Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern

“The American,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest far more upon brilliant phrases than upon logical ideas.”¹ Mencken’s rhetorical American remains, like most myths of the culture, an uneasy fixture in the popular and pedagogic landscape. In The American Language, he stands at the intersection of the many features Mencken sought to classify as the “hallmarks of American.” Mencken is first and foremost concerned with the growth of the American vocabulary: with the burgeoning of coinages, loanwords, and creative expressions that, like the example “rubberneck” he gives, form in nuce “almost a complete treatise on American psychology.” But if Mencken is fascinated with the new words of the language, he is also concerned with defining rhetoric itself. Its province here is largely public oratory and tale telling: persuasion and celebration; the art of convincing people that they need to vote for, believe in, or buy something; the rites of bringing people into ceremonies of occasion. But whether they be public addresses or private gatherings, speeches before great halls or tales around campfires, American rhetorical performances remain just that: performances that display both the national and individual character.

The American rhetorical tradition has long been understood as a form of public language that reveals a private self. Writing half a century after the fourth, and final, edition of Mencken’s book, Jay Fliegelman considers what he calls the “culture of performance” that shaped Jeffersonian democracy as concerned precisely with the public and the private.² His survey of Enlightenment rhetorical traditions and their impact on American discourses hinges on reactions against older Ciceronian and Aristotelian practices that came to be considered as unnatural or artificial. The oratorical ideal of the late eighteenth century was one of natural theatricalism, where the personal could be effectively expressed through language handled well. Questions of authorship and individual identity, national belonging, individual sincerity, and public authenticity were all considered to be subspecies of rhetorical theory. Self-presentation was not to be shadowed by the artifice of learned expression; rather, such learning was to be pressed into the service of revealing, not concealing, the person behind the persona. As Parson Weems had put it, in a passage that stands at the heart of Fliegelman’s embedded history of American rhetoric, “Private life is always real life.”³ Self-presentation through the forms of rhetorical staging is not, as Fliegelman argues, “merely a strategy of concealment. Rather, it represents a particular moral and social conception of identity.”⁴

This moral and social conception of identity stands, too, at the heart of American philology—a practice that, I argue in this chapter, is a fundamentally rhetorical enterprise. American philology and rhetoric preoccupy themselves with estrangement and displacement: with the separation of words from things, with the fluidity of meanings, with the pursuit of political argument through scholarly inquiry. These are the projects of the errant and the erroneous, projects that look back to the first claims for linguistic study in the new nation. Addressing the Americans of 1793 in his Cadmus, William Thornton avers: “You have corrected the dangerous doctrines of European powers, correct now the languages you have imported, for the oppressed of various nations knock at your gates, and desire to be received as your brethren. As you admit them facilitate your intercourse, and you will mutually enjoy the benefits.—The AMERICAN LANGUAGE will thus be as distinct as the government, free from all the follies of unphilosophical fashion, and resting upon truth as its only regulator.”⁵ Language is something to be righted. To “correct” is—for this Cadmus or my Casaubon—to draw a straight line, to be placed on roads not errant but exact. The true method of analysis gave rise to idioms of straightness, of correction, and of rectitude in all its forms in both rhetorical and philological instruction. The American will vivify these metaphors. To wander in the woods, to find a clear path through the forest, to err along pathways ill advised or ill marked—all these dead clichés take on a new life in a landscape rife with being lost.

Such imagery was always central to American writers on language. John Quincy Adams saw ours as a land of tropes and figures: of place names estranged from their points of origin, of forests filled not with the hydras of a classical mythology but with the rattlesnakes of local fears. “An error,” he notes, “was a wandering of the feet”—an etymology designed to make us ask not just where we shall wander but on what our feet will step.⁶ And for Henry Tuckerman, writing in the mid-nineteenth century about the importance of Horne Tooke and his theories of etymology, the figurations of familiar imagery become uniquely ours: “He certainly opened many new vistas in the dense and tangled forest of words.”⁷ Philology becomes the servant of expansion; linguistic history is manifest destiny.⁸

Philologists and rhetoricians have both made claims for the unique importance of their subject in America, and, at times, their polemics may seem indistinguishable from each other. “There is a sense,” wrote the modern historian of rhetoric George Kennedy in 1994, in a revivalist vein, “in which a history of rhetoric might be thought of as a history of the values of a culture and how these were taught or imposed upon the society.”⁹ How different is this statement, really, from the claims for the philologist made by Albert S. Cook a century before?

The history of American philology and rhetoric is part and parcel of that struggle of a given nation, whether it be the “free republic” that John Quincy Adams said “bestows importance upon the powers of eloquence” or the distinctive “cosmopolitan blend” that makes America, for Basil Gildersleeve, the ideal place for the “ready assimilation of whatever makes for life in the philological world.”¹¹ This chapter offers, then, a double history of American rhetoric and philology. It looks at the errores of academic life, not simply in the wanderings of scholars or the mistakes that they made but as part of a larger claim about the wanderings of meanings. For in this telos lies a further claim. The recent moves in literary theory for returns to rhetoric and philology resonate with the history of those disciplines in this country. The legacy of Paul de Man—the habits of etymologizing the names of rhetorical tropes, the fascination with irony—lies, for all its apparent European patina, squarely in the inheritance of American rhetorical philology. To read as an American is to make tropes of words and, in the process, to replay in linguistic terms the patterns of emigration and estrangement that have made us who we are.

But if this is a chapter about disciplines, it is a chapter, too, about feelings. Ardor lies at the very heart of argument. For Cicero—whose writings form the spine of the American rhetorical tradition and, in turn, my chapter’s exposition—the orator must seem as much to burn (ardere) with passion as the audience he would convince.¹² Each of my scholarly characters is, if not an ardent rhetorician of Mencken’s imagination, then an ardent etymologist of my own: zealous, emotionally charged, at times aflame with philological desire (recall George Hickes and his vision of the poet, and, by implication, the philologist, incalescens). But they are ardent, too, in that they all confront the very problem that this word exemplifies: a challenging historical relationship between the literal and metaphorical. From Samuel Johnson onward, such words provoked the philological imagination. “The original sense of words is often driven out of use by their metaphorical acceptations, yet must be inserted for the sake of regular origination. Thus I know not whether ardour is used for material heat, or whether flagrant, in English, ever signifies the same with burning.”¹³ Should we privilege the older, literal sense or the newer, metaphorical meaning? My etymologists all ground their scholarship in a notion of origination, not just of the word but of the nation. For John Quincy Adams and his academic heirs, for William Dwight Whitney, for Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, for the Cornell rhetoricians at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for the deconstructionists at its close—for all, the pursuit of etymology is the pursuit of national identity. Their writings reveal scholarly personae that enable a new understanding of the American academic self, one shaped by an ardent attention the errancies of a career or the slippages of signifying.

