In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rhetoric experienced new developments that were both classical and nonclassical, both a return to a better understanding of classical rhetoric and a more radical departure from the philosophical and civic assumptions of classical rhetoric. These developments are often viewed in terms of the influence of the new science, especially the new logic of Descartes and Pascal in France and of Locke and the British Empiricists, upon the understanding and exposition of rhetoric. Through the work of the Port Royalists, the schools of France, Britain, and America were directly affected in the teaching of logic, but new conceptions of rhetoric only slowly influenced teaching at elementary levels, which frequently kept to the Ciceronian tradition or to the lists of tropes and figures of Ramist rhetoric. Thomas Farnaby’s Index Rhetoricus of 1625, originally a handbook of Ciceronian rhetoric, was frequently reprinted and much used in British and American schools for over a century, but the later editions reduced it to a Ramist rhetoric of tropes and figures.1
It is also possible, however, to approach the new developments in terms of the neoclassical movement that flourished in France in the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715) and reached England after the restoration of Charles II in 1660.2 This approach is appropriate in a study of the tradition of classical rhetoric, for the history of the discipline in this period is analogous to a renewed classicism in literature and to the neoclassical movement in architecture, sculpture, and painting. Knowledge of Greek, recovered by the humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first produced Latin translations of Greek works, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Italian, French, and English translations of literary merit became popular, and awareness of the aesthetic superiority and originality of Greek literature was widely diffused. This new knowledge made possible the classicizing literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seen in the dramatic works of Corneille and Racine in France and of Dryden and Addison in England, which imitate Greek models, in contrast to Shakespeare’s greater reliance on Roman and medieval forms. In the case of rhetoric, neoclassical Hellenism can be seen in the preference among intellectuals for Plato and Demosthenes over Cicero and Quintilian, already evident in Bacon, and in a new role for primary rhetoric in French and English oratory. At the same time, Latin lost ground to French and English in education, since rhetorical studies increasingly focused on training for speech and writing in the vernacular, but Latin continued to be used throughout the eighteenth century for advanced scholarship and in some reference works. Ernesti’s dictionaries of technical terms, published in Leipzig in 1795 and 1797 and still in some use today, are good examples.3
Seventeenth-century classicism received official sponsorship from the French Academy, established in 1635. The goals of the Academy from the start included the publication of authoritative works on French language, rhetoric, and poetics.4 The most essential part of the program, a French dictionary, finally appeared in 1694. Oliver Patru, who became a member of the Academy in 1640, was apparently expected to produce the rhetoric and was occasionally referred to as “the French Quintilian,” but he never got beyond an informal prospectus. At least two treatises did eventually appear under the title La Rhétorique française, one by René Bary in 1659 and one by sieur Le Gras in 1671. Although both sought to take a broad view of the subject and to adapt it to the French language and the circumstances of seventeenth-century life—for example, by the division of rhetoric into the two contemporary forms of preaching and judicial oratory—neither was an imaginative or creative expression of the new classicism. More influential were two treatises by René Rapin of 1684, which represent the tendency of rhetoric to slip into literary composition in their development of the concept of belles lettres and which cling to the Latin tradition.5 Consideration of belles lettres became a standard part of discussions of rhetoric in seventeenth-century France, as seen in the writings of Lamy, Fénelon, Rollin, and others to be discussed below, and was brought to Britain in the next century, where it is a major subject of discussion by Blair and others.6 Ultimately, belles lettres became “literature” as studied in modern universities.
During the seventeenth century important developments were taking place in logic that had an effect on rhetoric. The starting point of these developments was the Discourse on Method of René Descartes (published 1637), of whom more will be said later in this chapter, and their most specific manifestation was the Port-Royal Logic of 1662, largely the work of Antoine Arnauld, a member of the Jansenist group that had formed a college outside of Paris.7 Another writer who contributed to the new program was Pascal, in the work called De l’Esprit géométrique, also known as L’Art de persuader (1664).8 The effect of these works was to challenge traditional rhetoric. Put in an extreme form, the new logic claimed that the only sound method of inquiry is that of geometry, proceeding from self-evident axioms to universally accepted conclusions. The “topics” of dialectic and rhetoric are useless in discovering truth or in demonstrating it. The role of an orator seeking to dominate communication is inappropriate, and to stir the emotions of an audience is unacceptable. The positive side of the new logic was the establishment of a method of communication needed for the emergence of modern science; its negative side was its apparent ignorance of psychological realities in politics, law, and religion, and of the existence of a special kind of rhetoric evident in philosophical and scientific writing in contradiction to its claims of certainty and objectivity.
There was considerable opposition to women’s study of the liberal arts in the period under discussion, but there is also evidence that some upper-class women acquired a knowledge of rhetoric. Women constituted a significant part of the audience for fashionable preachers; they often read sermons and were discriminating judges of the eloquence of the pulpit. In seventeenth-century Paris some independent-minded women began to hold elegant salons at which they entertained friends and admirers of both sexes and encouraged conversation on literature, the arts, and ideas of the time, while promoting reforms in family law to give women greater control over their lives. It was in this setting that a distinctive women’s rhetoric emerged in the salons and in literature and was given the name préciosité by male detractors.9
As a linguistic movement, préciosité encouraged purity of language at the same time that it exploited metaphors to avoid specifically naming anything regarded as unseemly in reference to the body or society, provoking criticism as being prudish. Molière’s farce Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) is a scathing satire of the language and ideas about love and society current in women’s salons. But the style précieuse strongly influenced Corneille and other dramatists and is found in many passages where love or moral virtue are treated in metaphorical language.
As a literary movement, préciosité was responsible for the creation of new literary forms by women, often produced by the collaboration of several individuals. The most important of these are the portrait, the conversation, and the maxim, but some women also collaborated in writing novels that employed the linguistic style of préciosité. Most famous are the novels of Madeleine de Scudéry, especially Clélie, histoire romaine, an enormous work published in ten installments between 1654 and 1660, utilizing the style of préciosité, and dealing with many of the issues discussed by women in the salons.
In anticipation of women’s future intellectual role in society, some fathers provided their daughters as well as their sons with instruction in literature and rhetoric and in Latin grammar and modern languages. One documented case is that of Beata Rosenhane (1638–74), daughter of a Swedish diplomat who moved in intellectual circles in Sweden, Germany, and France. Her exercise books survive, showing her acquiring an understanding of rhetorical invention, including traditional loci, and style.10 In Italy, women were sometimes allowed to study in universities, and one woman, Elena Lucrezia Carnaro Piscopia, earned a doctor of philosophy degree, awarded in 1678 by the University of Padua.
