CLASSICAL RHETORIC - Swarthmore Moodle

CLASSICAL RHETORIC

IN EN]GLISH POETRY

Brian Vickers

With a New Preface and

Annotated Bibliography

"Brian Vickers has an enviable rick of makinghis subject fascinating and readable. The eager-ness and conviction of his style has been a featureaf all his books and this one does not fall short in.1-i. -^.*nnç ì| f/ri¡t¡¡ f-^^}r-^-o

ibutederel

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CHAPTER ONE

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II

A Concise History of

Rhetoric

RHeronlc is'the art of speaking well', the art of effectivecommunication, in speech or writing. It is not simply, in thewords of one definition, 'the an of persuasion', for that wouldlimit it to a narrowly ergumentative or forensic capacicy. But itbecame much more than an 'art' or a school subject. In the wordsof that great scholar E. R. Curtius,

Rhercric signifies 'the craft of speech'; hence, according to its basic meaning,

it teaches how to construct a discourse artistically. In the course of time thisseminal idea became a science, en art, an ideal of life, and indeed a pillar ofantique culture. (Curtius, 64)

If it shaped the intellectual life of Greece and Rome for ninecenturies, it continued to dominate education and literature inthe Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, and indeed exerted itsshaping force into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Overtwo thousand years of 'Western culture were influencedby it, and

although it evolved new forms and techniques according to thesocial and literary needs of the time, its basic methods are thesame from one end of this time-scale to the other. Because itquickly became the key subject in education, the literary teachingwhich rhetoric fostered - a teaching as to literary structure,decorum of language and subject, the expressive resources ofsryle - remained essentially the sarne from Ovid to Shakespearc,from Juvenal to Dryden, from St Augustine to Dr Johnson. Allthese writers and all their contemporaries believed that rhetoricwas tlte important discipline for a writer; all would have knownhow to treat a theme, how to divide up the perts of a speech,

16 Classical Rhetoric ín English Poetry

what to do with rhetorical figures such as isocolon, polyptoton,

paronoffiasia, gradatio, and their schooling was thet of Virgil, Dante,Milton; Rabelais, Montaigne, Bacon; Marlowe, Ben ]onson,Racine; Petrarch, Du Bellay, Pope. Even Hobbes recorded that hehad enjoyed his education in rhetoric, and elsewhere we have

other tangible evidence of great writers' interest in the subject.In the Bibliothèque Nationale there is a manuscript in Racine'shand containing numerous extracts from the greatest of rhetoric-books, Quintilian's Institutes oJ Orøtory, presumably compiledwhen he was at the school of Port-Royal, where he had a thoroughgrounding in rhetoric (France, )7); Ben Jonson recommended

Drummond to read Quintilian 'who' he said 'would tell me thefaults of my verses as if he had lived with me' (Works, Ltlz),The very condensed survey that follows will try 6 explain whererhetoric came from, how it became linked with education, andwill show something of rhetoric's two-way traffic with literature.

GREECE

Rhetoric existed in literature long before it was codified into anart (indeed several theorists argued that rhetoric only systematizes

what have been intuitively recognized as effective ways of speakingand writing). The first great examples of rhetoric are to be foundin the oral epics of Homer: 'almost half of the ll¡ad and morethan two-thirds of the Odyssry are devoted to speeches by thecharacters' (Curtius, 6+), and the types of structure and argumentshown there have been well analysed by George Kennedy. Homerwas recognized by antiquity as 'the father of rhetoríc' , not onlyin the conduct and powerful effects of these speeches (Quintiliansaid of them that they 'display all the rules of art'), but in suchexplicit references þ the force of words as that in book x of thelliad, where Phoinix tells Achilles how he was sent to him byPeleus when Achilles was still only

a mere child, who knew nothing yet of the joining of battlenor of debate where men are made pre-eminent. Therefore

loton,

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A Concise History oJ Rbetoric t7

he sent me along witfi you to teach you of all these metters,

to make you a speaker of words end one who accomplished in action.

(rx.44o4)

or, better still, the way Odysseus rebukes Euryalus for havingmocked his unwillingness to join in the Phaiakian games:

Friend, that was not well spoken; you seem like one who isreckless.

So it is that the gods do not bestow graces in all ways

on men, neither in stature nor yet in brains or eloquence;

for there is a certain kind of man, less noted for beauty,

but the god puts comeliness on his words, and they who

look toward himare filled with joy at the sight, and he speaks to them

without faltering in winning modesty, and shines among

those who are gathered,

and people look on him as on a god when he walks in the city.(Oþsscy, vm,r66-73)

This is the first descripdon of the power of eloquence in civil life,and it is an aft of more than poetic justice that immediately afær

these words Odysseus should take up a discus 'more ponderous

than those already used by the Phaiakian throwers' and hurl itfar beyond their marks. Bacon might almost have been thinkingof this passage when he wrote that 'it is eloquence that prevailethin an active Life' (Work, ut,4og), F:lomer's Presdge as a rhetorician

persisted well into the eighteenth centuny, indeed Pope was so

moved by the excellence of the speeches in the iliad rhet in the

index to his o\4/n trânslation he listed them under their rhetoricalcategories: 'the Exhortatory ú Deliberative, the VituperatiYe,the Narrative, the Pathetic, and the Sarcastic'(lack, 88).

The connection between F{omer and the next stage in the use

of rhetoric strengthens the argument that in rhetoric Art merely

imitates Nature, for again the oral nature of Greek culture is in=

volved. 'Both the mechanics of ancient civilization and itsprimary expression remained oral.' In politics all business was

conducted by debate, at whatever level of importance; in law

complaints were brought before magistrates verbally' and 'litigates

pleaded their own cases in public before a iury of citizens';

r 8 Classicøl Rltetoric in Englisb Poetry

advocates and counsels were hardly known (only later did 'logo-

graphers', professional writers of legal speeches, appear), and

'Greek law requircd every citizen to speak in his own behalf inprosecution or defense', thus every Athenian citizen had to be an

effective public speaker (Kennedy, {, 28, 57), As Plato makes

Gorgias say in the dialogue of that name,

[rhetoric] is in very truth the greatest boon, for it brings freedom to mankind

in general and to each man dominion over others in his own country. . . . Imean the power to convince by your words the judges in court, the senators inCouncil, the people in the Assembly, or in any other gathering of a citízenbody. (Gorgias, 452 d-e; tr. 'W. D. W'oodhead)

It was indeed as a direct consequence of its practical utiliry thatrhetoric first became set down as an art. The traditional account

of the history of rhetoric (certified by Aristotle) places its emer-

gence in the Greek towns of Sicily, where 'aftet the expulsion ofthe tyrents of the Theron dynasty at Agrigentum (47r n.c.), and

those of the Flieron dynasry at Syracuse(4$ B.c.) . . . the ensuing

annulment of the confiscations which they had decreed' gave rise

to widespread litigations to establish ownership of properry.This was a situation in which rhetoric was naturully gasped as

the most potent tool, and 'the first teachers of rhetoric - Corax

and his pupil Tisias - appeared in fact in Syracuse'(Ma:rou, 5J).Litde is known about Corax and T,isias beyond their supposed

founding of judicial or:itory (Cicero in the Brutus (+ø Ð says thatthey compiled a handbook which taught how to speak in these

law cases), and they arc in any case overshadowed by the appear-

ance of the first great rhetorician, Gorgias.

As we have seen, Gorgias did not invent rhetoric (in additionto its presence in Homer, Kennedy showed (+l) that elements

of rhetorical processes are to be found in other earlier literature,notably in Herodotus and Aeschylus), but he was the first to make

it work in public affairs. FIe came from Leontini in Sicily, andin 4q s.c. led an embassy of the Leontines to Athens, where hisoratory made a great impression, fame increasing his influence as a

rhetorician throughout Greece. His teaching methods made muchuse of the imitation of model speeches, and in terms of content or

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A Concise History oJ Rhetoric tg

philosophical method he belongs with the Sophists (originally:teachers who gave lessons for money in rhetoric, politics and

methematics) and with that dangerous moral flexibiliry whichSocrates and Plato later attacked. Gorgias apparendy developed

the emotional and psychological functions of oratory, but he

became most celebrated through his own style and throughappropriating for prose certain rhetorical figures which had

earlier been the province of poeffy : antithesis, isocolon and parison,

homoíoteleuroø (these figures will be explained and illusuated inChapter Three). These so-called 'Gorgianic figures' remain

among the basic rhetorical devices for as long as rhetoric has an

influence, and the effect of his innovations on eloquence and

especially on prose is enormous - indeed Curtius says bluntly that'Without a knowledge of its history, antique literature is incom-prehensible' (65). Gorgias is also significant as being the first of agreat line of orators. The status of the orator as a culture-hero inclassical and Renaissance times was soon assured by the practicalsuccess and political influence of the Attic orators, who includethe brilliant but almost diametrically opposed talents of Isocrates

and Demosrhenes (Kennedy, rz5-z6l i Marroú, 79-84).The success of rhetoric both as a political and judicial tool and

as a model for literury sryle continued to grow, but the philo-sophical implications of its connection with the Sophists were

acidly exposed by Plato in the Gorgias, Of the Sophists, Protagoras

is said to have been the first to teach that it is possible to argue

for or against any proposition whatsoever (Manou, 5I) and made a

notorious claim that he could 'make the worse cause appear thebetter'. His method of dialectic in fact reduced itself to a science

known as eristics, a kind of debating for victory: no matter how

the argument went or what points you had to make or concede,

to win was everything. It was, however, rather more thanrhetorical opportunism, for some of the Sophists seriously

believed that truth was relative, and it has been maintained thatGorgias' love of antithesis is not merely a stylistic habit, but partof a deep-rooted desire to see both sides of an issue (Kennedy,

+z-6Ð - a connection between sryle and thought also found inBrecht. Nevertheless both charges of opportunism and relativism

zo Classical Rbetoric in English Poetry

were maintained by Plato, who of all the followers of Socrates

applied his teaching that truth was absolute and knowable withmost antipathy to rhetoric (Kennedy, r4),In the first part of thisdialogue Socrates engages Gorgias in argument and easily shows

that rhetoric has no subject-matter of its own, is concerned withpersuasion not knowledge, is not activated solely by

^ moral

concern, and can therefore be abused to the service of evil.Socrates pushes home his arguments by analogy with damagingparallels. Rhetoric is equated with flattery, with cooking, andwith cosmetics, all of which are described as mere 'routines' (he

denies them even the stetus of 'arts') designed to give the body

gratification and pleasure in a superficial and spurious way

(462c-465e). The animus which Plato shows here is perhapsexcessive, leading him rc give the defenders of oratory very weak

arguments, but his main objection - the moral relativism of rhemric

- is obviousþ a damaging one. Plato himself tried to answer it at the

end of this dialogue and later in the Phaedrus by proposing a truly'philosophical' function for rhetoric, which would be subservient tothe philosopher's search for the truth. Here, though, Plato takes an

extreme position regarding the relationship berween subject-matter

and form: a speech should be 'about' something, it must have a topic,and this topic must be philosophically important; lf k has neither ofthese requirements it is a debased, specious exercise (Kennedy, tS-r7,74n).

This is a vision of human communication reduced solely to theconcerns of Plato's type of philosopher, and if it had beenfollowed out would have virtually annihilated rhetoric, andcercainly its connection with literature. But happily for those whomight have been troubled by its implications, Aristotle in hisRhetoric exposed the weaknesses in Plato's argumenr. In theopening pages of this work Aristotle concisely sets out rhe validityof rhetoric as 'the counterpart of dialectic', having equaf. staruswith logic, and sharing its characteristic of not being 'bound upwith a single definite class of subjects', but being universal inscope (tlSS b8). Thus what for Plato had been a defect is forAristotle almost a virtue. Rhetoric is useful (a practical pointwhich Plato's attack had ignored), indeed given the nature of

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A Concise History oJ Rhetoric zt

human society it is essential, from the heights of law and politicsdown to everyday communication. It is also essential for self-

defence, and if the human body is allowed to defend itself when

aftacked, then the brain may legitimately do so by using words,

especially since 'the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a

human being than the use of his limbs'. Here Aristode alludes to

the famous argument of Isocrates that speech is indeed the basis

of human civilízation, and in the next sentence he meets Plato's

objection about the misuse of rhetoric head on:

And if it be objected that one who uses such Power of speech unjustly mightdo great harm, that ís a charge which may be made in common against all good

things except virtue, and above all against the things that are most useful, as

strength, health, wealth, generalship. A man can confer the greatest of benefits

by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly.