I begin with John Quincy Adams, the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (delivered in 1806–1809 and published in 1810), for all their civic Ciceronianism, give voice to a metaphysical philology rooted in the tradition of Horne Tooke. In his emphasis on figurative language and his obsessive etymologies, his political analysis and historical reflections, Adams writes a philological rhetoric: an argument for the word histories of tropes themselves, a claim for the devices of poetic expression and the politics of literary purpose.¹⁴ Take, for example, his inaugural oration. Its historical sweep, long periodic sentences, appeals to authority, paired oppositions, and practical philosophy are reminiscent of such texts as the opening of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, while its distinctive blend of patrician Harvard and republican America work out, almost as a contemporary allegory, the appropriative and political relationship that Cicero had voiced both toward his Greek predecessors and his Roman contemporaries.¹⁵

Note the appositions here: art versus science; Demosthenes and Socrates; Plato and Cicero. Note, too, the yoking together of metaphors from science (“zenith”) and social competition (“palm”), and the evocatively oxymoronic “unanswered eloquence.” Like Cicero, Adams offers a syncretic view of rhetorical history. He goes back to the central question of the discipline—whether rhetoric is truly an art or simply a knack—and invokes not just Cicero’s name but the very terms of his own historical surveys. The image of the “wise and virtuous man” translates Cicero’s magnus vir et sapiens.¹⁷ The question of whether the sciences promote misery or happiness echoes the opening feints of De Inventione, where Cicero reflects on whether societies “have received more good or evil from oratory” (1.1.1, pp. 2–3). Adams’s subsequent history of the origins of human reason and the emergence of the man of eloquence mime the continued story of De Inventione, where the making of social community hinges on the unification of ratio and oratio in the man who would unite “wild savages into a kind a gentle folk” (1.1.2, pp. 6–7).

If Adams seeks a Ciceronian argument to his opening polemic, he is most decisively American in the metaphors that express it. His first lecture on the nature of rhetoric and oratory distinguishes these two disciplines in an idiom uniquely keyed to both the time and place of their expression. He begins by defining terms, noting that “our language offers a facility, which neither the Greek nor the Latin possessed,” to distinguish the art from the theory (1:41). Rhetoric and rhetor are inadequate, he claims. “Some attempts were made to put into circulation the term oratoria, but they were resisted by their philological critics, and it is expressly censured and rejected by Quinctilian [sic], as irreconcileable with their etymological analogies” (1:42). The many titles of Cicero’s works, Adams claims, bear witness to this terminological deficiency in the classical languages, but “[t]he English language however has been less scrupulous in its adherence to the niceties of etymology. It has admitted the term oratory, which the Romans fastidiously excluded, and annexes to it a modification of the idea, distinct from that of the Grecian term, which has also been made English by adoption. Thus accumulating our riches from the united funds of Grecian genius and Roman industry, we call rhetoric the science, and oratory the art of speaking well” (1:42). Adams’s inquiry is more than quibbling. It rephrases the whole problem of rhetorical terminology into a central set of cultural metaphors and, in the process, makes the meaning of those terms not their referents in an antique past but their idioms in a political present.

For this is a philological disquisition. It seeks the origins of national identity in the histories of individual words. It uses etymology as argument, associating the history of languages with the history of a people. In essence, it proposes something of political lexicography, and, like many of his compeers, Adams got his philology from Horne Tooke. Tooke’s intellectual preoccupation with the metaphysical linguistics of French theorists (Condillac, De Brozes, Turgot) melded with his political claims for the rights of individuals in an age of revolution. But Tooke also shared in the late-eighteenth-century English recovery of Anglo-Saxon, and he argued vigorously for the origins of English in the pre-Conquest forms of the language. He honed his techniques of speculative etymology to argue not just for the histories of individual words but for the power of those histories to reveal truths philosophical and cultural. The study of “the meaning of words,” he wrote, should matter “not only (as has been too lightly supposed) to Metaphysicians and School-men, but to the rights and happiness of mankind in their dearest concerns.”¹⁸ Here, many readers (both British and American) found an argument for democracy over monarchy, and well they should have. “To the ears of man,” Tooke began part 2 of The Diversions of Purley, “what music sweeter than the Rights of man” (2:2). And it is in the pursuit of those rights that “we [must] always be seeking after the meaning of words. Of important words we must, if we wish to avoid important error. The meaning of these words especially is of the greatest consequence to mankind” (2:4). Tooke’s interlocutor accuses him of being a Democrat, and he responds that he has always held beliefs that “confirm my democracy” (2:12): “I revere the Constitution and constitutional LAWS of England; because they are in conformity with the LAWS of God and nature: and upon these are founded the rational RIGHTS of Englishmen” (2:14). No wonder the conservative reviewer of the Monthly Anthology wrote, in 1808: “The real object of Horne Tooke’s writings on language is believed by many intelligent persons to have been, merely to obtain a medium through which he might defame his government and his country.”¹⁹

For Tooke’s American readers, however, etymology and Saxon origin, sensation theory and political dissent, contributed not to the defamation but the celebration of a new government and country.²⁰ As early as 1788 (only two years after volume 1 of The Diversions appeared), Tooke’s banner had been raised, quite literally, by Noah Webster at the celebrations for the Constitution on July 23 of that year. Bearing the standard of the newly founded Philological Society, Webster marched in the parade in New York on that date, in the words of the New York Packet, “carrying Mr. Horne Tooke’s treatise on language; as a mark of respect for the book which contains a new discovery, and a mark of respect for the author, whose zeal for the American cause, during the late war, subjected him to a prosecution.”²¹ Webster himself relied on Tooke’s principles throughout his writings. His Dissertations on the English Language (1798) drew on many of the metaphysical etymologies of The Diversions, deriving conjunctions from verbs and finding in the pronunciations of his everyday Americans an afterlife of Anglo-Saxon verbal origins.²² Those origins were of great importance to Webster, too—in particular, the notion (really a myth) of the early English yeoman. Such notions fed into Webster’s ideas of an early English yeomanry, a kind of natural identity that would resist a foreign domination and that, in its American form, could stand as an ideal of linguistic (and, of course, political) independence.²³ To Tooke, Webster owed his arguments on spelling reform, his attempts at local etymology, and, most broadly, his apparent populism. In essence, Webster writes a national genealogy through etymology; he does politics through philology.

And so does John Quincy Adams. When he remarks how English has “admitted” the term oratory and “annexes” it to another term, he is acutely aware of these words’ etymologies and sensitive to connotations in contemporary usage. Language is akin to statehood. We are admitting words much as the fledgling country had admitted states, and “annex” would have had a specifically political connotation for Adams and his readers. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Wellington’s remark of 1800 on early colonial acquisition: “The whole country is permanently annexed to the British Empire” (s.v. “annex,” vb. 3). The word “adoption” similarly carried with it both a linguistic and a political metaphorics. For the late-eighteenth-century American polemicists, “adoption” stood as symbol for the new national family created after the irrevocable break with a paternalistic England. It was a highly charged term in the fiction and the public writings of a period that figured stories of belonging as adoptive tales of immigration and acceptance.²⁴ But it is also a term of lexicography, apparently coined by Samuel Johnson, in this usage, to refer to borrowing new words without changing their form. Such direct loanwords, Johnson wrote in the preface to his Dictionary, “must depend for their adoption on the suffrage of futurity” (cited in the OED as the sole reference, s.v. “adoption,” defs. b, c). And, finally, the idiom of accumulating riches from a united fund makes the rhetorical inheritance a kind of national bank (or, for that matter, national debt). The word “funds” takes on a uniquely fiscal sense in the eighteenth century (for example, R. Langford, cited in the OED, “Funds is a general term for money lent to government, and which constitutes the national debt”), as does the word “accumulate” (witness J. Mores, in American Geography 1 [1796]: 417, cited in the OED: “These funds … are fast accumulating by interest”). Writing a decade after Adams, John Marshall used the phrasing figuratively in a way that resonates with Adams’s own sense of Grecian genius and Roman industry as funds: “Industry, talent and integrity constitute a fund which is as confidently trusted as property itself” (OED, s.v. “fund,” sb. 5a, dated 1819).

