ANCIENT RHETORIC AND POETIC

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ANCIENT RHETORIC AND POETIC

INTERPRETED FROM REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

BY CHARLES SEARS BALDWIN PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

ΤΟ ΜΕΝ ΔΗ ΠΟΙΗΤΙΚΟΝ ΦΥΛΟΝ ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΝ Lucian

GLOUCESTER, MASS. PETER SMITH 1959

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Copyright, 1924 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Reprinted, 1959 By Permission of MARSHALL W. BALDWIN

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NELSON GLENN McCREA

ARTIS VTRIVSQVE LITTERATE PERITO HVNC LIBRVM COLLEGA AMICVS D. D. D.

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PREFACE

To interpret ancient rhetoric and poetic afresh from typical theory and practise is the first step toward interpreting those traditions of criticism which were most influential in the middle age. Medieval rhetoric and poetic in turn, besides illuminating medieval literature, prepare for clearer comprehension of the Renaissance renewal of allegiance to antiquity. Thus the historical survey needed to focus many important detached studies itself needs a preliminary volume of exposition. The influences of ancient oratory, drama, and story cannot be measured surely without more specific knowledge of ancient precept and practise, firmer grasp of ancient conceptions, than has been offered by any synthesis in English. Even in other languages the available compends are generally rather digests, or dictionaries of terms, than interpretations of leading ideas. Instead of risking once more the inadequacy and the forced emphasis that beset such a method, I have tried to make the most representative ancients speak for themselves.

Though the very choice of spokesmen interposes the chooser, scholars generally, I hope, will accept Aristotle for the theory of rhetoric as the energizing of knowledge, Cicero for its scope and skill in practise, Quintilian for its teaching, and so on through a list chosen for representative significances. Nor does the plan of spokesmen preclude sufficient indications of general theory and practise. It shows in Cicero the influence not only of Aristotle, but of Isocrates. In poetic, ancient epic art is [viii]revealed most definitely and most largely in the Æneid because Vergil, besides being one of the greatest of poets, was so studious a craftsman as to choose from all the ancient experience the most vital ways of narrative. Historically the New Comedy seems more significant than the Old; and the same consideration has included not only Ovid, but even Seneca. These analyses of ancient achievement are made complementary to ancient theory by being strictly limited to composition.

All the authors chosen have been already expounded and translated, some of them again and again, but rather as philosophers, or as orators, or as men of letters, or simply as Greeks or Romans, than as writers on composition. Yet composition was not only one of the greatest ancient achievements; it was a constant preoccupation and a consistent technic. No other body of technic is more thorough and comprehensive than ancient rhetoric; and few have been so generally recognized. Every writer had it in mind; and since commentators have often had in mind something else, I have felt myself bound always to explore the technical connotations of the originals, and usually to retranslate. Verification is facilitated by exact citation, and comparative study by the indexes. What may thus serve incidentally as a book of reference is primarily, however, a progressive exposition from ideas through principles to details. The Greek philosophy of rhetoric is confirmed and applied in the great period of Rome by the most influential orator of history. Aristotle’s

theory and Cicero’s vindication put us in the best position to comprehend the method and the detail of Quintilian. This in turn guides appreciation of that abundant study of style which is exemplified typically in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and illuminated by the genius who [ix]wrote the De sublimitate. Through such spokesmen, with complementary technical analysis of ancient achievement, the way seems surest toward recovering inductively the ancient artistic experience.

This experience has remained too long in abeyance for speakers, writers, and teachers of English. In the United States, though composition has been studied during the past fifty years more generally, perhaps, than in any other country except France, neither our theory nor our pedagogy has applied very widely the ancient lore. Jesuit schools, indeed, have maintained the tradition of rhetoric, as have some others teaching composition consecutively through Latin; but in general the multitude of modern text-books of English composition shows little use of ancient experience. Thus it has been possible to propose as new, and even to try, methods exploded in Rome two thousand years ago. There is no question of reviving an equally exploded archaism. Nor need we fall again into the Ciceronianism of the Renaissance. Ancient deviation, as I have tried to show, is no less instructive than ancient progress. The point is so to comprehend what the ancients learned in singularly fortunate conditions as to guide our own theory away from vain repetition toward progressive

realization of our own opportunities.

