[i]

ANCIENT
RHETORIC AND POETIC

[ii]

[iii]

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

[iv]

Copyright, 1924
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Reprinted, 1959
By Permission of
MARSHALL W. BALDWIN

[v]

NELSON GLENN McCREA

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

[vi]

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

[xii]

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.

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

The bare digest will show that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is hardly a manual. In fact, it is rather less a manual than is his Poetic. It is a philosophical survey. The scope of rhetoric is measured not by any scheme of education, but by the relations of knowledge to conduct and affairs. To be comprehended, this great work should be read consecutively, for it is not merely systematic; in spite of parts undeveloped, it is progressive, and its chief significance, perhaps, is from its total development. The following discussion presupposes a fresh and consecutive reading.

About rhetoric Aristotle would first of all have right thinking, conceptions large enough to be suggestive and distinct enough to be true. So the definition in his first chapter is slowly inductive. First we are to distinguish rhetoric from logic.[3] As modes of thought the two are alike general, both applicable universally, neither having its own subject-matter. As modes of utterance they differ typically in that while logic is abstract, rhetoric is concrete; while the one is analytic, the other is synthetic; while the one is a method of study, the other is a method of communication.

[9]

Rhetoric, no less than logic, has subject-matter in every given case. Only its perverters teach it as merely an art of dealing with persons, of reaching an audience. No less than logic, it is a means of bringing out truth, of making people see what is true and fitting. But rhetoric contemplates having truth embraced. It is the application of proof to people. Its distinction from logic is here, in the typical mode of proof. The type in logic is the syllogism; the type in rhetoric Aristotle calls the enthymeme.[4] By this he means concrete proof, proof applicable to human affairs, such argument as is actually available in current discussion. The enthymeme is not inferior to the syllogism; it is merely different. Actually, public address on current public questions cannot be carried on by syllogisms or by final inductions. That by which it can be carried on, the strongest proof possible to actual discussion, Aristotle calls enthymeme.

From this typical mode of rhetoric Aristotle gathers its fourfold function: first and foremost, to make truth prevail by presenting it effectively in the conditions of actual communication, to move; second, to advance inquiry by such methods as are open to men generally, to teach; third, to cultivate the habit of seeing both sides and of analyzing sophistries and fallacies, to debate; and finally to defend oneself and one’s cause. That truth does not always prevail shows the need of effective presentation. The first function, then, of rhetoric is to make truth prevail among men as they are. Truth cannot be learned by the mass of men through scientific investigation; for that demands special training. A second direction, then, of rhetoric is to make the results of investigation generally available, to teach truth in general human terms. Debate, [10]Aristotle’s third item, which is one whole field of rhetoric, may indeed be mere logical fence, using terms and propositions as mere counters; but real skill in debate, the habit of seeing both sides and of analyzing sophistries and fallacies, tends to make truth emerge from current discussion. The fourth use of rhetoric, for self-defense, seems added merely for completeness and to rebut the common objection that rhetoric is abused. That, says Aristotle, is no argument against it.[5]

The definition implied and sketched in Chapter I and formulated in Chapter II, may be summed up in the word persuasion, if we are careful to speak of persuasion not as achievement, but as method. Just as we ask of medicine, not that it shall infallibly heal—a degree of achievement impossible in human affairs—but that it shall discern and use all the means of healing available in the given case, so the true end of rhetoric is to induce such habitual skill as shall discern in any given case the available means of persuasion.[6]

As means of persuasion we must include both those that are extrinsic and those that are intrinsic,[7] those that lie outside the art of rhetoric in the domains of subject-matter [11]and those that lie within, the facts of the case and the technic of making them tell. For rhetoric has to include subject-matter, the forces of knowledge. Though this is extrinsic in the sense of lying outside the art of rhetoric, it is essential. Rhetoric is an art, as Aristotle is careful to show; but it differs from other arts in the degree of importance it must always attach to its subject-matter. The division here into extrinsic means and intrinsic means as both necessary to persuasion is not merely the obvious one into matter and manner, substance and style; it is a division of the springs of composition, the sources of effectiveness, into those that lie outside and those that lie inside of utterance, or presentation. It frankly accepts rhetoric as more than artistic, as never self-sufficient and absolute, as always relating presentation to investigation.

Equally philosophical is the following division[8] of the intrinsic means of persuasion into: (1) those inherent in the character or moral potentiality (ἦθος) of the speaker, (2) those inherent in his actual moving of the audience, and (3) those inherent in the form and phrase of the speech itself. That the three are not mutually exclusive is evident and must have been deliberate. Aristotle is telling us that rhetoric as an art is to be approached from these three directions and in this order. The division is comprehensive not only as being satisfying psychologically, but as constituting an outline for the whole work, the headings of the development in three books: first, the speaker himself; secondly, the audience; and finally, in the light of these two, and as the bringing of the one to bear on the other, the speech. Book I deals with the speaker as himself the prime means of persuasion. Rhetoric, Aristotle [12]implies, is necessarily ethical in that everything consecutively imparted or communicated, as distinct from the abstractions of geometry or logic, is subjective. Moreover, in making the speaker the point of departure Aristotle admits that other trend of classical pedagogy which made rhetoric a cultivation of personality. Book II, proceeding to the second item of the division above, deals with the audience, with knowledge of human nature, especially of typical habits of mind; for rhetoric in this aspect too is ethical. It deals with the interaction of moral forces in speaker and audience, and also with the direct arousing of emotion. The speech itself, the final utterance, which is the subject of Book III, has thus been approached as the art of adjusting the subject-matter of a given case through the intelligence and emotion of the speaker to the intelligence and emotion of the audience. This is the only book of very specific technic; and it comes last psychologically.

Aristotle’s division and its order are the division and the order not merely of analysis, but of much the same synthesis as underlies the actual processes of composition. I begin with myself; for the subject-matter else is dead, remaining abstract. It begins to live, to become persuasive, when it becomes my message. Then only have I really a subject for presentation. A subject, for purposes of address as distinct from purposes of investigation, must include the speaker. It is mine if it arouses me. I consider next the audience, not for concession or compromise, but for adaptation. What is mine must become theirs. Therefore I must know them, their ἦθος and their πάθος. My address becomes concrete through my effort to bring it home. The truth must prevail—through what? Against what? Not only through or against reasoning, but through [13]or against complexes of general moral habit and the emotions of the occasion. I must establish sympathy, win openness of mind, instruct in such wise as to please and awaken, rouse to action. My speech is for these people now. Only thus am I ready to consider composition; for only thus can I know what arguments are available, or what order will be effective, or what style will tell.

This is the philosophy of presentation. What is its practise? Rhetoric ranges for subject-matter most often in the fields of social ethics and politics, tempting its professors, Aristotle adds acutely, to assume the mask of politics.[9] It deals with “the ordinary and recognized subjects of deliberation,”[10] with matters still in dispute and doubt. Thus dealing with social and political conduct, it can neither proceed, as logic does, by absolute propositions nor arrive at logical demonstration. Its premises are not universals, but generally accepted probabilities. That is, to resume his previous distinction, the mode of rhetoric is not the syllogism or induction proper to logical formulation, but the enthymeme or instances proper to actual presentation. The mode of scientific induction emerges to-day in the “gas laws” or the formula of the velocity of light; the mode of rhetoric emerges in Huxley’s “Piece of Chalk.” Abstract deduction is summed up in the syllogism;[11] concrete deduction, in the enthymeme. By enthymeme, as Aristotle has now made fully clear, is meant a “rhetorical syllogism” in the sense of a deduction available concretely for presentation, as distinct from a deduction formulated abstractly for analysis. His enthymeme is deductive method used constructively. It is not mere popular reasoning, logic [14]modified for popular consumption, but public reasoning, such reasoning as is available with the public for building up public opinion and policy.

Therefore the headings, or “topics,” of rhetoric are not peculiar to a particular field of investigation, but general or “common topics” such as justice or expediency, which express common human relations. To deviate from these into the method peculiar to a given subject-matter, physics for example, is to pass[12] from rhetorical method for presentation over to scientific method for analysis; and this, of course, the speaker must do to the extent of mastering his subject-matter before he presents it. Though he must not forget that his ultimate task is to present to an audience and therefore concretely, neither can he forget that what is to be presented must be acquired. In so far as he investigates he will follow scientific method, the analysis proper to the field, the “special topics.” Thus for his education he needs some study of the “special topics” of those sciences that furnish most of his subject-matter, the “special topics” of ethics and politics. Of these he must have, as part of his equipment, a practical or working knowledge, the orator’s equipment for considering each case within its own field as well as in its general relations to human nature. Aristotle’s distinction here between general and special “topics” coincides with his earlier division (page 10) of the means of persuasion into intrinsic and extrinsic. The extrinsic means are knowledge, to be got by the methods of getting; the intrinsic means are utterance, to be given by the methods of giving.

At this point, the opening of Chapter iii,[13] Aristotle makes his scientific division of rhetoric by its fields. The three fields of rhetoric are: (1) the deliberative, persuasion [15]in public assemblies as to matters of current discussion, looking to the future, urging expediency: (2) the forensic, accusation and defense in courts, looking to the past, urging justice; and (3) the occasional,[14] praise or blame, looking to the present, urging honor. The underlying, general, or “final topics” of rhetoric, as distinct from the special topics that it uses from other studies, are thus seen to be expediency (including practicability), justice, honor, and their opposites; and the special topics drawn by rhetoric from philosophy, ethics, and politics may be grouped in a speaker’s compend of these studies according as they apply to the deliberative, the forensic, or the occasional field.

In deliberative oratory[15] the speaker deals with good and bad, not in the abstract as the philosopher contemplates virtue or happiness, but in concrete matters of doubt and dispute. So his topic of possibility is not abstract, as in mathematics, but concrete, in relation to human will. So in general Aristotle disclaims for his classification of the ordinary subjects of deliberative oratory any attempt at scientific division or scientific method of investigation. Those he follows in his other works; here the analysis that he provides is avowedly practical. Since in politics,[16] for example, the public speaker needs to know something of finance, war, commerce, legislation, Aristotle gives him a suggestive summary [16]of what he should learn. In our modern educational systems such a summary has far less importance; but the correlation remains vital. Pedagogically as well as philosophically, deliberative oratory must be correlated with its natural subject-matter. So to-day college courses in rhetoric demand correlation with college courses in history, sociology, economics, and politics. The professors of these subjects train for investigation, teaching the scientific method proper to each; the professor of rhetoric trains for presentation, teaching general methods, Aristotle’s general or “final topics,” for handling all such material. But unless each method of training can make use of the other, both will suffer. Rhetoric must lean upon such real knowledge of a given subject-matter as is furnished by the studies dealing with that subject-matter scientifically, i.e., by its “special topics.” Meantime Aristotle’s summary is intended not to explore these special topics, but to show what they are.

Similarly the student of deliberative oratory needs such a survey of philosophy[17] as will acquaint him with current ideas concerning happiness, whether of rank, offspring, wealth, honor, health, beauty, or strength, and concerning a good old age, friendship, fortune, and virtue. Therefore Aristotle, summarizing these conceptions, supplies[18] a cursory examination of good in general and of goods, or good things, in particular, proceeding[19] both by definition and by comparison, and not limiting his discussion to the deliberative field. To the latter, and to politics, he reverts in the concluding chapter[20] of this section by enumerating briefly the common forms of polity: democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, and monarchy.

[17]

Since occasional oratory[21] demands an equipment primarily ethical, Aristotle provides a summary of moral nobility[22] by definition and comparison. This is applied more specifically than the preceding section to rhetorical method, in this case to the method of enhancing or heightening and to the method of comparison.

For forensic oratory[23] Aristotle provides as a speaker’s compend of philosophy a survey of the objects and conditions of crime. He makes no specific mention of what we now call criminal tendencies; and his division of “extrinsic proofs,” i.e., of legal evidence (laws, witnesses, contracts, tortures, the oath) is for the modern lawyer neither scientific nor significant.

Book II

As Book I is the book of the speaker, Book II is the book of the audience. The audience is not merely discussed; it furnishes the point of view. As Book I considers the necessities and opportunities of the speaker, so Book II considers the attitude of the audience. Book I is rhetoric as conceived; Book II is rhetoric as received.

In this way Aristotle proceeds to analyze, in Chapters ii-xi, the common emotions: anger, love, fear, shame, benevolence, pity, envy, emulation, and their opposites. The relation of these to the formation of character leads to six chapters on character in youth, in age, in the prime of life, and on the typical dominant traits of character seen respectively in persons of social rank, of wealth, of power, and of good fortune.[25] The classification here will [19]be more satisfying as psychology if we remember that it analyzes the common types of character and emotion in a crowd. Aristotle is attempting neither an analysis of mental operations nor a science of human nature, but such a practical classification as may inculcate the habit of adaptation to the feelings of an audience.

The psychological analysis of the audience concluded with Chapter xvii, Aristotle returns to rhetoric in our ordinary sense at Chapter xviii with a recapitulation.[26] “The use of persuasive discourse,” he says, resuming the language of the opening of this book, “is for judgment,” or decision; i.e., persuasion connotes an audience to be persuaded. After showing that this is true in all cases, and summarizing briefly the main aspects of Books I and II, he concludes his transition by saying: “it remains for [20]us to go on with the common topics.”[27] With these he actually goes on, not merely extending the treatment of them in Book I (see page 14), but considering them now as to their availability, their effect upon hearers. More explicit statement, however, of this distinction might well have made the bearing of these latter chapters clearer. The topic of possibility[28] implies the range of the argument from antecedent probability (a priori). Example[29] includes analogy, both from history[30] and from fiction, with specific mention of fables. In this wide sense, including mere illustration, it means little more than vividness of presentation through the concrete and specific; but that its persuasive value far exceeds its logical cogency no one doubts who knows audiences. This is the angle, too, from which Aristotle discusses maxims.[31] “They have great service for speeches because audiences are commonplace. People are pleased when a speaker hits on a wide general statement of opinions that they hold in some partial or fragmentary form.”[32] The same point of view controls the further discussion of enthymemes,[33] which includes a hint of something like Mill’s Canon of Concomitant Variations,[34] directions for logical exclusion, for analysis demanding particulars, for dilemma, and for reductio ad absurdum. Remarking the popularity of the refutative, or destructive enthymeme over the constructive, and touching the fallacies of petitio principii and post hoc, the book concludes[35] with methods of refutation (λύσις).

[21]

Book III

Book III studies the speech itself. Book I having presented rhetoric from the view of the speaker, and Book II from the view of the audience, Book III now applies it directly to the speech.[36]

The threefold division sketched here seems at first sight to coincide, so far as it goes, with the one that afterward became traditional. Classical rhetoric as a whole assumes a fivefold division: (1) εὕρεσις, inventio, the gathering and analysis of the material; (2) τάξις, dispositio, collocatio, the arrangement, sequence, or movement in the large; (3) λέξις, elocutio, the diction, or the choice of words and their combination in phrases, clauses, and sentences, the movement in detail; (4) ὑπόκρισις, pronuntiatio, delivery, or “elocution”; (5) μνήμη, memoria, memory. But [22]Aristotle’s division neither corresponds to this nor is consistent with itself. The first item is the same in both. Aristotle’s second item is clearly the same as the later third, and has the same name (λέξις, diction). The third item of his opening sentence seems equivalent to the traditional second (τάξις), and uses the corresponding verb (τάξαι); but below he makes his third item instead delivery (ὑπόκρισις), which is the fourth item of the traditional division, and then proceeds in the same chapter to include delivery, by implication, under diction.[39] In a word, the opening division of Book III is baffling. But the actual development of the book is quite clear: chapters i-xii on λέξις, diction, or, in the widest sense, style; chapters xiii-xix, on τάξις, or arrangement.

Delivery, after declaring it to have the greatest force (δύναμιν ... μεγίστην), he dismisses in a few sentences. Tantalizing in its brevity, this passage is nevertheless suggestive; for it sketches an analytic division of delivery into voice-placing and volume, pitch, and rhythm; it points to the value for public speaking of the arts of dramatic recital; and, most important of all, it relates delivery to the whole idea of style as concrete presentation versus abstract formulation.

In thus uniting delivery and diction as alike means of effective utterance Aristotle has seemed to some readers to disparage both. He has seemed to express, as in a similar passage of Book I,[40] a philosophic contempt for style. But this impression is not confirmed by scrutiny. Not only can he hardly be thought to despise that to which he devotes himself cordially throughout a large part of his treatise, but his words here hardly yield the inference that [23]has been drawn from prejudicial translation. They may be rendered more precisely as follows:

“No one thus teaches geometry” cannot be taken as a slur on style. It simply reminds us, by applying to diction a distinction made with great fulness in the first two chapters [24]of Book I, that rhetoric is not geometry. Formulation, as in geometry, is colorless because it is abstract; but any actual presentation, even mere information (ἐν πάσῃ διδασκαλίᾳ), demands style, whether concreteness or the arts of delivery, for mere lucidity (πρὸς τὸ δηλῶσαι), much more for any sort of appeal. For any sort of presentation, Aristotle is saying, we must study style; and we must include the study of delivery except in those written addresses which depend on style even more than on thought.

The appeal of style, Aristotle says in this same first chapter,[44] was first discerned by the poets. The method of suggestion, in other words, belongs to poetic. This is more than a critical distinction; it has an application directly pedagogical. The teaching of style, always delicate and difficult, may well begin through poetry, which in descriptive heightening and in harmony of sound with sense, especially of pace with mood, most plainly exhibits style as adaptation. The connection of this with delivery, both with reading aloud and with dramatic recital, though obvious, is often neglected. Elocution in our modern sense may, if rightly related, be one of the gateways to appreciation of style.[45]

Chapter ii,[46] after glancing at the fundamental virtue of lucidity, considers the choice of words for appropriateness and for suggestiveness, i.e., for their connotation, and especially for the descriptive vividness of the concrete, as in metaphors. Chapter iii[47] deals with the inappropriateness [25]arising from bad taste;[48] Chapter iv,[49] with the extension of metaphor into simile. Chapter v[50] passes from single words and phrases to their combination in clauses and sentences. The distinction is important, and is kept throughout the classical rhetoric from Aristotle down. The choice of words is ἐκλογή (electio); the shaping of clauses and sentences is σύνθεσις (compositio). Frequent translation of the latter by our English word composition, which has a meaning so much wider as to be quite different, misses the specific point of technic, and often makes the ancient writers say what they did not mean.[51]

As the primary virtue in the choice of words is precision, so the first consideration in their combination, says Aristotle, is purity, idiom, conformity to usage. This assured, the next considerations of movement in detail are dignity,[52] which he presents as mainly amplification, and appropriateness.[53] Appropriateness here is not merely of the single word, as in Chapters ii and iii, but of the movement, or pace. It is gauged both to the moral habit (ἦθος) of the audience and to the emotion (πάθος) of the occasion.

From this general idea of appropriate movement Aristotle passes[54] to specific consideration of rhythm with his oft-quoted dictum:

Having laid down the principle that prose movement should be rhythmical, but not metrical, why does Aristotle proceed immediately to discuss it in terms of meters? Simply, perhaps, because these terms are familiar and definite. How else, indeed, shall we speak of a particular movement specifically? Perhaps also because the consideration of the larger, freer rhythms of prose is best opened through the fixed rhythms of verse, i.e., because [27]meter is the gateway to appreciation of rhythm, as poetry in a wider sense (see page 24) is the gateway to style in a wider sense. For us moderns it is the more significant that the classical doctrine of clauses and sentences deals so largely with rhythm, since our doctrine throws the emphasis on logic. That the σύνθεσις, or compositio, should be idiomatic, dignified, appropriate, Aristotle has urged briefly; that it should be rhythmical he proceeds to set forth in detail, consecutively showing how.[59]

In other words, the period is a sentence movement forecast and fulfilled by the speaker, divined and held by the hearer, as a definite rhythmical and logical unit. Its characteristic is that conclusiveness which satisfies at once ear and mind. In sound and in syntax it is the opposite of formless aggregation, of the addition of clause to clause as by afterthoughts. Forethought, indeed, is its very note. Thus its typical advantages are rather for oratory than for narrative. Oratory moves by grouping around ideas; narrative, by adding image to image. The style of Herodotus is in this sense aggregative. Its aim being to proceed not from idea to idea in thought, but from fact to fact in time, it is “loosely joined,” “running on,” without other rhythmical value than fluency. That Aristotle means to disparage Herodotus when he calls this movement old and unsatisfying need hardly be inferred. Old it is typically, the movement of all early prose, of Herodotus no more than of Froissart and Villani. Unsatisfying, unpleasing to the ear (ἀηδές) it is not—in its place; but its place is not in oratory, which demands definite measures to mark definite stages of thought. Otherwise the audience is frustrated and loses the way.

What Aristotle means by his comparison of the two movements is that the former is unsatisfying, not absolutely, but for the purposes of the latter, i.e., for oratory. This interpretation is confirmed by what he adds concerning the length of members, or clauses. That staccato habit of short statements which in oratory “drags the hearer headlong,”[64] unsatisfied and uncomprehending, [30]may in narrative be actually superior. To drag the hearer headlong is sometimes precisely what a story-teller desires. Examples abound, for instance, in Victor Hugo, for whom this movement became a mannerism. Neither of the two sentence movements, which from the point of view of Aristotle’s time we may call the historical and the oratorical, has remained through the long development of prose quite the same. Narrative has developed in modern times a movement more and more consciously poetic, while history in our special modern sense has turned more and more to the conscious group-movement which he associated with oratory. To-day we see much the same difference between our prose fiction and our expository history that he saw between Herodotus and Demosthenes. But the change is in application, not in the movements themselves. It remains true, and important, that there is on the one hand a prose movement rhythmically and intellectually loose, indefinite, and current, and on the other hand a prose movement compact, conscious, concluded point by point. The latter, the periodic, remains the typical movement of public address; for the audience, in order to follow, in order “to have hold of something[65] and to get something done,” demands definite measures.[66]

Having laid down as fundamental the distinction [31]between the two typical prose movements, Aristotle proceeds to details: the balance of member against member,[67] and the heightening of the individual member[68] by visualizing metaphor. His recurrence here to metaphor is unexpected, since he has discussed this already in Chapter ii[69] under the choice of words; but here something is added. The connotation of figurative language is explored further as a means to make a whole statement telling. Aristotle is inquiring how such pithy sayings as he has just exemplified in balance and antithesis are made forcible[70] by other means; and he implies that the process is essentially poetic, as being imaginative first in realization and secondly[71] in movement.

Imaginative realization in metaphor and simile is considered here as intellectual suggestion. As enthymemes, so metaphors and similes must steer between the obvious and the subtle. The best images, like the best enthymemes, stimulate the hearer to coöperate, to see the relation for himself.

Numerous examples follow[74] of ἀστεῖα, or pithy sayings, and Chapter xi[75] expands

[32]

Aristotle’s recurrence, then, to metaphor in the midst of his doctrine of sentence movement is because metaphor has the wider implication. It may be more than a single vivid word; it should extend to a whole habit of realizing a thing in action; and this involves expression in a sentence movement that shall heighten the suggestion by its pace.

In like manner the recurrence to aptness, or adaptation, is not repetition. Chapters ii[78] and iii[79] deal with aptness of single words; chapter xii,[80] with aptness of sentence movement. From the general definition[81] of apt movement as adaptation both to the moral habit of the audience (ἦθος) and to the emotion of the occasion (πάθος) Chapter xii now proceeds to the typical adaptations offered by the several fields of oratory: the deliberative, the forensic, and the occasional.[82]

The distinction here between style for writing (to be read aloud) and style for speaking (for immediate utterance) is general, as appears in the following reference to asyndeton and in the comparison of public speaking to the broad brush work of fresco; but it is also particular. It distinguishes occasional, or panegyric oratory as demanding a style more literary. “Style for writing,” above, must from its context refer to panegyric; and below Aristotle adds: “The style of occasional oratory is best suited to writing; for its function is to be read.”[83]

The final section[84] of Book III deals with the larger parts of a speech: exordium, statement of facts, proof, peroration. This discussion of τάξις (dispositio) is both meager and perfunctory, hardly more than a rehearsal of [34]those definitions and counsels which were already familiar in teaching and apparently in manuals,[85] and which were to be handed on by later tradition. Its importance is therefore primarily historical. It has little other significance, little of the Aristotelian discernment and suggestiveness. What the modern teacher of rhetoric misses, both here and throughout the later classical discussions of dispositio, is some definite inculcation of consecutiveness. That consecutiveness was achieved in the best practise there can be no doubt; how it was taught we are left to guess. As to movement in this larger sense, what we commonly mean by composition, Aristotle’s Poetic is more definite and more suggestive than his Rhetoric.

He begins[86] by saying that the only essential parts of a speech are proposition and proof. It is presently apparent that by “parts” here he means components, or elements, of any and every sort of speech. The statement of facts, for instance, is not a part in the sense of a distinct division except in forensic; and Aristotle rightly objects[87] to subdivisions by “parts” which are neither distinct nor applicable generally. Even refutation, as he shows later,[88] is not a distinct part, either in function or in method or in place. The most that can be allowed are four: proposition and proof as essential, exordium and peroration as usual.

With the same common sense he shows that the first function of the exordium[89] is to put the hearers in a position to understand; its second, to win their sympathy.[90] Chapter xvi[91] passes to the recital of facts (διήγησις). The common rendering of this term by narrative has been [35]widely misleading. True, the corresponding Latin term is narratio, and the thing is narrative in the sense of being sometimes, though not always, chronological; but narrative in our modern use, and especially in our modern text-books, is associated with objects and methods which Aristotle is not here considering at all, and which he rightly relegated to poetic. The Greek term διήγησις and the corresponding Latin narratio mean exactly what is called in a modern lawyer’s brief the “statement of facts,” as distinct from the following “argument.” It therefore belongs properly, as a distinct part having a distinct place, to forensic. When used in occasional oratory,[92] it should on the contrary be broken up, not as in forensic continuous. In deliberative oratory[93] it has least scope, i.e., it hardly appears as a separable part.

But the recital of facts, though it corresponds to the “statement” of a brief in substance, need not be so limited in style. A speech is not a brief; and the pleader, ancient or modern, must make his facts live.[94]

[36]

As to persuasion by argument[95] Aristotle begins with a mere hint of that determination of the main issue and character of the case which was afterward elaborated into the classified doctrine of the στάσις (status).

With no less abruptness Aristotle’s Rhetoric stops. It can hardly be said to conclude; and certainly it has no peroration.

Cicero remains after two thousand years the typical orator writing on oratory. The most eminent orator of Roman civilization, he wrote more than any other orator has ever written on rhetoric; and historically he has been more than any other an ideal and model. Conscious of [38]his own range and of the narrowness and low esteem that seem from the beginning to have cursed teachers and especially manuals of rhetoric, he is anxious in his greater works, De oratore and Orator, to appear not as a rhetorician, but as a philosopher. Though no treatment could well be more different from Aristotle’s, he is at pains to urge the Academic theory that rhetoric is a branch of philosophy, and to avoid the technical terms of the art while keeping its traditional categories. In this attitude he is but the more typically the artist discussing his own art. He writes as the man of letters in any age writes on literary composition. We may be annoyed at a certain condescension toward teachers—as if they might think themselves able to impart anything like his skill! We may be baffled in trying to reduce some of his elaborations to specific terms. But rather we should be grateful to find rhetoric presented, for once at least, pleasantly as well as suggestively, and still more to find the orator insisting that it must have the same large scope as is claimed for it by the philosopher. Where Aristotle and Cicero agree, we may feel sure.

Cicero has been disparaged as a maker of phrases. That he is certainly. “They write Latin,” says Newman[2] [39]of other great authors; “Cicero writes Roman.” His own style is the final answer to his detractors. He is evidently, indeed, a very conscious man of letters, and filed his speeches for publication; but can we deny vigor of thought to the maker of such vigorous phrase without lapsing into the separation of style from substance? Mere style is incredible—unless, as no one pretends of Cicero, the style is bad. So much a priori; and in fact his works will bear analysis. But he is not creative. He clarifies the thoughts of others and brings them to bear. His habit and skill are not at all scientific. His achievement is of style to the extent that it is an achievement of presentation. What he says of rhetoric, for instance, others have said before him; he says it better, more clearly, more vividly. He says it so much better, indeed, that his phrase has a certain finality. It witnesses not only his extraordinary command of diction, but also his constant awareness of human implications. His very diffuseness springs from his constant sense of how people think and feel while they hear and read. In all this he is typically the orator.