The gestures that shape Adams’s exordia form the core of his own rhetorical practice. He is an etymologist of the imagination. Whenever a new word, a technical term, or a point of history appears, he goes back to its roots. The history of words scripts out a history of disciplines—a history that matters, to appropriate Tooke’s phrasing, not just to schoolmen but to the rights and happiness of mankind. Look, for example, at how Adams handles “invention”: “originally compounded from the two Latin words, in venire, to come in, to enter.” He continues: “By the natural progress of all languages from the literal to the metaphorical meaning, it came in process of time to signify discovery” (1:164). Thus rhetorical invention is the finding of topics. Mechanical invention signals “a higher degree of ingenuity.” Poetic invention involves not only finding words but “the glory of creating.” Poetical invention, Adams states, “disdains the boundaries of space and time,” and he illustrates the brilliance of such invention with a quotation from Shakespeare.²⁵

The etymology of “invention,” then, traces the history of the human arts and sciences. Inventio encapsulates a journey of the mind and body—a journey of discovery charted in America. For it is with this language of discovery, this sense of searching and finding, that inventio becomes the practice of Americanization itself. As Shakespeare puts it, in Adams’s quotation, the poet “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” So, too, does the explorer or the colonizer. Adams’s political philology shapes a distinctively American landscape.

Look at his other etymologies for confirmation. Words such as “elegance,” “composition,” and “dignity,” when traced to their etymologies, reflect a similar concern. “A retrospect … upon their etymology will immediately show, that they are descended from one common stock, and are of close affinity” (2:146–47). “Elegance” comes from Latin “eligo,” to choose, and even though contemporary English appears to have “deviated” from this root, Adams can find that etymological meaning in Milton. For when Adam says to Eve, upon their eating of the apple, “I see thou art exact of taste, / And elegant,” he is, as Adams notes, playing upon this older meaning. And yet so is Adams, for it is here that the new world of Milton’s poem (quoted with an almost obsessive frequency throughout these Lectures) takes on its moral flavor. Is our new world one of paradise or taint? What have we chosen? “Composition,” Adams notes, like “elegance,” “signifies only putting together” (2:147). But “dignity” “embraces the whole theory of figurative language” (2:148).

The etymologies of words expose hidden narratives: miniature tales of travel and displacement, finding and discovering, ordering and building. The parts of rhetoric contribute to the making of a civilized state. What Adams calls “the progress of civilization and refinement” hinges on “the necessities of articulate speech” (2:189). The ordering of words, whether in simple sentences or in complex orations, depends on “principles” (a word Adams iterates throughout the lecture on order). The rule by law and precept orders “volatile particles” (1:187)—a phrase as redolent of political overtones as it is of the experimental chemistry to which it owes its origin. The reader is enjoined to see in etymologies—phrased here in terms of “common stock,” “close affinity,” and “rules and principles”—political and social arguments about the making of American identity.

And so, too, with “extend” and “influence,” Adams writes a history of nation building through word history. Quoting Samuel Johnson’s tract “Taxation no Tyranny,” which states that “The legislature of a colony … can extend no influence beyond its own district,” Adams reflects:

Those arts, throughout these lectures, are distinctively American. But America stands not just as a fount of easy example or topical allusion. America is figurality and fits precisely into Adams’s larger argument that figures are the rule (rather than the exception) in human discourse. “Nothing is more common than figurative language” (2:250), Adams announces, and he goes on to observe that all ancient societies used “symbols, … hieroglyphics … [and] allegories.”

Adams locates the essence of the figurative in primitive America. The “savages” here stand not as the representatives of some lost Eden or of an ideal of civic virtue (as they came to be represented early on in Roger Williams and then, later, in James Fennimore Cooper)²⁶ but as the first speakers in a curiously nativist rewriting of Cicero’s history of civilization (Adams invokes Cicero immediately after this passage, to aver his agreement with the Roman that “figures were in the first instance used from necessity, and afterwards were multiplied on account of their beauty” [2:251]). But this is, too, a Tookean account of language. One of the most politically charged of Tooke’s arguments was that the languages of the uncultivated—the “savage,” “primitive,” or “barbaric”—were just as much languages as those of the civilized. Language does not, he argued, change according to the level of the speaker’s civilization. Every language relies on abbreviation, on figures to take the nouns and verbs that constitute its elements and transmute them into the particles that make up grammatical sentences. “Savage languages are upon an equal footing with the languages (as they are called) of art, except that the former are less corrupted.”²⁷ Adams’s reflections on the “savages” has more to do with a theory of language than it does with the experience of American life.

And so, too, does his claim for human understanding. Like Tooke, Adams appears to dismiss abstractions as linguistic categories. As he stated a few sentences preceding this quotation, “It is equally clear that language, the purpose of which is to communicate our ideas, must be composed of words, first drawn from ideas of sensation” (2:250). Compare this claim with Tooke: “The business of the mind, as far as it concerns Language, appears to me to be very simple. It extends no farther than to receive Impressions, that is to have Sensations or Feelings.”²⁸ Adams’s conception of the mother tongue and his reflections on the passions are central to the kind of philological philosophizing long associated with The Diversions. In fact, when Adams reaches his conclusion—that “every word in every language … is a trope” (2.254)—he backs it up with an explicit appeal to Tooke’s authority: “The author of the Diversions of Purley contends at least with great plausibility, that those subsidiary parts of speech, called articles, prepositions, and conjunctions, are all abbreviations from words, which were originally verbs or nouns; and if so they are, as now used, all tropes” (2.254–55). This is Tooke in a nutshell, a recognition of the most important and most radical claim in The Diversions and testimony to its impact on American readers.²⁹

But Adams takes it one step further. He defines the American condition as “all tropes.” The “propensity to affix old words to new ideas” may be old, he writes, but “[t]here is no part of the world, where this disposition more generally predominates, than on our own continent.” “Look over,” he enjoins, “a map of the American hemisphere,” and you will see the names of familiar kingdoms, states, mountains, lakes, and so on “but scarcely a new name.” The natural objects of the landscape have the names borrowed from the languages of Native Americans. “But the whole new creation,” by which Adams means the European settlements and the political entities comprising the United States, “has received names already familiar to those, by whom they were adopted, and significant of different objects.” Once again, Adams invokes the idea of adoption to refer both to linguistic and political change. He argues, in effect, that naming American settlements after English and European ones is a kind of transferal of signification: an act of figurative language use—in essence, a metaphor. “In this sense,” he concludes, “perhaps nine tenths of the words in all languages consist of tropes” (2:255), for what else is a trope but the application of a familiar term to a new signification. America is the country of tropes, a map of metaphors. The etymological resonances of the opening lecture now take on full force, as Adams indulges in a speculative essay on the figuralism of etymology itself.