Metric, except where it bears incidentally on prose rhythms, has been deliberately excluded. In the present divergence of critical interpretation an entire volume would hardly suffice for a really contributory synthesis. The larger movements of poetic, dramaturgy and the development of verse narrative, show a consistency that warrants a synthesis of ancient poetic; and there is even greater consistency in ancient rhetoric. But we may not lightly speak of ancient metric, as if it were continuous [x]from Greek through Latin. Nor is the metric of either Greek or Latin, significant as it is incidentally, necessary to the comprehension of ancient rhetoric or poetic.

The innovation of expounding rhetoric and poetic side by side was suggested by the demands of that historical treatment which is proposed for a later volume. But though it was designed for this larger purpose, it has meantime facilitated the immediate task. Actually the experience of the ancients seems to be best approached from their conception of composition as twofold. Logical composition and imaginative composition are, indeed, distinct; but each technic, defined within its own scope, helps to define the other by contrast. Making each more distinct, the contrast further exhibits interrelations and confusions highly significant for the history of both pedagogy and criticism. Not merely as archæology, then, ancient rhetoric and poetic demand reconsideration, but as the theory of widely suggestive experiences in the progressive art of words.

The bibliographies at the head of each chapter or section, and the notes, are strictly selective. Enumeration of what I have read myself could only embarrass the guidance of readers who wish to proceed from this book to further study. Omitting, therefore, all mere acknowledgment of my long and manifold indebtedness, omitting also the obvious books of reference, whether histories or topical digests, the apparatus directs immediately to interpretations either of the authors themselves or of those principles and habits of ancient art which seem most significant for the study, the practise, and the teaching of composition. For example, the references are not to Volkmann and Christ-Schmid, but to Heinze, Rhys Roberts, Hendrickson, Hubbell, to Sandys the editor [xi]rather than to Sandys the historian; and preference has been given to works in English.

Personal indebtedness begins with a scholar who was professor of Greek before he became professor of English. The late Thomas R. Price revealed the study of composition as embracing all ordered expression from a periodic sentence to a tragedy. The working out of that integrating conception has been furthered by so many colleagues that specific acknowledgment must perforce be limited to those interested immediately in this volume. Professor LaRue VanHook read my translation of Dio Chrysostom’s Oratio LII; Professor Nelson Glenn McCrea, the entire manuscript and the proof. For criticism of the manuscript I am no less deeply indebted to Professors Brander Matthews and Ashley H. Thorndike; for valuable suggestions on the proofs, to Professors Edward D. Perry, Frank G. Moore, and Donald L. Clark, and to the Rev. Professor Francis P. Donnelly, S. J. In 1920 Professor Rhys Roberts, after sharing his acute and sympathetic scholarship in conversation on the plan of both volumes, did me the honor to read in manuscript the first draft of

Chapter II. High appreciation of all this generosity and a grateful sense of this fellowship of letters at once acquit these scholars of all responsibility for my interpretations and encourage my hope of contributing toward a more fruitful criticism of ancient composition.

C. S. B.

Barnard College May, 1924

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CHAPTER I RHETORIC AND POETIC

The two great works of Aristotle on composition, the Rhetoric and the Poetic, presuppose an ancient division. That a philosopher should have written either is itself significant; that he should have written both implies his ratification of the ancient idea that the art of speaking and writing is not throughout its various phases single and constant, but distinctly twofold. On the one hand, the ancients discerned and developed an art of daily communication, especially of public address, τέχνη ῥητορική, ars oratoria, rhetoric; on the other hand, an art of imaginative appeal, τέχνη ποιητική, ars poetica, poetic.