Qtssb)

It is a tool which .- like any other - is at the service of its user,

and having removed Plato's one-sided and emotional objections

Aristotle discusses how this tool can be used and makes many

suggestions for improving its accutacy and power (some of these

will be considered in the next chapter). Aristotle puts down several

other Platonic attacks - rhetoric ls an ert; to be able to argue on

both sides of a case is not immoral, but is in fact the best way ofappreciating rival arguments and is also a valuable intellectual

training - and he seems to have setded the dispute between

philosophy and rhetoric for the next cwo hundred years. But it is a

dispute that flared tp often, in the second century n.c. (Kennedy,zr) in the major rhetorical works of Cicero and Quintilian (who

both urged a wider, more philosophic scope for oratory), in St

Augustine as in the Renaissance (see, for examPle, Kristeller [l],87, t54). Yet it is a dispute which rhetoric has always won, if not

always by n theoretical refutation then certainly by the tacitagreement in many counffies at many times that rhetoric was

properly a lher:rry art which could get along quite well withoutthe aid of the philosophers.

'What it needed to concern itself withwes not general issues but particular examples, the details of scyle,

litenry language.

haps

zz Classical Rltetoric in Englislt Poetry

certainly the immediate history of rhetoric after Arisrotlebears out this judgement. His treatise resolved the theoredcalissue, but several scholars have noted that his positive proposalshad a very small effect compared with the series of rheroricaltext-books which began ro appear, and which dealt more and moreexclusively with the pureþ litenry aspecrs of structure and style.Part of this concentration on literary rhetoric was due to externalpolitical factors, for with the Macedonian domination of Greeceand the destruction of freedom and democrary, both political andjudicial oratory declined, and the energies of rhetoric went intothe schools and into literarure. 'whether the political changeactually caused the development of literary rheroric r..trrtdiftcult to prove, bur cerrainly from the middle of rhe thirdcentury B.c. onwards Greek rhetoric shows a great increase insensitiviry to sryle and ro the emorional and psychological effecrsof rhetorical figures (of which I shall have moie to say in chapterThree). The developments of scyle even exceeded the theories(Kennedy, z6z1) - as rhey always have done - but rhetoricaltextbooks became almosr solely inreresred in style. Theophrastus

G. j7o*, zïj B.c.) in seyeral lost rhetorical works devãloped acomplex theory of sryle and gave a separare section to rhe figuresof speech, a small bur imporranr srep: 'Heretofore they hadleentreated almost incidenally, but from now on they play an in-creasingly important role in the theory of sryle' (Kennedy, z7T).Many other works listed and analysed rhetorical figures, some-times indeed in over-much detail, but the excitemenr surroundingthis process tesdfies ro rhe discovery of the imporÞnce of suchdetails of sryle. on a larger scale rhe ueatise on style, attributedto one Dememiur (r. J jo4. z8o n.c.), included much perceptivecomment on variery and expressiveness in style, and it seems tohave influenced the various critical works of Dionysius of Hali-carnassus (a Greek writer who lived ar Rome under Augustus;fl* c. z5 B.c.), which include sophisticated analyses of individualprose-styles. The movemenr from philosophy ro liærature rryas

complete.The flourishing of literary and stylistic rhetoric in the Hellen-

istic period was accompanied by its dominance over education,

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A Concise History oJ Rltctwic z)

and, as the chief authority on education in antiquiry reminds us,

''When we say '{classical education" we rcally mean "Hellenistic

education". This became the education of the whole Greek

world, when the latter achieved some sort of stabilicy' (under and

after Alexander), and it was the model for Roman education,

which in fact'was only an adaptation of Hellenistic education to

Latin circumstances' (Marrou, g5Á). And in this education

rhetoric was the dominant element, leaving 'a profound impres-

sion on all manifestations of the Hellenistic spirit'. Education inall subjects took lessons from the rhetor, and as 'Rhetoric is the

specifié object of Greek education and the highest Greek culture',

,o 'H.ll.nistic culture was above all things a rhetorical culture,

and its cypical hítemy form was the .public lecture' (Marr9u,

ry4-Ð. Ëio* the time of Gorgias and fsocrates eloquence þadb..tr tire main cultural objective - no other discipline had arisen

to challenge it, and none was to do so, for it was indeed fundamental

to l"tg,.ra!e, and hence to human civilization, as Isocrates had

said. In the words of Marrou again:

Learning to speak properly meent learning to think properþ, and even to live

properly-: in ih. .y"t óf the Ancients eloquence had a truly human value üan-

...iai"g "r,y

prr.ii.al applications that -ight develop as a result of historical

.ir..rmr=tat..tl it was the otte means for handing on everything that made man

man, the whole cultural heritage that distinguished civilized men from

barbarians. This idea underlies all Greek thought, from Diodorus Siculus to

Libanius.... (tg6)

- that is, from the first century before to the fourth after Christ.

I hope I may be pardoned for quoting Marrou so extensi\"Ly, but Ikno* no beæer way of conveying the exffaordinary dominance

that rhetoric had thãn over education and culture, so much so that

the distinction between the two virtually disappeared: rhetoric

wøs edtrcation was culture. (As Marrou Points out' the word

paidcia meant both 'education' and 'culture', and so both were

.q,t"t.d with rhetoric.) It is difficult to gra:P this equation todaY,

but it is essential if we are to understand that when writers from

Quintilian to Dante to Puttenham say that eloquence is the most

imporranr of all human disciplines, they mean it literally.

24 ClassicøI Rbetoric ln English po*ry

ROME

From the second century B.c. onwards Greek rhetoricians movedin great numbers ro Rome, and their teaching was much soughtafter. cicero records how when the Romans hid 'heard the cåkorators, gained acquaintance with rheir lirerature and called inGreek teachers, our people were fired with a really incredibleenthusiasm for eloquence' (Dt oratore, Í.4,r4). Thá rhetor wasthe best paid_ and mosr respecred of teacheís (Marrou, zg+),rhetoric was rhe first subje.t lo be learned and thà orr. to b. tnírmastered. 'we know thar when 'in the fourth cenrury A.D. rwostudents - St Basil of Caesarea and St Gregory Nazíatrzen - r,r¡entfrom ca¡padocia to Arhens ro compl.t" tl.it rhetorical srudies,onestared four years the other five, perhaps even eight' (Marrou,zo4). Rhetoric was prosecuted at Rãme with æ *ti.h fàrvo,r, asin Hellenistic Greece, so much so that 'in practice, higher educa-tion was reduced ro rheroric, in the striciesf sense ol the word,(Marrou, 285; my italics) rules, process, discipline. TheRomans showed their usual faciliq, in mastering a GreeË invention,but added little to it. The rwo mosr influentià-l classical rhetoric-books ate both Latin, rhe anonymous Rbetorica ail Herennium('Rhetoric for F{erenniul') (r. si n.c.) and cicero's early Deínventione; but both are wholly derived from Hellenistic rhetórics,though they present their æiching in a more systemaric way. Asseveral studies have shown, rhere was no real Latin rhetoriå, forthe concepts, the methods, the terminolog¡z are Greek and remainGreek, even in the hands of such a profound rhetorician esQuindlian. The m1j9r theorisrs tried ro ãrtend the philosophicaland social responsibilities of the oraror, but here råo rh.y rryereinfltrenced by Greek theory and practice. Rome's single innóvarionwas in the developmenr of Law and in the applicariãr, of rhetoricto its

1ea¡hlng,.especially needful given thã-enormous develop-ment of the legal sysrem in the Roman Empire. Thus 'the kind äforator Quintilian aimed at producing was mainly rhe advocare,,

1d r large part of cicero's works (including much since lost) isdevoted ro the adaptation of rhetoric to legal studies (Maáu,

f

novedioughrGreekled inedible)r was

284),¡e last). t14¡O

- went:udies,

arrou,our as

lduca-word', Thention,:toric-nníum'Iy De

corics,

ry. Asic, foremainian as

phical'wetevationretoricyelop-

ind of)cate"rst) isatïou,

d Concise Historyt oJ Rhetoric 25

z8g--g). The fact that otherwise the Romans added nothing to

t¡íøí¡í mey mean either that they were uninventive or that they

realized thàt it had been developed as far' as it could go. It is

at least charitable to give them the benefit of the doubt, for infact since the r"for-ulations of the Rhetoríca aå Herennium and

Quintilia n's Institutæ oJ Oratory virtually no new rhetorical figures

have been discovered (it would hardly be possible, and certainly

not necessary), and the only fresh reafÏangements.have been those

for new or *uch developed genres (the sermon, the letter). 'Wha9

v/e must' be grateful fðr iJ that the Romans consolidated and

propagated rhãtoric as an educational principle. gr method, and as

" pt".ii.rl aid in public life. They did this yirl so much enerw

th"t rh.toric became a vital soufce for the Latin Middle Ages,

for the medieval vernaculars, and then with great force for all

European languages in the Renaissance and aftetFuither, if ihe Ro^tt t fuÍy rcalized the possibilities of rhetoric

in education, they also developed those Potential associations of

rhetoric with literature that were seen by Hellenistic rhetoricians

and are indeed exemplified in the course of Greek prose and verse

after Gorgias. The -application of rhetoric to Latin poetry is

traditional-ly ascrib.d ;å Ovid (Curtius, 66), but it w"sl I wåuld Yargue, inevitable that the Roman Poets should Put into Practice*ñ"t their education had told them was essential to literary

sffucture and style. This was esPecially so given the incret:i"g

tendency to identify the poet and orator, for rhetoric provided

the arditic language coÍìmon to both Poeffy and prose (Curtius,

qj Ð. Rhetoric was of course firmly established at Rome under

the Republic. The Ad Herennium was written at about the time

when irrcr"tirrs and Catullus were born, and they and the next

generation of poets - Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertnrs, Ovid -iu.t. given a ihetorical education, as were the poets of Augustus

and tñ" eaúy Empire - Persius, Lucan, Martial, Juvenal. At this

stage, too, ih.toti. ptouided an ideal for the aims of literature

whlch u/as to have a vast influence. Cicero had described the aims

of oratory: 'to insffuct is of necessity, to please is for interest, to

move is for victory' (Orator, zt.6g), and the triad docnc-dclectare'

tnor)ere was given enofmous currency by the Ars Poetic¿ of Horace,

/t1/\ Iv,l26 Classical Rbetorit in English Poetry

which M. F{. Abrams has called 'the great classical exemplar ofthe application of the rhetorical point of view ro poerry' (t6).These ideals of instruction and delight were taken up by StAugustin. (C. S. Baldwin, 65-6). in the medieval arts of preach-ing (Salter, z64o), in many Renaissance poetics (Dotan, z7;Gilbert, passim), and through Pope and Dr Johnson to the end ofthe eighteenth century.

As for the practice of rhetoric, Latin prose made fluent use ofGorgianic figures and many others, from the sonoriries of Cicero'slong-winded symmeffy to the tight and clipped symmetry ofSeneca (Norden; Vickers lrf, gZ-ror, z8 r-Ð.In drama Senecais the most famous of rhetoricians, but already Terence in thefirst half of the second century B.c. - before rheroric was reallyestablished - had shown considerable knowledge of both figuresand larger rhetorical processes, as a host of Renaissance com-mentators pointed out (Herrick, ßg-zr4; Doran, n-4), AllLatin writers knew about rhetoric and were influenced by it (evenif some reacted against it), but clearly they made differing uses ofit. Some poets make their indebtedneòs more apparenr thanothers. Ovid rryas a brilliant pupil of two famous rhetoricians, andwriting to Salanus (a rhetorician who had taught GermanicusCaesar) he proclaimed his own use of the art:

distat opus nostrum, sed fontibus exit ab isdem:artis et ingenuae cultor uterque sumus. . . .

utque meis numeris tua dat facundia nervos,

sic venit a nobis in tua verba nitor.