[40]

De Oratore

The title De oratore exactly expresses the subject. Cicero is discussing rhetoric, indeed; he is writing de arte oratoria; but always, as Aristotle in his first book, from the point of view of the speaker. It is worth insisting on that the practitioner here coincides with the philosopher, and both with the theory and practise of rhetoric in the best days of the ancient tradition. The training of the public speaker, this tradition consistently repeats, must focus the whole training of the man. The vice of the teaching of rhetoric in its decadence under the Empire[3] was so to pervert this principle as to make all training subordinate to technical skill in rhetoric; and indeed the principle has this danger of making the whole man serve rhetoric, instead of making rhetoric bring out the whole man. None the less the principle rightly conceived is fruitful; and no one has shown this more persuasively than Cicero.

The form is obviously the Platonic dialogue. The protagonists are the famous orators Crassus and Antonius, with Scævola, Cotta, Catulus, and Sulpicius as minor interlocutors. Whatever basis there may have been in the actual conversations of these historical persons,[4] the work, like its model, is fiction. It is dramatic in representing the speakers as personæ; but its imaginative realization goes no further. The literary device of the dialogue is used only to add concreteness to the discussion of what is always dry when it is abstract. The object is [41]the discussion, not even incidentally the men who discuss. They talk always as orators and to promote oratory; and as orators they proceed from point to point. Plato’s personæ are realized more dramatically. Though only Socrates is created fully, the others emerge as individuals. The movement of a Platonic dialogue is far more conversational. Not only does its form give the illusion of actual talk; its thought moves hither and yon, suggesting rather than concluding, seeking yet other approaches and departures, not marching but questing. Cicero raises questions, indeed, but as they are raised by the public speaker who has predetermined the answer and the stages by which we are to reach it. For all the ease and skill of its dialogue, De oratore proceeds by paragraphs as definitely as De lege Manilia.

It is disconcerting to arrive, after all, at the traditional parts of rhetoric. For the definition resolves itself into this:

[43]

But the traditional five parts of rhetoric are more than the table of contents of the manuals (artes). They constitute what we now call in college schedules a group of studies; and Crassus is contending for the group as a whole. What he has been insisting on is the importance and the scope of that first part which, in the long history of rhetoric, teachers have most often and most dangerously neglected, inventio, the investigation, analysis, and grasp of the subject-matter. He adds[13] that the orator, though in any given case he may gather his information from authorities, will express this information as no expert can express it; and he repeats that in one branch of knowledge he must himself be an expert, namely in human nature.

But what pertains to public speaking? How widely should the training for it range? The definition of Antonius obviously stresses elocutio. Whether he means to make this the main concern of the orator depends on whether he includes among his “sources” the fund of knowledge urged by Crassus. The context seems to show that he does not. To put his definition beside that of Crassus above is to see that its intention is narrower. It specifies no more than style, first as the amplitude and vividness that enhance a particular passage, and secondly as the orator’s general virtuosity.

One closes the first book with the idea that both Crassus and Antonius are right. The two men, even more than the two views, are complementary. The views are irreconcilable only when pushed to the extreme; and in extreme form either the extensiveness of Crassus or the intensiveness [46]of Antonius may become a reductio ad absurdum. Normally rhetoric is both extensive and intensive, both a comprehensive study of life and a specific art, even as the means of persuasion are both extrinsic and intrinsic. Doubtless Cicero meant to leave this impression; for he gives full weight to the theory of Antonius here, makes him the mouthpiece in Book II for the specific lore of inventio, which corresponds to the knowledge urged in Book I by Crassus, and makes Crassus in Book III the spokesman for style. But certainly Cicero sympathizes, and wishes us to sympathize, with Crassus. It is Cicero, not merely Crassus, who pleads that the teaching of the orator be not the imparting of tricks, nor mainly of technic in a wider and worthier sense, but the gradual bringing to bear of the whole man. He saw in the focusing of rhetoric on style a typical danger for teaching. The danger was present, apparently, in the teaching of his own day; it was serious in the time of Tacitus; it was epidemic in the schools of declamatio that spread along the Mediterranean and taught some of the fathers of the Church. The view of Antonius, uncorrected by the view of Crassus, is imperfect theoretically; practically it leads to the typical vices of the teaching of composition: historically it has branded a stigma on the word Rhetoric and all its derivatives.

The view of Crassus, too, has its dangers: the danger of vagueness and dissipation, the danger of pretentiousness and sometimes of sciolism. But apparently these dangers can more readily be met and counteracted, and must be risked; for the history of rhetoric seems to show that his is the right emphasis and the more fruitful idea. Speaking and writing are less a profession even for orators and men of letters, much less for educated mankind in general, [47]than a life. Though the same may be said of engineering, though all technical education involves general education, yet in learning to speak and write the technic is smaller in proportion to the general training. The training of Roman youth in oratory was at its best education for leadership. In this education composition was both end and means. It has been so always, it is so to-day, in the hands of its best teachers. The specific application is to open in the teaching of composition manifold relations. It thrives on what we now call correlation; it dwindles in segregation. For we may learn from Cicero to give rhetoric the same abundant relations to human affairs as he urges his orator to seek in all his oratory.

Because it has most of the Ciceronian message Book I has been the most studied and probably the most fruitful. The division of Book II is conventional. After glancing at the fields of oratory and the component parts of a speech and urging imitation, it treats inventio[26] and dispositio[27] under the usual heads and briefly summarizes memoria.[28]

The first specific counsel, then, is for the teacher promotion; for the student it is imitation, such as Sulpicius’s of Crassus, not mere copying of mannerisms, but such as produces[32] schools of eloquence from the example of great orators.[33]

Under inventio the first task is the investigation of the facts.

Though this is a conventional topic, and though its application here is legal, it is none the less instructive generally; and it might directly improve the teaching of argument and the practise of debate in our colleges.

The second heading under inventio is also conventional, the status, or determination of the main character of the case and the main issues. The status was determined in the classical system by applying certain traditional questions. The status legalis may be set aside as applicable only to legal pleading. The status rationalis, or status considered in the general aspects of reason as an affair of common argument, was determined by asking oneself how [50]far the debate hinged (1) on fact, on whether such-and-such things had happened, or (2) on definition, the facts being generally admitted, or (3) more broadly, on the interpretation of admitted facts and definitions. Though most cases need to be looked at from all these three points of view, in most there will be found a decided predominance of one; and forecast of this will direct the emphasis of the whole argument, will tell where to throw one’s weight. This one is the status of that case.

But the case must be surveyed also as to its ἦθος and its πάθος.

The lore of preliminary analysis is concluded with a brilliant summary under three questions of Cicero’s own:[43] (1) what kind of case is it in general (naturam causæ), i.e., of fact or of interpretation? (2) on what does it turn, i.e., what is the point but for which there would be no debate? (quid faciat causam; id est, quo sublato controversia stare non possit)? (3) why is it disputed? how does the dispute arise (quid veniat in iudicium)?

The transition from argument to the other means of persuasion, from probare or docere to conciliare and movere, is the caveat of Antonius against the current division of cases into general and particular[44] as a capital error. Theoretically every particular case must have general relations; practically, if oratory is not to lapse into mere accumulation of details, the orator must have the habit of bringing these general relations to bear. Antonius adds the further caveat that the whole system of the status is merely analytical. It is logical; and logic shows only how to judge arguments, not how to find them.[45] The sources of arguments (sedes argumentorum)[46] are therefore more important.

[52]

As to conciliare and movere[47] Cicero says only the usual things, perhaps because inventio in these aspects is rather to be promoted by exhortation than imparted by new categories.

The treatment of dispositio[55] gives little specific counsel toward the achievement of that sequence in which Cicero himself excelled.

The chapters on memoria[62] begin with the familiar story of Simonides, to make the obvious point that what furthers memory is order. Visual associations, Cicero thinks, are strongest, and can be used to recall even sentences. But verbal memory is less important. The orator’s memory is of things.[63]

In Book III Crassus discusses style (elocutio). About a third of the book[64] amplifies the theme that rhetoric is inseparable from philosophy. What follows is a conventional treatment of the choice of words (electio)[65] and the movement of sentences (compositio),[66] with a few chapters on delivery.[67] These latter topics are handled so much more explicitly in Orator that only the first part claims analysis.

These twenty chapters are a brilliant instance of what the ancients meant by amplification. Logically they do little more than iterate the truism that style is inseparable from substance; but actually they make the truism live. Cicero is an admirable example of his own definition of the eloquent as those “who speak with clear distinctions, lucid order, amplitude, brilliance of matter and manner, and in prose weave something of the spell of verse—in a word, who enhance.”[77] “Immortal gods! said Catulus, what a variety of things, Crassus, you have embraced! what force, what abundance! and from what poverty have you dared to lead the orator forth and establish him in the kingdom of his fathers!”[78]

[56]

Orator

Cicero’s De oratore, though it covers all five parts of rhetoric, is most ample as to inventio. His Orator is complementary in that it is largely devoted to elocutio.[79] Like the earlier work, Orator is specifically limited to deliberative and forensic oratory. Occasional oratory, or panegyric, though he declines again to treat it as a separate field,[80] Cicero recognizes as the “nurse of that orator whom we wish to form,” especially in sentence skill.[81] Inventio[82] and dispositio,[83] as depending more on foresight than on eloquence, are barely summarized. Elocutio occupies three-fourths of the discussion.[84]

Orator has been less attractive than De oratore for the reason that it is more compact and more technical. None the less it has a cogency and a felicity even more characteristically Ciceronian. Few men writing on style have shown in their own styles so much precision and charm. De oratore keeps the fluency of dialogue; Orator shows more of Cicero’s own mastery of the oratorical period.

The division of style into three kinds (genus tenue, genus medium, genus grande)[85] has been much discussed as to its origin.[86] Whatever its origin, it is dubious as philosophy and has been vicious as pedagogy. Cicero applies it later[87] to the three tasks, or objects, of oratory: to prove, to win [57]sympathy, to move. He adds[88] that the orator should excel in all three directions. But this hardly warrants a division of style into three kinds; for actually the teacher too ready to classify, or the student too ready to think of style as separable and additional, may thereby deviate his whole study. Historically the trail of the three styles has been baneful. For inculcating style perhaps the least fruitful means is classification.[89]

But Cicero’s discussion of style, though grouped at first by this classification, ranges beyond it.

Cicero’s treatment of rhythm in oratory, though sometimes vague and as a whole unsatisfying, is important historically. Its very extent and care show that for the orator, no less than for the theorist, rhythm in the classical tradition was a main consideration. It was not something additional, a final grace of style, but an essential element of oratorical effectiveness. Moreover it was a primary and controlling consideration in all that revision which is spent on the shaping of sentences. The oral and auditory ancients taught sentences more largely as movements in time than do the writing and visual moderns. They are thus the more instructive to those whose ears writing and print have trained imperfectly. In every case, of course, ancient or modern, the unit is logical, the expression of a thought; but whereas modern manuals generally confine themselves to terms of syntax, the ancient rhetoric is constantly aware of the effects of rhythm. Its analysis of these, though it leaves much to be desired in scientific accuracy,[97] serves at least to direct attention and stimulate imitation; and more than the modern logic of the sentence it seems to promote fluency.[98]

The pedagogy of rhetoric, more constant and more pervasive than that of most subjects still taught, demands historical interpretation, and thus extensive and consecutive survey.[1] Summary of its history has conveyed little of its vitality; but analysis of two cardinal documents will show, first, what the constant tradition of teaching was typically throughout the great classical centuries, and secondly what the teaching of rhetoric was destined to become, with almost equal constancy and pervasiveness, during the centuries of decadence. For each of these traditions there is fortunately, besides much other testimony, a typical text. Quintilian, writing long after rhetoric had ceased to function as an instrument of assembly government, nevertheless comprehends its best older tradition and the whole scope of its classical development in a great work of pedagogy, De institutione oratoria (about 95 A.D.). Seneca the Elder, who died about the time of Quintilian’s birth, had already recorded from memory and notes in his Controversiæ that particular application of the ancient schooling which in the generation before Quintilian was already infecting the old rhetoric, and through which the teaching of both Greek and Roman schools was to be dwarfed and perverted. Quintilian, though writing later than Seneca, preserves ancient rhetoric as a ripe whole; Seneca, though earlier, isolates the germ of its decay.

[63]

I. QUINTILIAN ON THE TEACHING OF RHETORIC (DE INSTITUTIONE ORATORIA)[2]

A. Tabular View[3]

B. The Terms

Quintilian’s survey is in the traditional terms of classical rhetoric. These demand the more attention because translation has often missed the specific meanings attached to recognized technical terms. “Institutes of Oratory,” never precisely rendering his title, is now almost meaningless. Institutio Oratoria means The Teaching of Rhetoric and announces not so much a manual for students as a survey for teachers. Of the pedagogical terms, grammatica and grammaticus may still be rendered “grammar” and “grammarian” only if they are understood to have wider scope. Prælectio (I. viii) describes the habitual introductory exposition of a passage of poetry by grammaticus, or less commonly of a passage of oratory by rhetor (II. v). Materia, meaning generally “material,” [67]means often technically (II. vi. vii) a prescribed outline, as French matière still does in pedagogical use. Declamatio (II. x) was quite different from “declamation.” It was speaking, usually extempore, on an assigned hypothetical case, and grew, as will appear below, from an exercise for boys to an exhibition of virtuosity by men.

Of the five traditional parts of rhetoric (III. iii), the first, inventio, does not mean “invention”; it means, in Aristotelian language, the discovery of all the extrinsic means of persuasion, or more simply, survey of the material and forecast. Dispositio (collocatio) refers not to the arrangement of details, but to the plan of the whole. Elocutio means “elocution” in the sense borne by that word before the nineteenth century. It is sufficiently rendered by “style” and is always conceived in two aspects: (1) electio, the choice of words, including “figures of speech”; and (2) compositio, the arrangement of words in clauses and sentences, including rhythm and harmony—in a word, sentence-movement. Compositio does not mean, though it is often translated, “composition” in the wide sense now current. For the latter the term is dispositio. Memoria ranges far beyond memorizing. It embraces the speaker’s whole command of his material in the order of his constructive plan and in relation to rebuttal, and was most stressed for speeches unwritten. Pronuntiatio and actio cover the whole field of delivery, including all that is now often called “elocution,” from the placing of the voice to the handling of the body.

In detail, status (III. vi), meaning generally and simply “status,” refers technically to a classifying system for determining “the nature of the case” (see 3. a, in the tabular view above). Of its three divisions, coniectura, having nothing to do with “conjecture,” denotes a main [68]issue of fact; finis, a main issue of definition; qualitas, a more general issue of morals or policy. Narratio (IV. ii) means never “narration” in the sense assigned by recent text-books, always either “statement of the facts” or, more generally, “exposition.” These and other technical terms have been guarded, in the tabular view above and in the interpretations below, by adding the Latin originals.

C. Typical Doctrine

(1) Elementary Exercises

The tradition of grammatica as having the twofold function of forming right speech and of expounding poetry[4] continued for centuries.[5] Traditional also are the first exercises in composition.[6] A chapter (x) on the concurrence of other studies toward a rounded education,[7] and one on elocution (xi), close a preliminary pedagogy so suggestive as to be still studied to-day.

(2) Declamatio

The counsels to rhetor (II) imply a warm atmosphere of promotion and a general habit of collaboration.

The teacher should frankly and fully show how. His criticism should beware of setting up inhibitions. To be promotive, he should find something to praise, and, besides explaining why he would have this out or that changed, should illuminate by interposing something of his own. Sometimes it will be helpful to give whole treatments which the boy may imitate without losing faith in his own (II. iv). In short, the teacher’s declamatio should be a model for his students (II. v).

The same promotive guidance appears in the assigning of outlines (materiæ), less and less ample as the pupils advance, for written composition (II. vi). This writing was generally for practise, not for casting a particular speech in form to be memorized. Sometimes, says Quintilian, the boys may recite what they have written out; but generally learning by heart is better spent on the orators and historians than on their own work (vii).

The declamatio recommended by Quintilian is speaking from outline on hypothetical cases. The more elementary [70]assignments, for deliberative speeches, were called suasoriæ; the more advanced, for forensic speeches, controversiæ. Both he treats only as school exercises. Within these limits he recommends declamatio as an important pedagogical discovery.

Evidently the declamatio that Quintilian recommends is not the declamatio that he heard about him. He wishes to recall to its original purpose what was already out of [71]hand. Originally, he implies, it defined that general practise in debating which must have been as common in the ancient teaching as in modern universities. But already, as he also admits by implication, it had become quite different. Already it was established both as a special exercise and as a special form of public speaking. With the narrowing of the field of public discussion, the large old rhetoric surveyed by Quintilian had been narrowed more and more toward an artificial combination of forensic ingenuity with dramatic imagination. Instead of training youth to lead in public policy and to secure justice for individuals, declamatio had become an end in itself, the rhetor’s own kind of oratory. As an exhibition of skill it was his easiest means of winning pupils, and of holding them by letting them exhibit themselves. The inherent vice of artificiality, which Quintilian admits by implication, he nevertheless assigns entirely to perverted educational practise. He would recall declamatio from invention to actuality, and from display to exercise. That his warning was already too late is evident from Seneca (see section II of this chapter). Meantime one of the chief opportunities for perversion will be found in the prosopopœiæ described next.

The pervasive classical inculcation of appropriateness (see also XI. i) was carried into declamatio through specific exercises known generally as prosopopœiæ (προσωποποιίαι). Their idea was an imaginative entering into the character, the emotional as well as the intellectual habit, of the person for whom one was speaking (fictæ alienarum personarum orationes, VI. i. 25). In more elementary form, sometimes called ethopœiæ (ἠθοποιίαι) they bade the student say what Priam must have said to Achilles, or Sulla on renouncing the dictatorship, or some [72]other character of history or fiction on a critical occasion; and they began even with the boy’s amplification of fables and myths.[8] As applied to declamatio (suasoriæ and controversiæ) they are thus described by Quintilian:

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(3) Status

Quintilian’s chapter (III, vi) on status is one of his most important, both as specific doctrine and as typical of ancient method. He has simplified a pedagogical device which, while it had been hampered by too analytical subdivision, had long vindicated itself as one of the most effective applications of the ancient theory of systematic guidance. Status, meaning the essential character of the case as it appeared to preliminary survey of all the material and all the bearings, had come to denote a uniform system for determining that essential character by leading questions. To gauge the sufficiency of his preparation and the line of his argument, to bring to bear not only his particular investigation, but the whole fund of his experience, the student was to ask himself what the case meant to him as a whole. He must interpret it as resting mainly on one of three issues: (1) of fact (an sit); (2) of definition (quid sit); or (3) of general considerations, as of right or expediency (an recte sit). The first was called status coniecturalis, or coniectura; the second, status definitivus, or finis; the third, status generalis, or qualitas.[11] Even if [75]two of these entered, or all three, one must always be the focus.

This sort of forecast, surveying the whole trend, the ancients regarded as so vital that they reduced it to a system. The classified status is typical of their pedagogy of rhetoric. Their teaching of inventio did not stop with investigation; it promoted reflection directly and guided it so systematically that no essential aspect could be ignored. Such questioning for focus and line in our day of statistical accumulation is not less, but more valuable.

(4) The Parts of a Speech

The traditional parts of an oration Quintilian discusses (IV-VI) under their traditional subdivisions. The exordium (IV. i), for instance, may be drawn from the case, from the persons, from the occasion, or from rebuttal of one’s opponent; and its threefold aim is to remove prejudice, to win attention, and to open the way for understanding.[12] But Quintilian often constructively recombines the traditional items, and often interprets them from teaching experience. The statement of facts (narratio, IV. ii) is not limited to pure exposition; even [77]rehearsal may contribute to persuasion. Its cardinal virtue of clearness he reasserts in rebuke of those students whom an itch to be always impressive makes impatient of the obligation.

That the statement of facts should be brief does not permit its being either abrupt or meager. That it should sound true implies that it should be in character, i.e., that it should be dramatically consistent and convincing, and also that it should lead into the argument. Similarly practical are the warnings against making the division (IV. v) too minute and against letting it hamper emotional appeal or interrupt progressive coherence. To his conspectus of the ancient classification of proof (V) Quintilian adds (xiii) the following shrewd maxims for rebuttal:

(5) Plan

Quintilian’s discussion of dispositio (VII) is like that of other ancient treatises in confining itself to plan in general. Without specific doctrine for the promotion of cogency as progressive coherence, it carries forward the system of status as determining the main line of argument. That the ancients appreciated and practised what is now taught in [78]American schools and colleges as the lore of paragraphs is evident in their best composition, notably in the orations of Cicero. The decline from such progressive coherence among the later declamatores is one of the marks of decadence (see section II, below). But how the lore was taught we are left to infer. The elementary working out of what is now unfortunately called a detached paragraph, i.e., of a single short composition, is prescribed in the chria (I. ix) much as in modern manuals; but that does not touch the art of composing a sustained speech by paragraphs. In the cogency of mounting by stages we miss the typical systematic instruction. Some of this must have been inculcated through assigned outline (materia, page 67 above), some of it by the rhetor’s oral teaching. Quintilian’s instruction as to the close of the exordium is a clear hint of what is now taught as paragraph emphasis.

There are, indeed, other hints; but that so important an aspect of composition should not be a distinct topic even in Quintilian’s constructive pedagogy leaves the ancient lore of dispositio too analytical to be sufficient for modern teachers.

(6) Style Analyzed

Quintilian’s long discussion of style (elocutio, VIII-XI) opens with one of his best sayings, “let care in words be solicitude for things”;[13] and the whole introduction [79]is an admirable answer to the old quibble about form and substance. If he thereupon proceeds for two books by the usual categories, he at least avoids the subdivision that had become excessive, and provides a convenient guide to the voluminous classical lore of elocutio.[14] Typical is his introduction, under sentence-movement (compositio, IX. iv), to the doctrine of sentence close (clausula).

(7) Style Promoted

Having followed the usual analysis of style, Quintilian proceeds (X) to constructive promotion, to the ways of gaining secure control (firma facilitas; see the tabular view, page 66). “We who contemplate oratorical power, not mountebank volubility, have to inculcate both range [80]and discrimination” (copia cum iudicio, X. i. 8). So the vivid impressions that come through the ear should be supplemented by critical reading. The reading of poetry promotes concrete realization, heightening of style, emotional appeal, and aptness in characterization.[15] From imitation Quintilian passes (X. iii) to writing for practise in style. Since this, like deep plowing, is for a better yield, he goes into specific counsels.

In transition Quintilian observes that meditation (cogitatio, X. vi) for speaking without writing can go so far as to fix not only the order of points, which is enough, [81]but even the connection of words. The value to the speaker of practise in writing is to make channels (formæ) for such meditation. Since meditation must always leave a margin for improvisation, the plan must be such as may be easily left and resumed. In other words, to give the speaker secure control, the plan must be progressive. Iterating this in the next chapter,[17] Quintilian adds that the other main means to extempore power is concrete realization.[18]

Writing gives speaking precision; speaking gives writing ease (X. vii. 29). From this summary of their general relations in education, Quintilian passes to the use of writing in the preparation of a particular speech.

The secure control that Quintilian seeks to promote, that firma facilitas which is the subject of the whole tenth book, is evidently quite different from mere fluency. With the gift of gab in boys he has long ago expressed his impatience. “Impromptu garrulity, without the [82]meditation that the master intends, almost without hesitation in rising to speak, is really the brag of a mountebank” (II. iv. 15). He not only presupposes, he specifically inculcates, most careful preparation.

(8) Memory

In this preparation the importance that he gives to writing, not only for general practise, but for the composition of a particular speech, may seem greater than is warranted by experience. Even so he is far from supporting those who represent classical oratory as having been generally written and memorized.[20] That the urgencies of public address could be met by that method is a priori a difficult assumption; and even the spread of the oratory of display in his time, and his own professorial fondness for finish of style, did not lead Quintilian to urge memorizing generally and unreservedly. Rather what he offers [83]under memoria (XI. ii) has the usual wide ancient scope. It should be read in its connection with what he has already taught (X. vi. vii, page 80 above) about cogitatio.

Devices and exercises for training and applying such a faculty (XI. ii. 8-35) are summed up (36) under the two principles of divisio and compositio, definiteness of outline and definiteness of sentence movement. The former is thus iterated for the third time (see X. vi. vii) as essential. The importance of the latter lies in the fact that the mind more readily retains settled rhythms (39). As verse is easier to memorize than prose, so periodic rhythms than unperiodic.[23] Thus Quintilian faces finally [84]the question of learning by heart. That it was a question, even for Quintilian, shows that classical practise was divided, as modern practise is, by differences both in talent and in the field of habitual exercise.

D. Scope and Plan

The comprehensive program announced by Quintilian in his proem is carried through. No other ancient treatise is so exhaustive.[24] Including all the traditional topics, he [85]proceeds upon the classical theory of systematic guidance, but makes the important contribution of pedagogical order. For his plan is progressive. Though sometimes anxiously analytical in subdivision, he is constructive in making his main line not the survey of the subject, but the development of the student. The traditional five parts of rhetoric stand out clearly; but they cover only about half of the space, and they do not determine the plan. Rather Quintilian proceeds from less to more, from boyhood through adolescence to manhood. His idea is to widen and deepen the practise of public speaking as it opens more and more to the growing speaker. Aristotle’s philosophy of rhetoric begins with the speaker as theoretically the efficient cause; Quintilian’s pedagogy ends with the speaker as practically the efficient result. So, before entering upon definitions, he devotes two books to practical exercises, beginning not with the subject, but with the boy.[25] So, after he has defined the field and scope, he expounds inventio as in practise it expands, and links it with dispositio. So the two books in which elocutio is traditionally analyzed are followed by the two that show practically how it may be achieved; and these two are the culmination, the final application of all the preceding doctrine. His Institutio is faithfully what its title proposes, a pedagogy of rhetoric.

That it keeps its place in the history not only of rhetoric, but of education is due, of course, to Quintilian’s cogency; it is due also to the largeness of the subject. Rhetoric, for the fortunate few who alone could aspire to leadership, comprised most of the higher systematic education. The [86]scope so brilliantly vindicated by Cicero[26] is taken by Quintilian as a matter of course. Thus his work is in more than one aspect a general pedagogy. Thus also rhetoric itself, to fulfil his demands and follow his methods, must keep his conception of bringing to bear the whole man. The narrowing of rhetoric in practise arose from the narrowing of public life and meant the narrowing of education.

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II. DECLAMATIO IN SENECA,[27] TACITUS, AND PLINY

A. Declamatio

The declamatio exhibited by Seneca, though already established, was fairly new at Rome.[28] Cicero, writing about the time of Seneca’s birth, still uses declamare, declamatio, and controversia[29] in their older general senses. His approval of practise speaking on hypothetical cases was apparently of something like our modern “moot courts.” Controversiæ of the Senecan sort he knew only in their incipiency.[30]

Tacitus, writing his Dialogus de oratoribus about 81 A.D., a few years before Quintilian’s Institutio, shows clearly that the specialized controversiæ, from being common, had become pervasive almost to the extent of monopoly. [88]From the older, Ciceronian position of comprehensive training his Messalla derides declamatio and all its works.

What Quintilian deplores, then, in the practise of declamatio Tacitus shows to have been none the less common. All the more significant is the slight and as it were unwilling consideration that Quintilian gives to these fashionable aspects. Even while he insists on the value of declamatio for general training, he deprecates that wide departure from actual pleading in themes, conception, and style which Seneca records as a matter of course and Tacitus derides as habitual. The use of declamatio by mature speakers not for exercise, but for exhibition, he passes over incidentally in a few sentences as a perversion. Its undoubted prevalence he admits sadly as something that a serious teacher should ignore.[31] Both the scorn of the historian and the reservations of the teacher spring from the older, larger tradition of rhetoric. To this both Tacitus and Quintilian discerned in declamatio a menace. How far their fears were justified will appear in later narrowing and perversion. Meantime they have supplied for interpreting the collection of Seneca not only the ancient standard, but also the necessary information.

