I. GIFFORD PINCHOT, TREES IN THE FOREST II. ALICE MEYNELL, SYMMETRY AND INCIDENT. PREFACE THIS has been made a college manual of rhetoric in the conviction that the work now done by good schools should be recognized as a foundation, and in the hope of answering those further needs which give to composition in the vernacular a definite place in college. The more important function of rhetoric as a college study may be defined in a word as that anciently assigned to logic. In becoming applied logic, it has become practically the organon. For the mass of college students this seems to remain its more urgent duty. But since we have so extended the term "rhetoric as to include the whole field of literary composition, this too is staked out here, in order that a student's reading, for himself and for college courses in literature, may be summed up in the main aspects of technic, in order much more that his practice in this too may have a practical guide. Doubtless the extension of the term has been too long current to be rejected now. At any rate, the thing itself, the practice of literary composition, whether in a given course it be called rhetoric or literature or simply English,- both has its approved place in college and seems to need a manual. Hence arises the division of Part I into logical composition and literary. The former has its selections for extended study mainly at the back of the book; the latter mainly in the Appendix. The sequence of principles has been relieved throughout of elaboration and detailed direction by relegating many of the examples and all the notes, references, and exercises to a single appendix, keeping the same section numbers. First, then, is a body of doctrine, mainly for the student; second, a body of apparatus, mainly for the teacher. By this means there was opportunity to make the doctrine simpler and the apparatus fuller. The references are in great part to the ultimate sources. Aristotle, for instance, having been somewhat overlaid by centuries of indirect citation, it seemed worth while to furnish exact reference, and, at important points, full summary. The directions for themes, again, have been made the more explicit because it is often easier for a teacher of limited experience to omit than to divine. The order of parts, whatever its merit for practice as well as for theory, cannot in any manual be adapted to all cases. Though the order here expresses some years' reflection and experience, the several parts have been made distinct enough to be used in another order. The twofold division of Part I, though it may have some support in De Quincey's "literature of knowledge and literature of power" and in Dr. Gardiner's "literature of thought and literature of feeling," differs from these in dividing, not literature by its effect upon the reader, but composition by the method of the writer. Reached independently in directing actual practice, it is advanced for the judgment of teachers on its practical value. The debts of any modern writer on rhetoric have accumulated too long to be acknowledged fully. Το the detailed citations of the Appendix I may add only the word gratitude for the generous criticism that has saved this book at more than one point from deviation. My colleagues at Yale, Professor Wells (now of the University of California) and Dr. Taylor, solved some problems of method that we discussed at length together. Professor Wendell of Harvard and Professor Bradley of the University of California were kind enough to review for me in detail the little book that is now enlarged to be Chapter I. I hope the larger book will prove worthy of further counsel. That a preface should not be a list of names prevents me from enumerating those others to whom it is none the less a cordial greeting. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, C. S. B. |