America becomes the most effective means of talking about figurative language. In lecture 32, Adams responds to Burke and Johnson on the increase of the American population. Central to the difference between the two men is their use of figures. Burke’s speech on conciliation seeks to move the audience by reference to the children of American families. Johnson’s, by contrast, seeks to antagonize them by evoking an America not familial and familiar but unique and feral. Americans, says Johnson, “multiply with the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes” (2:299). This phrase is the node of Adams’s explication. What is at stake is not merely the obvious: that, to “instill ideas of disgust and abhorrence against the Americans,” Johnson associates their brood with “the most odious and most venomous of reptiles” (2:300–301). Rather, it is that Johnson has transformed a classical allusion into a contemporary one—he has troped on a trope. The obvious association would have been to the Hydra. The classical allusion here would have effectively associated American procreation with the very symbol of monstrous and unchecked multiplicity, and Johnson, in fact, concludes the remarks Adams quotes by noting that America will “shoot up like the hydra,” and we must, he argues, therefore remember “how the hydra was destroyed” (2:300). Embedded in this play of allusions is the classical myth; yet, it remains embedded. Johnson, says Adams, “seems however ashamed of disclosing it in all its nakedness”—that is, he does not wish to make explicit the association of the story of the Hydra and its Herculean destruction with the task of England in America. For Adams, Johnson’s figuration leaves the implications of his story “under the veil of a general and indistinct allusion” (2:301).

By deploying the figure of metonymy, by having the rattlesnake stand for the American experience itself, and by displacing classical allusion with contemporary reference, Adams makes America itself the site of figural discourse. For the American to read the British—for Adams to read Burke and Johnson—remains an act of troping, an exposing of the metaphorical implications of what appear to be straightforward arguments. To read as an American is to read rhetorically, and the goal of Adams’s lectures lies not simply in the verbal education of the privileged undergraduate but in the public education of America itself. America embodies the rhetorical. When Adams concludes, therefore, by remarking how “masters of language, in oratorical works, make their imagery coincide with the sentiments which they entertain, and which they wish to communicate” (2:302), he is doing more than simply telling us that orators choose their words well. He is rephrasing the tradition of classical rhetoric into contemporary terms, making the discipline of speech the venue for epistemology.

And, at the close of Adams’s lectures, the rhetorician thematizes his own physical removal as an instance of the trope of translatio. Removed to Russia, leaving the position of pedagogue for the role of ambassador, Adams becomes the bearer of American identity across the sea. Yet, at the close of the lectures, the students should be well prepared to see their teacher’s departure not just as a mere movement from the scholarly to the political life but rather as a figure, in itself, for the condition of American rhetoric and the shape of oratorical life. It is, perhaps, no accident that Adams’s lectures conclude with disquisitions (in order) on allegory, metonymy and synecdoche, memory, and delivery. For what we have here, at the close, is a progression of figures themselves: a story of the lecturer who asks his students to consider the inherently figurative quality of their own condition; who has consistently used metonyms to make his points; who asks them, in his farewell, to remember the sound of his voice. His final pages recall the story of two lovers, separated by time and distance, agreeing to “turn their eyes towards one of the great luminaries of heaven; and each of them, in looking to the sky, felt a sensation of pleasure at the thought, that the eyes of the other at the same moment were directed towards the same object” (2:399). This little allegory constitutes the final gesture of the rhetorician. “Let me cherish the hope, that between you and me there will be some occasional, nay frequent remembrance, reciprocated by analogical objects in the world of mind” (2:399–400). It is an allegory of remembrance but, as well, an allegory of reading—a story of two sets of eyes fixed on the same interpretable object. And the goal of that direction is, of course, illumination. These “luminaries of the moral heavens” (2:400) are as much aflame as Adams’s memory of a “celestial colloquy sublime.” And, hence, his ardent wishes: “To open the avenues to science is the duty of the teacher. To explore them must be the labor of the scholar himself…. Of my ardent wishes, that your success in this and every other laudable pursuit may answer every expectation of your friends, and every hope of your country” (2.392). Here, again, lie embedded etymologies of argument: the burning stars that are the cosmic equivalents of ardent feeling; the opening avenues, the explorations that recall the many journeys—or errors, those “wandering[s] of the feet”—that opened up the country.

Was Adams wrong? Were his errors not just “wanderings of the feet” but misguided attempts to relocate American political identity along linguistic lines? Or were his claims for rhetoric simply the last gasp of an eighteenth-century Ciceronianism that would lose out to college belletristics? Certainly, his first readers seemed to think so. Only three reviews of the Lectures appeared in Adams’s lifetime, and but one—in the Port Folio (1810)—paid much attention to his arguments.³⁰ Indeed, for this reviewer, Adams’s Lectures are an anthology of errors. Page after page of mistakes are recorded; words found “superfluous” stand out, in italics, from Adams’s quoted prose; sentences that ramble to the point of unintelligibility are held up to ridicule. “Errors, that on the most deliberate revision, would not have been corrected or acknowledged, are certainly fair objects of notice. Such as illegitimate words, or words which the fathers of our language would disown” (pp. 123–24).

Language has a genealogy, and the Port Folio reviewer labels Adams’s language not just erroneous or, as he puts it elsewhere, “garish” but illegitimate. The very bastardy of his vocabulary undermines the Lectures’ own claims for “adoption”: for that gradual acceptance of new words, for language growth as kin to kin itself. The reviewer refuses to acknowledge Adams’s claim. “Language,” he writes, “is indefinitely improvable…. But it is improvable only by rejection, not adoption. As to words, this is true. But philologists need not complain. They will find work enough in their hands in this business of negative improvement” (p. 133). Rather than see the language as a welcome home to newly coined or fresh imported words, he sees it carefully excluding the unwelcome outsider. Is there a philological xenophobia to this reviewer? Is there a claim in his remark, “what necessity is there for new words in the English language,” akin to claims for countrymen (what necessity is there for new people in America)? Language, not unlike nationhood, defines itself by inheritance, here—for, if the fathers of our language would disown the bastard word, just whom would the fathers of our country disavow?

This Port Folio review rejects Adams because his rhetoric is un-American; his language garish, verbose, full of superfluities; his fascination with metaphor overwhelming (p. 124); his theories of language counterintuitive. For this final point, the reviewer recognizes Adams’s claim that “words by familiar use are made to deviate widely from their primitive meaning” (p. 130). The argument goes back to Johnson, and it stands at the heart of Adams’s fascination with the metaphorical and figurative—the sense that all words, ultimately, become tropes. And it inflects, too, Adams’s predilections for the metaphysical etymologies of Horne Tooke, the sense that there is something essential about a word and its history. But this account cannot please the plain-speaking Philadelphian of the Port-Folio. “Is it not agreed, that there is no possible, natural connexion between signs and things signified? Can any reason under heaven be assigned, but use, why one word should denote one thing more than another?” (p. 131).

The Port Folio reviewer is more canny than he has appeared. He recognizes that these Lectures on Rhetoric are approaches to philology, and he responds in kind. They raise questions fundamental to an understanding of the nature of linguistic utterance; to relationships between the literal and metaphorical; to the argumentative association of a people and their words, a nation’s genealogies and etymologies. “But philologists,” he noted, “need not complain.” The proper reader of these Lectures, then, is the philologist, and that fact, it seems to me, is why they disappeared from nineteenth-century American rhetorical discourse. They just are not rhetoric.