B. Character and Scope of Seneca’s Collection

Seneca’s Controversiæ[32] is a collection of the declamationes made by celebrated rhetors. Though Seneca may well have used published material, his extensive reports, as it were verbatim,[33] at once attest the grasp of the ancient [90]memoria and suggest, amid considerable variety, a fund of stock cases. To exhibit the rhetors’ skill by competition, his plan is to show side by side different treatments of the same theme. He interpolates specific, and, in the prefaces to the several books, general criticism. Though he does not offer his collection of models explicitly as a comprehensive guide, his pervasive implication is that declamatio exhibits the cardinal virtues. Rhetoric might with more safety tend to monopolize education so long as it had its old comprehensiveness; but as it was narrowed, it tended to put the cart before the horse. “Give your mind to eloquence,” says Seneca; “from this you can range easily into all arts.”[34] The idea is almost opposite educationally to Cicero’s view that eloquence is nourished by all studies; and the eloquence exhibited by Seneca is itself much smaller than that intended by Cicero.

(1) Subjects for Suasoriæ

Suasoriæ were deliberative; controversiæ, forensic. Though in actual practise the one field of oratory seems as difficult as the other, in pedagogical use suasoriæ were generally assigned as elementary exercises, the boy’s first extended compositions with the rhetor.[35] The seven surviving specimens of Seneca’s collection are on the following themes:—

That the subjects seem to have been always historical reminds us that Roman deliberative oratory was barred from its natural field of the living present. Thus restricted, it is meager even for a school exercise.

(2) Subjects for Controversiæ

The cases assigned for the controversiæ of older students, though more various, were even more removed from actuality. The list of those used by Seneca to exhibit the skill of the rhetors themselves fully justifies the exclamation of Tacitus,[37] quales, per fidem! Posed as available for argument on either side—a rhetor would sometimes espouse now one side, now the other—they are difficult, [92]subtle, sensational, often so dubious as to preclude quotation, always remote. On their face they were chosen and iterated by men who desired sensation, prized ingenuity, and had turned the art of persuasion to advertisement.

Against such subjects, against others equally subtle and unreal, even indecent and perverted, both Tacitus and Quintilian protest in the name of education. Training for actual pleading, they urge, is not to be had from tyrannicide, rape, incest, wizards, pestilence, and stepmothers. Seneca leaves no doubt that such subjects were typical; but he expressly repudiates the assumption that controversiæ should be exercises to train for the bar.[38] That [94]declamatio was quite different not only in his view, but in fact, there is no room to doubt. The difference between what Tacitus and Quintilian urge on principle and what they themselves, as well as Seneca and Pliny, record as practise is decisively sharp. It is the difference between the old rhetoric and the new. Even in Seneca’s time, much more in that of Quintilian, declamatio was measured as a special form of public speaking. As such Seneca seems to regard it with complacency. That he thinks it self-sufficient and self-justifying seems evident from his pains to give its oral triumphs the permanence of written record. Declamatio might be cursed by the older tradition as bad education, or justified as originally good by ignoring what it had become. None the less it had gone quite out from the old rhetoric, and had been accepted and widely applauded as an end in itself.

That it perverted schooling, as Tacitus complains, was partly due to its inevitable tendency to turn the school into an auditorium. The rhetor remained, indeed, a teacher; but even in teaching he offered himself as a model.[39] The transition was easy to offering himself to the public as an orator in the latest style of oratory. While this was one of the few ways left under the Empire for appeal to a large audience, it was also one of his chief means of publicity. What the rhetor was thus to become throughout the Roman Empire may be clearly forecast from Pliny’s account of Isæus.

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(3) Pliny on Isæus

In essentials this description applies to the controversiæ preserved by Seneca. The Greek rhetor Isæus whom Pliny heard at the end of the first century is recognizably like the Roman rhetors whom Seneca heard some hundred years before.[41] A century had only fixed the type as a distinct form of oratory, and extended its vogue. Succeeding centuries repeated it, in Greek and in Latin, throughout the Roman world. Meantime Tarsus may have taught declamatio to its most famous citizen. Certainly St. Jerome knew it well. “We have been rhetoricated,” he says with grim humor, “and have played a bit in the way of the declamatores.”[42] Indeed, the rhetoric that [97]came first and most actively to the Fathers of the Church must have come through declamatio.[43] Its influence as late as the fourth century on St. Augustine throws into sharp relief his ignoring of it in his rhetoric for preachers, the fourth book of De doctrina christiana. With such real work of oratory declamatio has nothing to do.

C. Seneca’s Classification and Treatment

Instead of giving his specimens entire, Seneca divides them by a threefold critical classification: (1) sententiæ, (2) divisio, (3) colores. The treatments of the same case by different declamatores are thus compared specifically as to (1) the significances, (2) the analysis, (3) the imaginative handling.

(1) The term sententiæ might imply such interpretations as were significant because they were leading. Taken thus, it suggests the saliences which mark, stage by stage, the development of a single, controlling interpretation. But sententiæ was used familiarly of such interpretations as were valuable rather separately than together, for themselves rather than for the furthering of a progressive development—in a word, aphorisms, or epigrams. The latter sense had become the more common, and in fact is what Seneca exhibits. His declamatores seem more concerned to strike now and strike again than to urge on. Though they still distinguish the formal parts (proem, statement, etc.),[44] they are no longer preoccupied with the [98]onward march of the older tradition. For the cogency of progressive development they have substituted the momentary effectiveness of striking summaries.

(2) Seneca’s divisio, the analysis of the case, shows similarly not the stages of a consecutive order, but merely the components of an arbitrary classification. Given such cases as were posed, even the divisio called for ingenuity. Its preliminary quæstiones sometimes suggest an ingenious and perverted application of the traditional status.[45]

(3) Under colores[46] Seneca exhibits the imaginative development. Meaning generally the tone, or cast—in a large sense, the style, colores means specifically in Seneca’s collection (1) descriptive amplification, and (2) dramatic characterization. Even the descriptions were more than concrete realization of the facts; they were imaginative elaborations.

More boldly and ingeniously imaginative was the characterization. The case itself being fictitious, the treatment might go the whole length of fiction. At least the declamatio must so enter into the motives, and especially the emotions, of the parties as to make them dramatis personæ; at most he might go so far as to supply his imaginary dialogues with a plot.[47] Thus a guilty son is staged in dialogue with his father:

That such dramatization is obviously an extension of the school prosopopœiæ[48] shows how pervasive was the preoccupation with imaginative development. “Asinius Pollio used to say that the color was to be exhibited in the statement of facts, and carried out in the arguments.”[49] What was left of the old rhetoric? The interpretations demanded by sententiæ and divisio were at least intellectual; [100]but the main interpretation, the goal and measure of skill, was imaginative. The surest way to fame was through colores. Through colores what had once been useful as a school exercise was artificially extended, and forensic was turned into a form of occasional oratory.

Sententiæ, divisio, colores, epigrams, ingenious analysis, imaginative development, seem a poor substitute for the traditional five parts of rhetoric. Especially impoverishing was the restriction of the ancient inventio. With investigation supplanted by fiction, debate lost its typical training and its typical power. With the shift of emphasis to imagination, rhetoric was confused with poetic,[50] to the impairing of both. Nor was dispositio furthered by sententiæ and divisio. Salience, instead of being used to further consecutiveness, became an end in itself. The whole was sacrificed to the parts. Elocutio, thus left to itself, tended inevitably toward an art of display. The history of rhetoric has no more striking proof that style, when cultivated in artificial isolation, goes bad.

So wide a departure suggests a divergence in conception, a divergence older and deeper than the particular innovations of declamatio. Beside Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric as the art of giving effectiveness to truth there had persisted the conception of it as the art of giving effectiveness to the speaker. Though the two conceptions are not mutually exclusive, the dominance of the one or of the other tends either to give rhetoric those manifold relations and that constant answer to reality which mark its great ancient achievements, or on the other hand to narrow it toward virtuosity and display. The large pedagogy [101]of Quintilian is animated by the Aristotelian conception. The other conception, brilliant in Gorgias and his like, had already animated not only the declamatores at Rome, but that larger “second sophistic”[51] which became pervasively the rhetoric of the imperial centuries, in Greek and in Latin, throughout the Roman world. Ancient rhetoric offers the historic example, then, of a divergence that has remained typical.

Criticism is inevitably a part of teaching. The teacher’s holding up of models involves both analysis of them and appreciation. The differentiation of the critic from the teacher is roughly that his judgments are not applied immediately to tasks of composition, that he rather defines or extends theory than promotes practise. His estimate of the professional writer is not directly brought to bear on the advancement of the amateur. He stops with appreciation; the teacher tries to carry this over into imitation. But the differentiation of the two functions has never been complete; and in classical times it went only a little way. Quintilian, who was typically the teacher, is included with respect in histories of criticism. Dionysius of Halicarnassus classifies his acute appreciations of orators and poets under text-book headings, and puts forth his treatise on style, as does the great unknown “On the Sublime,” for instruction. Both are what we now call critics. The classification of Dionysius does not hinder his critical appreciation; the classification of the great unknown merges into a kindling enthusiasm.

Probably most of the literary criticism current in the last years of the Republic and the first centuries of the Roman Empire came from grammarians and rhetoricians.[1] It is worth while, nevertheless, to consider separately from [103]the manuals and methods of instruction those treatises which were written rather to educate appreciation than to further the tasks of the schools. Outstanding among these are the Brutus of Cicero and the Dialogus of Tacitus; but the two most specific and significant in doctrine are the ones mentioned above: Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Sentences (De Compositione Verborum), and the unknown author on the Heightening of Language (De Sublimitate). In some respects complementary, the two together offer a clear view of style in the classical conception.

A. Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Sentences

The most specific and systematic rhetorical treatise of Dionysius[1a] deals with sentence movement, or compositio[2] [104](see pages 25, 53, 67, 79). This, he makes bold to say in his second paragraph,[3] is the aspect of composition most profitable for the study of youth.

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Sentence movement, moreover, Dionysius thinks to be more important than the choice of words.[5] He supports this assertion first by analyzing a passage from the Odyssey.[6]

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In like manner he urges concerning a passage from Herodotus:[7]

Not content with analysis, Dionysius proceeds[8] to enforce his point by garbling. Fine passages of verse and of prose, without any change of words, are dislocated to show that their force resides not in these words taken [107]singly, but in the sentence order, or movement. The method is ingenious. It is even telling. Any teacher who shall thus put side by side a fine passage of English prose and the same words in a different order will make his students aware of literary effects to which they should not remain deaf.[9] The connotation of pace and tune may be further exemplified by comparing, for instance, a tale of Chaucer’s with the version made by Dryden.[10]

The method is interesting, striking, to some extent revealing. What does it reveal? That suggestiveness is not only through the imagery of single words, but through their sound in combination; that a large part of the connotation which we call style is sentence pace. This is generally so little discerned that Dionysius may be pardoned for magnifying it; and he further guards himself by recording his intention of writing a treatise also on the choice of words. Occupied in the present treatise exclusively with their combination, he naturally brings out the importance of this as vividly as possible. Is the effectiveness of style in the choice of words, or in their combination? Here he seems to answer, “In their combination.”[11]

But effectiveness of expression resides primarily in neither electio nor compositio, secondarily in both. Primarily it is the writer’s keen sense of the ways of nature and of man, his receptivity and insight. Then it is concrete [108]expression, the choice of words of sensation, the speaking in terms of light, sound, color, motion, attitude, gesture. Such words, whether figurative in the technical sense or literal, may be called imagery. Or, in other fields of composition, it is an illuminating precision. Finally, that effectiveness which we call style comes from apt and beautiful rhythms, from that compositio which is the subject of this treatise. In a word, style is a complex. That compositio is an important element Dionysius does well to show, for this is not obvious and is commonly neglected; but that compositio is the cause, or even that it is generally more important than the other elements, can hardly be demonstrated. Undoubtedly Homer’s verse weaves much of his spell;[12] but surely his words, though often, as Dionysius says, ordinary, have none the less that specific concreteness which characteristically makes epic vivid. In the following passage that he quotes from Herodotus, where the separable charm of the sentence movement is made more obvious by playing as it were in the wrong tempo, he might claim even more. Surely the dialogue method is important for vividness and economy, and this too is a matter of compositio. But is the compositio, for all its charm, the main cause? Who shall determine? The impression is a complex in which each element counts—the choice of details, the choice of words, the arrangement or movement—and in which we can hardly assign an exact proportion to any one. Certainly the beat and tune of prose are part of its connotation, its effect on the reader. Doubtless also—though here we lack scientific [109]analysis to confirm our impression[13]—they are demanded subconsciously by the composing emotion of the author as he speaks or writes. Nevertheless Dionysius is an early instance of a danger lurking in statistical analysis of literature, perhaps also of a danger lurking in the treatment of style—much more of a single element of style—as a separate entity. Being a teacher, Dionysius doubtless thought that there was little danger in over-emphasizing the importance of pace with young students. They are too likely to be quite unaware of it to be corrupted by pedagogical exaggeration.

That “thin and bloodless talk” with which Cicero[14] taxes the philosophers Dionysius thinks to be due to defective compositio.

Having established the importance of adapting sentence movement, Dionysius proceeds to show that such adaptation is little hindered by a priori consideration of logic.

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Does Dionysius mean that logic offers no norm for the order of words?[17] Hardly. Rather he shows by his instances that word order has little to do with philosophical or logical classification. The order in a given sentence is not determined abstractly by the logical idea of putting the subject before the predicate, or the substance before the accident. It is guided partly by rhythm; and it is widely variable.

The variability that he shows in the Greek word order is wider than in English. In both languages it is controlled by usage, by what is habitual and therefore expected; and this fact seems to be ignored by Dionysius. Even a Greek could not shape a sentence at his own will without reference to the habit of the language. But in this respect Greek usage, because the Greek could rely on showing sentence relations by inflection, was less restrictive than English usage. For English, then, it is not true to say that there is no sentence norm, no normal or natural order. That the norm is not determined by logic in the sense of abstract analysis is true for either, or any, language; but in modern languages, much more than in Greek, it is restricted by usage. Every careful translator has found his efforts to convey Greek style hampered by the inferior variability of modern sentence habits. Taken more generally, however, the contention of Dionysius is sound and suggestive. It is that the order of words in a sentence is not predetermined by logic, that it is freely adaptable, and that this adaptation constitutes a large element in effectiveness.

Having thus vindicated the right of the speaker or [111]writer to deal with the order of his words artistically, unfettered by logic, Dionysius proceeds to inquire in what artistic shaping consists.

To simplify the language of Dionysius by borrowing from music a metaphor which, though it does not cover his whole intention, is true so far as it goes, the three tasks of the shaper of sentences are: (1) to hear the tune, (2) to follow the tune, (3) to correct the tune. The first depends on the speaker’s awareness, his sensitiveness to words; the second depends on his technical ability to carry out what is thus suggested, to sustain and enhance; the third, more specifically technical, is to revise in detail.

On its face this division is new. Not only has it nothing [112]to do with other divisions which apply to style in general, being limited to sentence movement, but it also differs from earlier divisions of this item by being synthetic. Its point of view is not that of a critic analyzing what has been already composed, but of a speaker or writer composing. It is practical.

Is it practicable? At the very outset of the exposition the analogy of the building arts is disconcerting. Even when allowances are made for the strict limitation to building, the exclusion of all that we now call architecture, the description still seems hardly exact. And, its exactness assumed, is it applicable? Is the analogy sound? Both the Rhetoric and the Poetic of Aristotle in speaking of sentences generally avoid analogies from the static arts. The Poetic even rules them out at the start by its classification of the arts; and Aristotle’s analogies for sentences are drawn not from building, but from walking, running, and breathing.[19] Dionysius both assumes and asserts the same point of view: “The science of public speaking is, after all, a sort of musical science, differing from vocal and instrumental music in degree, not in kind.”[20] And generally his discussion, like Aristotle’s, is in terms of rhythm. Why, then, this analogy with arts that Aristotle regarded as lying in quite another field? The famous analogy in the De Sublimitate[21] of building with solid blocks is not, in its context, so remarkable; for it is applied less restrictively to compositio. Is a shaper of sentences like a builder?

Is he like a builder in the process that Dionysius puts first, the discerning of inherent compatibilities in his material? The question is not of the subject-matter or conception of a whole work, but of component parts or [113]details. Doubtless an author may be somewhat vaguely considered as discerning potentialities in this material; but what is the material? Is it words in the sense that the builder’s is stone or wood? Can an author find inherent compatibility in words as a builder in the strength, texture, shape, or color of his stone? His material is ideas and images. His choice of particular words for these is doubtless affected by connotations of sound;[22] but must it not be primarily suggested and finally determined by the sense? Can word combinations be considered as in themselves beautiful and satisfying, as really having compatibilities of sound? An author who followed Dionysius literally might launch himself into mellifluous nonsense. Dionysius is speaking figuratively; but is his figure really suggestive? We may well remember that more modern analogies drawn from the static arts of mass and line have been misleading for the consecutive art of words.

The distinction between Dionysius’s two remaining items may seem slight until we remember that the division is not analytical into elements, but synthetic into processes that are consecutive in time. Given the primary and general equipment of sensitiveness, the writer may enhance while he is writing and then afterward revise. In fact, there is a typical difference between following the flow of thought and imagery and sound, and then correcting it, between composing and revising. That the two should be distinct, and that both should be guided partly by sound, is counsel practically helpful.

In fact, once he proceeds to apply his second and third headings in detail, Dionysius is more convincing. The righting[23] of a sentence by transposing phrases or clauses is in practise, and should be in theory, a first counsel of [114]sentence emphasis. A defect of modern text-books is to set forth this important process as if it were purely logical. Dionysius follows the ancient tradition in making it rhythmical; and he also clarifies it by specific instances. He proceeds[24] to the varying of the rhythm by lengthening or shortening. Here his preoccupation with rhythm tends to obscure other considerations. That a sentence is a logical unit, and that a given statement is left single or combined with its neighbor according to its logical bearing on the whole passage,[25] he seems to ignore or take for granted. Again, the lengthening of a clause to fill out the rhythm risks bombast. On the other hand, some of the additions that he quotes as unnecessary to the idea are not superfluous for the image; their value is not mainly rhythmical. But so far as it goes this chapter is suggestive.

Distinguishing[26] charm (ἡδονή) from beauty (τὸ καλόν), Dionysius finds[27] that they arise from four qualities: melody, rhythm, variety, aptness. Melody is an affair of pitch and inflection. The passage,[28] besides being a precious hint as to the Greek scale, is a useful reminder that English—and especially American—speech too often ignores variety of pitch. Similarly the treatment of rhythm as quantitative[29] should remind us that in our own habit it is predominantly accentual. These differences in habit of speech, while they suggest resources unused, should none the less warn us against transferring the distinctions and counsels of Dionysius bodily from Greek to English. Of those that are equally applicable to both languages is the general advice[30] to seek variety and aptness less in the choice of words, where there can be [115]little latitude, than in their combination. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that aptness of style, though abstractly it includes precision and imagery in the single word, is more largely than most of us realize an effect of rhythm, and that variety, except when in oral utterance it includes pitch, consists in rhythm exclusively.

Distinguishing[31] the letters as vowels or consonants, Dionysius finds Greek speech sounds to be neither more nor less than twenty-four. His phonetic analysis of these is specifically according to the position of the vocal organs in utterance. The following discussion[32] of the quality of syllables in combination, of effects hard, smooth, or sweet in sound apart from sense, is doctrine oftener accepted as an idea than tested.[33]

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That such associations are natural is obvious, Dionysius thinks, from onomatopœia, the earliest and simplest form of sound-connotation in words. But he does not shrink from pushing his doctrine far beyond this to the conclusion that sound effects both subtle and various may be achieved, and should be consciously sought, by literary art.

The following instances of poetic effects gained by apt combinations of proper names that have no such suggestions singly will remind English readers of certain sonorous passages in Milton.[36]

That the connotation of such combinations is due to their syllabic quality, however, as distinct from their rhythm, Dionysius hardly succeeds in establishing. The doctrine is flatly denied by Lewis.

Rhythm is discussed in the same order, first[38] by classifying feet as iambs, trochees, dactyls, etc., then[39] by analyzing their effects singly and in combination. “A simple rhythm or foot has not less than two syllables nor more than three.”[40] This is commonly accepted for meter; but does it hold for the rhythms of prose? Moreover that the foot is the rhythmical unit, whether in Greek or in other languages, is oftener assumed than proved. Rhythmical effects, in English at least, seem to be not so much of feet as of measures, whether verses or clauses. Unless the foot is actually a unit, for the composer or for the hearer—and this is at least doubtful—such analysis as that of a noble passage from the funeral speech in the second book of Thucydides[41] lays too much stress on the components—spondees, anapests, etc.—and not enough on the compositio, or pace of the sentence. By way of contrast to Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes, Dionysius pillories Hegesias of Magnesia.[42]

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Variety of rhythm[43] is discussed more generally, without instances, and as an introduction to rhythm in prose.

Aptness,[45] or appropriateness to the actors and the action, is analyzed rather as imitative smoothness or roughness in detail than as the speed of the whole stanza or paragraph. Dionysius says nothing, for instance, of the staccato effect of frequent predication. His text is the famous stone of Sisyphus from the eleventh book of the Odyssey.

Finally[46] Dionysius classifies sentence movement into three typical modes:[47] the rough (αὐστηρά), the smooth (γλαφυρά) or florid (ἀνθηρά), and the blended (εὔκρατος). Certain accidental likenesses to the familiar threefold classification of style[48] should not obscure the fact that we have here something different, a classification not of style in general, but of compositio. The first mode Dionysius defines as seeking rather the force of each part than the harmony of the whole. The words stand out separately, without fear of hiatus or other clashing of sounds, and without care for periods.[49] The aim is rather a direct [120]stirring of emotion (πάθος) than a pervasive suggestion of character (ἦθος). This sterner, elder mode, quite different from “the showy and decorative prettiness of our day,”[50] he exemplifies, with his usual minute analysis, from Pindar and Thucydides. The second, or smooth mode[51] is periodic in its sentences and nicely articulated in its clauses and phrases.

Aiming at the easiest transitions within the period, it is careful to distinguish between periods. The parts coalesce; the units stand out.[53] This is in line with the doctrine of Aristotle,[54] and is admirably exemplified by the practise of Cicero. Dionysius’s instances are Sappho and Isocrates. The third, or blended mode[55] Dionysius labors in vain to distinguish from the other two. Ingenious as are his analyses of the three modes, even sometimes suggestive, they fail to establish the reality of the classification. We can discern in the distinction between his first two a carrying out—perhaps an undue extension—of Aristotle’s distinction between the unperiodic style and the periodic.[56] His third mode seems to be not a mode at all, but merely a reminder that neither of the other two can be used exclusively or pushed to excess.

As to the distinction of prose rhythms from verse[57] Dionysius quotes with approval Aristotle’s dictum[58] [121]that prose should be rhythmical without becoming metrical. It seems plain none the less that his own taste is for rather marked rhythms even in prose, and that he would encourage students to go a long way toward meter. Before he closes his book upon this consideration, he raises quite frankly the question of how far its analyses have practical value.

The defense is sufficient abstractly, though it does not quite meet the fact that in practise both teachers and [122]students of rhetoric have not infrequently frittered away much time in minute analysis of compositio. Such analysis easily becomes over-minute, easily deviates from the paramount consideration of the idea or the image. That it is properly the work of revision, not of the first draft, Dionysius often implies, but might well have stated explicitly. So applied, given common sense and the honest determination to say what one means, analysis of prose rhythms is distinctly valuable and often necessary.

B. The Great Unknown on Imaginative Diction

“Longinus on the Sublime”[1] will for many years continue to name the most captivating of ancient treatises, though its author, whoever he was, was not the rhetorician Longinus, and though its subject is wider than our word sublime. The Latin sublimitas translates precisely enough the ὕψος of the Greek title; but our words sublime and sublimity are reserved for special application to such lofty passages as we quote from Dante and Milton. Sappho’s love poem, quoted by the author as a typical instance, though we feel at once its vivid beauty, we [123]should not call sublime. The Greek word is more general. Meaning literally height, it includes in this treatise all such effects of style as lift us, as move us beyond comprehension or assent to sympathy or resolve. But though the meaning is clear, an equivalent English term is still to seek. Elevation has unfortunate suggestions of the rhetorical; height is too vague; heightening, though nearer, is not generally used in this sense. Falling back on such a periphrasis as heightening of style, we become aware that our word style, as used generally and untechnically, is not far from the author’s intention. Though in text-books and works of criticism it is often extended, in ordinary parlance it means that very heightening, or lift, which is discussed by the Great Unknown. So we shall convey his intention as fairly as seems feasible by translating his title Style.

In the following digest Roman numerals indicate the chapters, or sections.

Compared with the orderly a priori progress of Dionysius, this treatment seems at once less systematic; and though the manuscripts show gaps, some apparently of considerable length, we have enough of the treatise to conclude that the whole was rather suggestive than logically divided and consecutive. But through it all runs the controlling idea that the higher reaches of style are, in cause and in effect, imaginative. Discussing oratory, the author is all the while drawing instances from poetry; and this means more than in the treatise of Dionysius. The scope is larger. Not only does he range far beyond compositio, which occupies only five of his chapters; he is looking in general less to technic and more to motive. What lifts the orator, and makes him lift his hearers, is first intellectual power of conception, then emotional power of sympathy. These are the springs. They work out in imaginative diction and rhythmical pace; but that few orators lift us by these means is due fundamentally to a general lack of idealism.

The contribution, then, of this unknown critic consists [126]in illuminating the bearing of poetic on rhetoric, the importance of imaginative realization even for purposes of persuasion. The distinction between rhetoric and poetic he never blurs; in fact he contrasts the two explicitly; but he brings out, more clearly than any other ancient author, their interdependence.

First, he precludes any undue separation of thought from emotion by making conception, in Homer as well as in Demosthenes, intellectual. His word νόησις reminds one that Aristotle conversely brings rhetoric into poetic by making thought, διάνοια,[2] one of the elements of tragedy. Then further he shows throughout that style at its height, in Demosthenes as well as in Homer, is imaginative realization, that where we feel ὕψος, sublimitas, even in the field of rhetoric, we find the typical language of poetic. Such passages, he says in his first chapter, do not merely persuade us; they carry us out of ourselves.

This is clearest in chapters x-xv, which show how power of conception works out in the typical movement (x) of poetic, then (xi-xiv) in that of rhetoric, and then (xv) in their common ground of diction. These chapters, the core of the treatise, confirm by artistic divination the philosophical analysis of Aristotle, and range beyond diction into composition. How, he inquires, are we to lift oratory to the heights? Even as Sappho, he answers, makes us in a single poem feel love; that is, by selecting those characteristic actions which are most salient and gathering them into a single body. “Do you not marvel how she seeks to gather soul and body into one, hearing and tongue, eyes and mien, all dispersed and strangers before?”[3] Poetry gives us the truth of life by bringing [127]into organic continuity what is revealing and significant. What life disperses and interrupts, poetry focuses and brings into emotional sequence and momentum. Its essential processes are to realize these saliences imaginatively and to unify them. “It is survey of the high points, and composition (σύνταξις) for unity.”[4] A simple modern instance is Browning’s “Meeting at Night.”

This, the treatise goes on (xi-xii), is the typical method of poetic. The parallel (σύνεδρος) method of rhetoric is the converse; it is amplification. Poetry suggests in a flash; oratory iterates and enlarges. The one is intensive; the other, extensive. The one is compressed; the other, cumulative. Now none of the many and well-known means of amplification is self-sufficient. They all fall short without what we have called heightening. True, amplification and height of style may seem (xii) to amount to the same thing, since the object of both is by definition to invest the subject with greatness; but they differ in method.

So much for height as proceeding from the whole conception and movement. To return now to diction:

Imaginative diction, then, is not primarily a trick of words; it is a visualizing habit of thought. It is sympathetic insight, even to the extent of feeling with Phaëthon’s horses their wings.

