indicates the cause in behalf of which the honored dead died: that cause for which they gave; the third is government . . .for the people . The three different kinds of relationship between benefit and benefited act with the three different but related benefits in the three phrases (resting place for those [who died ], cause for which [they died ] and government . . .for the people [shall not die ]) to pull the phrases together and apart so variously that a reader or hearer is casually and unconsciously a mental acrobat in casually comprehending them as incidental in the linear flow of easy exposition.

Before I go further, I should acknowledge that the rhetorical energy to be had from repeating words and from repeating them in different senses has been obvious for centuries. Most of the different kinds of repetition have several different, impressive, forgettable, and confusing names. The only difference between the effects I discuss here and those that rhetorical manuals talk about is that the rhetoricians ordinarily concern themselves only with noticeable effects, effects that call attention to themselves and to their authors' aesthetic or rhetorical intent.

It would take a handful of such terms to describe the activities of the word that in the Gettysburg Address. The thirteen thats help to integrate the speech, working much the way alliteration would.^[13] The thirteen thats are all concentrated in two parts of

[13] Lincoln took a lot of trouble with his thats . One cannot be sure which of the two extant early drafts is the earlier, but the one that differs most from the two transcriptions of the speech as delivered and from the three copies Lincoln wrote out later has "it" instead of that field, has "that the nation" instead of that that nation, has "This we may in all propriety do" instead of It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, and has "highly resolve these" instead of highly resolve that these . The other draft has its full measure of thats except for of that field, which first replaces "it" in the three copies Lincoln made of the speech after it had been delivered at Gettysburg. The preliminary drafts also show Lincoln experimenting with placement of the words here (which appears eight times in the middle of the final version of the address) and for (in one of the drafts he tried out "final resting place of those who," but he scratched out of and wrote for above the line).

I need hardly say that the fact that Lincoln cared about and fussed with the incidental little words of the Gettysburg Address does not make reading the speech any different than it would be if the number and positions of the thats, heres , and fors were as they are by accident rather than design. It is presumably also unnecessary to say that, although Lincoln surely knew what he was doing when he selected and arranged the substantively minor elements that support and connect his nouns and verbs, I do not suggest that he would have analyzed his results in the way I do. I do not ask you to imagine Abraham Lincoln sitting down on the train with his early drafts on his lap and saying to himself, "Let's see if we can't get a few more thats and fors into this speech." Study of the drafts is only valuable to a critic in that it helps one notice the kind of richness that goes unnoticed in the finished versions. Such study is dangerous to critics if they let their audiences forget that such richness does, did, and always will go unnoticed and/or if they let their audiences believe that the speech is, was, or can be enriched by conscious awareness of its unobserved but efficient effects.

the speech: seven occur just after the beginning—in the last phrase of sentence I and in paragraph 2; six occur just before the end of the last sentence. The two clumps thus participate in the simultaneous contrasts and equations of the beginning and end of the speech and the past and future of the nation. The thats are also persistently—though quietly and inefficiently—disintegrative because the same insistently repeated sound has different functions.

The readiest example of simultaneously identical and nonidentical thats is that that nation might live near the end of paragraph 2. The preeminent example is the progressively dynamic activity of the last three thats in the last sentence:

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Each of those three thats acts straightforwardly to introduce a clause specifying a particular resolution. However, although the second and third of the trio act to that end straightforwardly, they do not act to that end exclusively. The second, the that of

that this nation, acts twice on a listener's understanding: (1) to introduce appositive, alternate specifcation of what is to be resolved and (2) to introduce a desired result of the first resolution. It simultaneously acts to say "as follows" ("We . . .resolve . . .that this nation . . .shall have"), and to say "so that" ("We . . .resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain so that this nation . . .shall have a new birth"). The third, the that of and that government of the people . . .shall not perish, does even more. It has both of the functions the previous that had: it continues the sequence of fulfillments of the syntactic needs of resolve ("We . . .resolve . . .that government . . .shall"); and, like the that of that this nation, simultaneously specifies a desired result of the first suggested resolution ("We . . .resolve that . . .so that government shall"). Unlike the that of that this nation, however, the final that has a supplementary adjectival action beyond its two conjunctional ones. In echo of and response to the syntax of that these dead and in echo of and response to both the syntax and the substance of that this nation, the that of that government acts as a demonstrative adjective, pointing back to the United States (this nation in the preceding clause), and specifying it as "that government [which is] of the people, by the people, for the people."^[14] In effect, then, the that of that government functions three times simultaneously: "We resolve that . . .so that that government."

[14] In fact, the final phrase is often quoted as if it came from a context in which the whole phrase, from that to for the people, were a noun phrase like these dead and this nation .