(Our work differs, but it derives from the same sources; ïye are both worshippersof that liberal eft . . . es my numbers receive vigour from your eloquence, so Ilend brilliance to your words.) (Ex Ponto, tr,v.65 f)

Indeed Quintilian advised the orator to read the poets to findexamples of the figures, and in his own work takes his examples

from poet and orator alike. Other poets, such as Lucan and Seneca,

show their debt by the presence of rhetorical figures and processes

(Curtius, 66), and we can conclude in general thar Romanliterature had successfully absorbed the teachings of rhetoric onlitenry structure and especially on style. Rhetoric is sdll the

::

mplar ofry' Q6).rp by Stf preach-ftan, 27;he end of

nt use ofF Cicero's.mery ofra Seneca

ce in thevas reallyth figuresnce com-

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ermanicus

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A Concise History oJ Rhetoric 27

central source of literary criticism: as yet there is no seParate

'poetic'.In its influence on Practical life the rhetorical education con-

tinued and even grew in importance. In the law courts' inpolitics, the orator was a key figure, and none so more than Cicero

(Cl"rke, 6z-84), As with Gorgias and Demosthenes the successful

àpplication of rhetoric to politics was.a living demonstration ofiis value - as Plato's Gorgias had said, 'it brings freedom to man- fkind', and Cicero's two greatest political actions, the defeat of Ì

Catiline and the atmck oriMark Antonlz, were triumphs ,ro, orrly I

of the orator's eloquence but of his integriry. Milton naturally i

responded warmly to the image of rhetoric defending libercy,

and of several references perhaps the most poignant is that inPøradise Regained, which is put into the mouth of Satan for his

rempting survey of classical culture (Satan is evidenúy a keen

Humanist): Thence to the famous orarors repair,

iHm::îi'n:ï ff:iï:L:1i:i:'?+, u,.,)

Of the many accounts of Cicero's grip on his audience in politicalassemblies as in the law courts the most authoritative is Quin-tilian's:

In my opinion the audience did not know what they were doing, their "PPl"ï. 1 ,,

,pr"rrg rr.irh.t from their judgment nor from their will; they were seìzedwitha j /in"¿ ãf ftenzy and, unconscious of the place in which- they stood, burst forthj

spontaneously into a perfect ecstasy of delight. (8.1.+)

But with Cicero's death oratory declined, as both Seneca and

Tacitus observed (Clarke, ror-3), largely because the curtailment

of political freedom under the Empire meant a resuiction on

l.gil and political business. As a result the rhetorician's art was

ftÀited almost endrely to the rhetoric-schools and became in-

growing and sterile. It is for this reason that while Cicero could

itill urge the concept of the orator as a man of public and political

virtue, for Quintiiian 'writing later under an empire, the good

orator is a good man, a man of private virtue who exercises his

eloquence for the individual' (Sonnino, 8). Despite the decline

there tryere consolations, for the orator as schoolmaster tryas an

28 Classical Rhetoric in English Poetr2

important figure, and in the later Roman Empire rulers andgovernors took a personal interest in appointing to their schoolsand universities the best available. This flattering testimony totheir kudos is seen too in the remarkable development known as

the 'second Sophistic' (from the second to the fourth centuryA.D.), a revival of interest in all things Greek which elevated therhetor to the status of the modern film-star: he made tours, rves

lionized by vast audiences, and v/es treated even more generouslyby the Emperors (Bolgar, jz-3, jg4). These rhetors wete simplydeclaimers, who give brilliant and elaborate rhetorical speeches

as 'set-pieces', quite divorced from any legal or political function.For them and their public, rhetoric was an aft to be valued forpure display, andthey showed fantastic virtuosiry in improvisation(C. S. Baldwin, tz-ry) - rather like the virtuoso pianists of theschool of Liszt. But despite their reputed brilliance, it is hard notto see this development as a decline from the organic function of 'oratory in Demosthenes and Cicero.

Yet while deploring the oratory of display we must concede

that its vogue proves that rhetoric continued to exeft its powerover all culture. The later Roman Empire saw still more minorrhetorical ffeatises, each compiler being (as ever) dissatisfied withthe work of all his predecessors - but this too tells us about a

demand. As the Romans spread their power, rhetoric penetratedinto all their provinces and the lessons were learned so well thatthe provinces (especially Gaul, famous for its schools) sent skilledteachers back to Rome (Clarke, ryz-V). As Juvenal sardonicallyput it,

- today the whole worldHas its Graeco-Roman culture. Smart Gaulish professors

Are training the lawyers of Britain: even in IcelandThere's talk of setting up a Rhetorical Faculty.

(xv.r ro-r 3)

In fact the Roman influence in Britain produced what has been

described as 'the first English Rhetoric-book' (Howell, l 16), theVenerable Bede's Liber Schematorutn et Troporurn (Boo& oJ Schemes and

Tropes, c, Tor A.D.), which lists thirty basic figures and illustratesthem all from the Bible. A. C. Bartlett's study of the rhetorical

rs and;chools

ony toown es

:entury¡ed thers, was

erouslysimplypeeches

nction.ued foririsation; of theLard not:tion of

concede

s Power: minored withabout a

netrated,e11 that¡ skilledlonically

r. r ro-r 3)

ras been

16), thebemes and

.lusffates

hetorical

A Concise Hístory oJ Rhrroric zg

patterns in Anglo-Saxon poeffy has suggested that Bede may have

been an influen ce (4r), but either way her book provides abundant

evidence of the fluent use of rhetoric in such Poems as BeowulJ,

Judlth, The SeøJarer, and many others, including several familiardevices t anaphora (+o-+), Paronomøsía (4r), antimetabole (ro, 17,

etc.), parison (lo-+8), and epanalepsis (in a larger form, rePeating

the same phrase at the beginning and end of paragraphs: here

called 'envelope pattern', 9-29, etc.). The possible destrucdon ofthe rhetorical tradition by the fall of the Roman Empire in thefifth century was prevented by the akeady sffong links between

rhetoric and Christianity. St Augustine had been a teacher ofrhetoric for many years before his conversion, and although in theConJessions he abjured rhetoric as immoral the Latin Prose-style ofthat book as of many other of his works makes fluent use of thetraditional figures of rhetoric (Curtius, 73-4), Further, and more

important, in book ry of De Doctrina Christianø he rehabilitatedrhetoric for the Christian in both general and specific forms(Clarke, rjr-j; C. S. Baldwin, 1ra)). A final link becween

Christianity and rhetoric before the Middle Ages is provided inthe sixth century by Cassiodorus, who in his Institutiones aided

that reconciliation between secular and sacred eloquence whichwas to be carried further sdll in the Middle Ages and theRenaissance. Thereafter, five hundred years of 'darkness', buthuman culture was not extinguished nor was rhetoric. InByzanrium. meanwhile, rhetoric grew in importance, for where a

ninth-cenftr/ account merely records that students learned the

usual ffopes and figures, by the middle of the eleventh centurythe great humanist Michael Psellus was founding a universitycurriculum based solidly on rhetoric - a prophetic act (Bolgar,

69-To,74A).

THE MIDDLE AGES

'When the study and teaching of literature and philosoPh)' began

again in'Western Christendom in the tenth and eleventh centuries,

it was organized more and more in the framework of the seven

B

30 Classicøl Rhetoric in Englisb Poetry

liberal arts, the three basic ones (known es the 'rivi.tm') being

gfammar, logic. and rhetoric (the 'quadriviuT'lu: composed of

geomeffy, muslc, arithmetic and astronomy). Tfit affangement

i"r to áominate school and universicy teaching throughout

Europe well into the eighteenth c€ntury. Thus much medieval

t.ach?rrg on rhetoric is fãund in the context of a survey- of the

seven llberal arts, such surveys being often derived from the very

popular late classical encyclopedias, the Marriage oJ Mercury ani'

Phitotog by Martianus Capella (fifth century A.D.) and the Ori¿ins or

Etymologiu-of Isidore of Seville (sixth century A.D.). (Th. latter, for

instance, was the main source for the enofïnous and very popular

encyclopedia made in the thirteenth century by Vincent of Beauvais,

his Speculurn. ) \Mhen it is placed next to the other arts we see a certain

decline in the general status of rhetoric, for with the rise ofscholasticism in tlhe thineenth century logic takes over the dominant

position in human knowledge. Thus in the Anticlaudianus of þ¡Ienus ab

insulis (a thirteenth-century allegory of the seven aræ) in- the making

of a chariot for man the quadrivium supplies the four wheels,

grammar provides the pole and logic the ax[e, which rhercric merelyirdorn, rvith g.tttt tttd gold' (C. S. Baldwin, r73). But if given a

purely ornamental function here, rhetoric elsewhere had itsãefenders. Brunetto Latini, in his Old French Trísoq gives more sPece

to rhetoric and reasserts its practical function, quoting Cicero's

dictum that it is the best tool for governing a ciry, and - more

interesting for literary purPoses - he also follows the Ciceronian

madition in stating that the teachings of rhetoric are common to both

prose and verse, save for the added complication of metrics (C..S.

baldwin, r7ry).And the best medieval survey of the nivium, the

welfth-century Metalo¿icon of John of Salisbury, attacks those Yh" rryto expel the art from philosophy: 'Rhetoric is the beautiful and

fruitfut union berween reason and expression. Through harmony, itholds human communities together' (Curtius, 77) - thus reviving

Isocrates' teaching that reason and speech are the basis of all human

civilization.If the concePts used to defend rhetoric are familiar, even more

so are the details of irs make-up, one of the great teachers of the

Middle Ages was Bernard of Chartres, and his method of reading

lelng:d ofmenf

Shoutlievalf thevery

y and

¡ins orr, for>pular

ruvais,

ertain.se ofrinantrus ab

raking

'heels,nerely

iven ad itssPece

icero's

more:onian

> both

íC.S.n, the

ho tryrl and

'1/: i'

vlvtngrumen

moreof the:ading

l,t.,it'ti,J.llIt

A Concise Hístory oJ Rbetoric 1t

T{. *p"lnding crassicar literature was essentiaily that of theHellenistic schools, including -the po;".irrg-o,r. of rhetoricelfigures and then the imitatio.r"of l-,.,i; ;;j ñi, irrfl.rence herpedproduce the sjtuarion whereby rhetoric',domirratärd;;åri;

classroom (Bolgar, ,2gf , "ri):The poets "J.theorists of poerrycontinued as they had been t^lght.t iris r.rri*¡rrri"" riulyr"lä.

T*.oÍ poe.ty in rhe twelfth"and thirteenúr centuries EdmondFaral has shown thac they are still arts of ,h.toric, not poetic.Further, he has taburated the rists "f th;;:;r figures gi;;;the eight or nine majgr treatises, yirh orr. p"rrial exception, ailare taken direct from the Rhetorica ad Hrrrn ,irri,in the same order,and ofren with rhe same definirion or

'rustrai;"" aF;r"L i;:;;;

t.ht: analysis :f rl. processes of m.dieval th;;rr. rhrs neat andtidy Roman collection is again seen ro be the dominant infruence(the Middle Ag,es knew iã "s

the ,First, o. iòl¿ Rheroric,, todistinguish it from rhe other major source_book, the ,New

Rhetoric', cicero's equally ,yrt.rn"ii c Dc Inventíon). The more /,profound and philoroþttiá íorr., of Ro*a., rhetoric, cicero,sDe oratore and orator, euintilian's Institurii ao nor have muchinfluence now or even in the Renaissance, "rd *rrry historians ofrhetoric lament the fact. But it seems ro me that this universalpr*t:lje for practical rheroric-books in ,u.h äiff.rent praces atsuch different rimes is rarher a proof of man,s recognition thatrhetoric is essenti aIIy a.ritetary 'disciprin.l-ùã,

studied in theft{l of_language, uncrutrer.á r_ithipnil*"frrìcar generarities.(Roberc

lolgar has said that rhe De õratore *¿ ,t" Institutioncsoratoríae 'rransoort us into a croud-cu.r.oo_u"J of unrear izabreideals'.; nolgr,'3o-1.) c"1t^21y, whereve r we look in medievarrhetoric the favoured mode of árgani zation is the mosr practicarone, a list of figures. The standarã medieval -rr.*orric of gram-mar, rhe Doctrinaleof Alexandre de viltedieu, ñ, fourlists of thernosr familiar Greek-fis1..r; a[ the -rrr,r"rroof-Dictamcn, the artof letter-writing, incruãe the 'sacred Ir: "i o*res obrigatory inthe poetriae', and the most influential of these, t-h.,1u.tfrfi-;.;iöcandelabrum (l by Bene of Frorence), has , ñ;;; hgures straighrfrom th" Ad' Hirrnnium, and in rhe sarne order. Needress ro sevthe handbooks for sermon wriring arso incrud" ;i. ;"-iffi;ili

l'

t,

i.¡,¡

i'

i!'t

i

ddTåil¡t

,

)z Classícal Rbetoric in English Poetry

and tropes (C. S. Baldwin, t84, zt4, ZtÇt Tq'The details of

style "rrd

,.ìo.rure in prose or_ verse are still dominated by the

intuitive recognitiott of Theophrastus in the third century B'c'

thar a list of ñg.rt.t is the *ott useful way 9f communicating the

lkerary furrctiãns of rheroric, and the medieval rhetoricians dis-

seminated the Greek coqpus further and further. Faral says that

the teaching on rhetorical figures is too vast to even summatize

(Far;al, 93).' It wouiâ b. .rry to dismiss medieval rhetoric as 'derivative', ifit were not so oÉuious that Roman rhetoric is equally so' The

system which was formulated with such energ¡r and-precision in

ih. thr.e cenruries before the birth of Christ said almost ever/-

thing that needed to be said about the plylhological and emotional

poteitial of language when oryayn;d by the conventions of

ih"tori.. But thã tùi¿d. Ages-did have some things. to add,

variants on rhe classical pro..ri.r which were inspired by character-

istically medieval habiis of thinking and- writing, as.Faral has

,ho*rr. Thus the compilers of the arts of poetry in this period

agreed,with the teaching of antíquity that 'amplification' u/as the

main function of a wriler, but th"y changed the meaning of the

word and so of the Process. 'Whereas for Quintilian it meant 'to

heighten, enhance, itr.r, an idea' it now meant 'to develoP or

extãnd a subject' (Faral, 6r) - in effecq Jength not intensicy.