In England, a few seventeenth-century women began to demand the right to speak in public. The most famous is Margaret Fell, a Quaker who in 1666 while in prison for her religious activities published a tract entitled Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed by the Scriptures.11 An early discussion of rhetoric by an English woman is found in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II (1697) by Mary Astell. She devotes some twenty-five pages to showing how women can train themselves in speaking and writing even without the kind of education given males. She recommends that women read Lamy’s Art of Speaking and shows a knowledge of the Port Royalists.12 A third woman with good rhetorical skills was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. In addition to other works, she published Orations of Divers Sorts, Accommodated to Divers Places in 1662. This is a kind of novel consisting of speeches by men and women in an imaginary city, illustrating the power of eloquence and the separation of the sexes. Seventeenth-century English women published plays and poetry and argued for their right to do so in prefaces. Examples include Aphra Behn’s prefaces to her comedies The Lucky Chance and The Dutch Lover, and the preface to her Poems by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea.13
The most original rhetorical treatise to appear in France in the seventeenth century was De l’Art de parler, or On the Art of Speaking, published anonymously by Bernard Lamy in 1675. Anonymity was probably sought to protect Lamy and the religious order to which he belonged from charges of the influence of Descartes, whose religious views had come under scrutiny by the Church. In 1676 an English version of Lamy’s book, with some departures from the French text, was published in London.14 The translators, who have not been identified with certainty, attributed the original to “Messieurs du Port Royal.” Lamy was not a member of the Port Royal group, but he had benefited from some of their thinking about language and logic, and readers easily accepted the new rhetoric as the counterpart of the well-known Port-Royal Logic and grammars, thus greatly increasing its sale. The English edition was repeatedly reprinted in the eighteenth century but without inclusion of revisions that Lamy later made in the French text.
Although Lamy admired and quoted Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine, his handbook is not a traditional work. Aristotle is dismissed with little notice. The influence of Ramism is slight, that of Cartesian method strong, and there are many points of contact with the Port-Royal Logic. Lamy reorganized the structure of rhetoric to begin with an account of language: the organs of voice and speech; the parts of speech; the need to use words in their proper sense. But language, he recognized, is not rich enough to supply terms for all ideas; thus in the second part he proceeds to consideration of tropes and then to figures as expressive of the emotions. The third part of the work discusses sounds, pronunciation, and delivery. The fourth part examines style in a larger sense: imagination, memory, and judgment as the basis of a good style; the three levels of style: the lofty, the simple, and the middle; and the differences between the styles of an orator or preacher, a historian, and a poet. Only in the final section of the work does he come to the means of persuasion, the invention of proofs, dialectical topics, and the arrangement of a speech into parts. Although speech is the subject of the work, Lamy has much to say about poetry, including versification.
In one passage Lamy briefly states what might be called the dogma of neoclassical aesthetics. In the English version, the text reads:
A discourse is beautiful when it is compos’d according to the Rules of Art; it is great when it is more than ordinary [sic] perspicuous; when there is not one equivocation; no sentence unintelligible; no expression ambiguous; when it is well-disposed, and the mind of the Reader led directly to the end of the design, without the remora or impediment of impertinent words. Such clearness like a Torch dispels all obscurity and makes every thing visible.15
Shortly after the passage just quoted Lamy refers with approval to the treatise On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus. This work had been known for a century but was little noticed until, in 1674, the French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux translated it into French with an introduction and notes. In 1694 he followed this up with a series of essays, Réflexions critiques sur quelques passages du Rhéteur Longin.16 Familiarity with On the Sublime brought to neoclassical rhetorical criticism an element it badly needed: a theory of genius and inspiration to rise above pedantic rules of composition without contradicting them. This was particularly valuable to those critics, like Boileau, who sought to defend the greatness of the classics in the debate between the Ancients and Moderns, what Jonathan Swift later called “The Battle of the Books,” a dispute hotly contended in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.17
Interest in “the sublime” grew in France, England, and Germany and finally burst its neoclassical limits completely into the aesthetic of romanticism.18 The major treatment in English was the work of the parliamentary orator Edmund Burke, entitled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).19 Burke equated the sublime with the strongest emotions that the mind can feel and saw its sources in ideas of pain and danger, whatever is in any sort terrible, is concerned with terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, and he further associated it with vastness, obscurity, infinity, and magnificence, both in nature and art. In contrast, the beautiful is that which causes love or a passion similar to love, like smallness in size, proportion, smoothness, and grace. Some of these concepts are reminiscent of Hermogenes’ “ideas” of “grandeur” and “beauty.”
The history of Christian rhetoric in the Renaissance and early modern period is too complex a subject to attempt to discuss in any detail in this book.20 Thousands of sermons in Latin and in all the vernacular languages were not only delivered but also published and avidly read; most general works on rhetoric have something to say about preaching, and hundreds of other works are primarily devoted to preaching. Any general account of the subject needs to consider differences between Catholic and Protestant preaching, and, within each group, differences between conservatives and liberals, Jesuits and Jansenists, Lutherans and Calvinists, and Anglicans and Dissenters. Augustine’s On Christian Learning continued to be an inspiration to many theorists of preaching. The thematic method of the medieval scholastics fell into disrepute. Agricola, Melanchthon, and especially Erasmus made major contributions. Among theoretical questions was the extent to which preaching should seek to stir the emotions of the audience and the related question of the extent to which ornamentation, and thus the classical tropes and figures, had an appropriate use in preaching. Calvinists generally favored a plain style but at the same time one imbued with the passion of the Holy Spirit. Catholic thinkers of the Counter Reformation were more inclined to combine the tradition of Ciceronian rhetoric with Old Testament prophecy to create a Christian grand style. Christian epideictic reached its greatest level of eloquence in the second half of the seventeenth century in France when ecclesiastical orators, including Louis Bourdaloue and Jean-Baptiste Massilon, achieved enormous fame. The greatest of all was Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704) in whose dramatic sermons sin wars with righteousness and death with life, and whose preaching combined rhetorical features of the Old Testament, Cicero, and the Church Fathers.21
Fashionable preaching in seventeenth-century France is the background for a fine statement of philosophical rhetoric by François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, entitled Dialogues sur l’éloquence en général et celle de la chaire en particulier, written in the late 1670s (but published posthumously in 1718).22 As the title suggests, Fénelon treats rhetoric in general but gives particular attention to the eloquence of the pulpit (la chaire). As archbishop of Cambrai, he had a special interest in the subject, but preaching was the single most important oratorical form in seventeenth-century France. In the fashion for elaborately ornamented preaching Fénelon saw dangers analogous to those Plato had seen in sophistry, and his Dialogues are a neoclassical version of the Phaedrus. The interlocutors are called A, B, and C. A corresponds to Socrates and states what are apparently the views of Fénelon himself; he is knowledgeable and authoritative, but not much individualized. B is a young man passionately interested in hearing fashionable preachers and, like Phaedrus, is easily taken in by meretricious adornments. C plays only a small role in the first two books, which are chiefly devoted to rhetoric in general, but pushes A hard in the third dialogue to achieve an understanding of early Christian rhetoric and its relevance for the modern preacher. The work has elegance and unity and brings out the issues very well, but it lacks the charm of an original Platonic dialogue. The sources from which A and C draw are primarily Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. The models of noble eloquence cited are Demosthenes, Cicero, some other Greeks and Romans, biblical orators, and Fathers of the Church. Vitiated contemporary sophist-preachers are not named, but Isocrates is repeatedly taken as the classic model of their faults. References to recent discussions are disguised or indirect, as when A seems to use Cicero and Augustine against Ramist rhetoric in Book 2 (p. 92). Boileau’s translation of Long-inus is, however, favorably mentioned, and admiration for On the Sublime throughout the work is clearly derived from Boileau.
