RHETORIC AND ENGLISH COMPOSITION.

CHAPTER I.

THE ART OF RHETORIC.-HOW RHETORIC MAY BE STUDIED.— STANDARDS AND AUTHORITIES.

1. The Art of Rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of telling some one else by words precisely what you mean to say. A definition in such colloquial language may seem so obvious as to be almost unnecessary, but let us be sure that we understand it in its full force.

First. Why do we say "telling some one else by words"? Because, if you stop to think of it, you will see that there are a number of other ways besides language by which people communicate with one another. They may communicate ideas or emotions by music, for instance, or by painting, or by sculpture, or, to a certain extent, by architecture. The painter uses as his medium color; the sculptor, stone; the musician, sound; the architect, various solid materials. The laws or principles that the painter must follow, then, are those which have to do with colors, and which depend on their chemical properties, on optics, on all possible relations, in

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short, between the eye of the man who sees and the hand of the man who paints. So, too, the fundamental principles of the sculptor's art depend in the last resort upon the nature and structure of stone and such solid materials as he uses. The art of the painter or the sculptor thus differs from ours in that he uses colors or solid materials as a medium of expression, whereas we use words. Our art, then, Rhetoric, has little or nothing to do with other sorts of expression. It is plainly and simply the art of expressing thought or feeling by words.

But there is another part of the definition we should thoroughly understand. Rhetoric is the art of saying by words just what you mean. Why the art? Why not the science? Because between an art and a science there lies a great gulf. A science is something you know or understand without necessarily practising it. An art is something which you do, which you practise. History, for instance, is an important science, the aim of which is the understanding and appreciation of past events; but, strictly speaking, history, except for its reflex action on character, is mere dead knowledge. Any branch of engineering, on the other hand, is an art, which you first learn, then practise. Now Rhetoric is essentially an art. In order to write well you must, of course, govern yourself, consciously or unconsciously, by certain principles, but the knowledge of these principles is not the main thing. The essential part of Rhetoric is that you should act, that you should practise the art you are learning.

Our first point, then, is that we are dealing with expression by words, not by any other means,-a caution which, though for you not perhaps absolutely necessary, will serve to the attentive student as a discrimination of some importance. Our second point is that Rhetoric is an art, not a science.1

Not only, too, is Rhetoric an art of expression, but the art of expression by means of words; for, summing up what experience has taught us, it lays down for us rules of action which no writer, old or young, can with safety neglect, not because they are infallible or invariable, but because, as a famous writer on the subject has said, they "are drawn from the invariable practice of all who succeed in attaining their proposed object." 2 Rhetoric thus appears to us in its true light, not, like alchemy or astrology, as a sort of magic by the aid of whose formulas we may win the fame to which great writers attain even in our own times, but as a humble digest, based almost exclusively on experience, containing such facts as will guide us all in one of the chief functions of our lives, that of making what we write understood and appreciated. As such it is worth your earnest attention. Growth in power and grace of expression goes hand in hand with growth in real knowledge

1 Sculpture, music, painting, and architecture are frequently called Fine Arts, because they usually aim not only to express thought or emotion, but to produce on the ear or the eye an effect which may be roughly called beautiful. Rhetoric, therefore, may be called a fine art in so far as beauty is its object, though that is obviously not always the case. 2 Whateley, "Elements of Rhetoric" (Oxford, 1828), p. 21.

and in self-control. The rules which Rhetoric lays down you will no doubt discover from your own experience, in proportion as you have opportunities for writing and for being brought face to face with the impressions your writing makes on the audience for which it was intended. But all men are wiser than any one man, and from the experience the world has gained about the art of writing, you will do well to swell your own private store.

2. How Rhetoric may be Studied. From the time of Aristotle to the present day there have been three chief methods applied to the study of Rhetoric. The first, the highly philosophic method of Aristotle, who startles us by the plain good sense with which more than two thousand years ago he classified and formulated much that until our own days no one else could have treated in so deeply philosophical a spirit, starts out by defining Rhetoric "as a faculty of discovering all the possible means of persuasion in any subject." These means of persuasion Aristotle calls "proofs," which, he says, "are either artistic or inartistic. By 'inartistic proofs' I mean all such as are not provided by our own skill, but existed before and independently, e.g. witnesses, tortures, contracts, and the like; by 'artistic,' such as admit of being constructed systematically and by our own skill; in fine, the former we have only to apply and the latter we have to invent. The proofs provided through the instrumentality of the speech are of three kinds, con

sisting either in the moral character of the speaker or in the production of a certain disposition in the audience or in the speech itself by means of real or apparent demonstration. The instrument of proof is the moral character, when the delivery of the speech is such as to produce an impression of the speaker's credibility; for we yield a more complete and ready credence to persons of high character not only ordinarily and in a general way, but in such matters as do not admit of absolute certainty but necessarily leave room for difference of opinion, without any qualification whatever. (It is requisite, however, that this result should itself be attained by means of the speech and not of any antecedent conception of the speaker's character.) For so far from following the example of some authors of rhetorical handbooks, who in their 'art' of Rhetoric regard the high character of the speaker as not being itself in any sense contributory to his persuasiveness, we may practically lay it down as a general rule that there is no proof so effective as that of the character. Secondly, proof may be conveyed through the audience, when it is worked up by the speech to an emotional state. For there is a wide difference in our manner of pronouncing decisions, according as we feel pleasure or pain, affection or hatred; and indeed the power of working upon the emotions is, as we assert, the one end or object to which our present professors of the rhetorical art endeavor to direct their studies. Lastly, the instru