Flence the åh*r".ì.tirti. prolixiry þr eloquence l)_ of *.t.qmedieval writing, and hencå p.rhaps their gteart development of

the concepr diþessio, ro which nothing quite corresponds in

classical ttt..ott (Faral, 74t Curtius, 5ovz)' Ag¿in where,apostroph.'

-.".rt to classical rhetoricians .ri*ply.the orator's

t,rirrirrg ^

^*^y from rhe judge in order to address the adversary

dh"ctÇ, rháir medieval' ,,r-...rrot, equated it. with exclamatio,

which'the Rhetoríca ad Herennitmt desciibes as 'the figure which

expresses grief or indignation by means.of an address to some

,rrär, o, .ñy or place Jr obj.cr''(4.ti,zz). For some reason this

figure ..qúir.d ^grear

poputariry, _and there- are a remarkable

,ri*b., o? "porriophes-in-mediãval

poet\.t addressed to all con-

ceivable objects, especiatrty in the tonr "l 'E::l_and indiglat_i:n"

which accounrs for ihe risl of rhe 'Complaint' (Faral, 7r-z), Here

A Concise History oJ Rhetoric ))as in several other places the medieval interPretation persisted

into the Renaissan." (ott. thinks of the gteet frequency of the

complaint in drama (Clemen, 2rI Ð ot Po?try, or the even exces-

sive ise of apostrophe in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella), ,

Faral disiinguishes further- areas where medieval rhetoric

singled out pttticular processes for special development, perhaps

thJ most important being descriptio, the description of persons,

objects o, ,..rr", (Ad Herennium, 4,+g-5o), to which most ofMachieu de Vendôme's ffeatise is given, and which he considers

to be the supreme aim of poetry. B,tt it was description seldom

with a neural purpose, as Faral explains:

The principal aim of the rhetorical genre which the ancients called demonstra-

tiue is praiìe or blame, and the principal means of attaining it was by. de-

scription. This virtue of descriptiott is expressly commented on by medieval

rheioricians and given as its essential function. . . . This is very impor-'

ranr, es it explains why in medieval literature description only rarely aims at

painting p"rrãrs and rhings objectively and why it is always dominated by an

"ff..tiu. intention which ãscillates between praise and criticism. (Fanl, 76;

my translation)

Where descriptions in medieval Poetry wete formerly thoughttobe irrelevant ìr signs of the Poet's exuberance they can now be

seen as part of thã poem's rhetorical function, and the roles ofdescriptio in Chaucei and Langland should be reassessed, as has

recently been done so well for Sir Gøwain and tbe Grecn Knight

(Pearsail). One last example of medieval literature developing the

implications of teaching in classical rhetoric has been demon-

,tråt.d since the time of Faral, and that is the use of rhetorical

topoi ot commonplaces as stores of ideas and expressions. Their

.iirr.rr." was firsi properly shown in Currius's great work - such

things as the image óf Uf" as a journey, the convention of the

locus amoenus ot'pleasattt place', the 'ptl.er senex', the invocation

to the Muses (further medieval examples in Arbusow, gf-llt),If we can accept these large-scale rhetorical conventions as having

been a valuable inspiration to literature then it is time that we saw

the relevant funciiott of the more detailed convention of the

tropes and figures.

Ñot otrly ãid th. Middte Ages realign classical rhetoric towards

j4 Classical Rbetoric in English Poctry

their own interests, but they evolved two substantially new formswithin a rhetorical framework, the lerrer and the sermon. The

'Lrtes àictaminis and the Artes praedicandi are offshoors of rhetoriccreated by new social and cultural demands. The art of letter-writing was of enormous importance in medieval life, originallyfor law and diplomaclt but by extension almost as a literary formin its own righr (C. S. Baldwin, zo8-27; Curtius, 75 f , r48 f).'Ít grew up out of the needs of administrative procedure, and wasprimarily intended to furnish models for letters and oftcialdocuments' (Curtius, 75), but it rvas an obvious srep ro precedethe models with principles and rules. The success of the resultinggenre was so great that 'no nredieval form of writing has comedown to us more abundantly' in manuscriprs or in print, andepistolary technique became the most widespread application ofthe study of scyle (C. S. Baldwin, zo8). Baldwin's summary ofthe letter-writing handbooks reveals them to have had the basicform of all maditional rhetoric-books, down even ro a secrion onthe cursus (the rþthmical cadence ending a clause or period inprose), and Curtius has shown that their teachings on sryleresulted in the boundaries between prose and poetry becomingmore and more blurred (t+g). The sermon had no such rheoreticalaffiliation with poetry, but in practice its sryle continued roexploit these rþthmical and structural symmetries which havealways been a 'poetic' but functional element in prose fromGorgias to Dryden (C. S. Baldwin, zjo-S7; Vickers lrl, 96-14oand z8r n). Sermon theory continued the process of unitingpagan and Christian eloquence, which St Augustine had begun,and it remained essentially rhetorical (Charland; Howell, r r 5 n).One medieval development was rhe abundance within sermons ofillusrative descriptions and stories: 'rhe exemplum rryas so culd-vated in medieval preaching as to call forth many collecions'(C. S. Baldwin, zjj), such as the well-known Gesta Romanorum,

or 'the most competenr', rhe Summa Predicantium by an English-man, John of Bromyarde (Bolgar, 272, 4lza). This is a tendenrywhich has obvious connecrions with the rhetoric-inspired movetowards amplification, and these collections in turn providedmaterial for all kinds of literature.

A Concisc Historyt oJ Rhetoric j5

The biggest.practical.development of medieval rhetoric, then,was in prose, in the twin forms of the letter and the sermon. Asfor poetry, because in theory poetic was sdll equated with rhetoricand only fleetingly appeared as an autonomous discipline (Curtius,t{7t rfi), it is no suqprise to find that in practice medievalpoetry is still fundamentally rhetorical - it could not be otherwise.The most substantial ueatises on poetry in this period, the Ars

Versifcatoria of Matthieu de Vendôme and the Poetria Nola ofGeoffrey of Vinsauf , urge the poet to approech the compositionof poetry by using the structural teachings of rhetoric (the parts ofan oration) and by then applying the figures from the Ad Heren-

nium. Discussion of meffe (and, later, rhyme and stanza-fot*)where it is given, comes as a subsidiary, almosr an after-thought.The texture of medieval poerry, whether in Latin or in thevernaculars, is as fuIl of rhetorical figures as rhar of Ovid or

Juvenal, Sidney or Shakespeare. Faral has demonstrated very fullythe application of one figure (annominatio or paronoffiasiø) througha wide range of medieval Latin and Frenrh (yl),and has

glossed the examples of rhetorical figures given by EvrardL'Allemand in his Løboríntus with further examples from themedieval vernacularc (l i r f). Curtius has given more examples ofannominatío in Dante and elsewhere (278-8o), while Arbusow andPeter in their useful handbook Colores Rbetorici have also givenmany proofs of the existence of the classical üopes and figures inOld French and Middle High German. It would be possible (anddesirable) to produce a similar list from Middle English. Theproduction of such lists is, of course, only the first step in evaluat-ing the functions of rhetoric in poetry, but it is an essenrial one:as I argue below, the figures are the keys to emotional and psycho-logical expression throughout the two thousand years of rhetoricand if we are to understand rhetoric we musr masrer the detailwhich was so important. For the time being, though, it isenough to record that although challenged by logic and alrhoughadapted in some directions to accord with a nerry litenry rasre,

rhetoric is still for the Middle Ages the central discipline forliterature.

r

ll

)6 Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCEl

Lack of space and, alas, my oyn ignorance forbid the attemPt to

follow rhetoric acfoss rh. rrhol. of-the European Renaissance, but

I should like ro record the opinion that this would be a very

h.6i;i and illu-inating pi....åf work for those qualified to do it'

id newly developed "discipline of comparative literature (its

g-*rl, ,rí,r.h ¿.þf"4 and^ still nor wiihout the .dangeî^ "{îrairr.d and super ní¡rtadjustment between literatures) could find

in rhetoric a genuirr., .Jrrt al, vital tradition from Greek and

i".i" through"many of the European vernac'1ars, a discipline

which is basically ,h. ,"-. ".ro^r,

two millennia and several

continents, whi.l consranrly adapts itself to new situations and

conssntly provides forms íor litätary creation Rhetoric offers a

unique opporr,trtf for studyi"g tott'p atative1y all literature of

the'Western world down to the *oa.t"þeriod -no other approach

rivals it.-- But although f cannot here üeat the develoPment of rhetoric in

Europe, some conrinental manifestations which parallel those in

Errglând may perhaps be nored in passing..First the almost univer-

sal Renaissance "..äp.rrr.e

of the-classiial-medieval identification

oi rh.roric and poetic (see, for example., Herrick, ch. r). As both

po.rrr, "rrd

prorË have ìrtisric sryle oi dicdon in common, rhetoric

is the aft ProPer for both, n"i ut"t is merely orarcry given the

added di*.rriion of regular metres and rhyme' (But f prose

,1"r., the rþthmic poår.,tial through the symmetries of syntax

and the ,rr. áf claus,rl"., some theorists argued that since Prose-

,þth* was irregular ir *-": il fa.t -ot. difficult than verse.)

Á'.o*pr.h.rrsiu""survey of Islian literary theory has.showl the

identification of poed¿ and rhetoric almost everywhere, fr9'm

minor treatises @å1dwi"-Clark, 57, 59,rJ!, etc') to such-ttt"i:t

ones as those ìo-por.d by Vida QSù,^Minturno (t6.Sq)'

Scaliger (rT), r75; 'Hit iltott"p"tìon, from lexicography to

fig*å of ,pá..h, I *ith sryle.: rhã great ]pparatus for the pro-

ducrion of Latin poeffy remains largely rhetoric'). -9ity Tas.so

sees poeric as a disiirrct'"rt of compositiott (t 8g), and his ffeatise

A Concísc Historl oJ Rhetoric )T

includes such familiar features as an exposition of the three styles,

a discussion of style in such genres as epic and lyric, and a summary

of rhetorical proces.r .o-plete with a list oi fignt.t Q77).In a

more recent and exhaustive study of Italian criticism Bernard'Weinberg

stresses the nature of the rhercrical interest in criticism:'I must emphasize the extent to which considerations of sententiae

and of diction dominate the practical criticism of this period. Theuse of epithets describing style was not an accident, for one of thetendencies of rhetorical approaches rryas to reduce all criticalquestions to questions of figures of speech and ornaments ofdiction' (Weinberg, Lryg) - hence regarding all literature as a

repository for the details of sryle.In England the same identification of the two media was com-

mon from the lowest level to the highest. Of the greatest rhetori-cians and critics of the age, Puttenham, as his editors have poinrcdout, like Du Bellay or Gascoigne, seldom or never distinguishesbetween verse and prose in their rhetorical or expressive functions(Puttenham, Ixxiv). John Rainolds follows Cicero and Erasmus insaying that the two are of equal expressive status (Rainolds, zo-z),and Ben Jonson in restating and revising Cicero's dicrum gave itan added authoricy that persisted at least as far as Dryden'sfamous reference to 'the other harmony of prose': 'The Po¿r is theneerest Borderer upon the Orator, and expresseth all his vertues

though he be tyed more to numbers; is his equal in ornament,

and above him in his strengths'(Jonson, Timber; Work, vm.64o).Poetry is thus seen as being even more rhetorical than prose; it

ffioyr,s men more, and Jonson is perhaps remembering this argu-ment as so vigorously expressed by Sidney in his Apoloy Jor Poetrl.

(The corollary of the equaliry between the media is that moderncriticism must rediscover the 'poetic' qualities of Renaissance

prose, and in my studies of Shakespeare and Bacon I have tried todemonsrate the imaginative pou/er and flexibiliry of prose intheir hands. Other modern criticism which is writæn from a

similar belief in the uniquely expressive resources of Renaissance

prose include the studies listed in the Bibliography by J. A.Barish [t], G. K. Hunter, Floyd Gray and Joan Webber.)