And this is the point. Throughout the nineteenth century, rhetorical instruction had become so estranged from the philological that there was no need, it seemed, to take account of recent historical studies or the comparative method. Rhetoric, in effect, ceded its interest in linguistic speculation, becoming the basis not for inquiry into the nature of expression but for training practical professionals. Such was the goal of the succession of Boylston Professors that followed Adams. Ministers, antiquarians, and journalists would hold the chair to reflect on aspects of writing and composition, pulpit oratory, and English and European literature. Emphasis shifted from the social implications of a rhetorical ideal to the pedagogical concerns of writing and speaking well. Eloquence became a means of emotional persuasion, and the orator was taught less how to organize his speeches in precise Ciceronian form than to find strategies for affecting his audience.³¹

For Adams Sherman Hill, who held the Boylston Professorship from 1876 to 1904, philology arises only to be brushed away.³² His Principles of Rhetoric, published soon after he ascended to the chair in 1878 and revised and republished in 1895, defined rhetoric as an “art, not a science.”³³ Linguistic usage lies not in mere “fastidiousness” of correctness or in the pedantries of the classroom. Instead, it resides in the shared experience of educated speech and writing, exemplified by the best authors. Hill sets the stage for a rhetorical anthology of English literature: a collection of passages designed to represent words, grammar, idioms, strategies, and, most generally, an overall ideal of style. His preference, too, is for recent authors, as they show the English language being used, and modern usage is, for Hill, always the best guide to correctness. The grounds for usage are not found in early precedent or in the etymologies of English words. “In the English of to-day, one word is not preferred to another because it is derived from this or from that source; the present meaning of a word is not fixed by its etymology, nor its inflection by the inflection of other words with which it may, for some purposes, be classed” (p. 2). After reviewing a collection of such words—mocking those who would claim that new or imported are not as good as native English ones and those who would find in recent historical changes in the language (the form “its,” for example) only oddity—Hill uses Walter Savage Landor to beat down the ghosts of eighteenth-century etymological argument.

Go to the bottom of the page, and Hill’s footnote, in addition to citing the source of this passage (“Landor’s Conversations, Third Series”), offers the apparently gratuitous “Johnson and Horne (Tooke).” Surely, what Hill is doing here is referencing the very tradition that Landor mocks. Indeed, this is the kind of argument that John Quincy Adams would have used in his own Boylston Lectures. The etymological prestidigitation he would display in exposing the hidden meaning of a phrase such as “error and capital punishment”—where error is a “wandering of the feet” and capital refers to taking off the head—is ridiculed here. Landor’s joke is Adams’s high seriousness.

If Hill appears to have little patience with the etymologists, he has even less with the Anglo-Saxonists. In fact, he lumps them both together, calling those who would prefer Old English words over those from French or Latin subscribers to an “etymological theory” of diction. One should choose “words, not because they came from this or that source, but because they served the purpose in view” (p. 96). True, there are differences. Hill recognizes the effectiveness of pairing short words from Old English with long words from Latin (pp. 97–98). But, in the end, adherence to an “etymological standard” (p. 99) leads only to pedantry. New words are always coming in; old words are changing; ours is “now a composite language, in which every part has its function, every word in good use its reason for existence” (p. 100).

And yet Hill himself is not above a bit of philological play. When he dismisses the etymologists, he does so by exposing their own rhetorical fissures. “[T]he words of some of the most ardent champions of the Anglo-Saxon abound in words form the Latin” (p. 96). What better way of undermining your opponents than by showing them in contradiction? But Hill’s own language mimes the diction of that contradiction. “Ardent champions”—words from the Latin and the French used to modify “Anglo-Saxon,” a philological joke played on the philologists. Hill relishes such verbal oppositions. “Our associations with words of Anglo-Saxon origin often differ widely from those called up by words form the Latin” (p. 98). And, again, he quotes Landor at length (and, again, offers a footnote to Johnson and Horne Tooke) on enriching the language—that even though “the Saxon [is] always the ground-work,” words from a range of languages have come into English (p. 100). Argument from etymology makes difficult the acceptance of such words: “bloody” and “sanguine,” for example, “mean” the same thing yet connote far different values (p. 99). “[T]o give prominence to the etymological fact is to substitute an obscure for an obvious ground of preference” (p. 102). Hill’s quarrel is not with the old legacy of Platonic dichotomy—is rhetoric a true skill or is it merely a knack?—but rather with contemporary academic claims. Rhetoric, as he announces, is “an art, not a science: for it neither observes, nor discovers, nor classifies … it uses knowledge, not as knowledge, but as power” (p. v). By the end of the nineteenth century, the science that observed, discovered, and classified was philology.

Philology was the science of language—that wissenschaft whose historical principles had been taught to at least three generations by the time Hill’s lectures first saw print. The very phrase “science of language” had become a code for the disciplinary foundation of language study: a foundation that associated comparative philology with comparative anatomy or comparative biology. In Departments of English, in particular, conflicts between philologists and rhetoricians played out the larger conflicts of an academic selfhood. Hill’s comments on etymology and Anglo-Saxon must be seen in this context: in part, perhaps, a jibe at his all-too-philological predecessor in the Boylston chair, Francis Child; in part, too, a turf claim for his field against those who, much like James Morgan Hart, would deny to rhetoric the aegis for a literary study. In 1884 Hart (then a professor at the University of Cincinnati but soon to move to Cornell) wrote in PMLA:

“Rhetoric,” Hart went on, “always savors to me of the school-bench. It is, if we look into it scrutinizingly, little more than verbal jugglery.”³⁴ And for Albert S. Cook, who would address the Modern Language Association in 1898 under the title “The Province of English Philology,” the philologist (as I quoted at this chapter’s opening) “endeavor[s] to relive the life of the past; to enter by the imagination into the spiritual experiences of all the historic protagonists of civilization in a given period and area of culture; … to judge rightly these various disclosures of the human spirit, and to reveal to the world their true significance and relative importance.”³⁵ Philology seems quite like rhetoric itself here, a province of what Hill would call things “of the imagination.” Cook’s phrasing makes philology seem very much like rhetoric in the classical tradition: not just the art of speaking well but the rubric under which the emotions and the sensibilities were studied. Just who, then, has priority over the life of the past: the rhetorician or philologist? Just who should be charged with the study and the teaching of its literature and language? And just who should stand in the academy as model of professional identity?

For William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) and Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831–1924), the answer to these questions was themselves. German trained, research oriented, empirical in idiom, indomitable in work habits, they embodied an ideal of academic professionalism in sharp contrast to the rhetoricians and belletrists who had inhabited the older colleges.³⁶ Their science was philology; their subject of research, the languages and literatures of classical antiquity (which, for Whitney, included Sanskrit); their venues, the professional journals. But they were also great popularizer of their fields: Whitney, through his public lectures, dictionary editing, and summaries in such volumes as The Life and Growth of Language; Gildersleeve, though his addresses and magazine pieces, many of which were brought together into widely read collections of his work. Both had distinguished and distinctive careers, and both differed markedly in regional origin and public politics (Whitney, the scion of two old New England families who spent his whole career at Yale; Gildersleeve, the Virginian who fought for the Confederacy, taught at Virginia and Johns Hopkins, and never quite gave up his elegaics for the Old South). But what they shared was a commitment to philology as a discipline. For all their own rhetorical poses and ploys, they were at pains to distinguish what they did from rhetoric. And, in the process, they made philology the defining field for academic cultural identity in their America.