A distinction between the two in diction, the idea that the language of poetic is more freely imaginative, is both commonplace and superficial. The ancients, of course, were aware of it, and frequently thus contrasted poetry with oratory[1] or with history. But the distinction between the diction of public address and the diction of drama or epic, between prose style and poetic style, was not in ancient thought fundamental. Rather the ancients saw here common ground. Their discussions of [2]prose style freely draw examples from poetry; for their rhetoric, more explicitly than most modern rhetoric, realized that the appeal of public address, in so far as it is an appeal of style, is largely imaginative and rhythmical.[2] Polybius, indeed, reproaches Phylarchus for his eagerness to be pathetic and his habit of visualizing the terrible, “as do the writers of tragedies”[3]; but as a restriction on style in history this is quite exceptional and would involve disparaging Thucydides. The common view of history is summed up playfully by Lucian: “Let the

[historian’s] thought, in so far as it too is high-sounding and uplifted, appropriate and seize something of poetic, especially when it is involved in arrays and battles by land or sea; for then there will be need of a poetic wind to fill the sails and bear the tall ship over the waves.”[4] In oratory the ancients specifically inculcated imaginative visualization, and taught it from the poets. Their general distinction of style between prose and verse was in the habit of rhythms. No, the ancient distinction between rhetoric and poetic is far more than a differentiation of style.

The difference that Aristotle saw between history and poetry is far deeper; and perhaps this was in the mind of Polybius when he went on to say,[5] “the end of history is not the same as that of tragedy, but the opposite,” and complained that Phylarchus was too fond of working up crises (περιπέτειαι). Even the flippant Lucian may have meant to imply, though he does not carry out, a deeper difference when he said:[6] “the undertakings of the [3]poetic art [in general] and of poems [in particular], and the appropriate rules, are one thing; those of history, quite another.” At any rate, the Aristotelian distinction of history from poetry, repeated by Polybius in the second century B.C. and by Lucian in the second century A.D., is not merely in diction, not in prose or verse, but in composition.

So, even more evidently and pervasively, is the broader distinction between oratory and poetry. Rhetoric and poetic connoted two fields of composition, two habits of conceiving and ordering, two typical movements. The movement of the one the ancients saw as primarily intellectual, a progress from idea to idea determined logically; that of the other, as primarily imaginative, a progress from image to image determined emotionally. This distinction is more fundamental than that of so-called literary forms. The ancients were well aware that a particular composition might shift from one movement to the other, a play of Euripides lean toward oratory, an oration of Isocrates move for a while in the mode of poetry. What they contemplated in their division was not primarily a composition, but composition as a general habit, the predominant and determining way of composing, the difference between the habitual movement of a Demosthenes and that of a Sophocles. Finding these to be distinct essentially, as typical processes of conceiving, ordering, and uttering, Aristotle treated them separately

as two distinct technics, rhetoric and poetic.[7]

That the distinction between the habitual composition, or movement, of rhetoric and that of poetic is not oftener made explicitly by ancient critics need cause little surprise. [4]The distinction may have been familiar enough to be tacitly assumed. It is, in fact, often assumed; it was quite clear in the mind of whoever wrote the De sublimitate; but it is sharply defined and fully carried out only by Aristotle. We must remember that ancient criticism had no second Aristotle, that it was preoccupied with rhetoric, and that it usually discussed speaking and writing, as modern criticism does no less usually, in terms of style. The long history of criticism shows few outstanding works on composition in the large. None the less for the meagerness of criticism, the active presence of the distinction is seen in the greatest works of antiquity.

Nor is the distinction unknown to modern criticism. It is misinterpreted, for instance, at the beginning of Blair’s Lecture XXXVIII, confirmed by De Quincey’s distinction[8] between literature of knowledge and literature of power, and revived in the division, cited by Renard[9] from H. Balzac, into “écrivains d’idées and écrivains d’images.” But in spite of significant occurrences and recurrences, it seems not to have controlled any consecutive movement of modern criticism.

Again, the four “forms of discourse” widely accepted by American text-books naturally combine into exposition and argument under rhetoric on the one hand and, on the other, description and narrative under poetic. But obvious as this seems, the older, simpler, more fundamental division does not widely control modern pedagogy. None the less its pedagogical aspect, in either ancient or modern times, is more important than that of many more current critical distinctions. For learning to write, the distinction between rhetoric and poetic is more directive than the [5]distinction, for instance, of literary forms. It is also more supported and interpreted by psychology; for it divides not merely what is composed, but the typical habits of composing.