Rhetoric as understood by Fénelon is primary rhetoric: it is spoken and persuasive; his focus is on function, on the effect on the audience. “Why should you speak,” asks A, “if not to persuade, to instruct, and to proceed in such a fashion that the listener remembers what you say?” (p. 58). B thinks that simple persuasion is all right for the common people but that “gentlemen have more refined ears” (p. 61). A admits that there are two goals of speaking, to persuade and to please, which is more reminiscent of Horace’s statement of the goal of poetry, to teach and to charm (Art of Poetry 333–44), than of Cicero’s duties of the orator. “But,” says A,
when they seek to please, they have another, more distant, aim, which is nevertheless the principal one. The good man seeks to please only that he may urge justice and the other virtues by making them attractive. He who seeks his own interest, his reputation, his fortune, dreams of pleasing only that he may gain the bow and esteem of men able to satisfy his greed or his ambition. Thus, even his case can be reduced like that of the good man to persuasion as the single aim which a speaker has; for the self-interested man wishes to please in order to flatter, and he flatters in order to inculcate that which suits his interest. (pp. 61–62)
Fénelon’s concept of the orator is similar to Plato’s: he is to lead a simple life, to be free of passion and self-interest. The people give him honor and accept him as an authority:
In the dialogue where he makes Socrates speak with Phaedrus, Plato shows that the great defect of the rhetoricians is that they strive for the art of persuasion before they understand, by the principles of philosophy, what are the things which they ought to seek to convince men of. . . . The speaker will be obliged to know what man is, what is his destiny, what are his true interests; of what he is made, that is to say, body and soul; what is the true way to make him happy; what are his passions, what excesses they may have, how they may be regulated, how they may be usefully aroused in order to make him live in peace and to keep society together. . . . Thus does Plato show that the role of true orator belongs only to the philosopher. It is with this in mind that we must interpret everything he says in the Gorgias against the rhetoricians; that is to say, against the kind of person who devises his own art of speech and persuasion, without putting himself to any trouble to know in terms of principles what one ought to seek to convince men of. . . . Cicero has virtually said the same things. (pp. 82–83)
On this note the dialogue of the first day ends.
In Book 2 Fénelon touches on matters of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, taking truth and nature and the persuasion of the audience as the criteria of excellence in each case without any fondness for rigid rules of composition. A claims that “all eloquence can be reduced to proving, to portraying, and to striking” (i.e., to logos, ethos, and pathos). “Every brilliant thought that does not drive toward one of these three things is only a conceit” (p. 92). The heart of rhetoric is neither in dialectic nor in style, but in persuasion. Delivery, often neglected in rhetorical handbooks, is thus given some prominence: “The entire art of the good orator consists only in observing what nature does when she is not hampered. Do not do what bad speakers do in striving always to declaim and never to talk to their listeners. On the contrary, each one of your listeners must suppose that you are speaking particularly to him” (p. 104). The common system of thematic preaching, with its multiple arid divisions, is scorned: “The ancients did not divide a discourse. But they carefully distinguished therein all the things which needed to be distinguished; they assigned each thing to its place; and they carefully considered in what place each thing must be put to make it most likely to have an effect” (p. 112).
In Book 3 Fénelon discusses preaching. The argument is built on what Augustine had said in On Christian Learning. The history of early Christian rhetoric is perceptively reviewed, the influence of vitiated style on Tertullian and some other writers is recognized, and the homiletic preaching of the Fathers of the Church is strongly recommended as a model in content, arrangement, and style.
Fénelon made constructive use of the insistence of the Port Royalists on the logical integrity of the thought of a speech, but without sacrificing an important role for the speaker and audience in the speech situation. He shows no interest in the old system of topics as the basis of oratorical invention. Not only does he not mention them, he insists that the speaker must have a deep knowledge of his subject. In the case of preaching, this knowledge can be a matter of certainty, though in the case of other forms of oratory it must be one of probability. In contrast to the Ramists, he thinks rhetoric is first of all a matter of invention. Style and delivery are important in performing its function, and Fénelon’s concept of rhetoric extends to all literature, including poetry, but rhetoric itself is something other than literary technique. The autocratic rule of Louis XIV did not permit much opportunity for deliberative oratory in France, and it is thus largely overlooked by Fénelon. Like most other writers on rhetoric before modern times, he thinks of an orator giving a set speech and does not envision a situation in debate in which exchange leads to compromise or consensus; yet that is what he pictures as resulting from the questions and answers of the characters in his dialogue.