Continental and English critics also agree on the dominantB2

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18 Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry

place of rhetoric in human sociery. The mosr influential of theearly humanists, Peúarch, consrantly praised rhetoric as rhe queenof the arts, and saw eloquence nor only as the proper expressionof yirtus ('natural excellence'), but as its reward. The good mannaturally became eloquent, or would be praised and immorcalizedby poets (Bolgar, 247-jr), a concepr which was taken up en-thusiastically throughout the Renaissance. The Spanish humanistJuan Vives (whose great influence on the English sixreenth cenruryhas yet to be properly assessed) wrires in his De Tradendis Dis-ciplinis (r5r6) that rhetoric

is of the greetest influence and weight. It is necessary for all positions in life.For in man the highest law and government are er the disposal of will. To thewill, reason and judgment are assigned as counsellors, and the emotions are itstorches. Moreover, the emotions of the mind are enflamed by the sparks ofspeech. So, too, the reason is impelled and moved by speech. Hence ir comesto pass that, in the whole kingdom of the activities of man, speech holds in itspossession a mighry strength which it continually manifesrc. Not undeservinglydoes Euripides call eloquence rupowcrcóv rr,. (Vives, l8o)

The word, written or spoken, has an irresisrible force of persuasion,and is therefore the most important of nature's gifts ro man. AsCharron said, echoing Isocrates, 'Now as speech makes e manmore excellent than a beast, so eloquence makes the professorsthereof more excellent than other men', or as Lydgaæ moreconcisely put it, 'Kynde onto man hath yoven elloquence'(Doran,24, 26). Or again, in the words of Sir Philip Sidney: 'For ifOratio, next to Ratio, Speech next to Reason, be the greatest giftbestowed upon Mortalitie, that cannor be praiselesse, which dothmost polish that blessing of speech'(V/orks, fir.l7).It follows rharrhetoric rryas once more regarded as rhe chief of the sciences, andalthough a vast list of quorarions could easily be amassed insuppoft of this point, three quite diverse ones musr suffice. Thatbrilliant popular rhetorician Nashe, in his vigorous defence oflearning in The Anatoníc oJ Absurditie, urged rhat 'Eloquence'should not be separated from the other arrs, for 'Amongsr all theornaments of Aries, Rethorick is to be had in highest rãputation,without the which all the resr are naked, and shelnely grtrished'(Smith, L))4), Ar the other end of the academic scale rü/illiam

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A Concisc Histor¡ oJ Rbetoric )9

Holdsworth, fellow of st John's college, Cambridge, and later

Master of Emmanuel, writing in about ,645, held that rhetoric

(which he enlarged to include the srudy of all classical literature,

ìnd which he ò'ppor.d to logic) t".r th. most important of all

subjects, to *hich an ut dergr"duate should devote evely after-

,roon for four years, and without which 'all the other learning,

though never só .-in.rrt, is in a manner void and useless'(Curds,

;r"): This whole uadition is eloquently summed up by Daniel,

in his Musophilus:

Powre above Powres, O heavenly Eloqucnee,

That with the strottg reine of commanding words

Dost manage, guide, and master th'eminence

Of mens affections more then all their swords:

Shall we not offer to thY excellence

The richest tre¿sure that our wit affords? (Daniel' 96)

(One important sign of this 'treasure' was the kudos- given by

ìn. fngiish R.rraissance - subscribing wholeheartedly to..the

hu*"nñt ideal of the Active Life - to the Orator as Counsellor:

see Sweeting, passim.)In opposi"rrg'rhetoric to logic Holdsworth was reviving a long-

,trndiåj tiurlry. Medieval sãhohsticism had elevated logic to the

thronê ã"d d"ptessed rhetoric, and with it the study of classical

literature. (Aqïinas had subsumed rhetoric under logic, placing

poetry at the v"ry bottom of his intellectual scheme: Wimsatt and^Brookr, r3r.) Íh. R.naissance, of course, redressed the balance

(curtis, gi, g+-s), and ir is wirh an iconoclastic glee that skelton

ì..ord, how ih. þ*^rians and logicians are being expelled:

Albc¡tus dc moào signìicandi,

And Donatus be dryuen out of scole;

Prisians hed broken now handy dandy,

And intcr àidascalos is rekened for a fole;

Alexander, a gander of Menanders pole,

\Mirh Da Causalcs, is cast out of the gate,

And Dø Raeionalcs dare not show his pate'

Plautí in his comedies a chyld shall now reherse,

And medyll with Quinrylyan in his Deelamaqtons ' ' '(Spck Parrot; Sweeting, 64)

40 Cløssícal Rhctoric in English Po*r1

The issue is not simply logic versus rhetoric, but more deeply

concerns the place of t[re rt rãy of literature in a humane education.

As Foster 'Watson reminds us, 'The significance of the fight

between Mediaevalism and the Renascence is often reduced to the

question of pre-eminence between ryam1ar and rhetoric on the

one side "rrd

dirl.ctic or logic on the other. It must, however,

always be understood that cãuched in these terms grammar_.and

rhetáric stand fot the critical reading and srudy of authors' (Vives,

xvi). Indeed in England 'the interesting thing to be observed . ' 'i, íh"t logic

"nd rñ.toric joined hands in the educational scheme

of the Re-naissance'(Craig', r+z). Much of the credit for this union

is due to the earlyhumanists who drew up the curricula at grammar-

schools arrd ,rrríversities and endowed chairs and instruction in

both arts, but some credit is also due to the source of the most

vociferous of all the continental moYements, Peter Ramus, and

although this brief study is not concerned with logic some mention

of him must be made here.

The extremely detailed studies of W. J.,Ottg have illuminated

great arees of R"rn,ts's inheritance and influence, but they ha¡e,

i think, been attached rc a fashionable but superficial thesis that

Ramus created what is said to be a new 'spatialized' way of

thinking. This is a conffoversial issue and I must reserve fuller

"*"*i.riion of Ong's Mcluhanite theories for some other place;

for now I want to ümit this discussion of Ramism to the field of

rhetoric, and to mafters which can be discussed at the simple and

comforting level of the actual evidence of the texts. To start at

the obvioã, poirrt, Ramus reformed the relations between logic

and rhetoric. \Mhereas both arts had traditionally overlapped by

sharing the first two Processes of composition, Invention and

DispoJition, Ramus hived off these two for logic, leaving rhetoric

with rhe remaining rhree parrs: Elocution, Delivery.and Mg*o-q.

As logic and rheloric wlre to be studied together under his

,.h.rrri, this step simply reduced duplication.. But Ramus also

rccognized the aridiry of medieval Aristotelian logic .in its

fimñation of subjecr-mafter and illusffarive material to absract

issues and non-lit'enry references' so he proceeded to 'humanize'

logic by drawing his'illusüations from literature (as from Ovid'

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A Concise History oJ Rbetoric 4r

Virgil, Caesar) and from the Scriptures. The influence on Renais-

,"rrã" poets and dramatists of this Litenry content in logic has

been *,r.h discussed of late, and it seems to me overstated'

Although I am prepared to concede Hardin Craig's argument that

those Jrit.tt it fltt.tt..d by Ramism 'had their attention directed

to the logical aspect of liierature' (Craig , I4g),I dciubt whether

this imm! diate\y produced a rise in the quantiry of argument and

other logical pro..rr", in literature. f certainly disbelieve Rosemund

Tuve's ih.tlt that Ramist writers are or might be characteúzed

by the logical nature of their ímagery, or that this is indeed the

defining mark of Metaphysical Poetry.If thã effecm of the Ramist logic have been overstated, so have

those of its rhetoric. We are told that because Ramus 'reduced

rhetoric to style' the writers influenced by him will show a

gteater sffess on verbal ornament or display, "ld suffer in some

i"y fto* a debilitating separation from 'thoughr' or 'argument'.

But, as I have been "t

sorn. pains to show, one of the major featur-es

of rhetoric over its first fift..tt hundred Yeaß, and despite the

more philosophical approaches of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian,was an ever-lncreasing interest in elocutio or sryle' until medieval

and Renaissance rhetoric \ryas essentially srylistic. Poetry and prose

were of equal status because sryle was common in both, and

because literature was rhetoric. Ramus's tidying-uP of the $vo arts

might actually be due to the recognition tlaj rhetoric is essentially

^lit r^ry discipline, but it is in any case fallacious to assume that

he starrás o.tttid. or oPPoses the general shift of interest. Nor can

one assume that b.c".tt. of Ramus writers studying rhetoric would

in future know nothing about how to discover argumentt ot-

affange them: they *"tè supposed to study hislogic too. Even ifthey irsed some oih.t version this would give them

all that non-

R"-itt writers knew, and certainly all they needed. Other fallacies

are involved in the modern elevation of Ramism. Critics assume a

Ramist influence on the most tenuous evidence - a dedication, say,

that most arbítary of literary gestures, or attendence at the same

college or university. Critics are Prone to think of Ramism in

bhcÈor white, but the Renaissance mind lvas a very eclectic one,

and it is quite co$rmon to find bits of Ramist rhetoric side by

4z Classicøl Rbctoríc ín EryIísh Poctry

side with bits of Ciceronianism. Thus the Ramist rhetoric-books'

as well as dealing with the wholly conven'io4 topic 9l.pt?tt:,tyit* (Vickers [r], ro8 and n) '"dd"d (u-nde¡ figure¡ of diction)

" áir.,.rrrìon of *.ä.r, and so cóntributed further to the confusing

[sir] idea that poetry was but versified otatory'(D9ran, 4r)'.In,.hool, the Ramist rhetorics were used side by side with other

manuals which modern critics suggest they should have replaced.

Finally, there would seem to bJ-"o eviáettce thet even a self-

corrf.ssed, authenticated, card-carryíng Ramist writes in ^ny

other *ry th^na normal Renaissarrce poet.-There were certainly

more 'Ramists' ar Camb údge than "i O"fotd, but who would

offer rc discriminate the litelrature produced by gaduates of the

two universities on srylistic grounds? I confess that I cannot detect

"rry *ry, in which a'Ramiõ's writing d-rffers in scyle or method

fró- dr"t of a non-Ramist. The caie has not been proved on

srylistic grounds, and as its theoretical foundation is so tenuous itseems unlikely that it ever will be.

Ramus ,rri hi, followers were not totally new nor absolutely

different, however iconoclasric they may have seemed to con-

servarives like Ascharn or Hooker oi Ntth. (Howell, ry7, rgz f ,,

rg7). As W. S. Howell has shown in the course of a detailed

;ír;:.rr"/ of the movement (a sumlary which in my view

accords ir too much importance in the hisrcry of rhetoric), Ramus

effecred a r"aligrrmeni of uaditional disèiplines, not a total

reform (t+B , rþ-z8r). My contention is that Ramist rhetoric

*., d"àg th.'r"-" ltti"gr that other rhetorics were doing,

"tft p.rñ"p, more efÊciãntly' The gt"!:t..Ramist invention

(in'faå a simplificarion of Plaio: N. 'W. Gilbert, xxiv, tzg-)o,

i+li-+),,'", .h. dichotomy, th. 'one and only method' according

iJt¡ä, by which a subj.ct was divided into trvo Parts, ¡ach,1fthese into'another two,

".td to on aåf.nem. It is now clear that this

method was much less original and imPortaqt than his grandiose

claims for ir would r,rgg"rrlbut it is undeniable that the bracketed

rable was a greatrirpíiþing facror in the expositio2of 1nyslbject,and a vast numb.r'of

'Ralmist 'epitomes' soon flooded Europe

(Cilb.r., 7z), ro the disgutl of -.ny serious-minded humanists.

ìirr¿i" Cr^íghas rightly"called Ramus the greatest mester of the

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A Concisc History oJ Rhetvric 4J

short-cut the world has ever known' (t+Ð. The rhetoric textbooks

equally benefited from this simplifting afïangement, and the

Rärnist rhetorics are genuinely easier to use than many others' They

have the same lists offigures, the same definitions, the sarne reasons

for the efficaa¡of figureã, but the whole thing is set out more simply'

So far, rhen, the ñ.amist reforms had no damaging or limiting

effects on rhe líterury porenrial of rhetoric, and in one very impor-

tent way this movå-.ttt accelented what I earlier described as

'the twl-wey raffic of rhetoric', and that was by declarcdly

adapting rheroric to the vernacular. whereas other rhetoric-books

illustr"ãd the tropes and figures with examples from the classics

or rhe Bible, th. R"*ist ihetoricians, continental or English,

prided themselves on taking some of their examples from the

ir.rrr".,r1"rs, and from the great contemponry wtiters. The 1555

French rhetoric by Foclin ?tn*r mainþ on Ronsard, Du Bellay

and Amyot's translation of the greatest of Greek romances'

Heliodoru s' Aetbiopicø (another sign-of the equal status of prose)'

In England that.rrth,rriætic Ramisr Abraham Fraunce illustrated

his Líwiers Logike(r5S8) with Spenser's Shephyd's,.CøIendar, and in

his Arcadian"nhtìorikt ãf ,h". yeff he took illustrations from

sidney's poeffy (both Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella), f19m Du

Banai irr FrencÀ, Tasso in ltalian, Boscan and Garcilaso in

Spanish, so producing 'a collection of model Passages to show how

the preceptJ actuallli work' (Howell, zi}). In Chapter .Four.

of

thi, iook I follow Érr,rrr.. - I, roo, a¡n a Ramist on this point.