Note that the process I describe only confirms (and complicates perception of, and suggests a natural, a quasi-organic, truth in) an assumption inherent in the speech because of its speaker, audience, and situation. Even if this last of the last three that clauses were first (if the sentence read "resolve that government of the people, by the people ...," so that the juxtaposition of resolve and that and the absence of this nation as a potential antecedent for the demonstrative sense of that limited it to its conjunctive function)—an audience would still take the general definition for all democracy as simultaneously a very specific reference to the United States. As the clause is in fact placed, however, it has absolute generality and absolute particularity, each of which is urgent and neither of which is modified or diminished by the other.

It is interesting—and typical of this speech—that the third and last that in the sequence dependent on resolve is the one fullest of meaning. As the signals of sequence and parallelism indicate increasing limitation on the functions of the that s, their functions become less and less limited. The last that, the one whose primary syntactical function is most immediately obvious, performs more extra actions than any other word in the whole speech.

The combination of increasingly sharp focus evoked by repetition and increasing expansiveness also occurs on a larger scale in the pattern of the clauses that make up the single, repeated, and progressively more sweeping assertion about the duty of us the living . The first assertion (It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced ), is repeated in the complicated echoing clause I have already described (It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ), but the second clause suddenly expands when two subordinate and variously parallel that clauses are tacked on to it; in turn, the second of those subordinate clauses (that we here highly resolve ) has not two but three appended subordinate clauses, and the third of those suddenly swells to include the modifying triplets of the people, by the people, for the people .^[15]

The speech is not only wittily perverse in specifics; it is wittily perverse in its gross conception—and is much less remarkable for that wit than for managing not to flaunt it.^[16] As Lincoln

[15] Note the obverse relationship and reverse rhetorical effect in little note, nor long remember (double) and never forget (single).

[16] Perversity was Lincoln's stylistic stock in trade. So was the deep, quiet perversity I talk about here.

On February 22, 1861, eighteen days after the founding of the Confederate States of America, Lincoln spoke in Independence Hall in Philadelphia about the Declaration of Independence adopted there. He said nothing about the new confederacy of southern states, but he took gratuitous pains to mention that the Declaration of 1776 declared a "separation of the colonies from the mother country," and, incredibly, he referred to the Union as "this Confederacy."

For a different sort of example of Lincolnian perversity, consider his use of the "this too shall pass" story. The story was apparently introduced to Europe by Warren Hastings, who in 1795, when he was at last acquitted of charges of official malfeasance as governor-general of India, is said to have told friends that he had taken comfort from it during his years of trial. Lincoln tells the story at the very end of the speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (Milwaukee, September 30, 1859) and immediately concludes by applying it to a purpose exactly contrary to the one it embodies. This is the last paragraph of the speech:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentiment to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, "And this, too, shall pass away ." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride; how consoling in the depths of affliction! "And this, too, shall pass away." And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral worlds within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Also see the casual-sounding confusion between Washington the city and Washington the man at the end of the Cooper Institute speech (February 27, 1860).

says, he and his audience came to the battlefield at Gettysburg to dedicate a portion of that field as a cemetery; but he archly refuses to do it. First he flirts with his assigned topic by using dedicated to describe the nation; then he announces that his task can not be done: we can not dedicate . . .this ground; then he dedicates the audience rather than the field. He achieves a rightness in the speech by teetering on the edge of wrongness in what it conveys. The speech ends up rededicating the nation and thus repeats the action described in its opening clause. Lincoln thus implies identity between the nation's chronological past and its chronological future—an identity that is not literally possible. He simultaneously duplicates that physical paradox in the structure of the literary object that asserts the union: the beginning and the end of the speech are opposites—are so in several dimensions—but the last forty-eight syllables (the last three clauses) echo not only the topic of the first forty-eight (the first

sentence) but their ideas, metaphors, and diction—most of which have dropped away during the body of the speech (consider brought forth / new birth; this continent / this nation; continent / earth; new nation / new birth; conceived in Liberty / birth of freedom; all men are created equal / of the people, by the people, for the people ).

All the perversities I have mentioned and those I will get to later justify generalization: the farther Lincoln gets from a topic in the Gettysburg Address, the closer he comes to it; and the more limited and specific his locutions are, the more expansive and general. Those generalizations point toward these. The variously circular actions of the Gettysburg Address give it identity, independent being, a being that is independent of other physical or ideational things because it is itself a thing—an object, a quasi-physical fact marked out in time as a building or a fenced field is in space—and also a being independent of the persistently exercised limitations of the still-unthreatened systems that define it—reason and syntax, the very tools by which its outlaw identity is carved out. Its objectivity—the pseudophysicality of the literary object—vouches for the validity of Lincoln's assertions, much as the inherent suggestions of other and variously incompatible assertions vouch for and suggest superhuman breadth and depth in the meager assertions it does make.

Having now reached as much of a conclusion as I mean to reach for, I want to push my luck by going back to the first and last sentences of the Gettysburg Address to talk about more bizarre and even less noticeable elements in the speech and to suggest that they are like the other phenomena I have described and also contribute to the grandeur of the Gettysburg Address.