Thus the experience of the ancients with composition, an experience so prolonged and so progressive as to constitute a full and distinct chapter in the history of art, may be approached first by dividing as they divided. Each technic, defined within its own scope, helps to define the other by contrast. Making each more distinct, the contrast further exhibits interrelations and confusions highly significant for the history of both pedagogy and criticism.

Rhetoric in the philosophy of Aristotle is essentially the art of giving effectiveness to truth. Accepting this theory, Cicero nevertheless feels rather the tradition of rhetoric as the art of giving effectiveness to the speaker. The constructive review of a great orator exploring his art is thus complementary to the analysis of the philosopher. Even after Aristotle and Cicero there was room for a third survey. Quintilian showed how rhetoric pervaded and largely directed ancient education. For that ancient art which was at once useful and fine, an education and a career, had great spokesmen. We shall begin best, and go on most surely, by letting them speak: Aristotle for the function and scope of rhetoric, Cicero for its pursuit and achievements, Quintilian for its method.

FOOT-NOTES:

[1] Quintilian, for instance, appreciates Lucan as “ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus, et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus.” Inst. Or. X. i. 90.

[2] Typical of this habit of thought is: “Exigitur enim iam ab oratore etiam poeticus decor ... ex Horatii et Vergilii et Lucani sacrario prolatus.” Tacitus, Dialogus, 20.

[3] Polybius, II. 56.

[4] Lucian, Quomodo historia, 45.

[5] Polybius, II. 56.

[6] Lucian, Quomodo historia, 8.

[7] The terms rhetoric and poetic are contrasted in Lucian, Demosthenis encomium, 5-8, 17-18; Strabo, I. ii. 6 (C. 17, end).

[8] Essay on Pope.

[9] G. Renard, La méthode scientifique de l’histoire littéraire, page 385.

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CHAPTER II THE RHETORIC OF ARISTOTLE

The only art of composition that concerns the mass of mankind, and is therefore universal in both educational practise and critical theory, is the art of effective communication by speaking and writing. This is what the ancients and most moderns call rhetoric. More ample and exact definition, though unnecessary for elementary practise, is demanded for fruitful theory; and the theory of rhetoric has always concerned so many more people than the theory of any other art as to be part of every pedagogy. Here the practise of education not only may be guided by philosophy; it must be. For any coherence in its teaching, rhetoric must be comprehended not only in its immediate functions, but in its pervasive relations to other studies. It is at once the constant in educational schemes and the art among sciences. How we are in a given time and place to learn or teach rhetoric depends on how we understand its function and scope in specific relations.

The importance of a theory of rhetoric in this aspect was discerned by the greatest philosopher of antiquity. In Aristotle’s comprehensive survey of thought and action rhetoric is not merely included; it has substantive place. Aristotle’s Rhetoric,[1] though professedly [7]more analytical than constructive, has a consecutive development. Neither his ethics nor his politics receives more scrutiny or shows more penetration and grasp. As if he dared not slight it, he shows in this work, comparatively brief though it is, the full reach of his intelligence. In detail it has been questioned; but in conception and plan, in direction of thought and order of presentation, it has remained fruitful.

Book I

Book I surveys by definition and division the opportunity of the public speaker. (i) Rhetoric is the complement of logic (dialectic). It is the art of persuasion formulated by investigating the methods of successful address; and its object is to promote a habit of discerning what in any given case is essentially persuasive. Proof as contemplated by rhetoric proceeds by such means as may be used in public address. Instead of the syllogism, which is proper to abstract logic, rhetoric typically uses the enthymeme, that approximate syllogism which is proper and necessary to the actual concrete discussion of public questions. Thus rhetoric serves as a general public means (1) of maintaining truth and justice against falsehood and wrong, (2) of advancing public discussion where absolute proof is impossible, (3) of cultivating the habit of seeing both sides and of exposing sophistries and fallacies, and (4) of self-defense. (ii) The means of persuasion outside of rhetoric [8](πίστεις ἄτεχνοι) are witnesses, documents, and other evidence;