The Ramisr manual by Charles Butler , Rhetoricae Libri nuo (t5gZ),

which was ro be very popular in the seventeenth cenrury, being

in Latin naturally ."o"git draws its examples -from

the classics,

bur at one point it suddÃly quotes in English, from 'our F{omer':

Spenser, ilx k lrtt oJ Time, This gesture shows again the im-

pärr"rr." which the Ramists attach.á to literature as a source, and

ä, *n end, for rhetoric. But the Ramist rhetorics must not be given

sole credit for the important steP of quoting from the vernacular'

Quite independendy, Patriotic humanists such as Sir John Cheke,

Ascham "nã

Sir Humphrey Gilbert had urged that English was

as capable of all the figures of rhetoric as any other lanqrage -S*..ti.rg, 84; Nelson, rz9; Smíth, tt,zg ; Jones [r], chapters

t,

++ Classical Rh¿toric in Englisb Poetry

I, 6). So in t589, the author of Tlte Arte oJ Englislt Poesic (generallyascribed to George Puttenham) illusuated his precepts withexamples from 'Wyatt, Surrey, Gascoigne, Raleigh and otherEnglish poets, while in tjgg John Hoskins's DirectionsJor Speech

ønd Style drew its examples exclusively from Sidney's Arcødia, andincidentally provided a demonstration of the organic functions ofstyle in that work which modern citicism has yet to follow up.Whether or not the Rami,sts direcdy influenced Puttenham andHoskins, all these rhetoricians were working together rowards thercahzation in English of the full expressive potential of rhetoricas a basis for litemy language.

The period roughly between Sidney and George Herberr sees

the flowering of rhetoric in English literature. More new rexr-books of rhetoric were produced in thar period than any orher,and although they naturally derived their knowledge of rhe figuresfrom the great classical sources (book + of the Ad Herennium,

Cicero, Quintilian) or from such continental versions as Tra-pezuntius's Rbetoricorum llbri quinque (Venice, c, r47o) or theubiquitous and indispensable Susenbrotus (Epitune Troporum ac

schematum, rj4r) or the equally derivative and increasingly ex-haustive collectionr by Scaliger and Sturm (Sonnino, 46-8),the English textbooks, so far as f can see, showed more under-standing of the true literary function of rhetoric than any of theircontinental sources or analogues. Indeed, as I shall argue below,the rhetoric-books of Puttenham, Peacham and Hoskins developthe literary potential of rhetoric in a way which maynot perhaps beoriginal in itself, but is a very intelligent rcalization of these lítetarypossibilities, one not seen since the days of Demerius and Longinus.But in this period as in eyery other, practice surpassed theory inputting possibilities into action. Both Hardin Craig (t6r, t66,ry j-}r) and Madeleine Doran (Sr-r) have stressed that EnglishRenaissance drama is rhetorical from first to last (indeed there istheoredcal evidence that in the Renaissance the drama, 'more thanany other literary form . . . was rccognized as having a close

affiniry to oratory': Sackton, ))). The development which theytrace from a stiff, 'external', use of rhetorical forms to a suppleand flexible absorption of them is one which could (and should)

A Concise History oJ Rhetoríc 45

be shown in detail in poeffy and prose. I shall be discussing

some of its effects on poeffy later, but here I should like to quote

a passage from Craíg, pardy because it is so PercePtive a comment

on the 'natural' development of rhetoric, but also because itpoints to the reason for the triumph of eloquence in England:

In Shakespeare and his later contemporaries rhetoric is so naturally employed

as almost to escape notice. There is no longer any creaking of the machine. 'We

ere nor for thai reâson, however, to think that Elizabethan literature had

forgotten or rejected rherorical art. There is in the greatest of the Elizabethans

a rhetoricism which, based solidly on the teachings of the schools, has been

reûned by practice and experience until nature and art ere one, or, as Polixenes

puts it ín-The Wínter's Tãlc,'the art iæelf is nature'. Almost every degree ofobviousness or of unobffusiveness can be found. (t66)

The phrase which f want to pick out is 'based solidly on the

teachings of the schools', for to conclude this survey of English

Renaissance rhetoric we must look briefly at education then.

It is natural to begin with the universities. They were older

than the grammar-schools, and we can see there the humanistreforms in teaching which were to have so vital an influence on

the schools. Oxford and Cambridge, like all European universities

in the Middle Ages, had been dominated by scholasticism, the

study of Aristotle's logic being the single most important element.

The eer v English humanists (as early as r47gCaxton published a Nova Rbetorica written at Cambridge by

Trayersanus: Howell, 7g-8ù began to put into Practice the

ideals of srudying classical literature which had been developed

in fifteenth-century Florence under the inspiration of the

Byzantíne educationalist Chrysoloras (Bolgar, 87-8, z68 f), and

they made far-reaching changes in the university curricula. Where

logic had held the main place, rhetoric and grammar (includingstudy of the classics) now shared it with logic, and Greek was

added. In the vyords of a recent historian of Oxford and Cambridge

in this period:

Small as these changes first appear, they were of considerable consequence.

They represenr concessions to the criticism which humanists had levelled against

the old ¿cademic practices and they worked a readjustment of emphasis primarilyamong the subjects of the trivium. By reforming the study of grammar, by in-creasing the time spent in the study of rhetoric, by transferring rhetoric from

I

46 Classícal Rbetoric in English Poetryt

the more advanced part of the arts course to preparetion for the B.4., and byenlarging work in both fields through the introduction of some readings fromthe litcrac humaníorcs, trhey reduced the overriding emphasis formerly put uponlogic and allowed, if they did not invite, e new spirit to guide a srudenr'swork. (Curtis, 94)

The new spirit was soon there, not least because in addition touniversity lectures the colleges took more and more responsibilityfor organízing teaching, and in the establishment of colleges lvehave further evidence of the advance of rhetoric. 'When BishopFox founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1517, hespecified that lectures should be given on Cicero's Orator, hisParts oJ Rltetoric, Quintilian's Institutes and the Declamøtíons

attributed to Quintilian. Triniry, Oxford, adopted the same rexrsin 1555 and added whar has been called 'the Bible of rhe laterHumanists' (Bolgar, z7o), the Elegantiae of Laurentio Valla. Inthe same year St John's, Oxford, accepted this list and added ro itfurther works by Cicero, Hermogenes, fsocrates and Demosthenes,and the two Renaissance collections byTrapezunrius and Cassander(T. W. Baldwin, I.ro3f. And so on, as rhetoric became evermore important, and those who lectured on ir achieved fame -Rainolds at Oxford, Gabriel Harvey at Cambridge, like Vives,Ramus and St Augustine before them and George Herbert afterthem, orators, teachers of rhetoric.

But there vrere hundreds of teachers of rhetoric in the Renais-sance who are not so distinguished as these, whose na¡nes ere

often not recorded or simply given as 'schoolmasrers'. Thanks tothe enormously detailed work by T. \M. Baldwin we can now see

the full importance of grammer-school education in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. His indefatigable progress throughdozens of curricula, recorded in over fifteen hundred large pages,has established for ever one of the most remarkable educationaldevelopments of all dme. In r5ro and rSrr John Coler andErasmus, apparently independently, oudined a scheme for a

humanist reform of secondary education, a scheme set out mostclearly in Erasmus's D¿ Ratione Studii and which by t jtz Colerhad invited him to put into practice at St Paul's (T. \M. Baldwin,r.Z8), Although the early curriculum of St Paul's is not known

A Concise Historyt oJ Rhaoric 47

in detail, we know enough to see that'Wolsey's curriculum forIpswich in r5z8 is derived from it (rr8), and this is a patternwhich is followed many times: a school was founded at Saffron'Walden in rJzJ, and in r j jo its timetable was laid down as tobe based on those of V/inchester and Eton (tlÐ. Founders ofschools natwally looked to the authorities for models, and so theideas of a few great educators (Erasmus, Vives, Srurm) and thecurricula of the pioneer schools (St Paul's, Eton, Winchester,'Westminster) became repeated all over the countrlr, with slightvariations or compromises. The rate of expansion was high, andby , jZ; there were about 36o grammar-schools. In this standard-ized education-system the major aim was to achieve spoken andwritten fluency in Latin, and although the dominance of Latinhas been questioned (Nelson) it sdll seems to have been supreme.Apart from religious teaching and the introduction to Greek inthe higher forms, the texts srudied rryere in Latin, teaching wasmeant to be in Latin, the plays acted were mostþ in Latin, andany pupils found talking English to each other were supposed to bepunished - masters used pupils to spy on each other in order toenforce the rules. The first thing to be studied was, of course,

grammar, from the parts of speech onwards, using such techniquesas parsing, ffanslation from Latin into English and back again.Gradually pupils ascended to the writing of themes on a setsubject and impromptu disputations in Latin, while workingthrough Latin literature in stages of increasing linguistic diffi-culty.

The curriculum was not large, but the teaching was incrediblythorough. New facts rryere released sparely (new words at the rateof three

^ d^Ð and after the master's explanation the pupil would

repeat it, memoúze ít, be asked to recite it; be tested agaín,repeat it, and be made to use it over and over again undl therewas no chance of him forgetting it. The amount of repetitionrequired is frightening. School hours were from 6 a.m. dll 9,then breakfast; g.r5 till rr, rhen lunch; r dll 5, then supper;6-7, of pure repetition; for thirty-six weeks a year, and for fourto six years. First thing in the morning pupils were tested on thefacts they had been given to learn the previous day. Then some

48 Classical Rhetoric in Englisb poetrl

new work was introduced, which would be studied until lunch-time; that afternoon it would be repeated, and a little bit moreadded. All would be rehearsed in the evening, would be testednext day, and so on. Fridays and Saturdays the whole week'swork would be reviewed and repeated. 'A sixreenth-cenruryschoolmaster estimated that one hour of instrucrion wouldrequire at leasr six hours of exercise to apply the principles towriting and speaking' (Joseph, r r). One is glad nor ro have beena boy at such a school - or, perhaps more, not ro have been amaster.

This remorseless process of repetition and memorization testi-fies to the determination of the Elizabethan educaror ro leavenothing to chance. But it has importanr consequences forliterature,from the absorption of countless sententiae to the committing tomemory of large amounts of such texts as Ovid's Metamorphoses.

As eloquence was the greatest human acquirement and asrhetoric was the key to all literature, schoolboys rryere thoroughlydrilled in every srage of the arr. rn their reading as in their ównwriting they were taught to observe the larger processes ofrhetoric (the five parß of an orarion, the threà styles, how towrite using a 'formulary' system) and - mosr importanr for thecentral argumenr of this book - to know the name, definitionand use of a large number of figures of speech. rn rhe fourth form(n. the age of about ten) they would use that seminal workErasmus's De Copia, 'On the Copy li.e. copia, amplification] ofWords and Things' and in rhe fifth form they would graduare rothe list of figures in Susenbrotus's popular collection or in AdHerenniwn, Book 4.

'what pupils actually did when confrontedwith these compilations may be expressed in a quite bald way:'first learn the figures, secondly identify rhem in whatever youread, thirdly use them yourself' - though of course the processescould be followed in a differenr order, or simultaneously. For rhefirst stage Erasmus is rhe guide, advising the pupil simply to 'haveon the tip of your rongue a sutnn a of rheroric' (T. W. Baldwin,r.8r), advice which Vives addresses more to the masrer who is as

it were to pick a posy from a huge field of rhetoricians (Vives, I 8l).The principle of learning the figures is solemnly recorded in a hosr

.:

A Concise History oJ Rhetoric 49

of school statutes - St Paul's, Ipswich, Eton, Canterbury(Marlowe'sschool), Bnty St Edmunds, Aldenham and many more. So those

for Rivington in t5Z6 speciSr that the mester should introducehis pupil into the Ad Herennium in order 'to let him understandthe divers kinds, and parts of an Oration, giving him examples

out of other Authors, and how to furnish his sentences withfigures of all sorts, as they be plainly set forth in the fourth book,

which will be more easy to follow fu daily prafiice'(T. W. Baldwin,r.3+g; my italics).

Rotherham in the early seventeenth century used Butler'sRamist rhetoric, and with equal diligence: 'Their fore-nooneLessons were in Butler's Rhetorick, which they said memoriter, and

then construed, and applyed the example to the definition'(t,4rZ). An account by Archbishop Laud of 'Westminster in the

eady l63os (Dryden was there in the l64os) notes casually that'Betwixt 4 and J they repeated a leafe or two out of some book

of Rhetoricall figures' (l.16o). ft was simply accepted as routine,and given the crushing degree of memorization one can assume

that anyone who had been at school in sixteenth-century England

(or Europe) would know a goodly proportion of Susenbrotus's r 3zfigures and tropes.