I will start cautiously with a fact of the Gettysburg Address that has indeed been remarked—its pervasive concern for birth. This is Robert Lowell, speaking in the auditorium of the Interior Department Building in Washington in 1963: "Last spring I was talking about the Gettysburg Address to a friend who is also a man of letters. He pointed out to me its curious, insistent use

of birth images: 'brought forth,' 'conceived,' 'created,' and finally, a 'new birth of freedom.'"^[17]

Actually, of course, the insistent use of birth images in graveyard speeches is not curious at all; the coincidence of one kind of death and another kind of birth is a rhetorical dividend of Christian theology. And yet Lowell and his friend were right to use the word curious . What is curious is that the birth images, so obviously plentiful and paradoxical when pointed out, could have elicited surprise in two men of letters raised on the Gettysburg Address. In reporting the phenomenon, Lowell sounds like a man telling his listeners something they didn't know—or, properly, didn't know they knew. He seems to find the perception striking, to have found it striking the previous spring, and to have heard it from a friend who presented it as a surprise for Lowell.

An audience of students would assume that I am in the process of mocking Robert Lowell and his friend. I am not. The curious thing about Lincoln's use of birth metaphors is that, despite their density, they are recorded by their audience as atrophied metaphors would be. In the first sentence the idea of birth in brought forth has little more vitality than the idea of "heart" has in "recorded."

At this point, the same student audience would assume that l am debunking the Gettysburg Address. I am not. By critical tradition, atrophied metaphors are bad, and, if a work is said to be good, its metaphors will be, or will be said to be, vivid and vital.^[18]

The tradition is well-founded, but we need not follow it superstitiously. I suggest that the dormancy of the birth metaphors

[17] Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address: Commemorative Papers, ed. Allen Nevins (Urbana, Ill., 1964), 88.

[18] A similarly conditioned reflex probably accounts for the numerous assertions that the Gettysburg Address is terse. Although probability says that a speech both admirable and brief will be concise, the Gettysburg Address is luxurious in its expense of words unnecessary to the overt utilitarian aims of the sentences.

in the Gettysburg Address is a specific source of its greatness and is like the other specific sources of its greatness. The speech is sublime in all Longinus's senses of the word. It is also sublime in an etymologically dubious sense that lurks invitingly within it, but, though often endorsed, has always been suspect: a sense that can suggest the kind and location of the elements by which a writer's greatness of spirit comes to echo in the previously diminutive spirit of his readers. "Sublime," which derives from Latin sublimis ("uplifted"), a word probably unrelated to sub limen ("below the threshold"), could be a cousin of "subliminal" in fact as well as appearance. And, since I am pushing the proposition that the sublimity—the elevation—of elevated works can inhere in ideationally significant effects that do not signify and in demonstrably insignificant ones that do, the dubious but temporarily helpful etymology can encapsulate and clarify my contention that what one does not notice in great literature—what does not literally import and is not literally of its matter—is, in the metaphorical senses of those words, what is most important and matters most.

In the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address, the birth metaphors are demonstrably present, and specific reference to the two Fourths of July demonstrably is not. I suggest that the two are similar in their similarly nebulous action. They and the ultrapertinent but muted, casual echo of Psalm 90 act as tokens of infinity. By their agency a sentence understood as a simple assertion about the founding of the United States also includes an assurance of special and extra pertinence of the sentence to the occasion and an acknowledgment of a cloud of unformulated potential alternative or auxiliary assertions that give the sentence a feel of limitless and absolute truth. All the specifically available topics that the narrow assertion shuts out are also let in by the particulars that make it up; for example, take the appearance of dedicated in the first sentence, a sentence that is ostentatiously failing to get to the business at hand: dedicating a cemetery. The physics of the first sentence's action are, I think, these. The paraphrasable content of the sentence is solid, specific, and tells no

one anything everyone does not know. The message conveyed is not only absolutely true but familiar and unquestionable: the United States was indeed founded in 1776 and, at least in theory, was founded on the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Since the sentence says no more than that, its freight of misty grandeur gets the benefit of mundane, factual solidity while the mundane assertion has the feel of a grandly comprehensive, philosophically pregnant utterance by which a listener apprehends more than cool reason ever can.

An underlying idea in the notion of pregnant utterances is that their vitality is there and theirs but not delivered to the apprehending mind. When we say that pompous, obviously highflown ceremonial assertions sound as though they conveyed more than they do, we are usually and properly faulting them. I suggest that the same can be justly said, not against, but to the credit of treasured literary objects in which we feel extraordinary energy and truth.

3—
Plain Nonsense

I have so far talked mainly about ideationally potent elements that do not in any ordinary sense exercise their semantic potential. I want now to move on from undelivered sense to plain nonsense.