Imaginative realization of facts, the author is saying, which is essentially poetic, has its use also in rhetoric. That use is normally intellectual, for precision, for making an idea luminous. But there is a further use that is emotional. [129]Besides making ideas clear, imagery in oratory, as well as in poetry, makes facts live. Thus it is not merely stylistic beauty; it has its function at the very base of oratory, in the subject-matter, in the very facts. Make the audience visualize these facts, see them, hear them, live in them by imagination, and you have done something more effective than marshaling them as evidence and urging your inferences. By the imaginative illusion of actuality the audience is not merely convinced; it is captured. In such passages, rather than in reasoning, oratory reaches its heights.[9]

The following chapters (xvi-xxxviii) on figures, carrying into detail the fundamental principle of imaginative realization, are handled less originally and less suggestively than the principle itself. Perhaps we are the less patient with the details of imagery because we have been made to see vividly the scope of imagination. Classification of imagery, which seems inevitably to produce the most tedious chapters in rhetorics, lacks for us moderns what is most characteristic of this ardent and original spirit, constructive suggestion. But at least he abstains from carrying it into minute analysis. Even these his most technical chapters are illuminated by that genius for appreciation which brought together one of the most significant of all collections of literary models. His own style, too, flashes in memorable sentences:

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Occasional oratory (ἐπιδεικτικός) being recognized by the ancients as the most literary of the three fields,[10] one might expect this treatise to dwell on it especially. But the author’s object is not special; it is general. This and the contagion of his enthusiasm have made his book, ever since its recovery in the Renaissance,[11] a powerful influence. Its promotive quality sets it above the schematic analysis of even so discerning a critic as Dionysius. Milton must have felt in it his own creative attitude toward reading. Nor does it need to dwell on the school of Isocrates when its own most characteristic passages have themselves the very mood and method of occasional oratory.

Where has been more nobly expressed the mainspring of interest in literature? Great authors satisfy our longing to enter the human scene fully, to experience vicariously and to share in imagination passions and deeds greater than those of our every day. They touch the heights of style who know the heights of life. To bring oratory into this company is at once to claim for it literary height [131]and to insist on the relation of rhetoric to morality. The moral implications of rhetoric are stressed again in the last chapter (xliv) that remains. Aristotle had recognized them explicitly. St. Augustine, at the end of the ancient world, must reaffirm them for Christian preaching. But against the sophistic that had always threatened this ideal no antidote is more effective than the great unknown’s sense of mission.

Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric determines its function. Cicero dignifies even its conventional tasks as training for leadership. Quintilian surveys it as a comprehensive pedagogy. Dionysius analyzes its art. But the great unknown moves us to share that art ourselves.

Veneration of Aristotle has been impatiently classed with “other mediæval superstitions,” both by those who disliked authority and by those who revolted against the inlaying and overlaying of his text with centuries of interpretations. Since the Renaissance the Poetic has, indeed, fared in this regard somewhat as the Bible; and in both cases those deviations from the original intention are widest, perhaps, which have arisen from “private interpretation,” from missionary zeal more anxious to read into the text than to read in it. What may be called on the other hand communal interpretation, the consentient application of Aristotle’s ideas to the typical problems of a whole group or period, constitutes an important guide in the history of criticism. Both kinds of interpretation imply in the original an extraordinary fertility. This vitality, it is also clear, is of principles, of ideas set forth not only as classifying, but as constructive. The principles have been from time to time crystallized in rules; and some of the rules, having been found restrictive or even inhibitory, [133]have thereupon been flung aside. But again and again a return to Aristotle’s Poetic for orientation of practise and of criticism has vindicated it as constructive. It is not what Professor Dewey has lately called a “closed system.”[2] It has exceptionally little of that mathematically abstract method which Bergson[3] found unsatisfying for survey of human activities in time. Rather its method is inductive. It examines how imaginative conceptions have been so composed and so expressed as to kindle, direct, and sustain the imagination of an audience; and its formulation is typically like what modern science calls an hypothesis, that is a generalization interpreting facts so far as they are known, and fruitful in their further investigation.

To reinterpret the Poetic in 1924, therefore, should be not merely to reconsider the drama and the epic of Aristotle’s time, valuable as this is historically, but according to Aristotle’s intention to consider what makes drama, our own as well as his, and what vitally moves it to possess an audience. Each interpretation of so fundamental a work must have its own preoccupations. The French interpretations of the seventeenth century had an emphasis different from that of the Italian of the sixteenth; and we in turn must see with our own eyes. But the correction that therefore becomes necessary, lest we make Aristotle say what we wish, lies in the text itself. Fortunately the Poetic is short enough to be read attentively in two hours; and its terms, though translated somewhat variously, sometimes imperfectly, now and then perversely, really demand not so much erudition as patience, attention to the context, and some acquaintance with the processes of art. The [134]Poetic should be read consecutively as a whole and then scrutinized in its parts. Interrupted though it is here and there, in some few places even fragmentary, it nevertheless progresses as a whole.[4] As to its terms, the best precaution is to remember that they mean to express the processes of actual composition and the results of the actual representation of drama or of the actual recitation of epic. In this sense the book is practical. It is not, as Bywater implies,[5] the less theoretical; but it deals with the composing as well as with the thing composed.

That Aristotle’s survey of human expression included a Poetic as well as a Rhetoric is our chief witness to a division[6] oftener implied in ancient criticism than stated explicitly. Rhetoric meant to the ancient world the art of instructing and moving men in their affairs; poetic the art of sharpening and expanding their vision. To borrow a French phrase,[7] the one is composition of ideas; the other, composition of images. In the one field life is discussed; in the other it is presented. The type of the one is a public address, moving us to assent and action; the type of the other is a play, showing us in action moving to an end of character. The one argues and urges; the other represents. Though both appeal to imagination, the method of rhetoric is logical; the method of poetic, as well as its detail, is imaginative. To put the contrast with broad simplicity, a speech moves by paragraphs; a play moves by scenes. A paragraph is a logical stage in a progress of ideas; a scene is an emotional stage in a progress controlled [135]by imagination. Both rhetoric and poetic inculcate the art of progress; but the progress of poetic is distinct in kind. Its larger shaping is not controlled by considerations of inventio and dispositio,[8] nor its detail by the cadences of the period.[9] In great part, though not altogether, it has its own technic. The technic of drama in Aristotle’s day was already mature and was actively developing. The technic of narrative, in epic derived from the great example of Homer, in “mime” and dialogue still experimental, was less definite. To set forth the whole technic, the principles of imaginative composition, in a single survey is the object of Aristotle’s Poetic.

TABULAR VIEW OF THE POETIC OF ARISTOTLE[10]

I

The principle of poetic art is imitation. Its two kinds are drama in several forms and that other kind which ranges from epic to dialogue and which has no single generic name. All its forms in both kinds—tragedy, comedy, dithyramb in the one; epic, mime, dialogue in the other—are grouped with the arts of the flute, the lyre, and the dance, and apart from those of painting and singing. Thus begins Aristotle’s Poetic with that chapter of definition which, as in the Rhetoric, opens and illuminates the whole subject.

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To proceed surely from this opening chapter, it is evidently necessary to grasp what Aristotle means first by imitation, secondly by that nameless art which uses only words, thirdly by classifying the art of poetry with that of music and that of the dance.

By imitation Aristotle means just what the word means most simply and usually, but also and more largely the following of the ways of human nature, the representation or the suggestion of men’s characters, emotions, and actions.[14] At its lowest, imitation is mimicry; at its highest, creation. The latter is often implied in the Greek word poetic.[15] Poetic is one of the fine arts. By whatever means, in whatever forms, it is a direct showing of life, as distinct from any account of life through experiment or reasoning. The artist enhances our impressions of life by the suggestions of music or of story, the representations of dance or of drama. All these ways are called by Aristotle imitation because they follow the movements of human life. It is noteworthy that he presents imitation primarily as a constructive or progressive principle. The more obvious imitation achieved by a single phrase, a single melody, or a single dance-movement is reserved for later discussion of detail.[16] The poet is a maker, as indeed he was called by our Elizabethans as well as by the Greeks, in the sense that he is creative. Poet, poetry, poetic, all are used by Aristotle with this broad implication of creative composition,[17] of “imitating men in action.”

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Secondly, Aristotle specifies as kinds of the poetic art tragedy and comedy, which belong together as drama, and on the other hand epic, mime, dialogue, which also belong together, but have no common name. We lack, he says, a generic name for those forms of poetic art which, however various, are alike in having for their sole means of imitation words. The generic name that Aristotle desired to cover all prose and all metrical compositions in which the imitation is through words alone is still to seek. Yet that the genus is distinct through many varieties of form is even clearer to-day than in his time. The imitation of dancing and of all forms of drama is through representation; the imitation of music without words is through suggestion. Now so is the imitation of words without music. True, the words in the latter case carry something besides imitation; they convey ideas; but in so far as they achieve imitation, they do so by suggestion, and it is this suggestive imitation that makes them poetic. What is needed, then, is a term to cover all composition in words that proceeds by suggestion. Perhaps the nearest term [143]in modern English is narrative. Using narrative widely enough to include, as in common modern use it often does include, dialogue and description, we have the term that Aristotle desired. Story would serve if it were not often used of the plot of a play or of an account in a newspaper. Narrative usually connotes a distinct method. A distinguishing generic term is more important to-day than in the time of Aristotle. Modern authors have developed narrative in directions little explored by the ancients. We have thus a variety of narrative forms which was quite unknown to Aristotle. Still, through all this variety, runs what he discerned as a common controlling method, the method of suggestion. In this fundamental Gulliver’s Travels and the Sentimental Journey and The Lady of the Lake, to take examples as different as possible, belong together; and together they belong apart from Othello.

Thirdly, what is the significance of grouping all these forms of poetic art with music and dancing? Painting, which even in Aristotle’s day was a fine art, is mentioned only as an analogy from another group. Singing, or chanting, also is only mentioned for analogy, perhaps because it is not creative. Architecture may have been omitted as being primarily at that time a useful art; but sculpture was both a fine art and, perhaps most obviously of all arts, imitative. Though we need not assume that Aristotle intended here a comprehensive classification of the arts, it is clear that he intended to group poetic art with the arts of music and dancing. Nor is his principle of division far to seek. Clearly he regards poetic as one of the arts of movement in time, and as distinct from the static arts of line and color, balance, mass, and pose. True, music and dance entered largely into early Greek drama and were still present in the drama of Aristotle’s [144]time; but that fact does not explain the grouping together of “epic, tragedy, comedy, dithyramb, flute-playing, and lyre-playing,” with the later inclusion of dancing. Aristotle does not say that these occur together; and the mention of epic precludes any such interpretation. He says that they are alike. He saw all poetic art, especially drama, as primarily an art of movement. What is implied here in the opening chapter is carried out consistently, in doctrine and in terms, through the whole book. No one should deny a certain fundamental likeness among all the arts; but the likeness is not in technic except among those arts which have like “means” of expression, such as “rhythm, language, and music.” Modern application of terms from architecture and painting to drama and story has spread no little confusion. Aristotle will have us think along right lines; and, as in his Rhetoric, the first chapter is the most important of all. We are to think of poetic composition not as structure, but as movement.

The history of criticism involved in the successive interpretations of this much discussed section and the [146]following may be postponed. The immediate concern is the meaning of the definition and the division for dramaturgy, i.e., for the actual composition of a tragedy and for the analysis of tragedy in terms of composition. Aristotle begins with the subject-matter. The theme itself must be tragic, and is so if it is first serious and secondly complete within its own extent. A playwright considering the possibilities of such-and-such material is to ask first whether it is serious. The Greek word[21] means not solemn in the sense of sad, but such as to interest the composer and the audience by its importance. It might be rendered humanly significant. The question, Is there drama here? becomes, then, first of all, Is there action here that will engage emotional participation? That is the first question; for it is fundamental.

Secondly, is this action dramatically manageable as to extent? Will it finish within the time of a drama, come to its issue, focus; or is its interest such as to demand more extensive development in time; in a word, is it a drama plot or an epic plot? The epic of “much-enduring Odysseus” demands extent of time; the tragedy of Œdipus, compression of time. Complete[22] here means concluded, i.e., susceptible, within dramatic limits, of a conclusion emotionally satisfying. To be dramatic, the action must be self-consistent and self-determining. Tragedy is characteristically intensive.[23]

[147]

So far our tragedy has no words; it may even do without them. Nevertheless in its higher ranges it expresses itself also through suggestive language. In the third place, then, tragedy uses the whole range of “enhanced utterance,” i.e., rhythm, and occasionally music and song. In conception a tragedy must be significant and complete; in expression it may be variously suggestive.

The fourth distinction of tragedy is its characteristic movement, which is acting, not narrative. The process of drama is representation; the process of story is suggestion. Drama shows men and women doing; story tells what they did. That is essentially dramatic, then, which is best brought home by actual representation. In this regard imaginative conceptions of human life differ essentially. Some are best conveyed by the indirect but abundant suggestions of narrative; others have their poignancy only through the few direct strokes of visible action.

Finally, tragedy is defined by its effect, the tragic catharsis. Tragedy “through pity and fear achieves its purgation of such emotions.”[24] It is complete, then, not only in action, but in emotion. Emotion is not merely aroused; it is satisfied; it is carried through to a release. Tragedy is thus thoroughly emotional, more emotional than any other form of art. It is emotional not incidentally, but essentially; for it offers not merely emotional excitement, but emotional satisfaction. As all art enhances by imitation our impressions of life, so [148]tragedy reveals our motives and moves us onward through vicarious experience. We yearn toward our fellows moved as we are, only more deeply; we fear in some great crisis what obscurely threatens us all day by day; and we know the inevitable end not with our minds, but with our awakened hearts.

From definition of tragedy by its essential characteristics Aristotle proceeds to enumeration of its constituents. Of these the sine qua non is plot. The insistence on this is so ample and so convincing as hardly to need interpretation. Characterization comes second. Third is the expression of thought, as distinct from the expression of emotion or of character. The persons of the play not only reveal their individualities; they have also occasion to expound or persuade, and here poetic leans on rhetoric. For drama, though its movement is imaginative, though it primarily expresses emotion and character, cannot dispense with logic. Fourth is diction. Here again it is noteworthy that Aristotle puts this fourth, though tyros, he says, can master it before they can manage plot. Whether the diction be verse or prose he regards as negligible at this point. With the same brevity he enumerates finally musical and scenic accompaniments. What he enlarges upon is plot and characterization, and upon plot as the essential and determining factor.

Plot, then, is what makes a play “complete and whole”; it is a planned sequence of actions. Aristotle’s terms connote, not space and structure, but time and causal movement. The beginning is the point at which the cause is set in motion; the end is the result; the middle is the course from the one to the other. Plot is thus a significant course of action determined by permanent impulses; it imitates, not the mere surface movements of life, but its undercurrents. It is not a “slice of life,” such as the experience of this day or that, but a course of life, moving from a “serious” crisis of determining emotions, through actions that carry these emotions out, to the final action in which they are seen to issue. Plot gives us what we often miss in actual experience, and consequently seek in the vicarious experience of drama, a sense of progress to completion. Experience is interrupted and complicated; drama moves steadily on a single course. Plot is the means by which dramatic art simplifies life, in order from the facts of life to extract the truth.

Furthermore, plot means technically management of a significant course of action within a practicable time. The tragedy must be long enough to show the action as progressive, yet short enough to be grasped as a single whole. “Beginning, end, middle” are thus very practical considerations. Every playwright considers every plot [150]in this aspect. Where is he to take hold in order to make the situation clear? What final action is, for his conception, the inevitable end? What are the stages between, leading one to another, in which the action will best be seen as a progressive course? Without limiting his consideration to the time-rules of the actual dramatic competitions of his day, Aristotle seeks

What Aristotle finds necessary is time enough to make the action convincing, to carry out the dramatic consequences to their conclusion. Compressed within too short a time-lapse, the plot may remain fragmentary; stretched out too long, it may sag or trail. “Beginning, end, middle,” then, constitute a formula for plot.

[151]

Consistency of plot, consistency of characterization also, as Aristotle goes on to show, imply that the poet interprets. He is not merely a recorder. The acts (πράγματα) of his personæ are not statistics; they are parts of the consistent presentation of a single whole. Every one of them, quite differently from the acts of real life, is seen to be significant. In thus including the significant and excluding the insignificant, the poet interprets according to his conception of the springs of action. He simplifies life according to his view of causes and motives, “according to probability or necessity.”

In this the poet differs from the historian more generally. Tragedy is true to life not by rehearsing what men have done, but by revealing in significant action what men do, what they must do, being the men that the dramatist shows them to be. History records a man’s deeds, and reasons from this evidence; drama directly represents the doer doing what he should do “according to probability or necessity.” Plot, then, implies actions shaped to a unifying consistency. It imitates life: but it imitates by creative interpretation.

That dramatic composition is thus primarily the devising of a convincing sequence is seen conversely when the sequence is defective.

The essential dramatic force, then, is sequence, steady onward movement to a convincing issue. Scenes merely episodic, however vivid or clever each may be in itself, weaken this essential force. The episodic fault, whether it arise from weakness in the composer or from an actor’s insistence on having a “part” to suit himself rather than to suit the play, makes the worst plays because it is a fault at the source.

Finally on cogency of plot depend the tragic pity and fear. The catharsis depends on our feeling the issue to be inevitable. Unexpected to the actors it may be, and most strikingly; but it cannot be fortuitous. While it is surprising to them, it must be satisfying to us as the outcome of their action.

This latter passage is tantalizingly brief. So far as the context shows, suffering is used here to denote single scenes of unusually violent action. Why should such a scene be called a “part of the plot”? The word πάθος is used generally—and in the plural it is used repeatedly throughout the earlier chapters of this work—to mean emotion. Emotion is not a part of the plot in the sense that reversal or recognition may be a part. Rather it is a pervasive principle and an object. Suffering, to translate the singular noun so, may be regarded as a part of the plot in the sense that it may be an element of tragedy. So taking it, we may suppose Aristotle to countenance here such scenes of violence as were more familiar on the Elizabethan stage than on the Greek.[35] At any rate, Aristotle here inserts a chapter[36] on the formal parts (prologue, episode, exodus, etc.), before proceeding with the methods by which the plot may be worked out.

Chapter xiii insists that the vital principle of plot is [154]causal consistency. This rules out mere reversal. A turning-point (περιπέτεια) is, indeed, characteristic of drama. There is usually and typically a crisis, in which the hero’s fortunes turn from good to bad; but this reversal will not suffice by itself. The mere turn of fortune does not achieve the catharsis of pity and fear.

Why this insistence on character in the midst of the discussion of plot? Why the iteration of “not through depravity, but through error”? Because, as Aristotle shows below,[39] plot implies consistency of characterization, but more fundamentally because consistency of plot has for its very beginning and mainspring the realization of a central figure like ourselves progressively winning our sympathy. The essence of plot is motivation. What moves us is never mere luck, never mere surprise, but the [155]causation that springs from human will. Consistency of plot means clear causation; and causation in drama is the working of will. So the first consideration is the title rôle, the main “part.” He or she should be illustrious because the action is thereby conspicuous and partly known in advance; but his course of action must be moved by springs that we feel in ourselves. Macbeth is a warrior of an elder day and a king; but we, though neither warriors nor kings, feel the perversion of his manhood as like enough to our own to purify us through pity and fear.

This is the second consideration of consistency. First, the best tragedy springs from a great personal will gone wrong; secondly, it springs from a compelling progress of actions, from the plot itself. It depends not on the shock of this violent deed or that, but on the causal movement of the whole.

Character is discussed in chapter xv as a distinct topic, but still with reference to plot. For throughout this section, especially from chapter xiii on, the topic is consistency.[41] Consistency, though it refers primarily to plot, must also include characterization. In general, characterization must be consistent with the morality of the individual purpose, with the moral habit of the social group, with the received idea of the person, and finally with itself.[42] In particular,

In a word, consistency of characterization is part of the causal weaving of the plot.

Chapter xvi applies the principle of consistency to “recognitions,” or “discoveries.”[44]

Chapters xvii and xviii turn to the actual processes of dramaturgy, to the work of the playwright. This is concerned mainly with plot; but first Aristotle urges the fundamental necessity of visualizing.

Visualizing actively at every stage, the playwright is to compose his plot before he works out his lines. He is to determine his play by the method of solution, to avoid the extensiveness of epic, and to make even the chorus contributory to the plot.

The bearing of the meager observations on the logical element and on diction (xix-xxii) will be clear from the tabular view.[51] They are not distinctive except in the saying “the greatest is the being metaphorical”;[52] and they have surprisingly little on dramatic rhythms.

The third section of the Poetic (xxiii-xxvi) defines epic and compares it with tragedy.

The general likeness of epic to drama, then, is in interpretative focus, as distinct from the chronicle method of history. Story, as well as drama, selects in order to unify. [158]Moreover (xxiv) story, too, as well as drama, has its crises, its recognitions, its emotional outbursts. The epic poet, if he have something of Homer’s skill, can make his characters express themselves without intruding his explanations. These are general likenesses throughout the whole poetic field. For characteristic differences, epic has the advantages of scope and variety. It gains from the marvelous, which can generally be suggested better than it can be represented.[54] These points are as significant to-day as in the time of Aristotle. Not so the defense (xxv) of epic against certain typical objections which smack more of the schoolmaster than of the critic. To argue whether a given epic story were possible or probable or promotive of good morals was in fact one of the regular elementary exercises of the later schools. The closing exaltation of drama over epic[55] is summary, indeed; but that is natural, since the points, having been made before, are here simply reviewed comparatively. The idea of intensity through unity is a logical conclusion of the Poetic as a whole.

II

From Aristotle’s introductory grouping of drama with music and dance, throughout his long discussion of plot, runs the idea of movement. The dramatic mode of imitation is to set human life in motion before us and to heighten our sense of living by carrying it through to a significant issue. Has this idea animated other drama than the Greek? Is its vitality shown by its permanence? Is it essential? As all art heightens our impressions of [159]life and our sense of living, so the art of the dramatist in particular heightens and extends our sense of human life by vicarious experience. Its object is to make us feel human experience more widely and more intensely. All the technic of the stage, whether ancient or modern, whether simple or elaborate, has for its main object this sort of creative imitation. The dramatist tries to induce and to hold the illusion of actual experience. In so far as he succeeds, we forget that we are in the theater; we imagine that we are seeing a reality more real than we can piece out of our fragmentary glimpses at men and women; and in his greatest successes we almost pass from spectators to actors. Toward this result how important is Aristotle’s idea of movement, his doctrine that plot is a progressive synthesis of actions, unified but never static?

Those who have superficially thought of Greek drama as static, who may even have pictured it as statuesque, can hardly have studied the great play of Sophocles that Aristotle offers as an example, Œdipus the King.

This is the legend. Its events extend over many years. Which of them shall be chosen for the stage as having most dramatic value? Which to an audience can be made most significant; and how shall these vital scenes be arranged in such continuous and progressive movement as will convey, and at the same time enhance, our sense of the movement of life? Sophocles with his own dramatic skill, but in the form typical of all the best Greek tragedy, arranged his whole action within the compass of its last poignant hours. Omitting nothing that is emotionally essential, nothing that is essential to clear understanding, he yet relegated some events to the background in order to represent fully the great crisis. He gathers together the whole visible action into an hour and a half on the stage and a half-dozen persons; and in this brief compass he unfolds that action with increasing intensity by making every scene move from the last and to the next, on to the awful close.

The Theban people, represented by the chorus supplicating their savior king, rehearses his great achievements for their deliverance. Œdipus in the strong confidence of his power and his mission stands before his palace like a god. At the end of the play he is led slowly from that palace a broken man. But the composition of the play is not mere reversal for contrast. Between the first scene and the last, action moves without [161]haste, but without delay or interruption. The vigorous and self-reliant king chafes at the cryptic response brought from the oracle by Creon; he is indignant, then furious, at the tragic silence of the seer Tiresias. His quick intelligence scents a plot between the two. Breaking through the interposition of Jocasta, he wins from her false hopes while he gives her no less unwittingly the premonition of doom. Once suspecting, however darkly, he must know, he will know, he knows a dreadful part, he knows more, he knows all. So this great play, though it is focused on a single day, though it excludes all the past history and the development of character, is never static. It is never for a moment tableau. Because of its compression it moves not less, but more.

For that is why Aristotle insists that the dramatic action should be self-consistent, limited in scope. The object of dramatic unity is not bareness, but fulness and continuity. It is to give time for full and intense realization of what actual life merely hints interruptedly. It is to give us human life undisturbed and uninterrupted, so that we may see it clearly and whole. We are to have the illusion of actual experience, yes, but of larger and deeper experience than we can get from the mere reproduction of facts or from the cross-currents of life itself. Like every other art, drama is a simplification of life because it is an interpretation. The dramatic simplification is seen by Aristotle to consist essentially in moving from revealing crisis to revealing crisis up to a final revelation. It excludes all the accidental and the irrelevant that embarrass our actual movements; it tells what has happened through what is happening; it cuts to the quick. It takes those moments only in which a man is himself, suppressing those in which he is indistinguishable from [162]other men. But it does not leap or halt between; it brings out our real sequences. It reveals life to us by showing the emotional connection of its great moments.

That such dramatic unity became sometimes a bondage in seventeenth-century French classical drama was due not to any defect of the Aristotelian principle, but partly to making the practise too rigidly a code, and still more to stiffening the movement into tableau. The classical French application of the principle of dramatic unity is not, as has often been pointed out, altogether Aristotelian. Least of all is it Aristotelian when it hinders dramatic movement. French classical tragedy when it is cold—and to think of it as generally cold is a prejudice—is static; it is feeble in movement. The free movement, not to say the loose movement, of Elizabethan plays, which was hailed by Hugo and other Romanticists as a deliverance from the classical code, is indeed better than tableau; but it is compatible with bad playwriting. He would be rash who should assert that Elizabethan plays are in general more effective dramatically than French classical plays. Rather, since the two traditions bring out different dramatic values, each has something to learn from the other. But it is plain that the progress of the Elizabethans in dramaturgy was in the direction of unity, of more highly organized movement. To see this we need go no farther than Shakspere. The difference between his earlier plays and Othello is largely a difference in unification. Othello by itself is sufficient proof of the value of dramatic unity for dramatic intensity. And with or without unity, with the Greek and the French focus of time or the Elizabethan lapse of years, drama demands movement from scene to scene. The value of unity is only to heighten this sense of movement.

[163]

Drama, of course, has its differences of age and of race. We are not to think that at its best it must always be Greek. One of the large differences between ancient drama and modern is, indeed, a difference of emphasis. Ancient drama relies more on plot, modern drama on characterization. The ancient playwright had above all, for his theater, to realize the emotional values of a situation by seeing that his play was well put together; the modern playwright has sometimes, in a theatre giving opportunity for facial expression, relied far more on realizing his persons, on writing what the actor calls a good part. Nevertheless, though playwriting does not always need the compactness of Greek form, many modern plays have chosen this compactness, this closely organized movement, for intensity.[56]

Undoubtedly such dramatic composition demands of the playwright definiteness of interpretation. His selection, his limiting of time and place, his leading from scene to scene, are only the technical means of realizing his emotional intention. He is trying to show us human life, not in random and interrupted glimpses, not in the jumble and discord of its surface, not in aimless and frustrated movements, but in the animating emotions of its crises. In order to represent crises, he is compelled to show us wherein they are critical; in order to give to emotion full expression, he must make it significant. Rather it is this significance which first caught his attention, which gave him the conception [164]of his play and guided his realization. If his dramatic movement halts or lapses, the reason may lie deeper than technic in uncertainty of intention; and if on the other hand he is able to sustain it and carry it through, the fundamental reason is that his conception of its issue is strong and clear.[57]

This presumption has more than once been challenged. Why must the dramatist have an intention, a theme? Why may he not simply represent life? Represent life he not only may, but must, to the extent that he must reflect life, not reflect on it; but what is represented? Life in its multitudinous complexity, its unfulfilled intentions, life as it whirls past and escapes us? That is a task beyond drama. No playwright has ever represented life except as he saw it, or made his representation intelligible without interpretation. And as the dramatist has to interpret in order to compose, so the audience wishes to be led up to some issue. We desire not mere emotional excitement, but emotional release. Else the pity and fear, to use Aristotle’s words, will not bring us purgation. A play shows us life in critical moments, and these are moral moments, moments of the clash of wills. Drama assumes free will, and its movement is by motives. Motivation, on which Aristotle so much insist, is to make the issue convincing. The dramatic representation of life is creative imitation largely in proportion as it thus moves to an end; and the typically dramatic end is not blind fate, but poetic justice.

