A COLLEGE MANUAL OF RHETORIC

INTRODUCTION

1. Speech and writing may be considered first and essentially as composition, and then also as the use of separate words, phrases, and clauses. Both considerations are included in the term rhetoric; but whereas rhetoric means originally and properly the art of persuasion by public speaking, it is now used more largely to mean the whole art of speech and writing in whatever kind. In this larger sense, as in the narrower, rhetoric may be divided into prose composition, which is the subject of Part I., and prose diction, which is the subject of Part II.

2. Prose composition, again, may be divided into two classes, overlapping, indeed, but broadly distinguishable: composition for business, for those common ends which are the only concern of most men in writing; and composition for pleasure, for that expression of individuality which is the concern of the few and which is the impulse to art. The former, being ultimately determined by logical relations, may be called logical composition; the latter, being controlled less by logical relations than by artistic, may be called literary composition. The progress of logical composition is from proposition to proposition, and may be so measured in summary; the progress of

I

literary composition has a different measure of its own. The former is covered by the rhetoric of the ancients. For the latter, since they had comparatively little prose composition, except histories, outside of the former, the ancients had no separate body of theory; but since in their principles of the drama verse is not considered as an essential element, some of the fundamental aspects of our second class are developed at length in the ancient poetics. These two classes are not to be thought of as more than convenient abstractions. Business and pleasure are not terms mutually exclusive, nor logic and art. An essay, for example, must be logical to the extent of having a clear and reasonable sequence. It may also be artistic, have literary charm, and the more of this the better. But a division that sets on the one hand that sort of composition which everybody practises and everybody may learn to practise well, and on the other hand that sort which only the few practise much and only the few have the gift to practise well, serves as a sound basis for practical discussion.

3. Each of these two classes has one main kind of composition and also a subsidiary kind. The type of the former class, the main business of composition, is persuasion, the winning of assent; but necessarily combined with this, and also appearing separately, is exposition. The type of the latter class is narration, story-telling; but necessarily combined with this, and also appearing sometimes, though not often, separately, is description. Thus beneath all forms of prose lie four kinds of composition, which, though variously combined, are yet profitably distinguishable, practically separate in methods persuasion, the methods of winning assent; exposition, the methods of lucid explanation; narration,

the methods of conducting a story; description, the methods of suggesting mental images corresponding in some degree to scenes beheld or imagined by the writer. The plan, therefore, is simply this:

RHETORIC

I. deals primarily with prose composition,
A. both logical composition; i.e.

I. persuasion and

2. exposition;

B. and literary composition; i.e.

I. narration and

2. description.

II. deals also with prose diction.

4. In both A. and B. the elementary principles are generally applicable to either of the component kinds. Therefore the elements of logical composition are discussed first without distinction of kind, and the particular applications made afterwards, first to exposition, then to persuasion; and so with literary composition. The direct use of rules of construction, whether these rules be compiled from previous treatises or drawn or exemplified from good prose, is confined to revision. Indirectly, sound principles, and even sound rules as to detail, may lead to good habits; but directly they are of no practical use till something, at least, is written. To write by rule, in the sense of pausing to apply rules in the course of composition, is of course futile. In that sense nobody, perhaps, ever wrote by rule. To rewrite by rule is simply to follow the method of progress in any art.