The Gettysburg Address has not undergone much detailed analysis. There have been some pedantic exercises in taxonomy (for instance, Wills [174] quotes a 1917 essay by Charles Smiley, who identified "six antitheses, six instances of balanced sentence structure, two cases of anaphora, and four alliterations"). Wills himself devotes most of a chapter to Lincoln's style in general, is particularly illuminating on the ending of the First Inaugural, but is very brief about the Gettysburg Address itself. He gives most of his attention to Lincoln's use of repetition as a unifying device (171–75); what he says is good; this is a fair sample of the kind of point he makes: "By repeating the antecedent as often as possible, instead of referring to it indirectly by pronouns like 'it'

or 'they,' or by backward referential words like 'former' and 'latter,' Lincoln interlocks his sentences, making of them a constantly self-referential system. This linking up by explicit repetition amounts to a kind of hook-and-eye method for joining the parts of his address" (172).

But most detailed study of the Gettysburg Address has focused on its first phrase and on government of the people, by the people, for the people, one of its last. As I said earlier, the beginning and end of the Gettysburg Address have a special relationship to one another. They also have a common denominator in the fact that Four score and seven and the of-by-for trinity call for the attention they receive. Those phrases are the only ones that advertise the artifice of the whole, the only points where one hears rhetorical sweat. Their chief function is as boundary markers, isolating the speech as an island apart from everyday prose. Their chief attraction for commentators is that they can bear explication.

The attention given Four score and seven is mostly oral, amateur, and juvenile; it is deserved because at some time quite late in every modern English speaker's early life he or she does not know that "a score" is twenty. There is satisfaction in learning that and more satisfaction in passing it on. The pleasure is a kind of starter set for the sort of mentality that will later know the joys of telling a friend that (and how) Utopia and Erehwon mean "nowhere," learn to translate sailboat words out of and into English, and/or acquire the key particulars, private and public, by which to penetrate Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, and Wordsworth.

The of-by-for cluster is a different matter. Hearing or casually reading the speech, no English speaker would notice that he or she does not precisely see the specified distinction among of the people, by the people, and for the people or know the specific meaning of the whole urgently meaningful definition of democratic government. Most people are and have been content simply to understand the phrase as a triple drumroll saying and celebrating "American democracy." Some social scientists have felt a professional obligation to explicate government of the people, by the people, for the people, and most have ended up dismissing it (with bless-

ings on its head) as "rhetoric."^[19] Some of them have, however, first looked at it closely.^[20]

[19] For instance, see Giovanni Sartori in Democratic Theory (Detroit, 1962), 27: "The truth is that Lincoln's words have stylistic impetus rather than logical meaning. As they stand they constitute, strictly speaking, an inexplicable proposition. But this is precisely its purpose and its value—and I am not being paradoxical, for to use 'democracy' in its literal sense opens a prescriptive discourse whose very nature is to remain unfinished, to go on ad infinitum as well as ad indefinitum ."

[20] The potential (but efficiently inactive) ambiguity of of the people is particularly popular with political scientists. Sartori (26–27) analyzes the phrase in detail, and Bertrand de Jouvenel brushes it aside as a tautological truism: "The first term [in Lincoln's formula] stresses a 'necessary' feature of Government, for the lack of which a Government has no claim to that name, does not exist as such" ("What is Democracy?" in Democracy in the New States: Rhodes Seminar Papers [New Delhi, 1959], 29). These narrowly literalistic readings, both—significantly—by non-native speakers of English, evoked strenuous clarification in a New Yorker essay (September 8, 1975, 42–60) by Mortimer J. Adler and William Gorman. They concentrate on de Jouvenel's sentence. They announce that government of the people contains "a deliberate double genitive." Thereupon they spend two columns saying, essentially, that the phrase can mean both "that which is the governor of the people" (the one sense apparent to de Jouvenel) and "the government belonging to the people" (the sense contextually evident to English speakers). Although I doubt the deliberateness of the ambiguity, that does not matter here. The explication as explication does not matter for a different reason: the double meaning Adler and Gorman reveal is not apparent until looked for—and was not looked for until two political scientists were cornered by a literal-minded French speaker. When the triad is heard by someone who has never heard it before, its first element probably registers momentarily as a reference to the enterprise of governing the citizenry (says what Parker's "over all the people" says and continues to say as the phrase goes on), but the next two elements, by the people and for the people, are so obviously active modifiers (as opposed to tautological extensions of meaning already inherent in the word government ) that they entirely override any understanding of government of the people as a long-winded way of saying government . Although the tautological sense is not efficient as an alternate reading of of the people, it does, I think, operate in the completed triad; it operates after it has been dismissed by the defining pressures of its two successors, and it can thus give what feels like almost witty—clever-seeming—extra emphasis to the already emphatic declaration that this democracy is literally a people's government, emphasis derived from the now-established philosophical pertinence of the very fact that government of the people read as "government that governs the people" is tautological: "government belonging to the people, in which the people themselves are the governors of the people and govern for their own benefit."