Poetic justice sums up what Aristotle means by saying that “poetry is something more philosophical and more [165]serious than history.” It means the truth revealed beneath facts, the real cause and effect moving beneath the surface. An audience, desiring deeper emotional experience than it achieves through daily observation, desires especially to see how its sharper conflicts issue. It asks of the dramatist not only sight, but insight. It is not satisfied with “mere reversal.” “The mere spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us.” The same criticism is implied in Stevenson’s objection to Meredith’s Richard Feverel, that it “began to end well” and then cheated us.

The convincing close, expressing the playwright’s intention and resulting from the whole course of action, is thus a fair measure of what used to be called problem plays. It measures how far they are in Aristotle’s sense serious, how far they are penetrative and significant, in a word how far they are tragic. Each disclosure, each critical scene of the dramatic progress, having its full emotional value separately and for itself, leads on to the next. Such planning for momentum is not only Aristotelian; it is permanently dramatic.

Creative imitation of human life, thus moving us along that course of actions which is both the means and the measure of creative power, makes drama of all the arts most poignant. Whether it is, as it has always seemed to its devotees, the highest form of poetic, at least its appeal is at once the largest and the most direct. In the very persons of men and women it speaks to us by face and gesture, by the message, the imagery, and the rhythm of words, most of all by the order of its actions. Plato, indeed, would have us draw from this the moral that our own lives should be ordered poetically, that is creatively, [166]that we should control and direct our lives to harmonious movement.

The classical practise of poetic in the two modes distinguished by Aristotle, dramatic and narrative, has a twofold significance. It has the claim of all great art for its own beauty; and it reveals certain fundamentals of literary form and literary influence. Classical influences on later art have been defined sometimes vaguely, sometimes amiss, for lack of clear grasp of classical practise. Yet the vitality of classical poetic art is hardly more proverbial than its definiteness. Without circumscribing in formulas its creative variety, we can discern quite clearly its artistic habits in these two enduring modes.

Into such a survey recent questions as to literary forms need not enter. How far a literary form may be modified or extended without losing its character, how suggestive a recognized form is to the composing imagination, are questions important rather for those modern times in which the artist is much concerned with individual self-expression than for the centuries in which he was more the spokesman of a community. Even if Brunetière’s transference of the word genre from biology to literature be only analogy, even if Croce’s denial that a literary form is directive of the artist be justified, we must still use the terms drama and epic. From Aristotle down, criticism has used them not only for convenience, but because in fact there were two typical ways of extensive imaginative composition in words, varying in detail but constant [168]essentially, and always sharply distinct. Whether these should rather be called types or modes than forms is a question for later consideration. For the purposes of the present review the terms drama and epic connote only habits of composition universally recognized.

The two discussed by Aristotle as types are in fact seen as types to persist. The habits of drama have remained typically distinct from those of narrative, and have changed far less. To add Senecan tragedy to its Greek prototype, and to mark the distinctive traits of Latin comedy, will both fill out Aristotle’s summary and show in what forms classical influences came first to modern drama. Narrative in the ancient world developed along few lines. Its poetic art long remained epic. This art was at once followed by Vergil and recreated. The Æneid is the great exemplar of all that is fruitful in literary influence. The Hellenistic art that Vergil rejected was cultivated by Apuleius and ran to seed in the Greek prose romances. Meantime it was practised with facile brilliancy by the Latin poet whom the middle ages knew better even than they knew Vergil—Ovid. Setting aside, then, all minor forms, and in the two major forms all but what is typical, we may venture to survey ancient poetic, first in Greek tragedy, with Senecan tragedy for contrast and Latin comedy for supplement, then in Vergilian epic, with Ovidian narrative for contrast and Apuleius for divergence.

I. DRAMA

A. Greek Tragedy[1]

At first glance Greek tragedy strikes the modern student as finished. Its historical period is definite. It grew; [169]it matured; it died. Its strictly dramatic influence appears to be sharply limited. Inoperative as a mode of representation, indeed almost unknown, in the middle ages and the early Renaissance, it seems at first to have been revived in modern times only for archæological reproduction, as the models of Greek architecture in museums. Even if such a view were just—and it is not—Greek tragedy would compel attention by sheer artistic eminence. [170]It can no more be ignored than Gothic architecture. It is one of the great artistic achievements of the human spirit. But no such artistic achievement is ever finished in the sense of being relegated to a museum. Its eminence constitutes a presumption of vitality. Gothic architecture, though held in abeyance and even forgotten for centuries, is again operative. It compels attention to-day not only in reproductions, but in creation. Greek tragedy has profoundly influenced modern playwriting. Its increasing reappearance to-day in revivals, and the distinction of certain imitations such as Samson Agonistes, are less important than its influence on modern dramaturgy, as in Racine and again in Ibsen and finally in certain striking plays of our own time. This vitality implies that the Greek experience, in especially happy conditions of stage and audience, through a period of extraordinary artistic competition, was fruitful not merely in skilful adaptation to those conditions, but in dramatic principles.

(1). Theater and Audience

The emotions that are enhanced by representation before a crowd are typically such as are best felt by the crowd together, such as are communal.[2] Greek drama began, according to tradition, in the rites celebrated by the whole village to honor Dionysus, the god of fertility and enthusiasm. In the shouting, singing chorus there were at first no actors in the modern sense; but that was because in a broader sense all were actors. There was rude, impromptu mimic action. There was probably a good deal of improvised verse by individuals, and probably a good deal of recurring refrain by the whole crowd. Out of this communal [171]impersonation of the story of Dionysus grew very naturally individual impersonations of the god and of his more prominent mythical attendants, the crowd responding with impromptu variations of the familiar refrain. Every crowd produces a leader. The leader of the Greek chorus became an actor in the modern sense of taking, a fixed part. In time other fixed parts were assigned to individuals, till the mimic action had a definite dialogue; but the chorus persisted as representative of the whole community.

Then, as always, came the individual genius to discern the capacity of what had grown up among the people, to reveal and enlarge that capacity, and to fix a great form of art. The shaping of drama by Æschylus and its development by Sophocles and by Euripides expressed, indeed, individual genius; but no less they expressed the ideals of the Greek race and remained answerable to the original popular impulse. The Greek audience during the great period of drama felt not only that the chorus chanting in the orchestra was its representative, but that it was itself as a body assisting at a communal celebration. Always the enacting of legend or history known to every spectator by heart, the drama was always judged sternly not only by its poetic beauty, but by its faithfulness to communal beliefs and feelings. Its success was measured by the feeling of the community.

So the great open-air Greek theater was made for the community. It superseded the unfurnished hillside as the community passed more and more from participants to spectators; but it remained, to a degree rarely realized in modern times, communal. For Greek tragedy, even at its height, never lost its reminiscences of ritual. Every representation being an act of religion, the theater crowd, united by a common rite, was the more sensitive to common [172]sympathies. That the theater is for the crowd, not for the individual, has been realized by playwrights of every age; but the first great age of drama opened this peculiar opportunity of dramaturgy widest because its crowd was unified. The communal sense of tradition was focused by religion.

(2). Diction

Remembrance of this fact has led many modern readers who have never seen a Greek play to conceive Greek tragedy as formal and rigid. This is much the same error as supposes Greek architecture and statuary to have been white. It is an illusion of time. Greek buildings and statues became white when no hands were left to restore their colors. Greek tragedies became formal and rigid when they passed from the stage to the closet, when they lost the rhythms of dance and of phrase. With every revival of them upon the modern stage the illusion is dispelled. Indeed, it can be broken by merely reading them aloud.

Nevertheless, though they show to an exceptional degree that larger movement which Aristotle found to be a dramatic essential, they were stately in gesture and in lines. Even without the associations of religion, the very size of the theater would have precluded the facial play that is a main reliance of modern acting, and induced in the open air a delivery sometimes oratorical and always large. The tragic mask and cothurnus were adaptations to a great open-air space. To the same physical conditions were adapted the rendition and the lines themselves.[3]

The diction of Greek tragedy, though varying widely of course from poet to poet, has certain recognizable [173]constants. It is generally sonorous, sententious, and, to a degree never surpassed, direct. It realizes fully the emotional appeal of rhythm; for though its dialogue has less rhythmical variety than Shakspere’s, it rarely lapses into monotony, and it is relieved by the abundant imagery and metrical variety of the chorus. Greek tragic dialogue is typically austere. It rarely amplifies, for it is poetry, not oratory;[4] but it makes every word count dramatically. The ideal of economy is felt even in the diction. Passages of narrative, such as those of messengers, are made dramatically effective not only by situation, but by variations of tone and tempo. Effects of style may seem to have preoccupied criticism too much unless we remember that the Athenian audience was habitually sensitive to rhythm, and that it was never distracted by novelty of story from attention to the dramatist’s art. That the final touch of this art was the rhythmical finishing of the lines there can be no doubt.

Nor is dramatic verse a mere traditional convention.[5] Obviously it is appropriate to historical dignity; but beyond this we become aware, even from reading, much more from hearing, that the verse subtly and constantly enhances the emotion by enriching the connotation. It is not merely rhythm added to force, though how much rhythm, even in prose, is worth dramatically every good actor knows. It is not even poetry added to drama. It is an element permeating and integral. Good dramatic verse, to say nothing of the best, is not a lyrical addition, not a decoration, but as truly a dramatic means as the [174]other means of characterization. That is why the tradition of every great stage, such as the Comédie Française, lays distinct stress on rhythmical rendition; and that is why the dramatic rhythms of Greek tragedy are still inspiring.

Nor is even this the final value of verse in Greek tragedy. Such verse enhances the characterization not only in detail by widening the opportunity of the actor to convey mood and emotion, but generally by enhancing the poetry. The typical method of Greek tragic characterization is to idealize. The mighty figures of the past, remote from the urgencies of our confusing present, confirm our faith that man may dominate and direct his world for good, or, when they too fail, reveal with larger truth the tragic flaws of humanity and the hope of its regeneration. Modern history plays, as well as ancient, are poetic in diction ultimately because they are poetic in conception, as Greek drama was at once tradition and poetry. The word audience, which in its etymological suggestions has seemed inappropriate to a modern crowd gathered rather for seeing than for hearing, is entirely appropriate to the Greek theater. The visual values of representation were, indeed, realized in gesture and pose, though less in scenery and spectacle; they were realized as never, perhaps, since in group movements; but the auditory values, the sounding line, the phrase harmony of the chant, always enhanced representation by strong rhythmical suggestion. A Greek tragedy was in a real sense, though its music was simply melodic, a symphony.

(3). Chorus

The symbol of the communal import of Greek tragedy and of its characteristic form is the chorus. From being almost the whole the chorus dwindled dramatically to a [175]subordinate part. The inference, however, that it was outgrown, that except for historical study it is negligible, is unwarranted. Even Euripides used the chorus dramatically; and Aristotle urges, not that it be abolished, but that it be made an integral part, one of the actors. Nor were the practise and the theory mere concession to Greek convention. The chorus was in fact dramatic.[6] Too readily conceiving it in terms of our meager modern experience, as in opera, critics often seem to have forgotten that the Greek chorus furnished not primarily tableau or grouping or even pageantry in a wider sense, but chanting and dancing. That dancing may be highly dramatic we have but recently rediscovered. Aristotle[7] knew dance as compassing the whole range of bodily expression. Far from being merely a lyric interlude, the chorus offered distinct dramatic possibilities.

To begin with, the combination of choral dance and chanting has a direct appeal to the simpler emotions that are communal; and in Greek drama it enhances the idealizing of communal fears and beliefs and aspirations. The idealism of Greek tragedy is conveyed largely by the chorus. Then the chorus is used to enhance the emotion of a preceding scene by iterating it sympathetically, or by recoiling in protest, or by reflecting on it sub specie æternitatis. Thus are achieved the relief of variety and also an intermediary effect, the effect of spectators of the action itself interpreting to the spectators of the play. The variety brought about by the choral throng was the more marked because the actors were few. In the chorus [176]were many opportunities for representation of the human world about these isolated individuals, and for dramatic symbolism through the group movements of the dance. The choral dance, always symbolic, had been developed from simple, primitive forms to a fine art. The preliminary to every dramatic production was the public granting of a chorus; and the training of this chorus by the dramatist himself was a main part of rehearsal. The chorus is associated in every one’s thought of Greek tragedy inevitably and fitly. It is not merely an archaic convention; it is not merely a lyric accessory to drama; it has dramatic possibilities which may yet, if large open-air theaters win again a place in communal life, be revived.

(4). Themes and Personæ

The rhythmical effects of diction and of choral dance are hardly more characteristic of Greek tragedy than its unvarying use of legendary themes and persons. Euripides is thought to have chafed within these confines, to have been hampered by the conventional prescription of old bottles for his new wine. In any age the playwright who insists on ideas in advance of his crowd thereby sacrifices something of the communal appeal. But even Euripides kept outwardly the unwritten law, and Aristotle[8] accepted it as part of his theory. It is evident that such themes and such persons were a tragic convention; but the convention was still recognized in the middle ages;[9] it [177]was accepted by the Renaissance; it was formally adopted by the French seventeenth century; and its being a convention does not prove it any the less dramatic. Without disparaging the gain to modern tragedy from the widening of the tragic field we may take account of the typical values of the field of tradition.

The field of tradition is ipso facto the field of communal memories and aspirations and, even in modern times, of myth. Though the re-creation of myth may be artificial and remote, that it need not be so, that it may on the contrary originally express both the poet and the conceptions of his audience, has been proved many times, and very convincingly in our own time by William Vaughn Moody’s Fire-bringer. The fire of Prometheus is there seen, even after Æschylus, even after Shelley, to be undying. The modern science of anthropology, indeed, gives good ground for thinking both that myth is constantly human and that by its very persistence, as of a primitive trait, it opens opportunities for drama.

The modern study of folklore, by recovering some lost echoes in Greek tragedy, has enhanced its significance. Folk superstitions, though they retire from public gaze before more sophisticated conventions, are slow to die. Those which have become mere curious lore are of course dead dramatically; but those which express persistent human yearnings may be all the more vital dramatically because they are primitive. Such, for instance, is the folk-tale of the fairy mistress, the woman of unearthly beauty who has the magic to enrich the man she loves with joy and power. Widespread over western Europe in the middle ages, it has roots in remote antiquity. Euripides made it, not as the medieval writers the story of the delusion of the man, but the tragedy of the woman. In varying [178]forms it has recurred again and again. In Walter Map’s amazing tale of Gerbert[10] it concludes upon penance and renunciation. In Fouqué’s Undine its native force is dissipated in sentiment. A dead superstition, on the other hand, has no dramatic appeal. Though we admire the steadfast piety that agonizes over the unburied body of a brother, we can no longer appreciate the situation of Antigone as fully tragic; for we have lost irrevocably the ancient superstition from which it springs. But Medea with her power to bless and ban her lover, and with her unearthly capacity for suffering, who will venture to say that she is dead? That she is primitive gives her only the more power to walk the stage to-morrow.

Mythical idealizing is readily symbolic. But in Greek tragedy direct symbolism, except in the chorus, is not common. Rather than as symbolical, the legendary figures appear as typical. It is as typical that the “illustrious persons” are recommended by Aristotle and represented by the dramatists that he expounds. Prometheus, Heracles, Agamemnon, Medea, are chosen as eminent not in rank, as some French dramatists are accused of thinking, but in typically human traits. They show grandly and conspicuously what obscurely is suffered by us all. “There you and I and all of us fell down.” They are race heroes; we communally feel in them the race ghost. And the more mythical they are, the more we can feel the struggle of all human kind. For the very limitations on themes sets Greek tragedy in sharper relief against modern as exhibiting the dramatic vitality of legend.

Personages so fixed do, indeed, tend to preclude both [179]novelty and subtlety of characterization. In this regard Euripides, especially in his Medea, is sometimes exceptional. Generally the characterization of Greek tragedy is broad and simple. The personæ are taken full-blown, at some revealing crisis. But modern experience with plays and with novels confirms the impression that broad characterization is generally more effective before an audience; subtle, minute, or cumulative, with an individual reader. In this application, too, we may take Aristotle’s saying that plot is more important in drama, character in epic. But lest we separate character from plot unduly, we must remember that the movement of Greek tragedy is not merely of events, but of human will. Will is the exhibition of character in action. It is the mainspring of every tragic crisis. At once the simplest and the strongest expression of character, it animates Greek tragedy because it animates almost all tragedy.[11] Æschylus in Prometheus Bound promises the victory of heroic fortitude. Sophocles in King Œdipus conveys the agony of assertive individuality at finding the struggle for self-fulfillment vain, and brings even innocent willfulness to wreck. Euripides sees the tragic conflict of the traditional bloodwite with reverence to a mother as leading to madness. Within the compass of the few dramas left to us from the Greek stage the tragedies of human will in a few typical personages are seen to be as various as they are convincing. Even the rich variety of the great Elizabethan period does not make them seem meager.

Rather they exhibit the dramatic richness of the typical. By the very fact of being embodied in flesh and blood any [180]“illustrious person” begins to be real. Even the allegorical figure of Everyman in the mediæval morality—and the Greek dramatis personæ were never allegorical—has held modern audiences because each spectator recognized himself with his secret foes and friends. That the persons of the Greek stage were few and familiar, then, was not of itself a disadvantage. The tragedies of a few famous families can strike pity and fear into all families who know the bitterness of hate. Moreover, the restriction to familiar themes, the exclusion of novelty from plot, focused attention upon conception and movement. Playwright and audience alike looked for originality not in subject, but in art. Comparison of play with play was readier and more specific; and the competition of the stage was almost purely artistic.

(5). Plot

Plot in Greek tragedy, the movement of the whole play, is discussed so extensively by Aristotle that little need be added. For his preoccupation with Sophocles hardly makes his exposition the less comprehensive. Later criticism has generally accepted Sophocles as historically midway between the occasional archaism of Æschylus and the occasional modernism of Euripides, as typical of Greek dramatic habits, and as the greatest Greek master of plot. Sophocles, as has been often pointed out, intensified drama by making his unit not the trilogy, but the single play, by developing a single theme with a clear conflict, and by making its interaction self-sufficient through the use of a third actor. Euripides, on the other hand, seems to care less for totality, though he achieves it in some plays, notably in the Medea. His use of a separable prologue instead of dramatic exposition within the [181]play has been condemned as impatient;[12] and the vividness of his lines, especially in description, has been disparaged as distracting. In all this the art of Sophocles is no more eminent than it is typical. He is the shining example of Greek artistic economy.

This characteristic economy of Greek tragic art makes it permanently inspiring to playwrights. Modern audiences, being less conscious of art, may find the economy sometimes too close; but playwrights discern in it both a triumph of technic and an example. For the revolt against even the “unities” of the French classic stage spent its force long ago. Meantime the war of the romanticists against the classicists should make clear, what the greatest dramatists have always understood, that unity in drama is valuable only as a means to coherence. Its only raison d’être is to clear the way for steady movement and to lead that movement to a convincing issue. Now in this compelling force of movement Greek drama, especially in the hands of Sophocles, remains by common consent a model of tragic art. That even audiences habituated to variety and tolerant of looseness will still feel this force is suggested by revivals of increasing frequency, by the eminence, even in a period of very different dramatic habits, of such plays as Othello, and by the deliberate preference of some recent dramatists[13] for the Greek model. But whether single, steady movement through a limited time be a permanent dramatic principle or not, at least it is characteristically Greek. What one editor says of the Antigone of Sophocles might be said of Greek tragedy generally: “there is no halting in the march of the drama.”[14]

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This effect is brought about technically by focusing on a single scene and a continuous critical period.[15] The whole tragedy, as has been quaintly said, is compressed within the fifth act; or, to speak in still more modern terms, the Greeks composed their tragedies as long one-act plays. Such a play differs from Henry IV or A Winter’s Tale essentially; it differs from Othello only in removable accidents. The characteristic is not brevity, nor even unity, but continuity. That the habit of continuity was fostered by Greek stage conditions, the habit of discontinuity by Elizabethan, there can be no doubt; but neither can there be any doubt that the Greek stage conditions were modified more than once by a dramatist, or that the Elizabethan stage conditions did not determine the growth of Shakspere’s art. In both great ages a dramatist took the stage as he found it, but built up his dramatic technic as he chose. The continuity of Greek tragedy is not merely a fact of archæology; it is an achievement of technic.

The limiting to a single place and time has been objected to as forcing off-stage some events that the audience would like to see, and as unnaturally crowding the action. In a word, the one-act form, for an action of some magnitude, has been called artificial. Any form may seem artificial if it is realized imperfectly; and the limits of this form impose merely a higher degree of the difficulty inherent in any dramatic form, the difficulty of focus. Even a five-act play imposes limits, prescribes selection, by the very conditions of the stage itself. The peculiar opportunity arising from the stage conditions of the Greek theater [183]was discerned to be emotional intensity. Intensity has even been urged as the characteristic opportunity of all drama. Whether this be granted or not, undoubtedly the Greeks conceived drama so, and developed their technic accordingly. They worked for intensity. Though they were not content with two actors, they were content with one stage set and with one period of time. Not only so, but the difficulties of their form stimulated their art. In these conditions playwrights heightened intensity by a technic of progressive continuity.

So much for the idea behind the objections. The particular charges seem hardly to hold. What is forced off the stage of Greek drama, or of any drama? Surely nothing that the dramatist wishes to have on-stage, or his art is imperfect. That the frequent murders are only heard, not seen, is due not to any exigencies of form, but to social convention and to the idea that dying is less tragic than death. For the rest, to put shifting human life on a fixed stage, even with liberty to represent more than one place and time, always involves foreshortening. Art cannot have the diffuseness of life. It works by selection. The Greek tragic artists chose to carry selection to the highest degree. That this event or that of the tragic story is reported by a messenger, not enacted before our eyes, is not a hindrance to the tragic march, not the makeshift conceded to an intractable form. Let the speech of a Greek messenger be read aloud, or better, let it be acted; and it will no longer be called undramatic.[16] Add its dramatic value in context, its relation to the scene that it enters; and no doubt will remain. The possibilities of narrative on the stage, though they seem to have been forgotten by many English playwrights, are clear. [184]But the Greek dramatist did make a virtue of necessity. He sometimes used a messenger, dramatically indeed, but perforce. What we hear from a messenger we could not see without change of scene. This was the dramatist’s sacrifice, not to formalism, but to continuity. To that end he would have made even greater sacrifice.

The speeding of the action beyond the normal pace of life is not confined to this form. It is a condition of all drama. Nor does Greek drama seem either crowded or hurried. Though events may follow thick and fast, the Greek movement is typically unhurried. It has steadiness from careful preparation; it gains momentum as it advances; it culminates swiftly; it diminishes to a slow and quiet close.

That tragedy should have a full close, carrying the action through to a καταστροφή, or state of rest, must have been with the Greeks a principle; for it was an almost invariable habit. Though the tragedies of other and later nations do not always end so, they too have the full close often enough to suggest that audiences generally desire it.[17] Whether or not this is true of audiences, it seems true of playwrights in proportion as they work, as the Greeks worked, for singleness. In Greek tragedy the end crowns the work in the sense that the close completes the interpretation. The close of the action is the issue of the characterization. Characterization in Greek tragedy, more consistently than in any other, is motivation. In some Greek plays it offers hardly anything else. The characters are drawn for the play, not for themselves. The “part” is subordinated to the theme. When we see that this is true even for Medea, a “part” to be coveted by any modern actress, we realize that the significance of the whole play was habitually in the Greek conception [185]the main object. This explains the full close as the goal of a steady movement, and as the final stage of the idealization which habitually shaped both characters and plot. And where a modern playwright has worked with the same intention, we find again and again, as in Othello, the same full close.

The ultimate technical question, then, is What is continuity worth? Euripides composed sometimes as if it were worth less than salience. He has even been called romantic; and the influence of Greek tragedy, since it was overwhelmingly his among the Romans and in the middle ages, may seem after all to be hardly the influence of Sophoclean movement. But the great influence of Euripides is largely of his poetry apart from his dramaturgy. It reigns through a time when tragedy was waning, and through a later time when there was hardly any drama at all. He is still the most interesting of Greek dramatists to read. On the other hand, those of his plays which are now most effective as stage performances have the typical Greek continuity; nor does he often depart from the type very far. That the type has a controlling idea of continuity is evident. To the Greek dramatists generally continuity seemed to be worth much technical labor and even much sacrifice. The crown of their technical skill was to carry the theme, to develop it, to fulfill it at the last.

Behind this technic is an ideal of singleness. The sacrifice to continuity springs from that ascesis which has been remarked in other fields of Greek art. It has aroused—it will always arouse—the protest of the romantics. An art of singleness, lucidity, cogency, seems to them, as perhaps it seemed already to Euripides, too far removed from life. And not the romanticists only, but after them the realists, have demanded a drama more like [186]life itself, freer, more various, less composed. Perhaps there is no ultimate reconciliation, or perhaps the two conceptions are complementary; but the Greek tragedians seem to answer from their plays: art is not life; it is idealization.

B. Senecan Tragedy[18]

How far the Latin tragedy of the actual stage followed the great Greeks we can only speculate from a few fragments and from the references of critics. That the lost Medea of Ovid was Greek in more than name the habit of composition seen in the Heroides leaves much doubt. Certainly the tragedies of Seneca, while they revive the great names of Agamemnon, Hippolytus, and Medea, never enter the great art of Athens. Indeed, their relevance at this juncture is for contrast. A Senecan prologue is not only a separable prefix; it may be a summary of the whole plot, as the prologue of Latin comedy. Separable the Senecan chorus is always in providing lyric interludes. It would thereby interrupt the action if the [187]tragedy had the Greek onward course; but instead Seneca’s violent scenes are themselves separable, and his dialogue is sometimes a collection of speeches. Seneca wrote tragic scenes and spaced them with lyric pauses;[19] he did not gather momentum for a total impression. He made his personæ utter their feelings; he did not make them interact. The familiar names, the familiar stories, only heighten the contrast. Senecan tragedy is like Greek tragedy only in non-essentials. The essentials of Greek dramatic composition are not here.

What is here is not poetic, but rhetoric. That these pieces were written for recitation, not for acting, the external evidence is strong, though not conclusive,[20] but the internal evidence is abundant.[21] Most significant is the feebleness of plot. More obvious is the rhetorical method of characterization by typical traits,[22] the method of the character sketches (ἠθοποιίαι) in schools for boys as it was expanded in the schools for men under the masters of declamatio. A method essentially oratorical, it developed under the declamatores of the Empire not creative conception, but inventive ingenuity and a preoccupation rather with striking expression than with consistency. Most obvious of all, written large on every page, is the swelling rhetoric of the style. Not for nothing did this poet bear the name of Seneca.[23] To deny that such writing [188]has a certain force is to forget what it might become in the mouth of a trained speaker and before an audience taught to admire its distinctive effects; to forget also how eagerly Seneca was appropriated fifteen centuries later; to forget finally that oratory in the theater has not yet lost all its appeal. But while we grant to rhetoric some share in the poetic art, we cannot put Senecan tragedy beside the tragedy of Athens without seeing unmistakably that such art as it has is not the distinctive art of drama.

C. Latin Comedy

The plays of Plautus and Terence keep the dramaturgy known as the New Comedy,[24] the comedy of Menander. Its figures, alike in Greek and in Latin, are types. Such individualizing as may be discerned, in the Menæchmi [189]for instance, or the Self-tormentor, stands out as exceptional. Comedy, perhaps, tends more than tragedy to the typical. At any rate, Latin comedy has a set of personæ quite fixed:[25] two fathers, two sons in love and in debt, two daughters of romance or of pleasure, and two slaves to stir the intrigue. There might be a matron, a slave-trader, and a braggart soldier; and there would be pretty surely a parasite.

Stock figures involve conventionality also in plot. One of them may have a double,[26] and the plot may consist largely of mistaking one for the other; or the long-lost [190]daughter, as in the declamationes and the Greek romances, may have been kidnapped by pirates. Typical is the plot of Terence’s Phormio:

In essentials this is the plot of any Latin comedy. That the Greek originals of the New Comedy were less crystallized is suggested by larger fragments recovered recently; and that Menander was a creator of plots may be inferred from the saying reported by Plutarch: “I have made my comedy; for the plan is arranged, and I have only to write verses for it.”[28] Even with so few situations as in Latin comedy there is room for variety of handling. Early commentators distinguish the modus [191]motorius,[29] the kinetic mode, from the statarius, or static, and find that Terence, except in the Phormio, tends to the latter. But even the movement of Plautus is rather bustle and go than onward progress. Dramatic movement will hardly be compelling where motivation is so much from circumstances and so little from character. Modus motorius seems to imply rather liveliness than sequence. To the large, miscellaneous, and turbulent Roman audience, it has been plausibly suggested, there would have been little appeal in cogency of plot.