Secondly, the pupil, willing or otherïvise, noted them in every-

thing that he rcad, and transferred many examples to his ownnotebook - Every Man his Own Orator. Susenbrotus himself had

urged the teacher to 'fully point out' the grammatical and rhetori-cal figures in both sacred and profane authors so thac the pupilcen more easily 'understand the mind of the author who is beingtead', stressing that 'tropes and schemes . . . must especialLy be

pointed out while expounding', as if with the finger (rr.r39). Ifwe looked into the classroom of any school in England in thesixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth centuries we would findconfirmed what Richard Sheny recorded as earþ as I55o: 'Thecommon schole-masters be wont in readynge, to saye unto theirscholers : Hic est jgur a : andsometimes to ask the m, P er quam jgur am ?'But, he says, 'what profit is herein if they go no further?' One

must have a complete working knowledge of the figures in order

to understand any literature, 'For thys darre I saye, no eloquente

50 Classica| Rltctoric in English Po*ry

wryter maye be perceived as he shulde be, wythout the knowledge ofthem'(t.16). The schools recommended the constant observationof figuies. At V/estminster, between r and 3 in the afternoon themaster expounded the day's lesson 'out of Cicero, Virgil, Homer,Euripides, fsocrates, Livy, Sallust', a lesson which 'was to be

exactlie gone through by construing and other gremmatical waies,examining all the rhetorical figures' Q.lSg-6o). At Hertford thepractice of aiding teaching and furthering memorization by havinga higher form examine a lower one on its lesson was followed, burwith the proviso that the synonyms, phrases, 'with the Figures andOrder of composicion of the sentence shalbe added of the masrer,

observed by the schollers and inserted by them into their paperbooks' (r.lZl).'What was good for the schoolboy's norebook inthe sixteenth century was often good for a printed book. So int j4o ]ohn Palsgrave published a translation of the Latin comedyAcolastus in which he added in the margin notes poinring ourthe metaphors, scntcntiae and the 'schemes or exornations rhetorlcatlidrawing attention to such figures as øposiopesis, auxesis, epiphoncma

(Palsgrave, t4j-6) and Angel Day in his manual of episrolaryrhetoric The English Sccretorie (tSg6) indicated in the marginthe figures used in his model letters. (Further examples ofthe marginal listing of figures can be found in Joseph, r7z-3, andHerrick, ßg-2r4.) Elizabethan rhetoricians even wenr to thesurely unnècessary lengths of advising readers to mark the figuresin books themselves. John Hoskins informs the person for whomhe wrote hís DircctionJor Spæch and SryIe that in the copy of Sidney'sArcadiø presented with the treatise he has written 'M' against themetaphors, and 'des' against 'evident and lively descripdons'(Hoskins, 9, 4z). Similarly the schoolmaster John Brinsley,author of Ludus Literarius or The Grmtmør Scltoole (t6tz), recom-mended that in the left-hand margin it was good to list thevarious parts of the oration, 'and in the latte. side of the pagetowards the right hand to set the several tropes and figures, burin trro or three leffers. As for metonymia, efficentia, no more butmet, effic, or the like, marking some time under the word inwhich they are' (Charlton, rr4). We have Milton's copy ofHarington's translation of Oilando Jurioso. and we can see how

.á" Concisc History oJ Rbetoríc 5r

Milton the model pupil dudfully marked the metaphors andrhetorical figures (Clark lzf, ry6--7).

The last stage, that of the pupil using the figures himself, is

the one for which abundant wrimen evidence exists and whichdoes not need to be elaborated on here. One of the earliest Englishtheoretical works, Tbe Educøtion oJ Children (1588) by \MilliamKempe, advises that once the pupil has learned 'the tropes andfigures' and observed 'every trope, every figure' in the work he

reads, he should then 'take in hand the exercise of all these 3

Artes at once in making somewhat of his owne', keeping decorumor 'the fineness of speech in the Rhetoricall ornaments, as comeþtropes, pleasant figures' (T. V/. Baldwin, r.446). A fuller accountis provided by the influendal seventeenth-century educationalistChìrles Hooie, in his Ncw Discovcr! oJ the Old Art oJ Tcaching

Schoole Q. ,Ø7; published 166o). Given the topic for his theme,the pupil should first take his notebook, look up everything thatmight be useful, skerch the argument, and then put it into thefive-part form, endeavouring to use the formulae 'proper to each

part, so as to bring their matter into handsome and plain order;and to flourish and adorn it neatly with Rhetorical Tropes andFigures, always regarding the composure of words' (Hoole, r85).Thus by the triple process, endlessly repeated, the averege

Renaissance schoolboy knew as much about the rhetorical figures

as his Hellenistic or Roman counte{part.As a final insight into the English educational institution of

rhetoric we can look briefly at surviving school exercises. Virtuallyall of these have disappeared, of course, but the teaching of royalrywas of sufficient importance for the notebooks of King Edward VIto have been preserved. The king had the best humanist teacher inEngland, Sir John Cheke (who was to have such an enormousinfluence on Cambridge), and one can fface the progress of in-sffuction in his pupil's exercise-book. In tr47-8 he was taughtthe figures and the parts of an oration from the Ad Hcrcnnium

(Edward's orvn copy of this has survived and it is well thumbed,especially in the relevant parß here, Books 4 a.nd r: T.'W.Baldwin, Lzz4.-j, zlr-4), and he simply memorized them likeeveryone else. 'We can trace too the next stâge, rhetorical analysis

Sz Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry

of the works studied. In r 548 he was reading the most popularbook of moral philosophy in the Renaissance, Cicero's Ofices,

exffacting sententíae and phrases from it, then making an analysis

of its structure. More interesting is the evidence that on z8

January rj4g he made a rhetorical analysis of Cicero's famous

first speech against Catiline, noting the 'figures and phrases' used

in it. Of the celebrated direct opening ('Quousque tamen abutere,

Catilina, patientia nosffa?' - 'In heaven's narne, Catiline, how

long will you abuse our patience?') he wrote Exclamatio; of another

passage repeating 'nihil' at the beginning of six succeeding clauses

he wrote conduplicatío (or 'anaphora' - he uses the Ad Hcrcnnium

terminolog¡r). Another ('vivis, et vivis' - 'yot are living, and youare living') h. correcdy described as membrum, the figure whichends the construction suddenly, but not the sense; and of thesequence of clauses beginning with verbs similarly inflected

('Fuisti . . . distribuisti . . . statuisti . . . delegisti. . . discripsisti. . .

confirmasri . . . dixisti')heï/rote similitcr cadens,that is homoiotelcuton

or prose-rhyme (t,zz7-8). It is a formal enough exercise, but at

least as good as that performedby a modern historian of rhetoric(Clarke, 7z). The third stage of the schoolboy's absoqption ofrhetoric can also be seen here, for in r54g the youngKing Edward wrote a Latin composition on the theme 'love is a

greater cause of obedience than fear', an especially interestingtopic for a ruler. First he collected all his main arguments

(inventío), also listing similes and examples which he intendedto use; then he divided the material uP in the form ofthe five parts of a speech (disposnio); lastly he wrote the wholething out, neatly using up all his quotations (T. V/. Baldwin,

r.z5o f).King Edward VI may have had more individual supervision

than other Renaissance schoolboys, but the teaching system and

its dominance by rhetoric was the same for him or for QueenElizabeth (Ascham taught her and records how she too learned

her figures of speech - Joseph, zg) as for thousands of other

pupils, including all the great writers of this period. As C' S.

Lewis rather charmingly puts it, we must piccure medieval and

Elizabethan poets

)ular

fices,rlysis128rloususedltere,how

otherauses

miumf youvhichf theectediti....leuton

,uË at3toric¡n of/oungeisa)stingrrentsended

mofwholedwin,

vls10n

n and

)ueen:arnedotherC. S.

r1 and

A Concise History oJ Rhetoric 5i

growing up from boyhood in a world of 'prettie cpanortbosis't pdtonofiasid,

ísoeolon, end sìmilítcr cadcntia. Nor were these, like many subjects in a modern

school, things dear to the masters but mocked or languidly regarded by the

parents. Your father, your grown-up brother, your admired elder schooifellow

all loved rhetoric. Therefore you loved it too. You adored sweet Tully fCicero]and were as concerned about aytndcton end chiasmu.ç es â modern schoolboy is

about county cricketers or t/pes of aeroplane. (Lewis, 6l)

If that last sentence might seem to confuse the enthusiasm ofhobbies with the discipline of ïvork, Lewis's statement of the

farníliaúty and respect with which a boy regarded rhetoric can

be vigorously endorsed. And the Elizebethans' familiaúty withthe figures is demonstrated by their many references to them,

usually by the appropriate name. 'We must postulate, therefore,

their keen appreciation of the skilful use of the figures, either as

readers or as members of an audience (e.g. the way that characters

in Love's Labour's Iosf or Romeo and Juliet demonstrate their witthrough sleight-of-hand with the figures has to be appreciated

instantaneously in live performance or else the y¡hole point is

lost. The many Elizabethan parodies of bad rhetoric demand the

same keenness.) A characteristically witry account of their aware-

ness of rhetoric is providedby Nashe, as his UnJortunate Traveller,

Jack Wilton, describes an orator in full possession of his rhetoricand his audience: 'And ever when he thought he had cast a figure

so curiously as he dived over head and eares into his auditors

admiration, hee would take occasion to stroke up his haire, and

twine up his mustachios twice or thrice over while they mighthave leasure to applaud him'(]oseph, 49).

Of course nothing can 'explain' the flourishing of the arts inany age, but the credit for one of the richest abilities of Renais-

sance literature, its mastetyof the expressive resourcesof language,

must be given directly to the humanist school-system and to the

masters who energetically enforced it. In their hands the schools

of England attained a proficiency in the practical use of rhetoricwhich ranked them with the great rhetoric-schools of antiquiryand the Middle Ages - Athens, Carthage, Bordeaux, Chartres,

Bologna. For the schools exerted a lasting impression on the

writers who attended them - Marlowe at Canterbury, Spenser at

j+ Classicøl Rhetoric in Englisb Poetr5t

Merchant Taylor's (under Mulcaster), sidney and Fulke Greville

at Shr.wsbury,ShaÈspeare almost certainly at Stratford Grammar

School, er'Wesrminrtär Ben Jonson (under the revered Camden)

and later George FIerbert, "rri Hooker at Exeter Grammar School'

H;r. rh.y all"achieved a 'solid groundinq'. itt the most ancient

;;ã p"; Lrful litenry discipline," ""d wiihi" the framework of

,h.tåi. they were ír"" ,o å.u.lop. We owe more to the Eliza'

bethan schoolmaster than we know'

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER

The reade r maywell be tired of the sp.ectacle of rhetoric effortlessly

penerraring "irry corner of Western-literature, so perþsthe.rest

àf *i, hiiory ."r, b. more ixiefly outlined. In England school

curricula lvent on being consolidated and re-enacted, often without

change. The'West-irrit., curriculum, for example, remained the

,"-ån.il well into the nineteenth century, and undergraduates

at Harvard were still writing formal themes in the r83os. we

."r, pori, that Dr Johnson *d gorke had essendally t\ same-

education as Hooker and Bacon, and it was not dll the reform of

the curricula and the rise of modern subjects in the nineteenth

..rrrury that the rherorical education becomes reduced :o ole

ri*pfi in classics, just o-ne subject amongst mall: But rhetoric

*nr^rrt, unchallengád b.for. then, indeed the middle.yeers.of the

sevenreenth centufi saw a revival of the animus "gti":..

rhetoric

*tt.t has alway, É".r, presenr, an animus expressed with a force

which validarei Cicerois observation on Plato's Gorgias, that it

was air attack on rhetor icby a master rhetorician (De Oratore ,I'47)'so we find berween r64o and 168o all the old attacks: rhetoric

is a harlot, a slave, her ornamenß are those of a false and deceitful

cosmeric, and the proper course is to strip her bare until we dis-

cover 'rhe naked ir.,th', rhe cant'ideal of simpliciry for this

rhetorical indignarion. ft is interesting to _se€

the progressioÎ "Ímetaphor, ,rrå ,o describe the_ imputed 'cosmetic deceit' of

rheroric, a Baroque collecdon of cloudi, mists, veils, the obfuscat-

ireville'alrunar

rmden)School.ancient¡ork of, Eliza-

lrtlesslythe restI schoolwithout.ned theraduates

los. We1e same

:form ofleteenthto one

rhetoricrs of therhetoricr a force, that itre, L,47).rhetoric

Ceceitful. we dis-for this

:ssion ofeceit' ofrbfuscat-

A Concise History oJ Rhetoric 55

ing defensive liquids of the squid, ointment, greese and even

beauty-spots. The attack on rhetoric is only part of a complex

process involving a reaction against the exuberances of Jacobean

iit, to*ards a plain style in the pulpit and in the writing ofscience, and has io far been best studied by R. F. Jones (Jones [z],7 j-r¡z) - it might repay analysis from a purely stylistic view-

point. But although the reaction was violently expressed and- didhelp to alter the accepted models for prose-style it seems to have

had little pracdcal effect on education. The school curricula were

not changed, rhetorical textbooks continued to be reprinted and

even new ones appeared (there were ten significant publicationsbetween ú29 and ú99, several having many editions well intothe eighteenth century: Howell, passim). Everyone knows Samuel

Butler's famous gibe, inevitably quoted by those who misunder-

stand rhetoric or wish to avoid discussing it (they never have a

second quote to follow it):

+:#'i:Ji;:ï'** lî'iì,,.",,

However, Butler was at the 'Worcester Cathedral School, so youcan be sure he knew the figures as well as anyone else - and he

used them too, in Hudibras and elsewhere.