My sole purpose in going into previous analyses of phrases in the first and last sentences of the Gettysburg Address is to establish that those sentences have been scrupulously looked at and found strange by students of widely differing interests and sophistication. And my sole purpose in establishing that is to point out that two more remarkably strange things about those sentences have not been generally remarked—if indeed they have been remarked at all.

(1) Fathers—males—give birth in the metaphor of sentence one. (It has been suggested to me that fathers brought forth makes physiological sense if one takes it as a metaphor from midwifery, a metaphor in which the fathers are likened to an obstetrician. That explanation seems the product of desperation. In any context of parenthood the idiom "to bring forth" is so firmly associated with the action of the mother [e.g., Matthew 1:21, 23] that any other understanding of it in context of fathers is highly improbable, except after the fact and in answer to a critic-evoked need to make sense of the phrase.)

(2) The last sentence can be demonstrated to be syntactically incomprehensible.

Before anyone goes hunting in the last sentence to see what can possibly be structurally amiss, in a sentence that has never seemed amiss let me remind you, as I have previously reminded hypothetical students, that I am only talking about the unnoticed paternal prodigy because it is unnoticed and is therefore not part of what the sentence says—not part of the sense delivered by, and carried away from, the sentence. Similarly, I am neither finding fault with the last sentence, nor mocking previous readers for their folly in finding it syntactically clear; nor—and this is what matters most—do I mean to suggest that since the sentence is demonstrable nonsense it therefore was, or should henceforth be apprehended as, nonsense. All that one can see in a work is therefore of it and of its action on a mind capable of perceiving

it, but not all of that is, or should be said to be, part of what a work delivers to the conscious understanding. I insist on a distinction between, on the one hand, what a work comprehends (what it holds within it and what is thereby included within our perception of it) and, on the other, what we apprehend from it (what we pick up and carry away from it, what we know it to have told us).^[21]

Now to the syntax of the last sentence. Looking at the sentence in isolation, and knowing that it makes sense, and always has made sense, one can—if one looks hard enough—see a quite reasonable syntactical relationship between the main clause, It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, and the two succeeding that clauses; both that from these honored dead we take increased devotion  . . .and that we here highly resolve  . . .could be appositive to task: great task remaining before us —[namely ] that . . .we take increased devotion  . . .Nonetheless, I think it unlikely that anyone ever actually understood the sentence that way. My reasons are these. (I) An appositional relationship between a concrete noun like task and a noun clause specifying its particulars is unusual; there is no idiomatic impetus toward hearing such an apposition here. (2) The habits of the English language do not prepare us to hear the taking of increased devotion—or vowing of any kind—labeled a task; task usually implies effort of some duration; we are used to hearing task refer to something that requires sustained physical or mental labor in its performance (keeping a vow may take that, but vowing does not). (3) When we hear the great task remaining before us in the Gettysburg Address, it is itself in apposition—in apposition to, and therefore already specified by, the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced; the task is necessarily and obviously "winning the war"; the following that clause

[21] When I made this distinction between "apprehend" and "comprehend," I thought I was merely adapting the one Theseus makes in A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.4–6, 18–20. However (and predictably), Shakespeare there manages to make a clear, efficient, memorable distinction and also to use the two terms almost interchangeably.

does not invite us to understand it as an appositional definition of the already firmly defined task .

On the other hand, the that clauses following task are, as I will argue shortly, in effective apposition to the whole main clause. In fact, the whole last sentence is a series of increasingly expansive appositional fulfillments of It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced . Since that from these honored dead we take increased devotion is so obviously in general apposition to the clauses that precede it, it is easy to assume—or assume one has assumed—that the that clause is in apposition to task —the one element in the preceding clause to which it could be in syntactic as well as effective apposition.

If that from these honored dead we take increased devotion is not appositive to task, how does the that of that from these honored dead relate to, connect syntactically with, It is rather for us to be here dedicated ? An answer is obvious: the that of that from these honored dead is understood as "so that."

I will come back to "so that" in a moment. First I want to say that I think that what is signaled syntactically—"so that"—and what we understand from the construction are different. I suspect that, regardless of syntax, a listener or reader apprehends the substance of the sentence as if it read, "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—it is for us to take, from these honored dead, increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—it is for us highly to resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain...." In my awkward reconstruction of the sentence, the second and third clauses of the original (that . . .we take and that we resolve ) become infinitive phrases parallel with to be here dedicated . If I am right in saying that the recast sentence only provides syntactical cause for the general effect of the original, then why and how does the original smoothly achieve an effective logical relationship demonstrably denied by its syntax?

Complexly and multifariously.