A certain dulness in the audience is suggested by the fact that Terence was reproached for combining two Greek plots in one Latin play. He protests, naturally, that this is his right; and the Phormio shows his ability to weave an intrigue clearly and attractively. The dramatic lack mistakenly ascribed to his stories is rather of salience, especially of visibly significant action before our eyes. That this can vivify even conventional characters in a conventional plot is the chief dramatic message of Plautus. He trusts the intelligence of his audience so little as to make his prologue an oral program, a catalogue raisonné, explicit to the last degree.[30] With Terence he resorts to the aside, the soliloquy, and the convention of people on the stage together who do not see each other—all these when they could be obviated by a little dramatic ingenuity. Where Plautus spends his ingenuity is on [192]lively realism of detail, on abundance of stage “business.” He holds a scene, turning and returning a situation, until he has used its whole value. Though this is sometimes tiresome for reading, it shows good theatrical sense of the actual audience. He may have learned it from acting. Nothing is more instructive to playwrights than this filling of a simple outline. The habit is almost the opposite of the compression of Greek tragedy, and the New Comedy is doubtless inferior to tragedy in every point of plot; but none the less it vindicates clearly the value and the Plautine method of imaginative amplification.

II. NARRATIVE

A. The ÆNEID

(1). Epic

Epic is now often divided into “primitive,” “authentic,” or “popular” epic, such as the Iliad, and “artistic,” or “literary” epic, such as the Æneid. Of the former the great example is Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey remain, for us as for the ancients, supreme. Meantime the western European nations emerging in the early middle age expressed themselves in epics of original native force: the Roland, the Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied, and some of the Norse sagas. To put these beside Homer is to become aware of specific differences within a general likeness. Homer is both more ample and more finished. Primitive he certainly is not in any sense now recognized by anthropology. Even the word popular has for us implications quite inapplicable to the circulation of his day. The classification of certain epics as primitive, authentic, or popular is based on the idea that these are characteristically communal, expressing more the emotions [193]of a whole homogeneous community, less those of the individual poet. It has even been held[1] that such epic began in aggregation of tribal lays, and that even the form in which it has come down to us is less the creation of any individual than the final artistic shaping of successive anonymous versions. The theory of communal composition, in this literal and extreme sense, has been sharply challenged. Without denying the use of traditional material and form, one may remain convinced that the Iliad or the Odyssey is the work of a single man, whom we may as well continue to call Homer, and that he was not merely the mouthpiece of a community, but a conscious and skilful artist. That his art was not wasted on his community, that this community was far from primitive, there is ample evidence in the remains of its other arts.

The same direction of study leads to a similar conclusion for the later epics of this class. The more we know of the middle ages, the less warrant we find for calling these epics primitive. True, they are less finished than the Iliad; true, they show clearer traces of old war-songs; but neither their art nor the society for which it was shaped can accurately be called primitive. Alike the literary conventions of the poems themselves and the social conventions of their times rule such a characterization out. The “Gothic night” fancied by supercilious eighteenth-century critics, the “dark ages” of imperfect historians, are found to have had considerable illumination.

[194]

Nevertheless the twofold classification of epic, in spite of the inaccuracy of its terms, has some significance. Earlier epic, what we might call primary epic, is in fact more directly answerable to a homogeneous community. Its unknown poets evidently felt themselves to be spokesmen of communal emotions and achievements; and the world that they saw they expressed with less intervention. As if they were transmitters rather than creators, they expressed not themselves so much as their people. This people, too, was in that stage of civilization in which foray and warfare by small groups brought out individual heroes and kept life precarious and simple. Booty and food, a fine sword and a fine web, still had immediate appeal; and the physical sensations of battle-strain and sweat, of ceaseless surf and darkening deep, were still common experience. Thus primary epic, communal and objective, has the directness of immediacy. Arising from those simpler emotions which we all feel together, primitive perhaps in that sense, and expressing them in terms of familiar physical sensations, it has its own inimitable flavor.

Later, or secondary, epic is not the transmission of legends still active, but the re-creation of a past already remote. Still appealing to a communal sense of the heroic, it adapts the old epic mode to an audience more sophisticated not only in life, but in poetic art. The poet is thus at once more imitative and more original. He binds himself by traditions of subject-matter, of form, and of style; but within this recognized mode he composes with more individual freedom and to a more definite end. Relying less on scenes in a series, he selects and manipulates toward more artistic sequence. Since his descriptions must be less immediate, he develops the art of narrative. [195]Endeavoring to remain the spokesman of his people—for otherwise he must forfeit the communal mainspring of epic—he interprets their past by his own message for their future. Thus he may be all the more a poet, or maker. He cannot hope for the fresh immediacy of primary epic; but in compensation he has greater opportunity to move his people by his own vision. Milton’s conception, vast as is its scope, is essentially the same. He interprets the Bible as the epic of mankind in terms of a Puritan theocracy. Tasso re-creates a departed chivalry to animate a vision of devotion and redemption. Vergil, the great example of secondary epic, makes of the Trojan story, of Roman legend, of myth and cult and drama and history, of all that enriched the Roman past, a progressive vision of Roman destiny.

Primary epic and secondary epic, though thus distinguishable, are both epic. They are complementary. They reveal different capacities of a single artistic mode. Epic is constant. It was; it was again; it is; for aught that we can see, it will be. Extended poetic narrative of great deeds for communal inspiration, though it has never been common, has never been extinct. Primary epic seems inevitable. The minstrel in the hall of Hrothgar is poetically identical with the minstrel in the hall of Alcinous.[2] Both hint to us of what epic was made, and how; both show us its constancy. This primary form of epic can never, of course, recur. It has been civilized away. But meantime it has established a poetic art that is permanent. The word epic still connotes a distinct mode. To this Vergil deliberately conformed, and Milton. Secondary epic is still epic.

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What, then, are seen to be in ancient practise the essentials of epic? First, its inspiration and its appeal are communal. By contrast the modern novel, which is also extended narrative and also within Aristotle’s definition of poetic, is seen to be individual; or, where in exceptional cases it is broader and simpler,[3] is often distinguished by criticism as having epic appeal. Then, epic is in style objective. It narrates habitually without interposition, by images visual, auditory, motor. Its scenery is merely the background of heroic activity. Its speeches are in primary epic for characterization, not for plot. There is no plot in the dramatic sense for the whole; and such as there is for component parts is only to bring out persons. The object of epic being persons, its commonest descriptive details are of personal activity: attitude, movement, speech, gesture. The method is to suggest that heroic life by its physical sensations, to make the characters, as Aristotle says,[4] reveal themselves. Epic gives few reflections. It does not comment even on Helen’s coming to the Scæan gates, or on Hector’s parting from Andromache; it merely describes. This objectivity is a main means of epic directness.

The characteristic form of epic[5] is for scope and variety. Drama is intensive; epic is extensive. It has time to give us a sense of the fulness of life; and its movement does not preclude excursions. We meet many people and see them in various aspects. We can linger over a scene for itself without being urged forward. Continuity may be but leisurely succession from scene to scene. A scene may within itself have dramatic progress; but the movement [197]of the whole has not the dramatic causal compulsion. Drama has its characteristic force through unity. Unity in epic is neither compelling nor compulsory. In fact, to stretch the term unity over epic tends to deprive it of all force. No epic poet has ever composed more carefully than Vergil, or with keener awareness of the ways of drama. The Æneid was composed as a whole; its parts were carefully adjusted to a plan, and its plan was controlled by a single idea. Epic has never gone further toward unity; and Homer never dreamed of going so far. But even such dramatization of epic as Vergil’s has time for the funeral games, and does not sacrifice to the story of Rome the story and the person of Dido. In poetic, unity means nothing unless it means unity of form. This epic cannot have as a whole. Nor does any one regret the lack, or think it a fault. The unity of drama is for intensity; the object of epic is the realization not of a crisis, but of great persons in a long and various course.

So the style of epic is typically sonorous and high. Height of style may be attained by simplicity, and epic is simple often, but not always. To speak of epic as characteristically simple is to belie much of Homer and most of Vergil and Milton. Epic is not characteristically, nor even usually, simple. It may be very elaborate. It begins by assuming a language recognized as on a higher plane than that of ordinary speech. The epithets of the Iliad or the Beowulf are a poetical convention; and the style of epic proceeds always by conscious art. Here is the poet who, daring to sing great deeds, means to sing them greatly. That the effort may end in frigidity or bombast means only that there is bad epic as well as good; it does not mean that epic should be simple. Epic [198]poets have never thought so. The poets of primary epic, no less than Vergil or Milton, were occupied with style. For the term epic has always implied greatness. It is a word of praise. It means a story of greatness told greatly.

Homer was for the ancient Greek world, and Vergil became for the Roman world, a Bible of style. Both were conned in school not only for the examples of their great persons, but for the study of language. That their connotation was immeasurably enriched, their “sublimity” heightened, not only by rhythm, but by verse, no one will deny. It is even possible to feel in Milton’s verse a beauty separable from that of his ideas, and greater, lifting his narrow and political theology to wider import. Aristotle[6] remarks upon the appropriateness to epic of the Greek dactylic hexameter. Dionysius[7] even finds control of rhythms to be Homer’s main poetic means. We are more inclined to admit this view for Milton; but the ultimate truth is that we should not, except for analysis, separate verse from the other elements of style. That every great epic poet has been a masterly metrist means rather that for “the height of this great argument” he felt the need of all that verse can add of suggestiveness. Though prose epic, as Aristotle admits by implication, is quite conceivable, it has to move on a lower plane. The Norse sagas are more direct even than Homer, starker in narrative force as if stripped for action, equally expressive of communal emotions, equally vivid in characterization. They have all the epic means but one. That single lack does not, indeed, relegate them to a different class; but it shows by contrast that for its full realization epic demands verse.

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(2). The Conception and Scope of the Æneid

The whole poetic art of ancient epic is exhibited in the Æneid. Setting aside those interesting historical questions of epic origins, growth, and transmission which in the study of Homer can hardly be ignored, and on the other hand including the whole range of epic, secondary as well as primary, we can learn best from the great poet who devoted his mature years to conceiving, planning, and reshaping the epic of Rome. The artistic scope of the Æneid, as well as its artistic eminence, long secure beyond cavil, has been reaffirmed by recent criticism. Sainte-Beuve calls Vergil “le poète de la Latinité tout entière.”[8] Mackail, whose studies have been primarily Greek, exalts the Æneid afresh.[9] Woodberry, whose criticism has been mainly of English literature, says: “The distinctive feature of the ‘Æneid’ is the arc of time it covers, the burden of time it supports,” and again, “The ‘Æneid’ is, I think, the greatest single book written by man because of its inclusiveness of human life, of life long lived in the things of life.”[10]

The idea of Roman destiny, animating the Æneid throughout, is something larger than the nationalism of other epics. It is imperialism, and of a spirit generous enough to win the sympathy of Dante. It has not the occasional character of such a nationalist story, for instance, as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniæ. In a time of corrupt politics it is above political opportunism. Its Rome is not merely the throne of Augustus; it is the government of the world. Its Romanism is less political than religious. “Pius Æneas” is more [200]typical than “much-enduring Odysseus” of the struggle of man for an abode of justice and peace. This, more than the personal glory that humanism centuries afterward read from the classics, is the conception of the Æneid. The destiny of Rome reveals the hope of mankind; and the Æneid has the whole epic scope. Hardly less than Milton, Vergil justifies the ways of God to man.

(3). The Narrative Movement of the Æneid[11]

That the Æneid has a controlling idea implies that it is artistically shaped to stricter continuity than appears in the Homeric model. The Iliad and the Odyssey are everywhere freer. Homer writes a scene for itself; Vergil also for its significance in a progress.[12] Salience is sought by careful subordination. The Carthaginians, for instance, are not elaborated as are the Italian tribes.[13] The [201]slaughter of the last night of Troy is confined to a few vivid scenes. Using Hellenistic versions and evidently studious of their art, Vergil deliberately rejects their decorative detail and sentimental dilation. He reduces the mating of Æneas with Dido to a grave summary,[14] in order to give salience to those other emotions which for the Æneid as a whole were leading. Æneas does, indeed, in the fourth book yield his position as protagonist to the queen who among Vergil’s personæ is the great individual; but even so strong an impulse of creative inspiration does not drive the poet from his main purpose. One of the few great love-stories, the fourth book is still held, as it were by force, to the larger story of mission.

The same art deals with the gods. They were for Vergil necessary to epic; they embodied at once the traditional sense of supernatural response in natural forces and Vergil’s own sense of divine guidance. But they rarely interpose, and never interrupt. They work through men; and the course of events is always amply explained by human motive. The foundations of Troy were shaken by divine wrath; but we see them dislocated by human agency. The revengefulness of Juno, the protection of Venus, seem the more plausible because they operate through the passion of Dido. The one yields in the end, and the other prevails, because Æneas realizes his mission. Olympus, now ordered within itself under a calm and absolute ruler, expresses and animates, not interrupts, the progress of human order. Thus Vergil’s gods are more than “epic machinery,” and more than personification. The thoughts of men are not merely expressed conventionally in archaic personal shapes; they are seen [202]at once as determining each decisive action and as inspired by divine purpose. For not only has the Æneid a more consistent theology than the Iliad; it is also more religious.

The most frequent examples of Vergil’s subordination are in his fine art of description. Picturesque with brilliant color, as well as with the Homeric light and motion,[15] and as precise as they are vivid, his descriptions are rarely separable. Not only are they contributory to the action; they are also inwoven.[16] Vergil’s sensitiveness to the details of nature transpires in a sentence, even in single words,[17] which describe while they narrate. Here he discerned the artistic rightness by which Homer describes every thing movable as in motion,[18] and applied the principle with more careful attention to narrative continuity. He dispenses with Homer’s superfluous mechanism of transition.[19] Memorable as are the descriptions—and nothing in the Æneid is better remembered—very few can be detached from the context for separate [203]admiration.[20] The detailing of architecture and decoration, though it unduly seized the fancy of the middle ages, is hardly an exception. The Carthaginian pictures of Troy, the palace of Latinus, are there not for scene-painting, but for historic suggestion. They serve the story. Thus Vergil’s descriptive art is at once less ample than Homer’s and more specifically subsidiary. The Hellenistic tableau—ἔκφρασις is its ominous name—appears in the glittering conventional pauses of Ovid. Vergil had put it aside. This is the more remarkable because the ancients seem generally to have regarded certain scenes—battle, for instance, conflagration, storm, thwarted love—as rather description than narration.[21] Vergil, while he works even more than Homer to make us realize a scene by sharing in it as actors,[22] works also to avoid interruption of the story.

Similar is the constant care to avoid interruption of time or place.[23] Vergil’s unremitting prevision and revision have obviated any time-lapse that is insignificant for the action. The Homeric device of bringing in antecedent action by retrospective narrative is used more artistically. While it covers ground, extending the time-lapse beyond the stage, the narrative of Æneas heightens the love of Dido before our eyes.

It is a larger achievement, one of the greatest,[24] to [204]heighten epic by suggesting vast reaches of time, from tribal wanderings through wars of conquest to the reign of law. Here is the artistic significance of the visit in Book VI to the world of the dead and the unborn, which, as Mackail says, “slips in the keystone.” To compare the visit of Odysseus to the shades is to see Vergil’s higher art of composition. But the suggestion of the great loom of time (tot volvere casus) is not confined to a single artistic device; it is pervasive from the opening words through a hundred careful allusions; and it makes the Æneid wider than the Iliad or the Odyssey by making it constantly suggestive of the whole struggle of history. It reveals more explicitly the struggles of heroic men as the struggle of man.

Thus the oft-repeated objection that the Æneid breaks into halves is superficial. The break would not have been thought of if Vergil had not been seen to be working for a continuity stricter than Homer’s. Stated baldly by Tyrrell, the idea that the Æneid is an Odyssey plus an Iliad presupposes a sort of imitation to which Vergil shows himself everywhere superior. It would be as near the truth to reply that the Æneid is neither an Odyssey nor an Iliad. But prototypes aside, how and how far is the Æneid held together? Surely by the most careful articulation ever seen in epic, but surely not to the degree of drama. Among the evidences of revision are indications that the plan for the wanderings of Æneas was first achieved[25] when much of the poem was already written. The adjustment of this part to the whole course, a technic hardly explored by Homer, and the abbreviations of the [205]wanderings by careful selection, are of a piece with the consistent connection by repetition of the theme, from the opening lines,

throughout the whole poem. True, the seventh book invokes Erato for scenes of battle.

The following scenes are different, but not the theme. The art that deliberately avoided Homer’s succession of battles by interposing such scenes as Evander’s achieved more than variety. It suggests again and again what the battles were for. The close upon the tragic death of Turnus becomes more than the personal victory of the hero; it is the triumph, over violentia, over such individual prowess as Homer glorified, over personal ambition thwarting the state, of fortitude bringing in religion and law.

But to ask therefore that the whole movement of the Æneid should be unified is at once to recognize Vergil’s art of continuity and to demand for epic the strictness of drama. That Vergil understood drama, that his art learned not only from Greek epic, but from Greek tragedy, was pointed out by Nettleship and is important to remember. But he is too great a master of his chosen form to sacrifice epic scope.

How, then, is the Æneid dramatic? In the composition of the whole only by such preparations and recurrences as add to the vividness of parts suggestions of their bearing. Having planned a progress of events, not merely a series, Vergil marks that progress by such [206]articulation as had been used to this extent only in drama. In the composition of the parts singly his art is more dramatic. The Æneid as a whole is not dramatically unified, and could not be. What is unified is each book.[26] For purposes of recitation, epic had to be composed, whether as a whole or not, in distinct parts. Of this necessity Vergil made a virtue. He advanced the narrative art of situation by applying some of the technic of drama. This is conspicuous in his frequent use of peripety. Again, the memorable and well remembered Laokoön scene is interposed between the Sinon scenes. Each is made to heighten the other, and both to give first suspense and then compelling motive to the bringing in of the fatal horse. Again and again Vergil will be found thus to intensify his narrative by the technic of drama. The most obvious instance is the distinct group of scenes at Carthage. The entrance of Dido is in the dramatic sense and by dramatic methods prepared. First, Æneas hears of her from his goddess mother, and is kindled by her having achieved his own epic mission—dux femina facti. Follows his view of the city, big already in achievement, big also to every Roman listener with menace. Then the decorative pictures at once review the tragedy of Troy and reveal in this strong queen a propitious sympathy. Upon all this, as to a waiting stage and a waiting audience, enter Dido.[27] Moreover in the Dido scenes, instead of contenting himself with that mere strife of emotions which was familiar in Hellenistic poetry[28] and became a rhetorical commonplace [207]with Ovid, Vergil advances and heightens the leading emotion steadily, as in a play, up to its tragic close. The close is the inevitable result of something more than thwarted passion because Dido has been presented dramatically, without concession to the Hellenistic narrative dilation, by what she said and did. Vergil’s Dido is a creation every way beyond the Medea of Apollonius. She must be placed beside the Medea of Euripides. In her consistent tragic nobility, in the higher morality of her appeal, perhaps she must be placed above. For the fourth book of the Æneid, as fully as the Antigone, is tragic in its purgation of pity and fear.

Thus to apply drama to narrative without sacrificing the typical epic opportunities of fulness and scope is among the greatest achievements of poetic. It is an art so far beyond any other ancient narrative as to remain solitary until Dante; and Dante’s guide was Vergil. It guided also the creative hand of Milton. And not for epic only, but for all imaginative story, the art of the Æneid remains a test and a guide. In this sense he who became for medieval Latinists the poet, as Cicero was the orator, remains Master Vergil.

(4). Characterization in the Æneid

To turn from the narrative movement to the persons is to descend. At once we feel that the achievement is less and that the method is less fruitful for narrative art because it is less distinctively poetic. Vergil’s narrative composition has universal validity; but his characterization, for the most part, is only Latin. It had none the less influence on the middle ages—perhaps all the more; but it had the less inspiration for later creations.

To estimate Vergil’s characterization fairly, it is necessary [208]first to remove certain misconceptions. He has been reproached for leaving in our minds few outstanding figures: Turnus, Evander, Mezentius, Pallas, Nisus and Euryalus. Some of these, like the Camilla whom Dante remembers, are only sketched; and most of them are secondary. Now though this is paucity beside the populous pages of Homer, we must remember that Vergil’s whole roster of heroes is smaller deliberately because, much more than Homer’s, they are dramatis personæ. He makes the dramatic innovation of focusing on a few and of subordinating the development even of these to the development of the theme.

A more frequent objection is that throughout the latter part of the poem the hero is no longer Æneas, but Turnus. This is to use the word hero in a sense that Vergil would hardly have understood. Seeing Turnus through centuries of romance, we are so occupied with his bravoure as readily to forget that Vergil’s Æneas is not meant to have the interest or the significance of King Arthur. Nor, we should add, is he meant to have the interest of Achilles. His individual prowess is only incidental to his dominant fortitude. The achievement of personal glory is behind him. “He has outlived his personal life.”[29] His work is to found the Roman people. The characterization of Æneas, moreover, shows a certain development.[30] He shows more growth than “much-enduring Odysseus.” The battle frenzy of the return to the doomed city (arma amens capio), the vacillation at Carthage, are put forever behind. He becomes progressively more steadfast. Always [209]pius, he enlarges his pietas into calm assurance of mission. As for the story, so for the characterization of the hero, the sixth book is the critical stage of a progress.

The creative power of Vergil is amply vindicated by Dido. One may feel that she is too vivid for her function, that she takes the stage, as actors say, away from Æneas, that through her the nice planning of the whole is quite warped. We shall doubtless never be able to judge this as Romans. Perhaps even they were more absorbed than Vergil intended in his tragic queen.[31] Perhaps Vergil himself was swerved by his own creation. But all this only reinforces the testimony to a compelling characterization. There may be difference of opinion as to Dido’s part in the story; there can be none as to Dido herself.

But our estimates thus duly corrected, we cannot but feel that Dido stands out among the figures of the Æneid because she is exceptional. We feel her to be drawn not only better, but often differently. And this should lead to scrutiny of Vergil’s habitual method. To begin with, it is everywhere apparent that he cares less than Homer for individuality. A certain expansiveness in Homeric dialogue often keeps the story waiting to give the individual his say. Vergil shifts the proportions. He rejects long dialogues because he is more interested in narrative economy than in personal expressiveness. Further, the speeches are often more reasoned than Homer’s, more orderly, less like conversation and more like oratory.[32] Sinon’s are very naturally elaborate pieces of special pleading, and the rhetoric of Drances against Turnus is [210]appropriate in a deliberative assembly; but the making of successive points, and the careful adaptation of style not only to the speaker, but to the hearer, are habitual, as even in the speech of Allecto to Turnus. In this reasoned order, rather than in any mere elaboration, Heinze finds Vergil to be rhetorical. Instead of following the pace of emotional utterance, abrupt and disjointed, he sometimes holds even violent emotion to a steady course. By thus composing emotional expression he sometimes sacrifices directness of characterization.[33]

Indeed, Vergil is generally less concerned than Homer with creating individuals, and more concerned with showing his persons as types. Whether the loss in individual distinctness is compensated by a gain in common consent opens a long debate. Modern taste inclines rather to Homer than to Vergil; but between stretch centuries of Latin habit, and that habit, best exemplified in Vergil, is to characterize typically. This method of idealization may in Vergil’s case have Stoic preoccupations;[34] but more generally it is rhetorical. To characterize by age, sex, race, occupation, etc., is a prescription of rhetoric[35] fixed in recipes and school exercises. It was dilated into ingenious fictions by the declamatores. Ovid’s characterization hardly rises above the schools. Vergil was too great to move [211]on that level; but even he is preoccupied with that ideal and generally content with that method. He carried the method as far, perhaps, as it will go. That except in subordinate sketches he departed from it only in one surpassing instance is doubtless the fundamental reason for our finding his characterization inferior to his composition.

(5). Epic Diction

Generations have felt in the Æneid, first of all, high and constant beauty. No other great poem has seemed more infallibly beautiful. The beauty has sometimes, indeed, been acknowledged with a certain disparagement, as if it implied the less strength; but so perverse an antithesis cannot delay attention except to the fact that Vergil is beautiful even to his detractors. The worst that has been said of his style is that it is sometimes inappropriately elaborate.[36]

This, it must be admitted, seems comparatively remote and unreal beside similar meals in Homer, and absolutely too high a style for camp cookery. Nor is it safe to urge that Vergil is holding his style to the epic level; for that plea opens the way to such mere etiquette as centuries later quite deviated the discussion of epic from its main issues, and, besides, Vergil himself does not thus describe Dares and Entellus. No, the [212]plea must be rather of confession and avoidance. Such passages are not beautiful, and their style is not epic; but they are so few that to call them characteristic is quite unfair. Nor are they to be ascribed to preoccupation with rhetoric. Vergil is, indeed, sometimes more oratorical[37] than we wish; but he is not, in our modern sense rhetorical, and his rhetoric, no less than his poetic, must have found such passages inferior. Rather we may think that these few “rubs and botches in the work” were what led him to wish it burned; for after all his revision he was acutely conscious that it was unfinished. Unfinished in form it certainly is not. Unfinished in style it is here and there. But what a sense of beauty had the artist who could not bear even so few blemishes!

Not elaborateness, then, is characteristic of Vergil’s style, but certainly elaboration. His tireless revision is testified by the tradition that he composed first in prose, and that he spent on the Æneid ten years.[38] No style is more highly charged. It is made to suggest at once vivid descriptive imagery and the sanctions of history and religion. Not only the story, but the diction, is full of Rome. His use of the language of Roman ritual[39] is characteristic of an expression piously preservative of cult. “By instinct and temper a ritualist,”[40] he is continually suggesting the significance of traditional forms. The [213]Iliad and the Odyssey are in a special dialect. The Faery Queene has a language of its own. To achieve such suggestions in the Æneid with but the slightest resort to archaism is in itself a great achievement of language; but it is only part of a consistent allusiveness, an extraordinary connotation, ranging the whole gamut from sharp physical sensations to spiritual significance. A style eminently classic in precision and harmony is yet felt to be above all rich. No other poet seems more nearly infallible with the right word; no other so well to have charged classic restraint with romantic exuberance by the energy of his expressiveness. The influence of Vergil, immediate, wide, and long, is indubitably the influence of his style. Later ages, unappreciative of the poetic art of his composition, felt the spell of his imagery and rhythm almost as an incantation. “Virgil is that poet whose verse has had most power in the world.”[41]

(6). Originality in Imitation

The notion that imitation must be subversive of originality betrays a crude conception of both. Yet it lingers in such criticism as thinks the Æneid to be a Latin Iliad and Odyssey. To measure it so is to miss not only the art of a single great poem, but much of all poetic art. For since all art works in forms received and recognized, less by invention than by transformation, it is of cardinal significance to distinguish, in a poem conspicuously imitative and conspicuously original, just what artistic imitation is. Therefore what has been implied in the preceding sections may here be drawn together in summary.

Imitation is always of movement or style; it has nothing to do with material. To preface this should be superfluous; [214]but many quests for “sources” have left some confusion. Vergil took much of the Trojan story from Homer. To be sure, he used other sources too. Nothing is more remarkable in the Æneid than the wealth and variety of its material. Its sources are beyond the dreams of Homer. But even if Vergil’s material were all Homeric, he would not on that account be the more imitative. Ancient literature, and mediæval too, generally make freer with preceding stories than modern. The material is not thought to be any one’s property. In this respect Vergil is singularly independent. He uses more sources; he is more selective; and what he adopts is often a composite. He works in the modern way rather than in the ancient; but he is not on that account either more or less imitative. Some of Shakspere’s plays derive their plots from single sources; some are in plot composite; but all are alike original. A modern French tragedy took the plot not only of an ancient story, but of the best known of all ancient plays. It is none the less original; and its imitation, as all artistic imitation, is of the ancient technic.