Though esteemed in his own time as the leading American scholar of Sanskrit and as a great exponent of the comparative method in the study of historical philology, Whitney is largely known today for his anticipation (what one critic has called his “clairvoyant glimpse”) of the semiotics we have come to associate with Saussure.³⁷ The classic paradigms of Saussurian theory—the arbitrariness and conventionality of the sign, the conviction that language is a form of social behavior, the recognition of the independence of historical sound change from any essential bearer of meaning—have all been recognized as central to Whitney’s approach to language. Whitney labored hard to stress the point about the fundamental arbitrariness of words, and etymology had to be pressed into that service. Time and again, he argues against what he called “the old helter-skelter method of etymologizing,”³⁸ the search for essential meanings in word elements or the comparison of unrelated languages in order to make claims for broad linguistic universals. We do not study etymology in order to recover hidden meanings; nor do we pay attention to the histories of words in order to select effectively the vocabulary that we use.³⁹ The history of language, too, is not self-consciously concerned with etymology. As Whitney puts it, “The internal development of a vocabulary, too, would be greatly checked and hampered by a too intrusive etymological consciousness.” (LSL, p. 132). He goes on, “Those, then, are greatly in error who would designate by the name ‘linguistic sense’ (sprachsinn) a disposition to retain in memory the original status and value of formative elements, and the primary significance of transferred terms” (LSL, p. 132).

But, on occasion, etymological attentions could have a powerful rhetorical effect: “As we rise, too, in the scale of linguistic use, from that which is straightforward and unreflective to that which is elaborate, pregnant, artistic, etymological considerations in many cases rise in value…. A pregnant implication of etymological meaning often adds strikingly to the force and impressiveness of an expression” (LSL, p. 133). Whitney, then, wishes to distinguish the pursuit of etymology as a philological concern from its rhetorical implications. He narrowly circumscribes the range of acceptable etymological inquiries, ruling out older metaphysical speculations, on the one hand, and mythological or cultural associations, on the other. In the process, he defines not just the proper uses of etymology but the discipline of philology itself. The error of those who would claim a sprachsinn for the elements of words becomes an error not just of a local misinterpretation but of a conceptual misunderstanding. And the philologist most guilty of that error, and a host of others, was none other than Max Müller.

No one worked a metaphor as much as Müller, and his penchant for figurative expressions and analogies led him, ultimately, to argue for an inherently figurative aspect to language itself. His many etymologies fed into a linguistic mythology. Each word was something of a fossil history of culture. The meaning of a word lay not so much in its present as its past. “Thought was bred of words,” wrote his obituarist, E. W. Hopkins, “not words of thought,” a conviction that led Müller to believe, at his most extreme, in their almost magical power. As Hopkins put it: “As Müller advanced, he appears to have fallen a victim to the very factor in his mental furnishing which made his books so interesting to beginners, even an imaginative, fanciful way of looking at facts. He seems to have regarded words as endowed with some mysterious potency, and thus was drawn to the peculiar view which he upheld in his mythological studies and later in his ‘Science of Thought.’”⁴⁰

It was precisely this imaginative fancy that struck Whitney. Müller had the tendency, he noted, “to substitute figurative and rhetorical phrases for close thought and clear statement.” His was a language rich with “the graces and the ornaments of style,” an asset all too often taken to extremes.⁴¹ “In some instances, however, we think that he has been led too far in this direction—has given too loose a rein to poetic fancy, and talked in tropes and pictures when more exact scientific statement had been preferable” (p. 95). Yes, we may be “charmed by [his] eloquence,”⁴² but that should not prevent the reader, Whitney claims, from ignoring the controlling error of his work: the confusion of language with thought (p. 249). Müller emerges from these pages a mythologist and not a linguist, a rhetorician setting out to persuade, move, or dazzle his audience. “To express by a figure something which is only half-understood or wholly obscure, then to dwell upon the figurative expression as if it were a true definition, and let it hide from sight the thing meant to be expressed, is a good process in mythology, though not in science.”⁴³ In the end, Müller’s “science of language” is not science at all, but literature. “Taken as literature, it is of high rank, as the admiration of the public sufficiently testifies. Its author has a special gift for interesting statement and illustration, for lending a charm to the subjects he discusses; and he carries captive the judgments of his hearers and many of his readers. He is a born littérateur.”⁴⁴

But what of Whitney’s own “special gift for interesting statement and illustration,” what of his own rhetorical strategies? What should we make of this remark, offered in closing Max Müller and the Science of Language?

Or, for that matter, what should we make of the extended description of his own New England dialect in his “Elements of English Pronunciation”; or his brutal criticisms of the now-forgotten Henry Alford’s Plea for the Queen’s English, which Whitney held up to ridicule, both for its “violent ebullition of spite against [my] native country” and its ignorance of basic philological detail?⁴⁵ Or again, in his essay “How Shall We Spell,” what should we make of his witty obeisances to “that unscrupulous radical” Noah Webster, who, in spite of his “false etymologies and defective definitions,” nonetheless remained “one of the best-abused men of his generation”?⁴⁶

What we should make of all these statements is a claim for American identity. His critique of Müller remains not just a philological but a profoundly rhetorical act—a declaration of American scholarly independence. By placing himself in line with the great and greatly misunderstood (Webster, in particular), by giving us a personal self-portrait in his vowel sounds, by appealing to American readers against a silly British schoolmaster, Whitney gives us what Fliegelman would call, now going back to his encapsulated ideal of early republican rhetoric, “a particular moral and social conception of identity.” Whitney’s work is as much performance as Müller’s. The etymologist, he had said elsewhere, must, in his inquiries, be both an advocate and “play the part of the opposing counsel” (LSL, p. 239). Whitney puts Müller himself on trial. In doing so, he takes on not just the correction but the intellectual effacement of the highest ideal of an Anglo-German philological authority. Words such as “tyrannical sway” must resonate with a republican ideal, with the old Websterian critique of the king’s aegis and his English. In fact, much of the rhetoric of Whitney’s blast at Müller could be traced back to attacks on Samuel Johnson by Webster and his contemporaries. For, much like Müller, Johnson had the “sway in British public opinion.” Like Müller, Johnson was condemned for his elaborate idiom—in Webster’s terms, he only seeks to dazzle with “a glare of ornament.”⁴⁷ Archibald Campbell, one of Johnson’s British critics, shared with Webster a distaste for gaudiness, and he associated this decadence of English style with the decline of Rome, “when their licentious republick had degenerated into a most despotick tyranny.”⁴⁸

And finally, perhaps, Whitney’s own dialect description takes us back to Webster and the ideals of American linguistic purity. His deceptively titled “Elements of English Pronunciation” is, in fact, “an analysis and description of the elements of my own native pronunciation of English…. For aught that I know, my speech may be taken as a fair specimen of the ordinarily educated New Englander from the interior; a region where … the proper distinction of shall and will was as strictly maintained, and a slip in the use of the one for the other as rare, and as immediately noticeable and offensive (unfortunately, that is the case no longer), as in the best society of London.”⁴⁹ For Whitney of Northampton—“a shire-town of long standing, which in my youth had not lost its ancient and well-established reputation as a home of ‘old families,’ and a scene of special culture and high-bred society”—English pronunciation is his own native pronunciation. A philologist’s appeal to etymology now becomes a rhetorician’s appeal to genealogy. And yet both go back to Webster, whose characterized ideal English speech as “the common unadulterated pronunciation of the New England gentlemen, [which] is almost uniformly the pronunciation which prevailed in England, anterior to Sheridan’s time, and which, I am answered by English gentlemen, is still the pronunciation of the body of the British nation.”⁵⁰ By looking back to Webster, by locating his inheritance in New England speech, by invoking the buzzwords of an eighteenth-century linguistic battle, Whitney articulates his declaration of independence. He claims a philology as “native” as his vowels or (to go back to the language of William Thornton’s Cadmus) an American philology “as distinct as the government, free from all the follies of unphilosophical fashion, and resting upon truth as its only regulator.”