First of all, again regardless of syntax, the substantive words in

that from these honored dead we take increased devotion suggest, and are ideally suited for, an appositive restatement of It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us: take . . .devotion echoes be here dedicated ideationally; dead echoes dedicated phonetically; that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion restates the great task remaining before us (as that phrase had previously restated the unfinished work in the preceding sentence). Moreover and simultaneously, the propriety of the second clause, the one beginning that from these honored dead, is vouched for by its mention of the honored dead who gave the last full measure of devotion —a topic missing from the first clause but prominent in the preceding sentence, the sentence to which that first clause is itself so pointedly appositive; the second clause not only echoes the substance of the first but completes that clause's apposition to the last part of It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced . Furthermore—and by still another logic—the second clause of the last sentence seems not only an alternate way of saying what the first does but also a better way, a stronger way; the third clause is stronger still: the three clauses build in intensity from the unmodified verb in clause I (be here dedicated ) to the comparative proposition of clause 2 (take increased devotion ) to the effective superlative of clause 3 (highly resolve ).

I said that the reason the second clause overrides its syntax and is understood as appositive to the first is "first of all" the likenesses between the substantive words of the two. In saying so, I meant that the substantive diction is first in importance. What is literally first of all in relating the two clauses is that in that from these honored dead . How—at the moment it is heard or read—does the that of that from these honored dead function? As I implied earlier, I think that, at the moment it is heard or read, it is understood as a conjunction meaning "so that." Lincoln has twice said what "it is for us" to do; that seems to introduce a reason why we should do it. But to dedicate oneself to a task for the purpose of taking increased devotion to that task would be nonsensical.

However, the phrase from these honored dead intervenes between the briefly probable "so that" reading of that and we take increased devotion, the subject and verb of the clause. The variously pertinent intervening phrase gives the nonsyntactical logics of diction and sound time enough to assert themselves and lets us forget the logic of the syntax. By the time a listener or reader gets to devotion, to the word by which the substantive unreason of the apparent "so that" construction is revealed, the ideational parallelism and phonetic likeness between the two clauses has emerged, and one understands a connection between the clauses other than the one the syntax presents. If I am right about the way the sentence works, then the temporarily evident "so that" construction is a momentarily necessary and only momentarily available syntactical bridge that sustains the mind until it is ready to progress without the syntactical support we expect—support that here collapses without our noticing at all.

The that introducing the third clause of the last sentence (that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ...) is a slightly different matter. It is syntactically free-floating almost as soon as it is heard. A listener's mind can momentarily respond to another gesture toward a "so that" construction, but the blurring process by which we lost consciousness of the promised "so that" construction in the preceding clause presumably diminishes our expectations of a "so that" here. Moreover, even if the order of the second and third clauses were reversed and a "dedicated so that" construction were positionally possible, the absence of an intervening phrase like from these honored dead between that and the subject and verb would make the nonsensical redundancy of the "so that" reading immediately and disturbingly evident: "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us so that we here highly resolve ..." would be a proposition so immediately improbable that the mind would almost surely balk long before the sustaining logics of dictional and ideational parallelism could substitute for syntactic logic. As the clauses do stand, however, the fact that

the third clause is not even momentarily anchored to the main clause is no more evident than the more complexly blurred syntactic incompatibility of the main clause and the second. The third clause is appositive in every way to the second—or rather, to the second as it turns out to be after we have forgotten about the "dedicated so that" syntax on which we were carried into it. The third clause matches the second, and, if we do not blink at the relationship of the second to the first, we will surely not pause to worry about the relation of the third to the first.

Above all, the sentence's syntactical failure to accommodate that we here highly resolve goes unnoticed because it begins with that; the semantic gesture the word makes is logically impertinent to the sentence, but its sound—as sound—is ultrapertinent. As the first of the six thats in the sentence—the that of that from these honored dead —is the source of the difficulty I am demonstrating, the other five help to neutralize it—to render it only a hypothetical difficulty, one that requires demonstration if it is to be observed at all. In particular, the adjectival that of that cause vouches for the wholeness, the coherence, of the sentence while also and simultaneously acting—like any antistasis (any repetition of a word in a different sense)—to question the very continuity it asserts.

I have already talked about the multiple actions of the two final thats in the Gettysburg Address. Here it is worth also noticing that they have a complex effect comparable to the simpler one I have just described in discussing that cause: in incorporating the idea of "so that," they echo the momentarily signaled "so that" which turned out to be substantively inappropriate and had to be discarded in the course of listening to It is rather for us to be here dedicated . . .that... we take increased devotion.

I earlier recast the final sentence of the Gettysburg Address in a way that made its subordinate clauses syntactically pertinent to its first clause. That reconstruction was accurate enough, I think, as a paraphrase of what listeners or readers understand, but the reconstruction is obviously not accurate as a chart of the physics

by which they understand it. I suspect that the clause beginning that we here highly resolve enters the mind as if the word that were not there at all, as if the word that had no specific logical conjunctive power at all, as if the clause were independent, were the speech-act of resolution previously recommended: "We here highly resolve...." At the same time, the word that is obviously present, heard, and active. In fact, since that we . . .resolve echoes "Resolved that ..."—a standard phrase by which resolutions are proposed—the presence of the word that is probably vital to the process by which this syntactically subordinate clause can register as an independent act of resolving. More important, the presence of the word that in that we here highly resolve is inevitably an assertion of formal and logical continuity. It asserts continuity both phonetically and as a false syntactic gesture of logical subordination to the first clause.