Imitation in art, then, means following certain artistic ways. To begin with, Vergil evidently set out to write an epic, and undoubtedly looked to Homeric epic as a type. This is important not only in his case, but throughout literary history. Though its importance may be exaggerated in Brunetière’s évolution des genres, evidently epic meant something controlling to Vergil because of Homer, and has meant something wider ever since because of Vergil. To any poet, to Tasso and Milton as to Vergil, epic necessarily implies a pattern. It directs and limits personæ and diction; but it does not hamper artistic progress, for it does not limit interpretation. Vergil remade not only the epic material, but the epic form, to [215]a new end. His Sinon[42] is a typical instance of artistic rehandling. Drawn doubtless from several ancient sources, he has become through his new function and motivation creatively original. Battles there must be in epic, even battles of the Homeric sort; but Vergil does not rely on the general mêlée; he modifies it subtly in the direction of the more organized Roman fighting, and he changes the Homeric series into a progress. In short, even where he is perforce most dependent on Homer, his imitation is never repetition. Imitation is creative when it adapts the art of the past to the interpretation of the present. The Æneid is not a Latin Iliad; it is a Roman epic.

Vergil’s adaptation of the epic movement involves a departure from Homer in the direction of drama.[43] How, and how far, imitation of drama can serve extended narrative we learn fully from him because he imitates selectively. He does not try to make his story a play, or merely a series of plays; he finds how far epic can be conducted dramatically without sacrificing its epic appeal. No less selectively he rejects the Hellenistic technic of Apollonius.[44] Epic diction, he discerns, in order to have the old communal appeal, must sound traditional; but echo of Homeric style would make it sound merely conventional. He gives it traditional connotation by means of his own. His diction, therefore, is far less imitative than his composition. In fact, it is rarely imitative at all. In the limits, no less than in the method, of his imitation his art runs true. Through that obedience which great artists yield to the art that they inherit he shows the way to imaginative freedom.

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B. The Narrative Poetry of Ovid

Among the Latin poets Vergil has the siege perilous. He achieved that high poetic emprise beside which others must seem less. In comparison no one suffers more than Ovid.[45] Yet he who presented the gods without seeing their divinity, and retold the myths instead of recreating them, has literary qualities not only striking, but at once typical of his time and very widely influential. Vergil has been revered; but Ovid has been imitated and absorbed. Without attempting to measure his brilliancy, it is necessary to distinguish the characteristic habits of a poetic whose influence spread over western Europe.

That poetic is seen at once to be unfailingly expert in every artistic detail. Its metrical facility, proverbial[46] from the first and instructive of the verse of many centuries and many lands, is only the most obvious skill of a man who loved style. Though he does not make a habit of the elegiac tendency to rime, he plays variously upon alliteration and other consonance;[47] and his use of refrain suggests those stanza patterns set centuries later by [217]French courtly makers in rondel[48] and ballade.[49] For though he knows the subtlest spells of sound, Ovid is never neglectful of such notes as must catch the ear. His verse is more than popular; but it is popular, and many a Spaniard, Gaul, and Briton has been grateful to feel its music running in his head.

Equally obvious is Ovid’s decorative description. Its bent is not toward epic suggestion of character by attitude, gesture, and action, but toward picturesqueness. Bright imagery garnishes the familiar. Groves and streams and their tutelary nymphs, men, women, and gods, are not individualized; they are merely realized. But what exuberance of suggestion! To open dull eyes and spur jaded feelings, to vivify a legendary scene, to dilate a conventional mood, to redecorate an old landscape, Ovid had an inexhaustible fund.

For he elevated poetic convention to a fine art. A storm at sea[50] lacks none of the properties; a fainting heroine or hero,[51] no appropriate gesture. The pallor of love can move once more,[52] and the golden age[53] make the over-civilized pensive. “Mortal art thou, or divine?” was said by Odysseus to Nausikaa when gods walked with men; but Ovid had the art to repeat it[54] when the gods were dead. Repeat? He himself became the pattern of [218]these things for centuries. Not only is he forever the poet of “Gather ye roses while ye may,” but “Stay, dawn; why must thou haste?”[55] echoed across Europe,[56] was heard in the cry of Chaucer’s Troilus[57] and Shakspere’s Juliet,[58] and still reverberates.

The Alexandrian[59] dilation of such description[60] appears also in the long-drawn emotions of soliloquy.[61] The fixing of this as a literary type must have been promoted by the prevalence of the schools of declamatio,[62] where Ovid had studied. Practised in elementary form even by Roman schoolboys, developed by declamatores in exhibitions of virtuosity, the fiction of what so-and-so must have said on such-and-such an occasion is still a rhetorical exercise. As an exercise it has some value in promoting poetic appreciation; but it seems hardly the way toward poetic creation. Ovid, at any rate, hardly creates persons. The address of Sol, for instance, to Phaëthon,[63] is only a more extended and more professional school theme; and the mixture of allegorical personification with myth[64] shows [219]him rather as a rhetorician[65] than as a poet. That he is not a myth-maker, only a myth-teller, may be seen by putting any of his demigods beside the Prometheus of Æschylus—or even the Prometheus of Shelley. For re-creation Ovid lacked what the Great Unknown[66] thought to be the primary source of expression, intellectual vigor of conception. Thus his mythical persons, though always appropriate and sometimes vivid, are not alive.

More has been claimed for his story-telling. Cruttwell[67] says of the Metamorphoses: “The skill with which different legends are woven into the fabric of the composition is as marvellous as the frivolous dilettantism which could treat a long heroic poem in such a way.” The skill of the weaving is indisputable; but is it more than an art of transition? To call the Metamorphoses a long heroic poem suggests a cruel comparison with the Æneid, and partly begs the question. What Ovid seems to have intended, and what he achieved, is a deftly articulated collection. It is not a single poem in the sense of having emotional progress or totality, nor is any other of Ovid’s collections. His distinctively narrative art, therefore, is to be sought not in the connection between stories, but in the composition of each one. It is even probable that this art was the more popular because it offered, not a long sustained narrative, but many separable short tales.

The “vivid inventiveness” and “unflagging animation” urged by Owen[68] as characteristic of Ovidian narrative may be accepted without discussion, and should not be [220]undervalued. Inventiveness was overvalued, indeed, in the melodramatic fictions of declamatio, and implies an art rather facile than creative; but it is none the less sure of popularity. As for animation, whatever else a story may be, it may not be dull. Here Ovid often wins by his very levity. He makes no demands. No one can be followed more easily; for he moves on the surface. Where he skates on thin ice, he does so quite simply for excitement. There is none of the modern pretense of exploration. His problems are purely artistic, problems not of motive, but of interesting mood and attitude, of appropriate and various utterance. His animation, partly rhythmical, partly descriptive, is more largely unflagging expressiveness. Always expressive, his people can always be understood without effort. He holds attention without provoking thought.

The “rapid movement” claimed by Owen is often mere succinctness, rarely the speed gained by modern narrative use of dramatic technic. For that he usually has too much separable description, too much soliloquy, too little motivation. He seeks intensity less often than expansiveness. Nevertheless, though he pauses deliberately for description or tirade, he does not lag. There is no clumsy prosing or deviation. He has the art, more valued in ancient and medieval times than in modern, of lucid, fluent narrative, the art of the tale. That he does not follow it oftener is due to his readers’ fondness, and his own, for dilation. The onward movement of poetic is thus sacrificed to rhetoric. The parts become more important than the whole. For Ovid was a rhetorician, not only bred in the schools, but habitually thinking of poetry less as composed movement than as lucid and brilliant, as ample and harmonious style.

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C. The Metamorphoses of Apuleius

Sighting from the Metamorphoses of Ovid through the Metamorphoses of Apuleius,[69] one clearly discerns the coming of the Greek Romances. So runs the Alexandrian narrative line from decorative description and expansive emotion, through exciting incident and uncontrolled variety,[70] to sheer violence. Ovid’s stories are sometimes like dreams; the Greek Romances are nightmares. Apuleius, between the two, already seeks the violent and the bizarre. His metamorphoses are no longer mythical, nor in the least allegorical; they are mere sorcery. The appetite of his time for horrors and other excitement had been both fed and whetted by declamatio.[71] Ovid, too, knew declamatio; but Apuleius, himself a rhetor, [222]was less restrained by earlier literary standards from giving rein to the sensational.

Though the bulk of his extant work is narrative, Apuleius devotes no attention to onward narrative movement. Superficially continuous, his Metamorphoses are nevertheless often quite separable, as is evident in the most famous of them, Cupid and Psyche. Such course of plot as there is eddies in harangues, tirades and decorative descriptions. The abundant dialogue is uncontrolled by dramatic concision. Everywhere Apuleius is orally expansive. A rhetor telling stories, he goes little beyond the poetic of the platform: work for excitement, relying on lust and witchcraft; expand what is showy, emphasizing each part without regard to sequence; use dialogue for variety, letting prosopopœia suffice for characterization; and if nevertheless the tale lags or becomes confused, make a fresh start by bringing on brigands. This habit of mind, and not the incidental satire, explains the narrative looseness. Apuleius is no Rabelais; he is only a facile second-century rhetor carrying the rhetorical fiction of his time to greater length. In style, though habitually diffuse, he is sometimes charming and often lively; but in composition he merely extends a meretricious convention.

During his lifetime Iamblichus wrote the Babylonica, or Rhodanes and Sinonis (166-180); and, soon after, Chariton of Aphrodisias the Chæreas and Calirrhoe (before 200).[72] Thus was established the mode followed later by Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, the perverted narrative [223]known as the Greek Romances. Any one who has the patience for these phantasmagoria of passion, horror, and adventure will see their likeness to the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and will probably reproach him the more for ignoring that onward causal movement without which the art of narrative seems to lapse.

A. The Pervasiveness of Rhetoric

The Aristotelian distinction of poetic from rhetoric has been sometimes blurred, sometimes ignored, by criticism. Such confusion as thus arises became more common in ancient criticism with the waning of ancient art; it was widespread in the middle age; it has reappeared many times since the Renaissance.[1] For consistent development of poetic as a technic distinct from rhetoric is beyond the occasion of most criticism, whether ancient or modern. At an ebb tide of creation especially, the average critic is likely to confine his observations to style; and there the two technics have much common ground. Even in criticism of composition we have seen often in our own time such familiar terms as unity, emphasis, and coherence restricted to their rhetorical definitions, and yet imposed in these senses on composition whose actual control was quite different. The unity of the Ancient Mariner, for instance, has been interpreted as the logical control of the proposition “He prayeth best who loveth best,” though surely that composition was unified quite otherwise. Or the term coherence is permitted to suggest that the progress of Burke’s speech on Conciliation from paragraph to paragraph [225]is like the progress of Othello from scene to scene, though the two technics have little resemblance. Such warping of poetic has sometimes been even urged by ancient or modern schoolmasters and text-books. It has seemed thrifty to make Molière, for instance, exhibit those principles of composition which pupils must use in writing essays upon him. But even without such pedagogical perversion it is easy to think of poetic in terms of rhetoric; for rhetoric is in everybody’s head.

It was so much more a preoccupation of ancient thought that the conception of poetic as a distinct movement seems to have become less and less active. Though a few critics, even under the Empire, held the Aristotelian distinction, generally ancient poetic was more and more warped toward rhetoric. With rhetoric determining education, with even Cicero and Tacitus discussing poetic as contributory, with the later declamatores habitually blending the two, with even poets yielding to the common tendency, poetic could hardly be conceived often as a distinct movement of composition. While Vergil’s art revealed a critical conception unknown to Seneca and Lucan, Horace could repeat Aristotle without following his distinctive idea. Cicero and Tacitus, best of Latin critics, naturally contemplate in poetic rather its imagery than its movement;[2] and Quintilian,[3] even more naturally, explores only its treasures available for orators. That ancient criticism never lost the Aristotelian distinction altogether appears in the anonymous and undated De sublimitate[4] and in a few of the many words of Dio Chrysostom;[5] but Plutarch’s poetic is indistinguishable from rhetoric.

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B. Criticism from Grammarians

The overwhelming preponderance of rhetoric in ancient critical thought followed naturally from the dominance of rhetoric in education.[6] Formal schooling in poetic, what we now call primary instruction in literature, began with grammaticus,[7] and he was committed in advance to preparing his boys for their studies in rhetoric. With his task of inculcating correctness in reading, speaking, and writing were associated his lectures (prælectiones) on the poets. Though these may often, given the highly selected group of students, have done much for appreciation of literature, they can hardly have ranged far in poetic. Grammaticus probably confined himself in most cases to what is known in French schools as explication des textes. Within its limits this is admirable; but given the age of the pupils and their specific object, it cannot often have gone beyond words and sentences into the poetic composition of the whole. Criticism ad hoc, the detailed study of a particular poem passage by passage, is a method not only necessary for schooling, but valuable more widely. By sheer prevalence it must always be influential; illumination must in fact have come oftener from such interpretation than from a systematic treatise on poetry. None the less it needs more correction and extension from other forms of criticism than was usually possible in the ancient world. By itself it tends toward a pedestrian analysis of diction and toward emphasis [227]on those aspects of poetic which are available for rhetoric.

Criticism by labels, the classifying of authors by accepted adjectives, is not, unfortunately, confined either to antiquity or to grammarians. A certain amount of criticism, apparently, must always be devoted to telling people what they ought to say. But the classifying habit seems to have been especially prevalent in ancient criticism. At any rate, the labels affixed by grammarians were widely repeated. Even so discerning a critic as Quintilian thus makes his tenth book a convenient “survey.” The satisfaction of an audience in neat and recognizable characterization is given by Apuleius.

Each orator has the right label, as in a cram-book; and the same classifying neatness disposes of the poetic of Philemon.

Nor was the habit confined to rhetors. It was widespread in the “three styles”[8] of oratory, in the ten canonical Attic orators, in “Asianism” versus “Atticism,” in the bias of even Dionysius of Halicarnassus[9] toward classification. True, it appears generally in criticism of rhetoric, and is common enough in modern times; but in ancient criticism it amounts to a preoccupation,[10] and is more readily carried over into poetic.

Grammar in those wider reaches now comprehended in the term philology has much to contribute to the criticism of older poets. Theon, for instance, whose manual of school exercises (προγυμνάσματα[11]) has come down to us from the time of Augustus, annotated with scholia the tragic and the comic poets. The tradition of the Alexandrian grammarians included, besides syntax and exegesis, textual criticism. But such criticism depends for much of its value on science little explored by the ancients; and typically it makes little contribution to poetic.[12] By no good fortune, then, “philology and poetry went hand in hand in the ancient and classical literature of Italy.”[13] [229]The result of this companionship was not, indeed, always nor necessarily so arid and confined as the criticism of the second-century lexicographer Aulus Gellius;[14] but at most it had little range.

C. Criticism from Professional Public Speakers

Not only did the prevalence of rhetoric make poetic generally subsidiary, but the prevalence of declamatio[15] in later teaching and practise tended actually to confuse the two. This rhetoric was itself largely poetic, largely an art of appeal by description. Sometimes carrying descriptive dialogue into a sort of oral fiction, it had no occasion for poetic movement. The pattern of a speech sufficed as well as another where the opportunity was less of the whole than of the parts.[16] Immediate popular oral effects were then, as now, gained rather by stinging epigrams and dramatic realizations than by any onward course. The poetic that shall win a crowd on the spot is more likely than the poetic that shall be savored by individual readers to be sensational. Sensational in fact it was commonly, to judge by examples ranging all the way from Seneca’s Controversiæ well into the Christian centuries.

Even those rhetors who were not sensational in their own practise were little more likely, in a time of such preoccupations, to conceive poetic distinctively; and rhetors purveyed, among other things, literary criticism. Besides teaching and exhibiting at home, the more popular rhetors traveled as occasional orators and lecturers. Though their speeches were oftenest, of course, occasional, and, when [230]they were rather lectures, were commonly in the fields of philosophy and ethics, still professional public speakers must have purveyed, at home and on their journeys, a good deal of the current literary criticism. Where this was incidental, it need not be taken too seriously. No device of public speaking is more persistent than the flattering of an audience by literary allusions and accepted adjectives of admiration.[17] Such passages, in ancient speeches or in modern, show merely what is regarded as the right thing to say, and are almost always limited to style. But where a rhetor develops a literary topic, even for a paragraph or two, he may be as significant as any other literary critic.

The particular rhetor might be a teacher of rhetoric primarily, or secondarily, or hardly at all. Though he hardly ranked as a philosopher,[18] yet he was an active purveyor of philosophy. An expert in public address, he professed a variety of considerable range. Occasional oratory of itself invites ranging in both emotion and thought. Conventional as he appears when considered merely as one of a numerous class, he might nevertheless be an outstanding individual; and even as a type he was at least accomplished and influential.

Apuleius, lively and daring enough in his narrative,[19] [231]seems in the excerpts preserved from his oratory quite conventional. The Florida show certain typical encomia, two passages of critical labels, three long pieces on philosophy, and several of those exordia which traveling lecturers prepared, and still prepare, for extempore adaptation. If the Great Unknown’s De sublimitate[20] was a public address—and its suggestiveness is strongly oral—its author rose quite above the type without losing the typical opportunity of oral criticism. One may fancy the close of that noble appeal echoing long in the ears of a rapt audience. But without any flight of fancy one may read the possibilities of ancient oral criticism in certain of the orations of Dio of Prusa, often called Dio Chrysostom.[21]

(1). Dio of Prusa

Dio’s speech known as the Olympic, and having for subtitle The Primary Conception of God, opens with a proem characteristic of the form, an introduction separable, adjustable, ostensibly impromptu, but none the less following a type. A fable of the owl—occasional oratory seems inevitably to begin with a story—leads to other proverbs, to historical allusions, to the speaker’s profession of modesty, sincerity, and homeliness. “I am just come from the Getæ. Shall I tell you about this interesting people?” A rhetor’s offering the choice of theme to the audience might be merely conventional; for Dio effectively recalls [232]it by adding: “Here at Olympia, beside your wondrous statue of the Olympian, shall I not rather speak of Zeus himself?”

So is approached a discourse upon embodiments of deity in poetry and in sculpture, a lecture carefully conducted from point to point, and delivered doubtless in these words, certainly by this plan, in more than one welcoming city. Such a prepared address needed only the adjustment of the proem to the place and the occasion.[22] The lecture itself remained substantially the same. This one makes first the following points.

That question was answered to the Athenians of the same generation quite differently, by a speaker less different than his conclusion, a Roman Jew of Tarsus, one Paul. Dio goes on, after an encomium of Phidias:

There follows a comparison of sculpture with poetry (70). Though this stresses unduly, perhaps, the mere range of verbal suggestion, it make none the less clearly a fundamental distinction.

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An encomium of Phidias, a discours de circonstance, has been made to involve two large principles of artistic theory. The first is ethical, expressing a fundamental relation of art to human life. Art, and especially poetry, is a revelation to us of what we vaguely feel to be divine; it interprets communal experience as communal vision. The second is æsthetic, deriving a difference of technic from the fundamental difference between stimulating mental images by successive verbal suggestions, visual, auditory, motor, and actually representing to the eye alone all together and all at once. While poetry ranges through successive suggestions, sculpture focuses statically by typical representation. Though it is easy to read into these principles from modern criticism more than Dio intended, they can hardly be regarded as less than penetrative and fundamental. The first, often reaffirmed in modern times and sometimes apparently rediscovered, is often implied in ancient criticism. Dio’s contribution is to formulate it explicitly, and to express it with unusual [234]warmth. The second is clear, though less explicit, in Aristotle’s Poetic. It is ignored by both Horace and Plutarch.[23] As Dio’s words went down the ancient wind, so Lessing’s almost identical distinction[24] has not precluded much bland modern confusion of the arts.

More and more a moralist as his life advanced, turning from rhetor into preacher, Dio nevertheless maintains a variety reminding us that this form of oratory had great range. The prelude of his Euboica, extensively descriptive of simple frontier life, is almost a short story. Quite different from the conventional expatiation, which Dio elsewhere does not despise, it shows him expert not only in the theory of narrative, but also in its practise. Some of his discourses are less speeches than what we should call essays. The one on Practise in Speaking[25] is in topics, plan, and style quite conventional. The remarkable one on Greek drama is as it stands an essay in literary criticism. By the insertion of recited passages it could easily and effectively have been expanded into a lecture; but even without these it is both sustained and suggestive.

Conventional as this is in making the usual contrast between Æschylus and Euripides, with Sophocles as a golden mean, it defines these distinctions afresh with suggestive precision. Moreover, the essay is free from the usual preoccupation with diction. What is said on that point, though not original, is tersely subordinated. If the manuscript is complete, therefore, the close upon the quotation from Aristophanes gives a false emphasis; [239]for the criticism as a whole is quite different from the usual comparison of style with style.

Plot, indeed, is not developed extensively as a separate item; but it is clearly implied in the treatment of characterization. The constant theme is motivation, the bringing out of character through the movement of the plot, the dramatic management of persons through interaction. Thus Dio has made his criticism singularly consistent. Instead of merely appreciating one dramatist after the other, he has made his comparison progressive. The oral criticism uttered by Greek and Roman rhetors of the Empire, we may guess from what has survived in manuscript, was not often either so sustained or so free from the bias of rhetoric. Perhaps Dio’s unusual grasp came from his missionary sense of the tradition of Hellenism.

D. Plutarch’s How Youth Should Read Poetry[26]

Literary criticism has often taken direction from philosophy. In ancient criticism such a slant was habitual. Most ancient critics show definite preoccupation with some school of philosophy.[27] For example, there was a Stoic theory of style; and “the æsthetic theories of Panætius are reproduced in the first book of Cicero’s De officiis.”[28] Such cases are typical even to the involving [240]of æsthetics with ethics; for ancient literary criticism, more generally and avowedly than modern, is ethical. Aristotle is almost alone in proposing for poetic principles frankly æsthetic. The general tendency of ancient criticism is to give poetic a moral color. This ethical direction of critical thought confirmed the tendency to conceive poetic in terms of rhetoric. Not only are the implications of rhetoric inevitably moral, but the theories of rhetoric associated with ancient theories of morals were often extended to include even poetic expression. Ancient poetic was thus rhetoricated partly by being moralized.

An extreme instance of this ancient habit is Plutarch’s Greek treatise of the first century, How Youth Should Read Poetry. Here the familiar idea that poetry is a means of ethical education is so expounded as to reveal the limits of Plutarch’s conception. He is not merely, as grammaticus commenting Homer in school, offering poetry as a propædeutic to philosophy; he is repeating a narrow and commonplace æsthetic. His treatment of imitation, ignoring Aristotle’s use of that term,[29] has in mind faithfulness to fact. Ignoring also the Aristotelian idea of poetic movement, he repeats the commonplace and misleading analogy from painting[30] with a barren literalness.

Poetry is pictorial in this sense not to authors whose creative bent is distinctively dramatic or narrative, but to the describers and expatiators, not to Vergil, but to Ovid.

For this narrow conception of poetic truth Plutarch’s recurring terms[32] are not merely narrow; they are distinctly rhetorical. They are the very ones commonly used by rhetoricians to describe success in prosopopœia,[33] or characterization according to type. That Plutarch means them so is clear in section x on characterization in Homer.

In a word, Plutarch’s moralizing of poetic is definitely rhetorical. For the schools of philosophy generally poetic was incidental to the consideration of diction; for him it was indistinguishable in method.

E. Horace’s Ars Poetica

That the unsystematic epistolary reflections of a Latin poet on poetry should for centuries have influenced criticism of poetic more than the searching analysis and consecutive synthesis of the greatest Greek philosopher has seemed strange to the point of irony. Not only was Horace quoted while Aristotle was forgotten, but even after the recovery of the Poetic he was quoted still. He is quotable. He abounds in sententiæ; and they have a long life. Though he would have been himself the first to smile at the putting of his epistle to the Pisos beside Aristotle’s Poetic, he knew none the less the sort of criticism that people like. We have been often reminded that Ars Poetica is neither Horace’s title nor accurately descriptive. But it is a title naturally given by grammarians who hardly conceived poetic as a distinct technic, and naturally accepted by readers who found Horace’s epigrams no less suggestive because they were detached. Certainly the epistle is not an ars; but certainly its criticism has enough shrewdness, lucidity, brilliancy, adaptability to the short flights of ordinary thinking on the subject, to explain all its popularity. One need not be cynical to think that the poetic of a Horace will usually be more popular than the poetic of an Aristotle.

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At the risk of wronging Horace, his editors and other critics have tried to brief this epistle. Wickham,[34] for instance, finds three parts: (1) 1-118, “the original principles of poetry, unity of conception, choice of words, style of diction;” (2) 119-284, characterization in drama, the Greek practise of drama; (3) 285-end, “the two aims of poetry, the necessity of excellence.” But this is not a division at all. Wilkins,[35] admitting difficulties of sequence, even digressions and repetitions, nevertheless finds “three main sections”: (1) 1-72, unity of style and conception; (2) 73-288, application of “these general principles ... to the various kinds of poetry, and especially to the drama”; (3) 189-476, requisites for cultivating poetry, and difficulties. None of these coincides with any of Wickham’s. Plessis[36] more cautiously says: “His principal counsels are three: the importance of composition and of the harmony of the parts, the supremacy of taste, perfection of craftsmanship.” Three again, and again not the same three. Could there be clearer proof that the epistle is not logical, nor even consecutive?

Since it is in fact one of the least consecutive of Horace’s epistles, so expert a composer must have meant it to be taken, as it has been taken, not as a logical progress, but as a collection of sententiæ. These, whatever their particular source or sources,[37] may safely be taken as generally current in Græco-Roman literary circles. [244]Thus they have the more significance; for Horace’s originality is hardly in conception. His contribution to criticism, like Cicero’s, is in finality of phrase. The maxims that have echoed so often down the corridors of criticism have the carrying power of simplicity.

Commonplaces some of these must have been even in Horace’s time; but they have persisted in criticism because he stamped them.

The one that is most clearly a distinctive principle of poetic is the familiar “Semper ad eventum festinat,” etc. (148). The idea of so adjusting the time of the plot as to insure a significant beginning and a continuous and accelerated movement up to an issue is central in Greek drama. That Horace applies it to epic evinces no sharp discrimination of technic. Ut pictura poesis (361) is not, as in Plutarch,[38] a comparison of the technic of poetry with that of painting; it merely insists that a poem, as a picture, be judged according to its kind, according [245]to its specific object. Horace may, indeed, imply a vindication of his own poems beside those of longer reach and more sustained power; or he may be merely repeating his dominant idea of appropriateness; but in either case he is not formulating a principle of poetic. The rule of five acts (189), wherever he got it, is not vital. Though he spends more time on drama than on any other mode, though he uses Aristotle, he does not carry out the principle of dramatic movement.

The conception of characterization is clearly rhetorical,

and so on through Horace’s seven ages of man. Thus stripped of their style, these counsels might have come from any classical rhetoric. Nothing was more firmly fixed in the tradition of the schools than characterization according to age, sex, race, occupation. Such characterization by type suffices for prosopopœia in school, for the fathers and sons and pirates of declamatio, for even the spendthrifts and slaves and parasites of Latin comedy; it does not suffice for Œdipus or Neoptolemus, for [246]Medea or Dido. Nor is the difference merely in degree; it is in the distinctively poetic habit of creating. Poetic movement, if Horace indeed glimpses it as distinct from that of rhetoric, he does not fully define; poetic characterization he seems not to regard as distinct at all.

Indeed, most of the Ars Poetica applies equally to ars rhetorica.

If oratores be substituted for poetæ we have the familiar docere, delectare of rhetoric, as we have it in the summary miscuit utile dulci (343); and with Horace the movere that remains hardly suggests a different technic. Si vis me flere, dolendum est (102) will be found in Cicero and Quintilian. The counsel of congruity with which he begins, and to which he reverts again and again, is a preoccupation of ancient rhetoric. No better phrase has been found for the progress of a speech than lucidus ordo (41); and the iunctura (47) to which it is immediately applied is a term of compositio. In the thought of Horace’s circle the distinction between rhetoric and poetic as two movements, two ways of composing, seems to have been inactive. Rather Horace seems to think of composition as generally constant throughout various forms, and as involving mainly the control of conception by congruity and plan, of expression by adaptation and finish. That such ideas were salutary when declamatio had begun to threaten both rhetoric and poetic, and that they are salutary still, no one should deny; but they make no contribution to the distinctive development of poetic.