A. N. Whitehead called the Augustan Age the 'silver age ofthe European Renaissance'(Jack, r), and that is particularly true

of its rhetoric, for despite the attacks on the idea of rhetoric (thatis, on the image of a crude, mechanical and artificial system

which writers prided themselves on having destroyed) the artcontinued to have a great formative influence on Poetry, easily

adapting itself to the newer modes. 'W. K. Wimsatt, in a valuable

essay demonstrating the continuiry of rhetoric between Puttenham

and Pope, concludes that the gap between theoretical attacks and

acrual practice in this period is so wide that 'there is a marked

correlation not between poems and contemPorary Poetics butactually between poems and contemPorary anti-poetics' (Wimsatt,r85). That is to sa/r rhercric continued to be essential to litera-ture. Dryden uses some figures comPetently, Pope many brilliantly(his rhetoric deserves a full smdy in imelf - so far we have only a

j6 Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry

few suggestive articles), and Swift was evidently an adept rhetori-

cian, n, " t...nt -órrograph has partially shown (Beaumont).

The tradition went on: in his early Poems a thorough analysis has

shown Fielding using such figures as anaphora, asyndeton, epipltoyya

and, chiasmør çMill"i, 36-8), while obviously the prose of Dr

Johnson or Gìbbon or Burke is built around the schemes and

trop., evolved by Gorgias and fsocrates. That most rhetorical (in

,uiry sense) of the eighteetrth-century novels, Tristratn Sbanþ,-

not only ú.t many serio-comic references to the history ofrhetoric and to classical orators' dress, technique and behaviour,

but refers quite familiarly still to such figures as 1piphonema,

erotesis, sorites, catacltresis, hypøllage, and prolcpsis (Sterne's favourite

is aposiopesis, and it could be argued that this figure, with its,."rirrg Èreaking-off in the middle of a senrence, is symbolic ofthe bãok's whãle design of frustrated expectation - see the

complete definition anã illustration of the figure in book u,

ch"pt.r 6). Rhetoric-books continue to aPPear, including several

inflLentiai ones from the Continent (such as Rapin's Reiections otl

Eloquence, translated ryo6) and English writers make many n::v

coliecdons. ft is noticeable, however, that some Augustans feltdistaste for the technicalities of rhetorical terminology, though

retaining their interest in the effecm appropriate to the figures.

Ín r7r l-Joseph Trapp, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, .attacked'those Booksbf Rh.rorick that are usually rcad in Schools. . . so

full of dry logical Definitions' but he went on to atgue that the

figures "rå

b.tt appreciated in their contexts in literature:.'every

oã. th"t is conveisãnt with the best Authors [i.e. presumably, the

Classics], that reads them with Understanding, and true Relish,

cannot but be acquainted with all the Figures of Speech, and the

Art of using them, tho' he never heard so much as their Names,

or their Definitions' (Jack, 9). It is perhaps for this reason that

Dryden prefers to use the Neoclassic term 'turns of speech'

rat-her thìn name specific figures, though it is clear from the

examples he quotes that several different figures are involved (e.g.

Essay, II.I5 r--z), and that the manuals increasingly prefer to

disiuss general qualities of sryle - 'purity, elegance, manliness,

vivaciry'.

A Concise Historyt oJ Rbetoric 57

However, certain traditional aspects of rhetoric remain the

same, and in P. w. K. stone's analysis of The Art oJ Poetrl,

tTjo-r8zo there are many details which Geoffrey of Vinsauf or

Mlrrtotno or Puttenham would have agreed with. The identifica-

tion of rhetoric and poètic continues (Jack, 2 i-), for Horace's

borrowing from Cicero (aut prodesse øú delectar) lernains the aim

or end of both arts (Stone, t6-t8), as expressed most concisely

by Dr Johnson: 'The end of writing is.to-instrqct; the end of

poetry is to instruct by pleasing'. Similatly the critics of this

þ.tioã . do not distinguish between Prose and verse in their

expresslve resources (ro, 57), nor sugg.tlrh"r_thought'is differ-

"iúy affected in either medium (+S-f), Yh:" Po.1? is dis-

ringuished it is as before in terms of the added complication.of

*Jti.r or because it is more moving than pros. (28) - as withBen Jonson, it is merely more effective rhetoric. Common to

both media still is the classical-medieval-Renaissance concept oflfuenry composition as being a deliberate_Process, involving a

plan, " d.fitti.. aim, and a distinct renge of emotional effects on

ihe audience (zo, and passim; Jack, z-r4). The creative process

is, as ever so far, still an objective one, concerned with the work

not the writer: 'It occurs to no one that a writer will set out to

express the reactions of hís sensib iliry for their_ own sake' (Stone,

T;). h the detail of composition the plan is still articulated, using

thá first three stePs of an oration, invention, disposition, elocution

(lof), so when Dr Johnson evaluates Pope's work it is natural for

hi.tt to do so in explicitly rhetorical terms (le). Cicero, Quintilianand Longinus are idll the basic authoritiet (r 5), and their defini-

tion of Ãetaphor as a 'compressed simile' is still. accepted (lg),as is the classical and Renaissance sffess on the 'illusrative' or

visual effect of literaturc(55-6). Rhetoric remains basic to liærary

theory until the end of the eighteenth century Qù: and although

progressive movemenß may change particular details, they do- not

q,t.itiott the fundamentally rhetorical assumPtions. (36,_t4t 87).

But if firmly linked to the traditional ideas and mechods, late

eighteenth-cenrury rhetoric is not stale or shrivelJed up.- Withinp*. rhetoric it ii concerned not only with style, but with all the

ihetorical processes, and with 'every kind of literary and aesthetic

rhetori-umont).lysis has

'i\honemaeofDrnes andrical (in

Shanåy,

story of:haviour,iphonema,

Favourite

with itsrbolic ofsee the

book II,.g several

Iections on

nny new

;tans felt, thoughe figures.attacked

,ls...so: that the:e: 'everyrably, the.e Relish,r, and the.r Names,:ason thatf speech'

from therlved (e.g.

prefer tonanliness,

58 Classical Rhetoríc in Englísh Poetry

problem" 'developing a properly philosophical rationale for

rhetorical theory' by quickly absorbing both empirical philosophy

and the r.* ,.i"rrce of psycholog¡r (rz-r5). W. see rhetoric here,

as so many times before, adapting itself to nelv demands on the

scyle, structure and even content of literature. It was sdll grgwing

*'h.r, the first generation Romantics abruptly cut it off, and withour longer view of the literary Potential of rhercric we must egree

with Mr Stotte's conclusion that the new theories of literature

were not entirely beneficial (r #-So) - something of importance

had been lost. The Romantics completely disengaged rhetoric

from poetry (8r), and their hostiliry to the concePt of poetry as

a*. Q)o) l.d to the dismissal of all the rhetorical Processes and

their offshoots, especially the idea of genre. The Romantics

'brought about a virtual extinction of all the traditional. genres:

rhe dramatic, the epic, the didactic, the satirical' (r+Z). (It is

worth adding that when'Wordsworth came to PrePare a collected

edition of his poems he grouped them not by genre but according

rc autobiographical relevance, to places or incidents, or to the

workings ðf ftit own creative faculry: 'Poems founded on the

affecdons', 'Poems of the fanq, of the imagination, of sentiment

and reflection'. The poet's feelings dictate the genres now)''Wordsworth's t 8oo Preface to the Lyrical BaIIøds dismisses such

rhetorical concepts as 'presentation' or 'effectiveness', and withthem the whole Renaissance and Neoclassic sffucture of literary

creetion and literary criticism. The new form is the ode or l1níc,

the subject-matter the introsPective emotions of the Poetl no

longer public, genenlized emotional concePts but the subtle,

individual rt"t.t of mind. As De Quincey put it, 'the problem

before the writer is to project his own inner mind; to bring out

consciously what yet lurks by involution in many unanalysed

feelings' (rt4-rl). (lt would be interesting to trece the various

strategies and conventions which the Romantics evolved as a

substitute for rhetoric.)I have summarized Mr Stone's book at such length because I

believe it to be an important analysis of a decisive step in the

development of litenry theory (anticipated in general terms by

M. H. Abrams, t4-26 and passim), an almost complete change of

)nele forrilosophyoric here,

ls on theI growingand withtust egree

literaturenPortence

I rhetoric

Poeffy as

:esses and

tomanticsal genres:

¡.2). (It is

r collectedaccordingor to the:d on thesentimentres now).risses such

and withof Litenryle or lyúc,: POet, no

he subtle,,e problem'bring outunanaþsed:he variousclved as a

r because IiteP ln the

Ie

terms bychange of

A Concíse History oJ Rhetoric 59

dírection, one which still affects our conscious and unconscious

thinking about literature. The abandonment of rhetoric comes

soon aft.r l8oo. Goethe in r 8 r 5 still held the view of Isocrates or

Cicero or Vives that rhetoric is indispensable to humanity: as

Curtius úghtIy says, 'fn him the entire European tradition was

alive' (Curtius, 63), and Curdus is equally right to say. of the

vogue ior rhetoric-books which continued as far as t83o 'Today,

alfthat is waste paper' (28). But De Quincey saw this at the

rime. In December l8e8 he reviewed one of the last manuals of

rhetotic(and a by no means incompetent one), Bishop Whately's

Elements, and wrote: 'No art culdvated by man has suffered more

in the revolutions of taste and opinion than the art of Rhetoríc' ;'from being the height of human accomPlishment it had declined

ro rhe level of alchemy and asrology, to 'impostures' and 'rifles'.Now 'the age of Rhetoric, like that of Chivalry, has passedamongst

forgotten things' (Works, x.8r, 97). Not quite, for De Quincey'sown prose-sryle is as full of antithesis, balance, and more exuberant

figures of speech as a Hellenistic romance (C. S. Baldwin, 4o,

44-7, 4g),Ín English literature since then there have been some

obviously rhetorical phases. For example, the figures of symmetry

and repetition have served such diverse purposes (whether drawing

on art or on nature) as emotional emphasis in Dickens and Tenny-

son, static or 'hieratic' incantation in T. S. Eliot, and various

appeals to the emotions in modern political oratory (some details

in Corbett). For two other modern writers rhetoricwas of conscious

importance. First, and in a major waft the poetry of Gerard

Manley Hopkins is rich with the figures of rePetition and in-tensification, a scylistic influence which was pardy due to his

classical education and partly, perhaps, to his Jesuit training.That Order used a traditional Ars dícendi, which had had twenty-one editions by ry28 (Curtius, 78), and which sdll included an

exercise from'the ProgSmnasmøta. (C. S. Baldwin, z6),'Or:itory'was also important in the education of Stephen Dedalus, and

Joyce used rhetoric to characteríze one of the worlds of Uþsscs. As

Stuart Gilbert was the first to show, Episode vII, 'Aeolus', set inthe offices of the Dublin neÌryspaper the Freeman, makes dense and

ironic use of the figures of rhetoric to record the living (if debased)

:.

ì"'.1t.a

:.

'a

:.]

6o Cløssical Rhetoric in English Poetry

connections beEween modern journalism and the language ofCicero. And Finnegans Wake , in which the last sentence completes

(or begins) the first, can be seen as _a

large-scale example ôfìpønøIepsts, in which the last word of a line (or sentence' or

p*rg*ph) is the same as the first. As we have seen, in Anglo-

Sr*ott po.try this figure is known as the 'envelope pattern', and

that doãs ,roi t..ttt an inappropriate metaphor for the self-contained

unit of Joyce's novel.But theie few exceptions epatt, as a branch of litemty theory,

and as a creative discipline for the writer, rhetoric has disappeared,

and Mr Srone's observation that in the cenffry following the

Romantics' rejection no major critic has paid any attention to itas a literary tool (9) is all too true. Not just neglec,ted but despised,

and the animus behind the sublimely ignorant Pronouncement ofRenan in l87o that 'Rhetoric is, with Poetic, the only mistake

the Greeks made' (Clarke, r58) can be duplicated many times,

until as a word it has shared the debasement of most of the words

connected with the theatre (Barish [r]). Like 'theatricalf or( stãgef' , 'rhetoricaf is now Largely a term of abuse, signifying

falsèness, deceit, inflation. But although the words connected

with the theatre have been degraded, few people today despise

drama, and the analogy should hold. The books of rhetoric are

not iust wastepaper. It is unlikely that rhetoric will ever again

provide a system or framework for the creative writer, but as a

*."nr of understanding and evaluating most of the major litera-

ture of the past it is essential, and those books are our tools. I hope

that this crowded survey has given enough evidence of the

dominance of rhetoric as a litenry discipline. V/e must now look

et its teachings in more detail, and try to re-create their value forliterature.