Fénelon’s Dialogues appeared after his death in numerous French editions and were translated into German, Spanish, Dutch, and English. The influence of the work in Britain was considerable. William Stevenson published a free English translation in 1722, reprinted several times later, and two new translations appeared in the nineteenth century. The ideas of Fénelon entered into the work of several British writers who made major contributions to rhetoric.23
The relationship of rhetoric, as understood at the time, to the new science was much debated in the seventeenth century. Bacon had acknowledged a valuable role for rhetoric in human affairs. Descartes, in pursuit of philosophical certainty, was more doubtful. In Part I of Discourse on Method (1637) he speaks of his early esteem for eloquence and his subsequent conclusion that those with the strongest powers of reasoning, and who most skillfully arrange their thoughts to render them clear and intelligible, have the best power of persuasion even if they have never studied rhetoric. His adoption of a mathematical model of knowledge caused him to reject probable argument, and thus both dialectic and rhetoric as traditionally understood. In practice, however, like many philosophers, and with some apparent embarrassment, he found it necessary to utilize rhetorical methods to communicate with a general audience. Among his techniques were the use of French instead of Latin, the use of autobiographical narrative of the development of his thinking, and the use of imagery and the dialogue form.24
Thomas Hobbes might be said to have moved in the opposite direction from Descartes. Early in his career, while tutoring a young nobleman, he made a Latin translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and later revised it into an English version, published anonymously in 1637 under the title A Brief of the Art of Rhetorique.25 This is the first appearance of the Rhetoric in English, though it is more a running outline of the contents, with omissions and additions, than a translation. Later, in his major works, Hobbes came to see rhetoric as a threat to society, stirring up the passions of the crowd, and in the fifth chapter of his most famous work, Leviathan (1651), he attacked metaphorical language in particular as senseless, ambiguous, and a cause of contention, sedition, or contempt.26
The British counterpart of the French Academy was the Royal Society of London, which began as an informal group shortly before the middle of the seventeenth century and received a charter from Charles II in 1662. In contrast to the linguistic and literary interests of the French Academy, the Royal Society was much more concerned with science; but fundamental to that interest was the development of a new logic—inductive reasoning and scientific method, and discussion of logic in the seventeenth century necessarily involved the question of the province of rhetoric. Several members of the Royal Society had something to say about rhetoric,27 including the most famous philosopher of the time, John Locke. Locke had given lectures on rhetoric at Oxford in 1663, but what he said then is not known. In his most famous work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he seems at first to allow for something like Plato’s philosophical rhetoric as described in Phaedrus. It would have three legitimate functions: “First, to make known one man’s thoughts or ideas to another. Second, to do it with as much ease and quickness as is possible; and Thirdly, thereby to convey the knowledge of things” (3.10.3). Turning, however, to “the abuse of Words,” he concludes (3.10.34) with a stinging invective against rhetoric, reminiscent of Plato’s Gorgias:
Since wit and fancy find it easier entertainment in the world than dry truth and real knowledge, figurative speeches and allusion in language will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. I confess, in discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight than information and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed from them can scarce pass for faults. But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats; and therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them. What and how various they are, will be superfluous here to take notice; the books of rhetoric which abound in the world, will instruct those who want to be informed; only I cannot but observe how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind; since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred. It is evident how much men love to deceive and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation; and I doubt not but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality, in me to have said thus much against it. Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. And it is in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.
The reader might find amusement in identifying the dozen or more tropes and figures to be found in a passage where Locke denounces their use!
Neoclassicism appears in Italian art and architecture, and archaeological excavations began on a serious scale in the eighteenth century, but civic and intellectual life was then in general decay in Italy. One extraordinary figure, however, emerged and has a place in the history of rhetoric. This is Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), who was professor of Latin eloquence at the University of Naples. His lectures, preserved in student notes, have been published under the title Institutiones Rhetoricae; they set out the older classical tradition in reaction to views of other rhetorical authorities of his time.28 He also delivered epideictic addresses on civic and academic occasions in Naples and wrote epideictic poetry. One of his academic orations, expanded into a book, was published in 1709 and is known in English as On the Study Methods of Our Time.29 Here, in opposition to Descartes and the Port Royalists, he argues that the study of logic destroys the minds of the young because it prevents them from developing original thoughts; it should only be undertaken after they have been exercised in the use of metaphors, memory, and imaginative rhetorical composition.
Vico’s most important work is Scienza Nuova, or The New Science (1725, with later revisions), intended to counteract what was regarded as the “new science” in France and England.30 Here, arguing against Descartes and Locke, he explains that speech precedes thought; since speech is the subject of rhetoric, rhetoric is foundational and the basis of any understanding of human culture. He outlines a series of stages in the development of civilizations, beginning with the poetic wisdom of myth, through which experience of the world is ordered, leading to a later stage of abstract thought. This approach anticipated views of modern anthropologists. He also distinguishes four dominant tropes in social development: first metaphor or fable,31 then metonymy, synecdoche, and finally irony, when thought becomes philosophical and reflective.32 Vico’s work was ignored by rhetoricians of his own time and had no influence on others until it was rediscovered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The great Scottish philosopher David Hume was an admirer of classical rhetoric and himself one of the most eloquent of philosophers. In his essay Of Eloquence (1743) he laments the state of oratory in his own time:33 “If we be superior in philosophy, we are still, notwithstanding all our refinements, much inferior in eloquence.” This is strange, he thought, since “of all the polite and learned nations, England alone possesses a popular government, or admits into the legislature such numerous assemblies as can be supposed to lie under the dominion of eloquence. But what has England to boast of in this particular?” Ancient eloquence, he thought, “was infinitely more sublime than that which modern orators aspire to.” On the lips of “our temperate and calm speakers” Demosthenes’ oath by those who fell at Marathon or the pathetical passages of Cicero’s speeches against Verres would sound absurd. Equally absurd would seem the vehement delivery of the ancient orators.
Hume examines three reasons to explain this failure in eloquence and finds each unsatisfactory. It is true, he admits, that modern legal procedure and rules of evidence put constraints on judicial oratory, but it was deliberative oratory in antiquity that most elevated genius and gave full scope to eloquence. It is also true that modern customs, “or our superior good sense, if you will, make our orators more cautious and reserved than the ancient, in attempting to inflame the passions, or elevate the imagination of their audience.” But in Hume’s view modern customs should not have this effect. Ancient orators “hurried away with such a torrent of sublime and pathetic, that they left their hearers no leisure to perceive the artifice by which they were deceived.” “Of all human productions,” he continues, “the orations of Demosthenes present to us the models which approach the nearest to perfection.” Some people claim that the disorders of antiquity gave ampler matter for eloquence, to which Hume replies, “It would be easy to find a Philip in modern times; but where shall we find a Demosthenes?”
These reasons thus rejected, the only conclusion is that modern speakers simply do not make the effort or they lack the genius and judgment of the past: “A few successful attempts of this nature might rouse the genius of the nation, excite the emulation of the youth, and accustom our ears to a more sublime and more pathetic elocution, than what we have been hitherto entertained with.” As it is, “we are satisfied with our mediocrity, because we have had no experience of anything better.” Hume concludes with a specific observation about modern orators: “Their great affectation of extemporary discourses has made them reject all order and method, which seems so requisite to argument, and without which it is scarcely possible to produce an entire conviction on the mind.”
Hume’s essay, though not so cogently argued as many of his writings, is an interesting medley of themes of classical and eighteenth-century rhetoric, echoing some of what could be found in Tacitus’s Dialogue on Orators. Combined here are aspects of the debate of the Ancients and Moderns; the sophistic strand of classical rhetoric, with its admiration of the orator; the effect of the new logic on rhetoric; interest in the sublime and the equation of genius with the grand style; and the appeal of elocution.
The improvement in public speaking that Hume desired took place in English oratory in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The challenge of great issues arising from acquisition of a vast empire, and from the American and French Revolutions, brought the response of the most eloquent political debates since antiquity, and important cases in the lawcourts inspired oratorical display. It may well be that there was in fact an effort by speakers to achieve a higher level of eloquence, helped by greater attention to rhetoric in education and by rivalries among leaders of different factions. A French visitor, Amédée Pichot, in 1825 published his observations of British eloquence of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, distinguishing three styles heard in the lawcourts: the English style, simple and devoted to discussion of technical issues; the Irish, florid, emotional, and poetic; and the Scottish, which combined the styles of the other two.34 The great orators of this period include Thomas Erskine, James Macintosh, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, William Pitt the Younger, and in the early nineteenth century, George Canning and Lord Brougham.35 Burke’s speech On Conciliation with the Colonies and the series of speeches in prosecution of Warren Hastings for corruption as governor of India are classic works of English literature.
