Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

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СКАЧАТЬ deliberate choice, since it ultimately determines both action and speaking. In the Nicomachean EthicsAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE), AristotleAristotle asserts that different kinds of persons aim at different ends (NE 3.2 111b5). Similarly, the kind of things one chooses to say, and the way one chooses to say them, suggest something about the kind of person one is (Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 3.16.8)—and this explains ethosethos’s potential for abuse, that is, the politician’s deception: using words to obscure moral characterethoscharacter. In Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’: An Art of Character, Eugene GarverGarver, Eugene argues that ethosethos is the most important of the three “means of persuasion” (pisteis: logos, ēthos, pathospistis, pisteislogos, ēthos, pathos) because in AristotleAristotle’s hands it transforms rhetoric from an instrumental activity, a technēcrafttechnē, into a civic activity, a function of the virtuevirtue of citizencommonwealthcitizens (GarverGarver, Eugene 6-8). In practical terms, it makes a speaker appear worthy of credence to an audience (Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 1.2.4). But AristotleAristotle cautions that ethosethos is not the reputation a speaker already has. Rather, it is the kind of person that one appears to be in the act of speaking (Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 1.2.4).

      In Malherbe’s case, the first ode “À la Reine sur sa bienvenue en France” (1600; 1601) praises Marie de Médicis, both her great virtuevirtues and the critical role that she will play in the new regime. The praise of Henri IV and the indirect plea to him in the ode’s last section make it clear that the ode is addressed to both monarchs. The second ode “Prière pour le Roi allant en Limousin” (1605; 1607) is trying to please and to move Henri in particular. In each ode, success means that the royal patron admires or approves of the ode as appropriate to himself (or herself) in some way. Ethosethos, or characterethoscharacter, is the artistic means to that end. It gives the speaker something to aim at. It determines how the speaker of the ode portrays the subject of praise, shaping the choice of argument and style. It influences, for instance, whether he chooses arguments that stress legitimacy by divine right or emphasizes personal merit due to virtuevirtue, and it selects what sorts of tropes and figures he uses to represent royal majesty—hyperbole, for example, being appropriate to great virtuevirtue as well as to passionate advocacy. The act of presenting such arguments and values is meant to reflect the speaker’s own characterethoscharacter, lending credibility and sincerity to the ode’s praise and political advocacy. There is room for the speaker to assert his individuality, and this emerges from particular, even singular choices. But an ethosethos cannot be totally idiosyncratic. It must encompass the monarch’s two bodies, and it must reflect the values and the ideals which the monarch has absorbed from his or her social group.

      Addressing a monarch is not like addressing a private person. A monarch has a “mystical bodymystical body (of the king)”—a political abstraction informed by theology—and this notion is broad and flexible enough to include the commonwealthcommonwealth, the state apparatus, the territorial kingdom, and the patrienationla patrie [nationnation] (KantorowiczKantorowicz, Ernst H. 208, 211, 232, 236, 247). Addressing a king in writing is the equivalent of what we would call an open letter, so that one was addressing at the very least the entire courtcourt (royal) and royal bureaucracy, and potentially all members of the body politicbody politic. If characterethoscharacter, or ethosethos, is not an idiosyncratic affair, it is certainly a type, the fusion of personality with social function. To cite Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: “The requirements of a characterethoscharacter are imposed from the outside, from the way in which others regard and use characterethoscharacters to understand and evaluate themselves. [ ] A characterethoscharacter is an object of regard by the members of the culture generally or by some significant segment of them. He furnishes them with a cultural and moral ideal. Hence the demand is that, in this type of case, role and personality be fused. Social type and psychological type are required to coincide. The characterethoscharacter morally legitimates a mode of social existence” (MacIntyre 29, his italics). Such observations hold true a fortiori in the case of a monarch. Ethosethos, in the moral connotation of the term, thus refers to a social type, and more narrowly, to the moral constitution of a particular individual. It signifies in fact that zone where type and individual mingle. Consequently, the royal patron targeted in Malherbe’s odes, while particular, even a particular (indeed the controlling particular), is neither a unity nor a private entity, but rather individual and collective, personal and public. A reader should therefore expect the royal patron’s characterethoscharacter to shape the composition of Malherbe’s encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry odes in both ways: the ode represents something particular about the monarch, for instance, personal attributes for which he or she is known or would like to be known, but such a representation is already shaped by the collective, embodying the ideals of a caste—and of a nationnation.

      The final caveat is that the patron-client relation between monarch and poet may be represented as personal, even exclusive, but also, and on the contrary, as exemplary, illustrating the proper relationship of monarch and subject. Malherbe’s eloquenceeloquence may distinguish him from other subjects and uniquely qualify him to praise the monarch, but the argument and style of any one of his odes, because they are adapted to the monarch’s characterethoscharacter, model the proper thoughts and feelings which they seek to produce in the reading subject. Thus an ode aimed at the monarch, and modeled on him, at the same time targets the monarch’s subjects. This is what I mean when I claim that the actual persons being addressed in Malherbe’s royal odes go beyond the individual monarch. Every ode’s argument and style are calculated to affect the reader cognitively and emotionemotionally. This multi-directional relationship—monarch and poet, poet and reader, reader and monarch—requires a rhetorical tool broad and flexible enough to establish and to encompass these binaries. Ethosethos is such a tool, always already collective, guiding the choice of argument and style, which are calculated to reflect the values and ideals of an individual and/or a social group. For this reason, small differences in diction, exampleexamples, imagery, and intertexual sources from one ode to the next point to the composite nature of Malherbe’s audience: Catholics and ProtestantProtestants, nobles and commoners, great nobles and governors etc. However, the long-standing convention of decorum—where the orator so reliably and completely adapts himself and his discourse to the ideals and beliefs of the audience, that one may infer the characterethoscharacter of the audience from the arguments and style of the speech3—should not blind the reader to the creative possibility of Malherbe constructing, from the multi-directional relations of ethosethos, a whole greater than its parts. Malherbe’s principal task is to craft an ethosethos capacious enough to encompass diverse constituencies and inspiring enough to unify them in an imagined community. Put another way, the rhetorical ethosethos of the royal odes constructs a civic relation between monarch and subject, but also between poet and reader.

      Since the monarch is the unifying focus of the various constituencies addressed in the odes, Malherbe would have wanted to choose an ethosethos appropriate to Henri IV which at the same time had broad appeal. The aristocratic ideal for the generation of nobles that had lived, fought, and survived the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion was the Aristotelian megalopsychosmagnanimitymegalopsychos, or great soulmagnanimitygreat soul, and, in Henri’s particular case, such an ethosethos happened to be a fitting characterization. Most French subjects, including leading great nobles, expressed genuine admiration for his valor. Even enemies and critics had to admit that the scrappy king of Navarre had proven himself time and again in key military conflicts. Not only was he recognized as a master tactician of cavalry, but like CaesarCaesar and AlexanderAlexander (the Great), the greatest heroes of antiquity, Henri often fought alongside his men. Once during the siege of Amiens (1597), from which the Spanish had sallied to disable French artillery, Henri’s infantry was in danger of being routed. “Henri, alerted to the danger, dismounted, seized a pike, and charged forward to rally the troops” (Pitts 202). Almost fifty years before the duke of Enghien, the future Grand CondéGrand Condé (also duke of Enghien), distinguished himself at Rocroi (1643), unleashing a torrent of hyperbolic praise comparing the young noble to AlexanderAlexander (the Great) (Bannister, Condé 17), Henri IV incarnated the ideal of the classical hero. In the words of Pierre de L’Étoile, he was “king, captain, and soldier all together” (ctd. in Pitts 200).

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