Truth may be the great regulator, but, for Basil Gildersleeve, “Grammar is a regulative art.” Its province is “correctness,” though its practice should not be left to the pedants.⁵¹ Instead, the true masters of grammatical or philological analysis should be the literary critics, and the goal of their study should be aesthetic evaluation. “So sharply objective is the character of the dominant school of philology,” Gildersleeve noted, “that the very mention of the word ‘aesthetics’ is almost enough to send the utterer into the camp of the littérateur and the essayist” (ES, p. 106). An exile to that camp was just what Whitney had in mind for Müller—that “born littérateur”—and Gildersleeve, too, would dismiss the belletrism or elaborate figurative diction of “fine substantives, superfine adjectives, … or sympathetic phrase-mongery” (ES, p. 133). And yet Gildersleeve wants to make the case for literary artistry. Phonetic analysis—the study of “the sensuous effect of sound”—need not be the domain of the phonologist but may instead, along with syntactic description, lead to “literary criticism [and] aesthetic appreciation” (ES, p. 506). For, unlike Whitney, Gildersleeve is an aesthetician of philology. He recognizes that in the traditions of rhetorical analysis we may recover “an organon of aesthetic appreciation” (ES, p. 145).

What is American about this philological aesthetics? Gildersleeve shares with Whitney a desire to declare an independence from the European academic. The history and literature of the ancient world, he argued, could be best read in the light of the American experience. Americans should draw on the unique resources of their character, what he called our “practicality,”⁵² and our “unequalled adaptability, our quick perception, our straightforwardness of intellectual motion” (ES, p. 93). For, while he acknowledges a profound debt to European teaching—“To Germany and the Germans I am indebted for everything professionally”—Gildersleeve argued vigorously for an independence of American scholarship:

These polemics have more about them than a mere appeal to native know-how or a plea for a naive comparatism of contemporary and classical life. They powerfully exemplify rhetorical philology: a suasive argument deployed to praise or justify a calling. Use Gildersleeve’s own categories of analysis on this text. By mirroring his statements on the present and the past, by using parallel constructions, he sonically, syntactically, and substantively equates the American and Greek. Such an equation is impossible for European scholars: “the German professor phrases, and the English ‘don’ rubs his eyes, and the French savant appreciates the wrong half” (ES, p. 105). Professor, “don,” savant: a rapidly descending hierarchy of mock callings, from the mere title, to the sniffily dismissed nickname in scare quotes, to the untranslated and italicized pose.

But Gildersleeve’s rhetoric, too, returns us to the central idioms of academic inquiry: the crooked and the straight, the errant and the correct. Embedded in the very idea of “straightforwardness of intellectual motion” is a criticism of that perceived European, particularly German, circularity. Recall George Eliot’s “Word for the Germans,” where she characterizes their scholarship as full of “involved sentences, like coiled serpents, showing neither head nor tail.”⁵³ Not so Gildersleeve’s American, who can quicker than any other “take the point of a situation.” Like James A. H. Murray—whose Dictionary’s progress Gildersleeve had clearly followed closely (HH, p. 55)—philologists may be pioneers, hewing straight paths through uncharted lands. The “scientific study of syntax,” for example, has produced “[a] few pioneers [who] have opened avenues here and there, and monographs on isolated points or separate authors are appearing in greater and greater numbers in Germany” (ES, p. 107). But there is still “ample room” for work. “Here, then, is a province which has not been so occupied that American philologians may not find in it abundant room for the native sagacity, the unresting energy, which have distinguished our people in other departments of science. It is, indeed, a noble province” (ES, pp. 107–8). Though Germans may have opened up the way, it is the Americans who will effectively take over, occupying the province much as an army occupies a land. But even “an able explorer may be an indifferent teacher; a good teacher may not have the spirit of initiative which leads to successful investigation; but the two faculties, though not always in perfect balance, are seldom wholly divorced, and a university professor should possess both” (ES, p. 91).

Gildersleeve revels in the paths of inquiry, in part, to participate in the old tropes of scholarship but also, in part, to engage with rhetoric itself. For rhetoric remains the domain of the ornate and elaborate (ES, p. 141). Rhetoric, of course, may be pressed into scholarship’s service, and Gildersleeve has much to praise in the ancient rhetoricians, whose discipline could embrace the study of both language and culture in the large. But there remains much that is mere ornament: “I believe in rhetoric, but it must be rhetoric in the service of truth; not jingle, but tocsin. The fair facade must be the growth of the living rooms” (HH, p. 25). When the “professional philologians push their studies into the domain of the Greek and Roman rhetoricians,” even they “are apt to become impatient with what must seem at first to be fanciful detail” (ES, p. 144). For, in the end, as he put it in his Hellas and Hesperia, “It is better to be a doorkeeper in the house of philology than to dwell in the tents of the rhetoricians” (p. 45).

Much like Whitney, Gildersleeve finds in rhetoric only the byways of an argument, and like Whitney, too, he is suspicious of the rhetorical uses of etymology. “The study of origins, of etymology, has very little, if anything, to do with the practice of speaking and writing…. The study of etymology may help a scholar here and there to a happier use of language, but over-consciousness is fatal to supreme excellence in composition, and the best etymologists, the best grammarians, are not the best stylists” (HH, p. 56). In these discussions, etymology is not a category of linguistic history but a trope of rhetoric: a device for enhancing an argument, for coloring a claim. And so, too, Gildersleeve relies on it. “We have to deal not with the roots but with the foliage of language” (HH, p. 57). Words from Greek and Latin are that foliage, he claims, and thus they constitute an ornament to English. “Root” from the Old English; “foliage” from the Latin, by way of the French. Translate, then, Gildersleeve’s claim philologically. We have to deal not with the Anglo-Saxon origins of words but with the Latin, Greek, or other words that leaf it out, that give it color, shade, and fullness. It is as if Gildersleeve himself is now appropriating foreign words and naturalizing them: performing not just a linguistic but, of course, a political act, one whose idiom goes back to the terms of William Thornton and John Quincy Adams. “Admit” words as one admits peoples, Thornton claimed; “annex” and “adopt” new words, wrote Adams.