In Germany, rhetoric became the victim of romantic aestheticism and the idealization of poetry. Immanuel Kant, whose influence dominated German philosophy throughout the nineteenth century, expressed the relation as follows:
The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding. Thus the orator announces a serious business, and for the purpose of entertaining his audience conducts it as if it were a play with ideas. The poet promises merely an entertaining play with ideas, and yet for the understanding there inures as much as if the promotion of its business had been his one intention.36
Kant then describes oratory as exploiting the weakness of hearers and dismisses the art of rhetoric as worthy of no respect.
Before moving on to discuss the important developments of the second half of the eighteenth century in Britain, a subject of special interest to American readers, it is desirable to give brief mention to some major treatises written on the continent. Most are long works, written in vernacular languages, intended for teachers of speech and writing and as a contribution to the development of the national literature of their authors, and adapting the classical tradition to the perceived needs of the time.
France continued to dominate the international scene in the first half of the century. Traité de l’éloquence by Claude Buffier, published in 1728, is the work of a Jesuit priest who was familiar with ideas of Descartes and Locke and wished to preserve a place for rhetoric in human affairs.37 It focuses on the nature and attainment of true eloquence in contrast to what only appears to be eloquent, and emphasizes natural talent and practice more than observation of rules. Invention and arrangement are touched on, but most of the work is devoted to style, by which the soul can be moved to belief and action. The discussion includes some remarks on vivacity, a topic taken up later by British rhetoricians. Toward the end of the work, Buffier discusses judicial rhetoric and preaching, with French examples of different genres and critical observations on Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Buffier was also the author of a treatise on memory systems, which was frequently reprinted.
Much more widely known was Traité des études: De la manière d’ enseigner et d’étudier les Belles-Lettres, by Charles Rollin, first published in 1726 with many later printings and repeated translations into English, German, Italian, and even Russian.38 Rollin was an educational reformer who sought to reduce the role of rote memorization in schools and encourage study of French side by side with Latin, and was also the author of a textbook of ancient history widely used in Europe, Britain, and America as late as the nineteenth century. His treatise on rhetoric, like Lamy’s, relates rhetoric closely to language study and illustrates how to analyze exemplary French texts. It thus was a further step toward a primarily literary approach to the subject, encouraged by the need to teach composition in schools and by the relatively limited role of public address in autocratic France.
A crucial further step in the understanding of rhetoric in France began with the treatise Des Tropes, published by César-Chesneau Du-Marsais in 1730. Its subtitle can be translated, “Some Different Senses in Which One Can Take a Word in the Same Language.” This culminated the tendency toward regarding rhetoric as the study of literary devices of style, begun in France with Ramus, and became the standard approach to the subject in French schools until replaced by Pierre Fontanier’s Traité générale des figures du discours after 1821.39 Although Du-Marsais’s work was translated into English, rhetoricians in Britain in the later eighteenth century, where oratory had a significant role in public life, viewed rhetoric in something closer to the classical sense, with a secondary application to literary composition. The result has been a division between the European understanding of rhetoric as primarily a matter of the use of tropes and figures, taken up by teachers of English in Britain and America, and an American tradition among teachers of speech viewing rhetoric as civic discourse, derived from classical sources and other eighteenth-century British rhetoricians. This split has continued into the twentieth century, although new approaches have begun to find ways to bridge the gap.
The most important German treatise on rhetoric in the eighteenth century was probably Johann Christof Gottsched’s Ausführliche Redekunst, or “Complete Art of Rhetoric,” first published in 1736.40 It presents rhetoric as understood in the classical tradition, but with ideas from Lamy, Rollins, and others to bring it up-to-date, and with special attention to the speaking and writing of German. The second part of this long work consists of German translations and imitations of classical and other speeches and letters. It was much read in Germany and eastern Europe throughout the eighteenth century.41
In Spain the most significant new rhetorical treatise of the eighteenth century was the work of Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, professor of jurisprudence at the University of Valencia. His Rhetórica of 1757 devotes books to invention, including stasis theory and dialectical topics, to arrangement, to style, and to delivery, with a fifth book on framing questions and answers, conversation, letters, dialogues, inscriptions, and historical writing.42 As Rollin in French and Gottsched in German sought to improve composition in their national languages, so Mayáns was much concerned with the development of literary Spanish. He illustrates his doctrines with Spanish proverbs and the nondramatic literature of the Spanish Golden Age, as well as ancient sources, and criticizes seventeenth-century mannerism. Although Mayáns corresponded frequently with intellectual leaders in other countries, his Rhetórica does not seem to have been much known outside of Spain and Latin America.43
During the eighteenth century in Britain, five different approaches to rhetoric are evident. One of these is the revival of the technical, largely Ciceronian, tradition. A second was the peculiar Elocutionary Movement, which shares some of the features of sophistry. A third was neoclassical philosophical rhetoric somewhat like that expounded by Fénelon, with roots in Plato. A fourth was belletristic rhetoric, adapting some features of traditional rhetoric to study of literature. A fifth, in contrast to the third, was the attempt to create a new philosophical rhetoric based on the new logic, with the addition to it of a new psychology as developed by the British Empiricist philosophers, paying some lip service to classical rhetoric but differing from it in fundamental ways.
The first approach is seen in the teaching of rhetoric at the elementary level, which continued much as it had throughout the Renaissance, sometimes in the full Ciceronian tradition, sometimes limited to study of tropes and figures.44 At the more advanced level it is exemplified by the lectures of John Ward at Gresham College, London, which were published in 1759 under the title A System of Oratory.45 Ward’s fifty-four lectures set forth Ciceronian rhetoric in a thorough, rather pedantic way. Although he had read Fénelon, he was untouched by his spirit, and although he knew of attacks on the system of topics, he described it in the old way. Ward’s rhetoric was praised at the time of publication and was used as a textbook in American colleges, but it was soon overshadowed by newer approaches and not reprinted.