In short, the identity of the that we . . .resolve clause is multiple. As one hears it, one hears it in several independently signaled, syntactically incompatible, but nonetheless coexistent, relationships to the clauses it follows: (1) the that we . . .resolve clause repeats the form of the clause it immediately follows (the that from these honored dead clause), and the substance (a) of that clause, (b) of the first clause of this final sentence, and (c) of the whole of the sentence that precedes this one; (2) it is a syntactically subordinate continuation of the syntax begun in clause I; (3) it is effectively a syntactically independent unit—the promised act of resolution. The act of understanding the clause is paradoxical (the clause is not paradoxical, but the act of understanding it is). One's mind easily and casually masters more than common sense says it is possible for a mind to master or the clause contain. The act of comprehending the clause and apprehending its simple, clear sense is a metaphysical act—easy, casual, but beyond the apparent limits of our faculties.

That mental act is all the more satisfying for not only effectively apprehending a single syntactical gesture—one syntactical identity—as two that are mutually exclusive, but also apprehending other temporary identities that turn out to be syntac-

tically incompatible with their contexts and substantively incompatible as well. For example, the tentatively signaled and instantly rejected "so that" construction momentarily inherent in they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve  . . .can add a shadowy, syntactically illicit suggestion of "they gave the last full measure of devotion so that we would highly resolve"—an assertion never made, never heard, and unjustified by the probabilities of military motives, but one that pertains to and supports Lincoln's implied assertion that the survivors owe it to the dead to continue the fight for which they died.

Such signs of shadow dimensions are valuable because they increase the trueness of the literary object that contains them. They add to the speech's logically, syntactically, and phonetically achieved impression that its topics all pertain necessarily—naturally—to each other (the impression we testify to when we say that a work of art is an organic whole). Such a hint of extra dimension is also valuable as one of many token inclusions of potential considerations, assertions, and grammatical constructions that, as a purposeful and successful artifice, the speech excludes. By letting our minds touch momentarily on irrelevancies—irrelevancies at once defined as such by a logic and syntax that create a context that exists only to exclude them and evoked by that same logic and syntax—the Gettysburg Address gives the impression that—even though it is obviously a special arrangement of specially selected truths—it is a comprehensive embodiment of all truths that could impinge on its chosen territory. The speech goes beyond the limits of its own insistent and effective precision. It lets us have our cake and eat it too. By virtue of the simultaneously efficient and inefficient—precise and imprecise—operations of tools by which our experience is mediated, the Gettysburg Address makes us seem temporarily to be as we would be if we could master un mediated experience.

No successfully assimilated irrelevancy is quite so valuable and satisfying as one that dimly or momentarily suggests a line of thought that, if it emerged fully in an audience's consciousness, would undercut the assertions among which it lurks. The mere

ridiculousness of the unsaid shadow sentence implying that soldiers might die for the specific purpose of evoking a resolution that they did not die in vain has that kind of value. And so has fathers brought forth . The literal sense of that phrase is comprehended within the assertion and within the experience of hearing it or reading it, but is not part of what one apprehends from it. The ridiculous metaphor is really only an exaggerated version of any metaphor, and its value is of the same kind, but greater—greater because the assertion of oneness among distinctly separate entities is made without purposeful recourse to the link of likeness—a link that admits and asserts (as links in real steel chains do) that the unity it makes exists only by virtue of that single connection—admits and asserts that the unit is not a unit but a federation of otherwise and essentially separate elements. Where a simile or a logically acceptable metaphor connects things by virtue of a likeness between them, fathers brought forth and (in a more complicated way) the muddle of thats at the end of the speech make an amalgam, a substance more urgently it self than its parts are them selves.

I submit that the sublime, traditionally contrasted with the ridiculous, gets its sublimity by including the ridiculous—that the ridiculous is of the essence of the sublime here and everywhere else where sublimity is perceived.

In talking about assertions and implications that are present and available to the eye and ear but to which the consciousness of an auditor or reader is insensible, and in talking about assertions and implications that are senseless (are ridiculous) but are apprehended as sensible and straightforward, I am talking about nonsense. That is not necessarily the same as talking nonsense, but it is not easy to make and keep the distinction evident. I have repeatedly insisted that Lincoln's failures of precision are valuable only because they increase the scope of an obviously orderly, rational, purposeful, exposition—and only because they are not consciously noticed. However, it takes so much time and energy to demonstrate the presence of nonsense in a straightforwardly sensible work that students are liable—nay, eager—to think that

in asserting the preciousness of nonsense in things that have made simple sense, do make simple sense, and will continue to make simple sense, one is asserting the preciousness of nonsense generally, asserting its general superiority to sense, and encouraging them to believe that what was clear before is unclear now and is therefore better than things that are clear.