Grammarians, rhetors, philosophers, men of letters seem thus to converge under the Empire toward a poetic [247]strongly tinged with rhetoric, no longer distinct as a movement having its own technic. The inference, though not conclusive, is suggestive as an hypothesis. Less conclusive, but still suggestive, is the further inference that this habit of critical thought was intensified in the specifically Latin tradition. In sustained emotional movement the Æneid is solitary; and even while it was revered, its poetic seems less influential than that of Ovid. Vergil had turned for his poetic from the newer Greek ways adopted by his countrymen to the tradition interpreted by Aristotle. That older tradition is no longer active in the poetic descending from the Roman Empire through the Holy Roman Empire.

The ancient experience with rhetoric and with poetic is seen in retrospect as typical. The theory of rhetoric as the energizing of knowledge and the humanizing of truth is explicitly the philosophy of Aristotle and implicitly that of Cicero, Tacitus, Quintilian. What the later ancient professors of rhetoric had rather in mind is the training of immediate personal effectiveness; and this theory of rhetoric as the art of the speaker is at once as old as the other and as permanent. Its name is sophistic. Aristotle deprecated it in his first chapter; St. Augustine turned his back on it at the end of the ancient world; but meantime it had been for centuries, and it has been again and again, a popular pedagogy. Further discussion of these traditions, and of such details as the persistence of classical metric after the beat of more popular stress rhythms had become insistent, is properly historical. Historical interpretation of the ancient lore of composition and of its influence in the middle ages is relegated to another volume. The expository task of this one concludes naturally with the completion of the ancient experience.

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The references are to pages. The terms are also included alphabetically in the General Index, and may be explored in the indexes of the Cope and Sandys Aristotle, the Wilkins Cicero, the Rhys Roberts Dionysius, and the other editions cited in the bibliographical notes at the head of each section.

The plan is generally that of Quintilian (see pages 63-66).

The Greek terms of drama and epic may be found in the General Index and, through the tabular view of Aristotle’s Poetic on pages 135-139, in the Greek index of Bywater’s edition.

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• Achilles Tatius, 222
• acting, 22, 23, 73, 147, 156, 173, 175, 176, 187, 191
• actio, (21-24), 42, 64, 67, (156), (173), (174)
• action, 140, 141, 145, 147, 151, 161, 184, 186, 192
• adaptation, 8, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 32, 53, 66, 72, 73, 74, 76, 104, 114, 115, 119, 245, 246
• Æneid, 192, 195, 197-215, 216, 219, 225, 241, 247
• Æschylus, 169, 171, 177, 180, 219, 238
• ἀηδής, 29
• Alcidamas, 82
• Alexandrian, 218, 221, 222, 228
• allegory, 180, 218, 221
• alliteration, 216
• allusion, 204, 212, 213
• altercatio, 65
• Ammon, G., 104
• amplification, 25, 39, 44, 55, 64, 98, 124, 127, 173, 192, 201, 209, 217, 220, 222
• ἀναγκαῖος, (150), (151), (152), (155) (see causation)
• ἀναγνώρισις, (145), 152, 156 (see recognition)
• analogy, 20
• ἀνθηρός, 119
• antithesis, 31
• ἀπόδειξις, (confirmatio), 65
• Apollonius, 207, 215
• appropriateness, 24, 119, 145, 245, 246 (see adaptation)
• a priori, 20
• Apuleius, 221-223, 227-228, 230, 231, 232
• Archilochus, 124
• argument, 36, 65, 128
• argumentum, 64
• Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2, 4, 5, 6-36, 38, 40, 43, 58, 59, 67, 79, 83, 100, 112, 120, 126, 129, 130, 131, 247;
• Poetic, 112, 132-168, 172, 175, 176, 179, 180, 196, 198, 225, 234, 240, 242, 245, 247
• ἁρμονία, 26
• Arnim, H. von, 80, 230, 232
• Ars Poetica (Horace), 210, 225, 234, 242-247
• articulation, 204, 205, 219
• artificiality, 71, 211, 217
• ἄσκησις, 185, 234
• Attic, 61, 228
• audience, 11, 12, 17-20, 23, 164, 171, 174, 184, 191, 192
• Augustine, St., 75, 97, 131, 247
• Aulus Gellius, 229
• αὔξησις (amplificatio), 127
• αὐστηρός, 119
• Bacchylides, 124
• Bacon, 128
• balance, 31, 58[254]
• Baldwin, C. S., 8, 30, 107, 114, 234
• Beowulf, 192, 195, 197
• Blair, 4
• Boissier, 87
• Bornecque, H., 37, 87, 89, 90, 97, 98, 99, 100
• Boulanger, A., 230
• Browning, 117, 127
• Brunetière, 167, 179, 214
• Butcher, S. H., 132, 135, 141, 142, 153
• Bywater, I., 132, 134, 135, 140, 146, 147, 153, 155, 156, 157, 166
• Cadence, 27, 28, 59-61, 79
• Cæcilius of Calacte, 105
• Capperonier, 74
• Carlyle, 119
• catharsis, 145, 147, 152, 154, 155, 164
• causation in drama, 148-152, 154, 155, 197, 207
• Causeret, C., 38
• character in an audience, 18, 19
• characterization in oratory, 71, 72, 76, 98, 99;
• in drama, 134, 141, 145, 148, 154-156, 161, 163, 174, 176-180, 184, 187, 188, 189, 191, 239;
• in Vergil, 207-211;
• in Ovid, 219;
• in Apuleius, 222;
• by types, 210-211 (see prosopopœia)
• Chariton, 222
• Chaucer, 107, 176, 218
• Chickering, E. C., 186, 187
• chorus, 157, 173, 174-176, 186
• chria, 63, 68, 78
• Cicero, 5, 37-61, 75, 78, 87, 88, 90, 103, 105, 109, 120, 124, 127, 191, 207, 225, 239, 244, 246, 247
• Clark, D. L., 224
• clauses, 21, 28-31, 58, 60, 114, 118, 119, 120
• clausula, 27, (28), 60, 61, 79
• close (see conclusion)
• cogitatio, 80, 83
• coherence (see consecutiveness)
• Colin, l’Abbé, 37, 59
• collocatio (see dispositio)
• colores, 97, 98, 99, 100
• comedy, 140, 144;
• —Latin, 188-192;
• —New, 188, 190
• communal, 170-172, 174-176, 177, 192-196, 233
• comparatio, 64
• comparison and parallel, 64, 234-238
• complication, of plot, 156
• compositio, (25-33), 53, (58-61), 65, 67, 79, 83, (102-122), (124), 125, (173), (202), (210), 246
• conciliare (one of the three tasks of oratory), 51-52, 58, 65
• conclusion, 146, 147, 150, 152, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 181, 184, 185, 194, 207, 244 (see peroration, καταστροφή)
• concrete for vividness, 12, 20, 22, 24, 35, 40, 81, 128, 129, 194, 202, 212-213
• confirmatio, 65
• coniectura (status coniecturalis, see status)
• connotation, 173, 198, 203, 212-213 (see allusion, concrete, rhythm, verse)
• consecutiveness, 34, 52, 77, 78, 98, 127, 134, 135, 149, 150, 152, 160-162, 182, 184, 185, 187, 194, 200, 202, 203, 205, 219, 221, 222, 223, 229, 244, 246
• consistency, 150, 151, 154, 155, 156, 200, 201, 204
• continuity (see consecutiveness)
• controversiæ, 62, 64, 70, 72, 73, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91-94, 95, 96
• convention, 217-218, 234
• Cooper, Lane, 122, 132, 189
• Cope, E. M., 6, 7, 10, 19
• correlation, 6, 9, 11, 14, 16, 40, 68[255]
• creation, 141, 142, 143, 151, 159, 164, 194-195, 209, 215, 220, 246
• crisis, 2, 154, 158, 160, 161, 164, 204, 209 (see περιπέτεια)
• criticism, 56, 102, 130, 224-247;
• —by classification, 227, 228;
• —of texts, 228
• Croce, B., 167
• Croiset, A., 221, 228, 240
• Croll, M. W., 27, 61
• Cruttwell, C. T., 91, 216, 218, 219
• Dance, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 158, 175, 176
• Dante, 199, 207, 208
• debate, 9, 65, 100
• declamatio, 46, 48, 64, 67, 68-73, 74, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94-97, 100, 101, 187, 190, 210, 218, 220, 221, 225, 229, 245, 246
• definition (see status)
• deliberative oratory, 8, 14, 15, 16, 18, 35, 36, 64, 90, 210
• delivery in oratory, 21, 22, 23, 24, 48, 53, 58, 63, 66;
• —in drama, 156, 173, 174, 187
• demonstrativus, 64
• Demosthenes, 30, 61, 118, 121, 124, 126, 127, 128
• dénoûment (see solution)
• De Quincey, T., 4
• description, 68, 98, 194, 201-203, 212, 217, 218, 220, 221, 222, 229, 234, 241
• De Sublimitate, 4, 122-131
• deus ex machina, 156, 201
• dialectic (see logic)
• dialogue, 40, 135, 139, 187, 209, 222
• διάνοια, 126 (145)
• δίαρμα, 127
• dictation, 80
• diction, 1, 2, 21-33, 57, 145, 148, 157, 172-174, 211-213, 215 (see style)
• διήγησις (narratio), (33), 34, 35, 65
• δικανικός (iudicialis), 8, 15, 35, 64
• Dio Chrysostom, or Dio of Prusa, 225, 230-239
• Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 21, 102-122, 125, 130, 131, 198, 228
• discovery (see recognition)
• dispositio, 21, 33, 34, 42, 47, 52, 64, 65, 66, 77, 85, 100, 103, 104, 123, 135
• dithyramb, 140, 144
• divisio, 83, 97, 98, 99, 100
• docere (one of the three tasks of oratory), 51, 56, 65, 95, 246
• Donnelly, F. P., 76
• Doxopater, 105
• drama, 133-192, 205-207, 208, 215, 229, 245
• dramatis personæ (see personæ)
• Economy, 181, 185, 202, 209
• écrivains d’idées et écrivains d’images, 4, 134
• Egger, M., 103
• εἰκός, (150), (151), (152), (155), 241
• ἐκλογή (electio), 25, 65, 103
• ἔκφρασις, 68, 203, 218
• elaboration, 211-212
• electio, 25, 53, 65, 67, 103, 104
• Elizabethan drama, 141, 153, 162, 179
• elocutio, 21, 42, 44, 53-55, 56, 64, 65, 67, 78-82, 100, 102-131
• emotion, 3, 13, 18, 19, 32, 35, 52, 53, 124, 125, 126, 128, 140, 141, 145, 147, 148, 163, 165, 175, 210
• emphasis, 100, 200, 201, 202, 208, 222;
• —of sentences, 113-114
• ἔμπρακτος, 128
• ἐναλήθης, 128
• ἐνέργεια, 31
• enhancing, 17, 44, 147, 173, 207 (see style)[256]
• ἐνθύμημα, 36
• enthymeme, 7, 9, 13, 20, 31, 36, 65
• ἐπεισοδιώδης, (152)
• epic, 134, 135, 139, 140, 144, 146, 157, 158, 168, 192-198, 200, 201, 204, 205, 207, 210, 211, 213-215, 244
• ἐπιδεικτικός (demonstrativus), 8, 14, 33, 35, 64, 130
• ἐπίλογος (peroratio), 36, 65
• episodic, 152
• ethics (see morals)
• ethopœia, 68, 71
• εὔκρατος, 119
• εὐμαθής, 27
• euphony, 24, 64, 65
• εὕρεσις (inventio), 21, 64, 65
• Euripides, 3, 128, 156, 169, 171, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 184, 185, 207, 238
• εὐσύνοπτος, 28, 120
• Evanthius, 191
• Everyman, 180
• exordium, 33, 47, 53, 65, 76, 78
• extempore, 67, 69, 80, 81, 83, 95
• ἠθοποιία, 68, 71, 187
• ἦθος, 11, (13), 18, 25, 32, 50, 58, 120, 141
• Fable, 20, 63, 72
• fabula, 64
• facilitas, 66, 79, 81
• fairy mistress legend, 177-178
• Fierville, Ch., 63
• fiction in oratorical narrative, 72, 99, 100, 220, 222, 229
• figures, 24, 31, 124, 128, 129, 201, 251. VI. B. (see concrete)
• finis (status definitivus, see status)
• Fiske, G. C., 226, 239
• Flickinger, R. C., 169
• folklore (see legend)
• forensic, 8, 14, 17, 18, 35, 36, 60, 64, 71, 90, 100
• forms of discourse, 4
• forms of literature, 3, 5, 167
• Fouqué, 178
• Fowler, W. W., 208
• French classical tragedy, 162, 177, 178, 181
• Froissart, 29
• Fronto, 79, 94
• Genus tenue, genus medium, genus grande, 56-59
• γλαφυρός, 119
• Glover, T. R., 200, 202
• γνώμη, 20
• Goodell, T. D., 169, 182
• Gorgias, 58, 101
• grammar, 66, 226-229
• grammatica, 66, 68, (226-229)
• grammaticus, 66, 73, 102, 226, 240
• γραφικός, 33
• Greek Romances, 221-223
• Greek tragedy, 168-186
• Gummere, F. B., 193
• Haigh, A. E., 169
• Haines, C. R., 94
• Hardy, T., 146
• harmony, 58, 67, 111, 113, 119, 174, 213 (see rhythm, clausula)
• Harrington, K. P., 217
• Harris, Ella I., 186
• Havell, H. L., 122
• Heinze, Richard, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 208, 209, 210, 218, 219
• Heliodorus, 222
• Hellenistic, 201, 206, 215 (see Alexandrian)
• Hendrickson, G. L., 38, 51, 56
• Herennium, Rhetorica ad, 37, 63, 75
• Hermogenes, 68, 72, 75
• hero, tragic, 154-155, 176-177, 178;
• —epic, 196, 208-209
• Herodotus, 27, 29, 30, 58, 106, 150[257]
• hiatus, 58, 119
• history and oratory, 57, 66;
• —and poetry, 1, 2, 150, 157, 165
• Homer, 105, 108, 115, 119, 124, 126, 135, 158, 192, 193, 195-198, 199, 200, 202-204, 208, 209, 210, 213-215, 240
• Horace (see Ars Poetica)
• Hubbell, H. M., 38, 103
• Hugo, V., 30, 162
• Hyperides, 124, 128
• Iamblichus, 222
• Ibsen, H., 163, 170
• idealizing, 144, 174, 175, 186
• idiom, 25, 53, 54, 110
• imagery, 20, 24, 31, 35, 81, 128, 129, 134, 194, 202, 212, 213 (see concrete)
• imaginative composition, 1, 2, 3, 40, 70, 71, 72, 98, 100, 124, 125, 126, 128, 134, 135, 139, 140-223, 232-247;
• —diction, 24, 35, 129 (see concrete, style)
• imago (φαντασία), 81
• imitation for study, 48, 66, 68, 69, 80, 102;
• —as a principle of drama, 139, 140, 141, 142, 147, 149, 150, 159, 164;
• —in epic, 194, 204, 213-215;
• —as conceived by Plutarch, 240
• incisum, 60
• intensification, 127, 144, 146, 158, 159, 163, 183, 197
• interaction, 180, 187, 203, 239
• interpretation, 151, 157, 161, 163-166, 184, 214
• introduction (see exordium)
• inventio, 21, 42, 43, 47-51, 64, 65, 67, 76, 85, 100, 104, 123, 135
• investigation (see inventio)
• Isæus, 95, 96
• Isocrates, 3, 33, 58, 82, 103, 120, 121, 130
• Jebb, R. C., 6, 24, 28
• Jerome, St., 96
• John of Salisbury, 68
• Julius Pollux, 189
• iunctura, 246
• Juvenal, 96
• κάθαρσις (145)
• καλόν, τὸ, 114
• καταστροφή, 184 (see conclusion)
• Kittredge, G. L., 193
• Knapp, C., 189, 191
• Lallier, R., 188, 189
• Laurand, L., 37
• legend, 194-195
• Legrand, P. E., 188
• Lessing (Laokoön), 32, 202, 234
• LeJay, P., 200, 206
• λεκτικός, 26
• length of sentences and of clauses, 114
• Leo, F., 188
• Lewis, C. M., 116-118
• λέξις (elocutio), 21-33, 64, 65, (145)
• λῆμμα, 128
• logic, 7, 8, 13, 109, 110, 148
• logical exclusion, 20
• λογογράφος, 33
• “Longinus on the Sublime,” 102, 122-131, 219, 225, 231
• loose sentence, 27-29
• Lucan, 1, 2, 225
• Lucian, 2, 3, 74, 130
• ludus, 96
• λύσις (refutatio), 20, 65
• Lysias, 73, 124
• Mackail, J. W., 199, 204, 212
• materia, 66, 69, 73, 78, 88
• material and art, 10, 11, 12, 49, 113, 146, 213-214
• Matthews, Brander, 169, 179, 182[258]
• maxims, 20, 63
• meditatio, 73 (see cogitatio)
• μελέτη, 74 (see declamatio)
• melody, 26, 114, 141, 145 (see music)
• μελοποιία, (145)
• membrum, 60
• memoria, 21, 42, 53, 64, 66, 67, 82-84, 90, (95)
• memory, 28, 69 (see memoria)
• Menander, 188, 190
• mensio, 58
• mensura, 58
• Méridier, L., 230
• messenger in Greek tragedy, 173, 183-184
• metaphor, 24, 31, 32, 124, 157 (see figure, imagery)
• meters in prose, 26, 27, 59, 60, 118, 121, 140
• Michaut, G., 189, 191
• Miller, F. J., 186, 216
• Mill’s Canons, 20
• Milton, 116, 122, 130, 158, 170, 195, 197, 198, 200, 207, 214
• mime, 135, 139, 140
• μίμησις, 142, (144), (145), (148), 166 (see imitation in drama, in epic)
• μιμητικός, 142
• μνήμη, 21, 64 (see memoria)
• modus motorius, 191
• modus statarius, 191
• Montgomery, W. A., 234
• Moody, William Vaughn, 177
• moral appeal, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 32, 50, 51, 52, 148, 195, 200, 205, 233
• morals in literary criticism, 239, 240, 242
• Morgan, M. H., 189
• motivation, 154, 155, 164, 184, 191, 201, 207, 220, 239
• movement, 144, 149, 158-162, 165, 172, 191, 220, 222, 229, 239, 240, 246 (see consecutiveness, sentence-movement)
• movere (one of the three tasks of oratory), 51, 52, 58, 65
• Murray, Gilbert, 169, 175, 181, 183
• μῦθος (68, 72, see legend, myth)
• music, 26, 111, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 158, 174, 175
• myth, 68, 72, 176-178, 195, 216, 218, 221
• Nageotte, E., 212
• narratio, 35, 47, 53, 65, 68, 76, 99
• narrative, 30, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 157-158, 167, 168, 173, 183, 192-223, 234 (see epic)
• Nassal, F., 38, 103, 105
• Nettleship, H., 200, 205, 221, 228, 229, 240, 243
• Nibelungenlied, 192
• νόημα, 127
• νόησις, 126
• numerus, 56, 59
• Occasional oratory, 8, 14, 33, 35, 53, 56, 64, 100, 229, 230, 231, 233, 234
• ὄγκος, 25
• οἰκονομία, 103, 107
• ὅμοιος, 241
• onomatopœia, 116
• orbis doctrinæ, 68
• order (see consecutiveness, movement)
• originality, 213-215
• ὅρος (finis), 65
• Ovid, 186, 203, 207, 209, 210, 216-220, 221, 241, 247
• Owen, S. G., 216, 218, 219
• ὄψις (145)
• Padelford, F. M., 239, 241
• painting, 143, 144, 240, 241, 244
• πάθος, 12, 18, 25, 32, 50, 58, 120, 141, 153[259]
• panegyric (see occasional oratory)
• παράδειγμα, 20, 36
• parts of a play, 153;
• —of a speech, 33-35, 47, 65, 76-77, 95, 97;
• —of rhetoric, 21, 22, 42, 66, 85, 100, 107
• Patterson, W. M., 27, 61
• Paul, St., 96, 232
• period, 27-30, 60, 83, 104, 119, 120, 135
• περίοδος, 27-30
• περίοπτος, 120
• περιπέτεια, 2, (145), 152, 154 (see reversal)
• peripety (see reversal)
• peroration, 33, 36, 65, 77
• personæ, 40, 41, 72, 99, (148), 151, (154), (171), 176-180, 187, 188, 189, 201, 208
• personality, 5, 12, 85, 100, 130
• persuasion, 7, 8, 10, 17, 20, 21, 26, 51, 77, 92, 126
• Peterson, W., 63, 87
• petitio principii, 20
• Petronius, 89, 225
• Philodemus, 18
• Philostratus, 96, 230
• πιθανός, 10, 241
• Pindar, 120, 124
• πίστις, 65;
• πίστεις ἄτεχνοι—ἔντεχνοι, 8, 10 (46)
• pitch, 22, 114
• pity and fear, 145, 152, 154, 164 (see catharsis)
• plan, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 197, 205-206 (see plot)
• Plato, 40, 41, 118, 121, 124, 140
• Plautus, 188-189, 192
• Plessis, F., 243
• Pliny, 93, 94-96
• plot, 145, 148-158, 163, 179-186, 187, 191, 205-206, 239
• Plotinus, 139
• Plutarch, 190, 210, 225, 234, 239-242, 244
• poetic, 1-5, 132-247;
• —in rhetoric, 100, 125-126, 229
• poetic justice, 164-165
• poetry and oratory, 126, 127, 173
• poetry and sculpture, 232-234 (see painting)
• poetry in prose, 1, 2, 31, 66, 70, 128
• ποιητής (151), (166), (195)
• ποιητικός, 1, 139, 141, (151)
• ποιότης (qualitas), 65
• Polybius, 2, 3
• post hoc, 20
• Pound, Louise, 193
• prælectio, 63, 64, 66, 226
• πρᾶξις, 141, (145)
• preparation, dramatic, 205-206
• πρέπον, 119, 241
• Price, T. R., 202
• Prickard, A. O., 122
• προγυμνάσματα, 63, 68, 228
• πρόθεσις (proposition), (34)
• prologue, 180, 186, 191
• pronuntiatio, 21-24, 48, 53, 67
• proof, 7, 33, 65, 77
• προοίμιον, 65
• proposition, 34
• prosopopœia, 71, 72, 73, 99, 218, 222, 241, 245
• προσωποποιία, 71 (see prosopopœia)
• Quæstio, 98
• qualitas (status generalis, see status)
• Quintilian, 1, 5, 58, 61, 62-87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 99, 101, 102, 127, 131, 225, 227, 246, 247
• Racine, 170
• reading aloud, 66, 80
• rebuttal (see refutation)
• recognition in tragedy, 145, 152, 153, 156, 158
• recurrence, 26, 205, 216-217[260]
• reductio ad absurdum, 20
• refutatio, 65
• refutation, 20, 53, 65, 77, 83
• representation, 134, 140, 141, 142, 147, 158, 164, 174, 233
• reversal (peripety), 145, 152, 153, 154, 160, 165, 206
• revision, 61, 66, 122, 203, 212
• rhetor, 64, 66, 68, 71, 73, 88, 90, 94, 229-230
• rhetoric, definition, 1-10, 41, 44-47, 100-101, 134, 145;
• —relations, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 40, 44, 45;
• —scope, 41, 44-47, 54, 85, 86, 90;
• —three fields, 8, 47;
• —three tasks, 51;
• —in poetic, 187, 206, 209-212, 220, 222, 224, 225, 227, 240-242, 245-247
• rhythm, 2, 25-31, 58-61, 67, 79, 83, 104, 108, 114, 118, 119, 120, 140, 144, 147, 173, 174, 198
• ritual, 171, 212
• Roberts, W. Rhys, 103, 104, 108, 122, 130
• Roland, Chanson de, 192
• romantic, 162, 181, 185, 208
• Sagas, 192, 198
• Sainte-Beuve, 158, 199, 200, 202
• salience (see emphasis)
• sapientia, 54
• Sandys, J. E., 6, 37, 56, 58, 61, 63
• Sappho, 120, 126
• scenario, 156
• scenery, 148, 174
• scenes, 134, 150, 152, 161-165
• Schevill, R., 218
• sculpture and poetry, 143, 232-234
• sedes argumentorum, 51, 74
• Sellar, W. Y., 200, 209, 211, 216
• Seneca (rhetor), 62, 71, 87, 89-101, 225, 229
• Seneca (dramatist), 186-188
• sensational, 92, 221, 222, 223, 229
• sentence-movement, 21-33, 53, 58-61, 65, 67, 79, 83, 102-122, 202, 210, 213
• sententia, 1, 45, 97, 99, 100 (229), 242, 243
• sequence (see consecutiveness)
• serious (of dramatic theme), 144, 146, 149
• Shakspere, 117, 128, 155, 162, 173, 181, 182, 185, 203, 214, 218
• Shelley, 177, 219
• significance, 126, 146, 151, 158, 160, 163
• silva, 80
• simplicity, 197-198
• soliloquy, 218, 220
• solution, 156 (see conclusion)
• song, 145, 147 (see music)
• Sophistic, 101, 230, 247
• Sophocles, 124, 156, 159-161, 169, 171, 178, 179, 180, 181, 185, 238
• sound, connotation of, 115-118
• speaking (see delivery, writing and speaking)
• spectacle, 145, 174
• σπουδαῖος (144), 146
• stanza, 216-217
• στάσις, 36, 65 (see status)
• statement of facts, 33, 68, 77
• status, 36, 49-51, 65, 67, 74-76, 77, 98
• Stevenson, R. L. (Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature), 107, 109, 115, 118
• Stoic, 210, 239
• στοχασμός (coniectura), 65
• Strabo, 3
• style, 1, 2, 21-33, 39, 44, 53-61, 65, 67, 78-82, 100, 102-131, 173, 187, 194, 197-198, 211-213, 216, 224, 230
• suasoriæ, 64, 70, 72, 73, 88, 90, 91, 218
• sublimitas, 103, 122, 123[261]
• suggestion, 141, 142, 147, 158, 232, 233 (see connotation)
• σύγκρισις, (238)
• συμβουλευτικός (deliberativus), 8, 14, 15, 35, 64
• symbolism, 176, 178
• σύνθεσις, 25, (58-61), 65, 103, (202), (210), (see compositio)
• σύνταξις, 127
• σύστασις (145), 155 (see plot)
• syllogism, 7, 9, 13
• σχῆμα, 25
• Tacitus, 2, 87-89, 90, 91, 94, 103, 225
• Tasso, 195, 214
• τάξις (dispositio), 21, 22, 33, 64, 65
• Terence, 188-191
• theater, Greek, 172, 174
• Theon, 228
• Thrasymachus, 58
• three fields of oratory, 14-15, 130
• three styles, 56, 57-59, 228
• Thucydides, 2, 118, 120
• time in drama, 149, 150, 157, 160-162, 182;
• —in epic, 199, 204
• τόποι, loci communes, sedes argumentorum, 14, 15, 20
• tradition, 174, 177, 194, 195, 199, 212, 215
• tragedy, 140, 142, 144-157, 159-161, 168-188
• transition, 202, 219
• transposition in sentences, 113-114
• Tyrrell, R. Y., 200, 204
• Unity, 127, 149, 150, 151, 157, 158, 161-162, 180-185, 197, 205-206
• ὑπόκρισις, 21-24, 64, (156), (173), (see actio)
• usage, 110
• ὕψος, 122, 126
• Valmaggi, L., 81
• VanHook, L., 82, 169
• variety, 59, 60, 104, 114, 115, 119, 158, 173, 221, 222
• Vergil (see Æneid)
• verse, dramatic, 173;
• —epic, 198 (see meter)
• Villani, 29
• Walden, J. W. H., 90, 97
• Waters, W. E., 231
• Watson, J. S., 37, 63, 74
• Weil, H., 110
• Welldon, J. E. C., 6, 10, 23, 24
• Wickham, E. C., 243
• Wilkins, A. S., 37, 42, 43, 63, 243
• Wolff, S. L., 222
• Woodberry, G. E., 199, 208, 212, 213
• Wright, W. C., 230
• writing and speaking, 23, 32, 33, 44, 66, 69, 70, 72, 81, 82-84
• φαντασία, 23, 127
• φύσις, 142
• χρεία, 63, 68, 78
• ψυχρός, 25