A second approach to rhetoric in the eighteenth century was the Elocutionary Movement.46 Elocutio was the Latin word for style, but it literally means “speaking out,” and its English derivative, “elocution,” was adapted as a term for delivery or reading aloud. Delivery, divided into control of the voice and use of gestures, was the fifth part of classical rhetoric but had often been neglected by medieval and Renaissance rhetoricians. Interest in it began to revive with the effort to achieve high standards of delivery in preaching and in the theater in the seventeenth century. Early works on rhetorical gestures in English are John Bulwer’s Chirologia, Or the Natural Language of the Hand and Chironomia, Or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644).47
The French Jesuit Louis de Cressoles wrote a Latin treatise on delivery early in the century. But more influential was the work of a French Protestant, Michel Le Faucher, entitled Traité de l’action de l’orateur, ou de la pronunciation et du geste, published soon after his death in 1657. Fénelon also discussed delivery as an important feature of rhetoric, but interest in elocution flourished most in the British Isles, where its leading proponent was the Irishman Thomas Sheridan, father of the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The elder Sheridan tried to establish a school of correct English speech, which he hoped would attract students from England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and the British colonies and would contributed to the cultivation of a standard English. He lectured widely and published several works, of which his Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762) was the best known.48 To Sheridan, the only part of ancient rhetoric that really mattered was delivery. He attracted much attention, and the resulting Elocutionary Movement has a history in Britain and America that stretches even into the early twentieth century. Demonstrations of elocution are a part of the sophistic strand of classical rhetoric. Plato’s Menexenus is supposed to have been recited annually in Athens in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and Greek orators of the Second Sophistic repeated their best speeches with appropriate gestures all over the Roman Empire. Sheridan gave little attention to gesture, as important as it was for elocutionists. An exhaustive treatment of that subject, complete with a system of written notation to be used to “score” a speech, was published in 1806 by Gilbert Austin under the title Chironomia: or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery.49
The third approach, along the lines of the philosophical rhetoric of Fénelon, is best represented by the work of John Lawson, who taught rhetoric at Dublin and in 1758 published his Lectures Concerning Oratory, Delivered in Trinity College.50 Lawson regarded rhetoric as “the Handmaid of Truth” and sought to answer the objections of Locke by taking up Bacon’s view that rhetoric, though inferior to wisdom in excellence, was superior in common use: to impart truth, Lawson asserted, it is necessary to “soften the severity of her aspect” and thus to “borrow the embellishments of rhetoric.” In approaching the parts of rhetoric, Lawson sought to reconcile Bacon and Aristotle, and in treating the topics he noted the objections to them but felt they were useful for beginners. He viewed the study of rhetoric in his own time as aiming primarily at the improvement of eloquence in English, and especially in preaching. Style was an important part, but Lawson rather scorned the artifices of tropes and figures, and he disapproved of the growing interest in elocution. Most interesting, perhaps, is his eighteenth lecture. Here he turns from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Cicero’s On the Orator as his main sources to Plato’s Phaedrus, of which he gives a summary. He says that Phaedrus contains “the fundamental precepts of rhetoric, enlarged afterwards and reduced into a regular system by Aristotle, to which succeeding writers have added little new; even the eloquence and experience [Bacon’s word] of Tully [the common neoclassical name for M. Tullius Cicero] did not much more than adorn these.” Lawson ended his lecture with enthusiastic praise of Plato’s “poetic” style and a poem of his own composition, modeled on the popular myth of the choice of Heracles, in which the young Plato is faced with a choice between the two allegorical figures of Philosophy and Poetry. He chooses Philosophy but is rewarded with the gift of Poetry as well. Lawson’s Lectures went rapidly through four printings, but the work did not have as much use as it deserved and was soon overshadowed by others.
In 1958 two sets of student notes of lectures by Adam Smith on rhetoric and belles lettres were discovered in a library in Scotland. Smith, later to become famous for his pioneering work on capitalism, The Wealth of Nations (1776), had delivered the lectures while teaching moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1762–63, probably elaborating lectures he had given in Edinburgh earlier.51 Smith’s lectures are the earliest known statement in English of belletristic rhetoric, the fourth of the approaches to rhetoric mentioned above. The lectures were not published until 1963, but they exerted an influence on those who had heard them, including Hugh Blair, who later lectured on the same subject in Edinburgh.
Smith begins, like Lamy, with observations on the nature and history of language. He describes books on figures of speech as generally “very silly.” Beauty does not consist in the use of figures; style is beautiful when a thing is neatly and properly described and the sentiment of the author is conveyed. The influence of Locke is evident here. The English prose styles of Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, and Lord Shaftesbury are then discussed, followed by appraisals of other authors, ancient and modern, with special attention first to writers of history, then to poets. At this point in the lecture series the student should have an understanding of language, style, narrative, characterization, and literary genres. The last ten lectures are devoted to oratory. Although it was one of Smith’s announced objectives to prepare students for activity in public address, he concentrates on giving them an understanding of great classical oratory, especially works of Demosthenes and Cicero, and does not provide a systematic discussion of invention or arrangement. The manuscripts break off at this point. Smith may have continued with observations about British oratory of the recent past.
The fifth approach to rhetoric was the systematic effort to think out a new theory on the basis of the work of the British Empiricist philosophers, and especially that of Hume. Locke had thought of the mind as an empty page on which experience (Greek empeiria) writes; knowledge comes partly from experience, partly from reflection on experience. Hume and others added to this the principle of association: the mind draws its conclusions from the association of resemblances, contiguities, or causes and effects. Passions arise in the mind either from direct affections (joy and sorrow, desire and aversion, hope and fear) or from indirect affections associated with objects and their causes. These concepts and others related to them constitute a theory of human nature and human knowledge that has implications for rhetoric. In Elements of Criticism (1762) Henry Homes (Lord Kames) applied the new learning to rhetorical style. Contemporary thinking about psychology also influenced Joseph Priestley’s A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Composition (1777).52 More significant, however, were the studies of George Campbell, professor of divinity at the University of Aberdeen, who attempted “to explore human nature and find herein the principles which underlie and explain the art of rhetoric.”53 The result was The Philosophy of Rhetoric, published in 1776. Book 1 is entitled “The Nature and Foundations of Eloquence,” Book 2 “The Foundations and Essential Properties of Elocution,” by which Campbell meant style, and Book 3 “The Discriminating Properties of Elocution,” which develops Campbell’s theory of “vivacity,” or liveliness of ideas, the quality, in his theory, primarily responsible for attention and belief.
Campbell departed radically from the traditional structure and terminology and many of the ideas of classical rhetoric, though others, including the roles of speakers and hearers and the stylistic virtues of purity and perspicuity, are discussed.54 He occasionally cites examples from classical literature or classical rhetoricians, including Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, but at least as often he refers to modern writers. Nevertheless, he thought of his work as directly linked to the classical tradition in rhetoric. In the introduction (pp. L–LI) he outlines the empirical sources of the rhetorical art. The first step, he says, is nature: there were orators before there were rhetoricians. The second is observation, the beginnings of the critical science of discovering modes of arguing or forms of speech. The third step is comparing the various effects, favorable or unfavorable, of those attempts at speech,
to discover to what particular purpose each attempt is adapted, and in which circumstances only to be used. The fourth is to canvass those principles in our nature to which the various attempts are adapted, and by which, in any instance, their success or want of success may be accounted for. . . . The observations and rules transmitted to us from these distinguished names in the learned world, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, have been for the most part only translated by later critics, or put into a modish dress and new arrangement. And as to the fourth and last step, it may be said to bring us into a new country, of which, though there have been some successful incursions occasionally made upon its frontiers, we are not yet in full possession.