Students are conditioned by the classroom norms they have known since grammar school. For instance, when teachers deal with stylistic elements, they usually point only to things unusual in ordinary speech. One can insist endlessly that a literary effect need not be unique, or even unusual, to be present in—and contribute to the unusual goodness of—an unusually good work; and one can insist: endlessly that what matters is the density, variety, and inconspicuousness of elements that enrich a work with ideational static rather than the nature or the presence of any particular element; and students will still say that one's argument leads to the conclusion that any sentence that uses the word that twice and in two different senses is a masterpiece, or dismiss commentary on elements like Lincoln's that that nation by saying that that sort of thing happens even in their own sentences. Moreover, since so much of classroom literary analysis has so long seemed accusatory—a process in which the student is demonstrated to have missed a thousand ships—students either insist that analysis of the unobserved in literature is invalid because "I didn't see any of that" or insist on filling with shame because "I didn't see any of that." Academic critics are by tradition explicators, and their audiences therefore assume that anything said to be true of a work is presented as something readers should notice and should take meaning from.

The heart of this whole problem is the special quality of language that distinguishes it from all the other materials in which artists work. The problem does not, for example, exist at all in considerations of the humblest and most sophisticated of the arts, interior decoration. Language, however, exists to convey ideational substance (that is, the word dog seems to have been brought into existence only to enable abstract reference to the

animal it labels). Common sense says therefore that what is valued in things made of words must be the ideational substance its audience takes away from it. We all know that common sense is wrong. However, we cannot act decisively on that knowledge because common sense is not altogether wrong. King Lear is better than "Jack and Jill" and is probably so not only because of its physical size but because its ideational matter matters to us. Still, the currency and obvious justice of the stock notion that works lose something in translation testify that not all value in literature resides in the substance one takes away with one when one finishes reading. Nonetheless, the obvious purpose and always primary function of language leaves us all with an all but instinctive fear that a critic who talks about the nonsensical elements in literature must be talking nonsense, must be tempting us to take his observations about a work for that work as previously observed. Students are therefore relieved and teachers pleased whenever substantively incidental elements like alliteration or rhythm are imitative of, or at least auxiliary to, the substance discussed or asserted. It is no accident that a whole generation of American schoolchildren was taught Masefield's "Sea Fever," by which they got the comforting notion that the purpose of rhythm in verse is to induce sea sickness in stay-at-homes.

I must admit that I am myself comforted by an irrelevant awareness that the various meanings of the sound for have a special aptness to Lincoln's topics and assertions; the sound pertains to the Fourth of July, birth (bringing forth), purpose, sacrifice, and duty. I find similarly dubious encouragement in the pertihence of the literary physics of the Gettysburg Address to the ideas of e pluribus unum, civil war, and forming a "more perfect union."^[22]

[22] The essentially biographical incidentals presented in notes 10 and 12 are similarly irrelevant to the validity of what I say about the Gettysburg Address. However, I find the existence of other examples of Lincolnian perversity reassuring. I admit also to taking illicit, logically contemptible, but nonetheless real comfort from Lincoln's concern for the ideational small change with which I am concerning myself. The comfort is vaguely akin to the comfort collectors of modern art in the 1950s got from being able to assure their bemused acquaintances that Jackson Pollock was, and could if he wished again be, an enormously able draftsman.

It is hard to break habits that have become nearly instinctual. Take, for another example, the notion that literary analysis is always intended to make a work work better, that the critic's purpose is always to heighten his reader's experience of the work, and that a critic's function is thus comparable to that of the work he or she describes. Once again the Gettysburg Address is ideally suited to my purposes. No one in this culture can be insensible to the charm of a spurious irony that sparkles like a zircon in any analysis of the Gettysburg Address: my analysis is several dozen times longer than the work analyzed. We can perfectly understand why it takes an anatomist a volume to explain what the muscles of a hand do when it picks up a pen; we do not suspect the anatomist of thinking that his analysis improves or could improve the action he describes. Such is not the case with literary critics, but it should be.

Leonardo da Vinci dissected cadavers in an ultimately futile search for the seat of the human soul. I suspect that the soul of great literature may be found by examining what one of my students has, with merciless precision, called "literary chickenshit." The search may be as futile as Leonardo's, and its laboratory reports will sadly lack charm and belletristic grace, but the enterprise will be nonsensical only if it is assumed that the purpose of the dissection is to increase the vitality of the objects studied. If we as academic critics can resign ourselves to answering academic questions, and if we can once get shut of the general assumption that our purpose is inevitably and exclusively to explicate and to supplement, then we will no longer be slandered from our different and humbler duty, but rather dare to do our duty as we would be wise to understand it.