Campbell thus comes not to deny classical rhetoric, but to go beyond and fulfill understanding of it. When he gives his definition of eloquence in the opening of Book 1, “that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end,” he immediately cites Quintilian’s support in a note and goes on to say that he chose this definition for two reasons: “it exactly corresponds to Tully’s [Cicero’s] idea of a perfect orator; and it is best adapted to the subject” of his own work.
Campbell’s work was widely studied, not the least in America, where over thirty editions were printed and where it was frequently used as a college text. Its long-term effect was to supply a modern rhetoric that satisfied many teachers and students and reduced their dependence on classical sources, not necessarily on classical statements of rules such as those in Quintilian, but on the more speculative discussions of rhetoric by Plato and Aristotle and by Cicero in On the Orator. It was widely believed in the eighteenth century, even by defenders of “the Ancients,” that modern philosophy had made remarkable strides beyond that of the past. The reputation of both Plato and Aristotle suffered at this time, and Campbell seemed to be providing a basic theory of rhetoric built on the best of modern thought.
The most definitive statement of neoclassical rhetoric, combining features of the approaches just discussed, came from Hugh Blair (1718–1800). Blair, like Hume, Smith, and Campbell, was a part of the Scottish Enlightenment, a group of intellectuals who brought a note of dispassionate common sense and reason to philosophy and literature in the eighteenth century and a note of liberal imagination to the dour Calvinism of the North.55 Blair was a Presbyterian minister who also served as Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh. (A “regius” professor is one whose position is funded by the king.) The Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, which Blair published in 1783, had been repeatedly delivered over more than twenty years, apparently with little revision.56
Blair is known today almost solely from his lectures on rhetoric, but he had earlier published an edition of the works of Shakespeare in eight volumes and other literary studies. The title, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, reflects the title of his professorship, but “Lectures on Belles Lettres and Rhetoric” would be a better description. His literary interests are clearly seen from the outset when he begins with belletristic topics important to his contemporaries: taste, criticism, genius, sublimity, and beauty. He then turns to the history of language, with special attention to the development and possibilities of English, culminating in a discussion of style, including classical tropes and figures. He focuses on a small number of devices of style, which he discusses in depth, and avoids the pedantry of meaningless lists. He cites examples from Greek, Latin, and English poetry and concludes the first half of his course with four lectures on the style of Addison, analyzing specific Spectator papers, and with one lecture on Jonathan Swift. These are the same two authors that Adam Smith, whose lectures Blair had attended, took as models of good style.
The second volume of the lectures as published then turns to primary rhetoric—its history, its kinds, the oratory of the senate, the bar, and the pulpit, the parts of an oration and its argumentation, and delivery. These subjects take up nine out of a total of forty-seven lectures. Selections from Demosthenes, part of Cicero’s speech for Cluentius, and a sermon by Bishop Atterbury are analyzed. “Philosophical rhetoric” is seen in Blair’s emphasis on the importance of truth in oratory: “True eloquence,” he says, “is the art of placing truth in the most advantageous light for conviction and persuasion” (vol. II, p. 104). “Conviction” is the term used by the British rhetoricians to mean logical demonstration, while “persuasion” includes ethical and emotional factors. The doctrine of topics, or loci, is dismissed as of little practical help (II, p. 180).
The philosophical strand in the rhetorical tradition is thus evident in Blair’s teaching, but so is the sophistic strand. Consider the following passage in Lecture 34, “Means of Improving Eloquence”:
To be an Eloquent Speaker, in the proper sense of the word, is far from being either a common or an easy attainment. Indeed, to compose a florid harangue on some popular topic, and to deliver it so as to amuse an Audience, is a matter not very difficult. But though some praise be due to this, yet the idea, which I have endeavored to give of Eloquence, is much higher. It is a great exertion of the human powers. It is the Art of being persuasive and commanding: the Art, not of pleasing the fancy merely, but of speaking both to the understanding and to the heart; of interesting the hearers in such a degree, as to seize and carry them along with us; and to leave them with a deep and strong impression of what they have heard. How many talents, natural and acquired, must concur for carrying this to perfection? A strong, lively, and warm imagination; quick sensibility of heart, joined with solid judgment, good sense, and presence of mind; all improved by great and long attention to Style and Composition; and supported also by the exterior, yet important qualifications, of a graceful manner, a presence not ungainly, and a full and tuneable voice. How little reason to wonder, that a perfect and accomplished Orator should be one of the characters that is most rarely to be found? Let us not despair, however, between mediocrity and perfection, there is a very wide interval. (II, pp. 226–27)
This is Blair’s version of the praise of the orator by Gorgias, Isocrates, Cicero, and Quintilian. He turns then to the question of how to improve oratory. Nature must bestow talent; art must cultivate it. Personal character and disposition are important. Only a good man can be a good orator, as Quintilian maintained. Next in importance is a fund of general knowledge, including poetry and history. Then follows imitation of good models and exercise in composing and speaking, and finally the study of criticism. Here the ancient writers on rhetoric are useful, but they tried to do too much, to form an orator by rule. “Whereas, all that can, in truth, be done, is to give openings for assisting and enlightening Taste, and for pointing out to Genius the course it ought to follow” (II, p. 243). “Of all the antient [sic] writers on the subject of oratory, the most instructive and most useful” is Quintilian, “though some parts of his work contain too much of the technical and artificial system then in vogue” (II, pp. 244–45).
In the thirty-fifth lecture Blair turns from oratory back to belles lettres to discuss the comparative merits of the Ancient and the Moderns—he takes the view that the Ancients are the superior or equals of the Moderns in genius, or creative imagination, but that there have been remarkable developments in modern science—and to discuss the major genres of modern literature. The result is to imbed the discussion of primary rhetoric into the middle of a larger account of language and literature in written form, to integrate rhetoric into belles lettres.
Blair’s lectures were widely studied on both sides of the Atlantic. More than fifty editions of the full text are known to have been published in Britain, and the work was translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian. Many other editions were published in America, where the work was the most commonly used rhetoric textbook during the first half of the nineteenth century.57
What might arguably be called the last important British neoclassical rhetorical treatise is Richard Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric, first published in 1828 when Whately was teaching political economy at Oxford and extensively revised in later editions after he became Anglican archbishop of Dublin in 1831. Discussion here relates to the fullest version, the seventh edition of 1846.58
Whately’s subtitle, Comprising an Analysis of the Laws of Moral Evidence and of Persuasion, with Rules for Argumentative Composition and Elocution, gives an indication of the contents and tendency of the work. In an extended introduction Whately says that the “province” of rhetoric at its extreme limits includes all composition in prose, and at its narrowest limits persuasive speaking. He proposes “to adopt a middle course between these two extreme points; and to treat of ‘Argumentative Composition’ generally and exclusively, considering Rhetoric (in conformity with the very just and philosophical view of Aristotle) as an off-shoot from Logic” (Intro. 1, p. 4). The main body of the work is divided into four parts: I, “Of the Address to the Understanding, with a View to Produce Conviction (Including Instruction)”; II, “Of the Address to the Will, or Persuasion”; III, “Of Style”; and IV, “Of Elocution or Delivery.” Whately had earlier published Elements of Logic. Logic’s function, he thought, was to judge the validity of arguments, whereas rhetoric invented (that is, found arguments to prove a proposition) and arranged them. Appeal to the emotions he described as shared with poetry. His discussion of style considers three virtues: perspicuity, energy or vivacity (from Campbell), and elegance or beauty. In discussing elocution he dismisses the artificial systems of Sheridan and Austin and seeks to train a natural delivery.
In his introduction to Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric editor Douglas Ehninger made a series of important points about the work. First, it is predominantly an ecclesiastical rhetoric. Whately has nothing to say about civic rhetoric; the chief business of rhetoric in his view is to arm a preacher for the task of conveying the indisputable doctrines of Christianity to his congregation and to arm the Christian controversialist to defend the evidences of religion against the attacks of agnostics and deists. Second, the work persistently focuses on oral argument, although Whately does give practical advice on training in written composition, especially in the introductions to the later editions. Third, the Elements was intended as an introductory college text, not a philosophical treatise. Ehninger also stressed the growth of the book over six revisions and its uneven quality, agreeing with other critics that the best parts are the introduction and the discussions of “conviction” and “delivery.”
Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric had some use as a textbook in Britain but was especially popular in America, replacing the works of Blair and Campbell in some colleges. His observations on composition in the introduction, influenced by the romantic movement of his time, encouraged teachers to abandon set themes, imitations, and amplifications as practiced earlier and to assign free composition based on the student’s experience: Whately seems to have been the first to propose the essay topic, “What I did on my summer vacation.”
Puritans introduced Ramist rhetoric to the Harvard curriculum in the seventeenth century. In the mid-eighteenth century the published lectures of John Ward, discussed above, became the approved texts at several of the new colonial colleges. Study of Ward’s lectures brought Ciceronian rhetoric to the colonies at a time when oratory and public debate were about to experience remarkable development during the great events that created the American Republic. The first original teaching of rhetoric in America was the series of lectures on rhetoric given by John Witherspoon at Princeton as part of a course on moral philosophy and eloquence required of all students beginning in 1769.59
Witherspoon was born in Scotland in 1722 and was a classmate of Hugh Blair, but they became opponents in controversy over education and church government. Both were Presbyterian ministers, but Blair, a theological moderate, sought to bring English culture to the rougher world of Scotland and to impose an intellectually enlightened clergy on local congregations. Witherspoon stood for a stricter Calvinism, for local influence in choosing ministers, and for individual freedom of conscience. Blair’s approach to rhetoric was elitist, belletristic, and concerned with literary criticism; Witherspoon’s civic, populist, and connected with politics and ethics. Though he admired literature and learning, Witherspoon conceived of rhetoric as practical training in composition, argumentation, and public speaking. Called to become president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton) in 1768, he found America in political ferment. He trained Madison, Burr, and other leaders of the Revolution, took up the cause of American independence, and signed the Declaration of Independence as a delegate from New Jersey.
The word “rhetoric” appears only rarely in Witherspoon’s lectures. His preferred term was “eloquence.” He cites Aristotle, Cicero, Longinus, Ward, Lamy, Fénelon, Rollin, Burke, and other sources (Blair’s lectures had not yet been published), and his approach throughout is broadly classicizing, but his teaching was original in a number of respects. In Lecture VI, for example, he criticizes Ward’s division of style into low, middle, and sublime and prefers to speak of three kinds of eloquence and composition: sublime, simple, and mixed. In Lecture XIII he makes a useful division of eloquence on the basis of the different ends or objects of the writer or speaker, identifying them as information, demonstration, persuasion, and entertainment. Lecture XIV then takes up the subjects of oratory, divided into the eloquence of the pulpit, the bar, and what he calls “promiscuous” (that is, mixed) assemblies. Throughout his lectures, Witherspoon shows sensitivity to the special needs of American students in studying composition and public speaking under the conditions of the times.
Witherspoon’s lectures were given, at least intermittently, over a period of about twenty years. He died in 1794. The lectures were published in his collected Works in 1800–1801 and in editions with his lectures on moral philosophy in 1810 and 1822, but they never became popular texts. Blair’s lectures were preferred by most teachers as more polished, and, with the end of the revolutionary period, belletristic rhetoric was regarded as an important study in improving taste in a culturally underdeveloped country.
The most classical early American rhetoric is that described in lectures given in 1806 by John Quincy Adams, the first holder of the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. “A subject which has exhausted the genius of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian,” said the future president, “can neither require nor admit much additional illustration. To select, combine, and apply their precepts, is the only duty left for their followers of all succeeding times, and to obtain a perfect familiarity with their instructions is to arrive at the mastery of the art.”60 In the following lectures Adams turns most often to Quintilian as his source; he dismisses Plato in Lecture 3 as “intellectual chaos.” Although he was familiar with Blair and other Moderns, his presentation is based on classical authorities and even expounds the theory of the topics (Lecture 9).
In contrast, later nineteenth-century reference to classical authority by American teachers of rhetoric is often window dressing. As Professor John McVikar of Columbia complained in 1833, the study of classics and the study of rhetoric drifted apart: “The present junior class knows nothing of Cicero’s De Oratore,” he lamented.61 Romanticism rejected the belief that artistry should be based on rules and imitations of canonical models, the Elocutionary Movement drew student and public attention, and rhetorical theory became an aspect of belles lettres and English composition. In the course of the century the Boylston Professorship, despite the founder’s intention, was converted first into a chair of belles lettres and ultimately into a professorship of poetry.
At the same time, however, classical philology advanced rapidly, first in Germany, then in Britain and America. Important publications of the nineteenth century included the collected Rhetores Graeci of Christian Walz, published in nine volumes from 1832 to 1836; Richard Volkmann’s reference book Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer in Systematische Übersicht; E. M. Cope’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, followed by a commentary on the Greek text, edited by J. M. Sandys after Cope’s death; and R. C. Jebb’s The Attic Orators.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche began his career as a teacher of classical philology at the University of Basel; among the subjects on which he lectured in the period between 1872 and 1874 were Greek oratory and Greek and Roman rhetoric. Some of his lecture notes survive and have been translated into English.62 In them Nietzsche defends rhetoric against the criticisms of Plato, Kant, and other philosophers and gives an account of the subject based on the classical sources and recent German surveys.63