But there is a world of difference between the politics of language in the nation at the turn of the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth. And there is a world of difference between the politics of revolutionary men and those of Gildersleeve’s age. For what Gildersleeve is really talking about is the restoration of a country after civil war. The politics of verbal meaning, here—the ardent quality of his philology—comes from an enduring personal memory of the Old South: of the lost cause, of the atrocities that Gildersleeve saw perpetrated on his home.⁵⁴ Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, attending Princeton, teaching at the University of Virginia, serving in the Confederate Army, Gildersleeve was unabashedly a scion of the aristocratic South. “I have shared the fortunes of the land in which my lot was cast, and in my time have shared its prejudices and its defiant attitude.”⁵⁵ He joined up in 1861, saw action in the battles of the Shenandoah Valley and at Wyer’s Cave, followed from his sick bed Sherman’s march to the sea, and prided himself on his membership in a “heroic generation.” And when he neared death, at age ninety-three, he asked to be buried back in Charlottesville.⁵⁶

This Southern background shaped both the aesthetics and the politics of Gildersleeve’s rhetorical philology. His Creed of the Old South (a collection of magazine articles originally published in 1892 and revised and reissued in book form in 1915) argued for a distinctive humanist and literary Southern culture—an ideal of gentlemanly ethics, where young soldiers’ “talk fell on Goethe and on Faust,” where Princeton college roommates and Virginia students could die with the classics on their lips.⁵⁷ In his other autobiographical reflections, Gildersleeve could look back on a Charleston childhood rich with littérateurs, poets, and artists. One of those writers was Paul Hamilton Hayne, who averred that his contemporaries “looked upon literature as the choice recreation of gentlemen, as something fair and good, to be courted in a dainty, amateur fashion, and illustrated by apropos quotations from Lucretius, Virgil, or Horace.”⁵⁸

At the University of Virginia, where Gildersleeve taught from 1856 until he left for the newly created Johns Hopkins University twenty years later, this belletristic Southern culture was enhanced by a distinctive vision of philology as similarly keyed to geographical inheritance. For, if the young man could quote Lucretius, or Virgil, or Horace, he should, too, be able to see his life refracted in the heroisms of The Battle of Maldon or Beowulf. The Southern Anglo-Saxonists had taken their philology explicitly in response to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Maximillian Schele De Vere, Gildersleeve’s contemporary professor of modern languages at Virginia, noted that the survival of Anglo-Saxon after the Norman Conquest could be likened to the survival of Southern culture after the Civil War. As defenders of individual liberty, as speakers of a language rich with heroic poetry, as figures of defeat, the Anglo-Saxons came to stand, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as models for the Southern self. Indeed, some philologists came increasingly to believe that the Southern dialect preserved the forms and sounds of early English. The defeat in war, then, meant defeat not just for a society or cause but for the history of the language itself.⁵⁹

Such sentiments were made explicit in an essay published in the second volume of the Sewanee Review in 1894 by J. B. Henneman. “The Study of English in the South” reviewed the previous half-century of education to chart the curricular shifts from rhetoric to philology.⁶⁰ Students were reading Blair and Campbell still in the mid-nineteenth century, while “English” very much meant “rhetoric”: instruction in “the old-time orations and methods of essay writing,” with “classes in ‘rhetoric and belles-lettres’” taught by the professor of metaphysics (p. 181). Even though the old “graces of the Southern orator” survived in the classroom (and clearly survived in Gildersleeve’s essays), German-trained philologists were coming to the colleges to teach philology. The interest in the history of the English language, though, Henneman stresses, “was a movement essentially of native growth, and nowhere of foreign importation or imitation” (p. 189). Robert E. Lee, the president of Washington College (later, Washington and Lee University), marked his administration by a “sympathy” for the historical study of English. Such study “was a product answering to local needs, as those needs had become intensified through the interruptions and derangements of the War” (p. 189). Henneman goes on, in a vein perfectly parallel to Gildersleeve: “A knowledge of the early forms of English was demanded, not as philology pure and simple, constituting an end in itself, but as a means for acquiring a true, appreciative knowledge of the mother tongue” (p. 189). Beowulf (“this stirring Germanic epic” [p. 195]), the heroic poems, and what Henneman calls The Fight at Maldon, were read and translated at the Southern universities by the 1880s (p. 194). And even though the founding of Johns Hopkins made historical philology, both English and classical, part of the accepted university curriculum, the Southern schools were well ahead of the curve.

Philology became a means of regional identity, a way of locating the Southern self against an old, heroic literary figuration. Indeed, the South—with all these claims for a historical link to Anglo-Saxon, the associations between Civil War defeat and classic battles, the identification of gentlemanly action with antique heroism—in these discourses becomes some purer version of America itself, perhaps in answer to the claims from Webster to Whitney for a New England purity of diction and historical inheritance.

In this environment of Southern scholarship, Gildersleeve emerges as “an ardent lover of literature” (ES, p. 506). And in his 1878 address as president of the American Philological Association, he announced: “While special research has, it is true, the drawback that it tends to make the course of instruction symmetrical, what is lost in the rounded completeness of form is more than made up by the kindling of life that goes forth from every one who is engaged in the ardent quest of truth; and so thoroughly correlated is all knowledge, that there are subtle lines of connexion between the most remote regions of scientific study which vitalize them and method through the whole intervening space.”⁶¹ The ardent quest of truth itself is flaming here, lit by the “kindling of life.” What connections may we find between this passage and the “most remote regions” of Gildersleeve’s own thoughts? For how can we not think of that great conflagration so fixed in his memory that, half a century after the Civil War, he could still call it up?

The rhetoric of scholarship becomes the elegiacs of the war. The pioneers, the provinces, the tracks, the fires—all the artistry of word and will cannot express what he had seen. Go back, now, to the language of the philological pioneer: not just in James A. H. Murray but in Gildersleeve and, again, in Whitney—Whitney, who could write of Bournouf as “essentially a pioneer and pathmaker” or who could claim “the labors of the etymologist must precede and prepare the way for everything that is to follow.”⁶³ The etymology of “pioneer,” of which I made so much in my previous chapter—a soldier who goes first, to blaze a pathway for an army—now, in these reminiscences of war, takes on an elegiac edge. What good is etymology? “The only good compound evolved during the Civil War,” Gildersleeve tossed off in Hellas and Hesperia, “is ‘gripsack’” (p. 63).

But, surely, what that war gave to Gildersleeve was more. Philology becomes a vast amnesty project for Southern resistance. Etymology takes on a profound importance as it leads us back through personal reflection to American identity. Even an old cliché such as “sweetness and light” refracts itself through Gildersleeve’s memory. “Sweetness” recalls how hard it was for the Confederate soldier to get his sugar, and this recollection then leads to a discourse on honey, the sweetener of the ancient world. Attic honey was a special treat. “The Peleponnesians would not have been soldiers if they had not robbed every beehive on the march.” The old war recalls an even older one, and both recall a personal experience. “Attic honey has the ring of New Orleans molasses; ‘those molassesses,’ as the article was often called, with an admiring plural of majesty” (Creed, pp. 99–101). Grammatical analysis is never far away, even from this string of an old man’s free associations.

And, of course, there was the light. “A Confederate student,” he wrote, “could more readily renounce sweetness than light, and light soon became a serious matter.” He goes on: “The American demands a flood of light, and wonders at the English don who pursues his investigations by the glimmer of two candles. It was hard to go back to primitive tallow dips. Lard might have served, but it was too precious to be used in lamps…. Many preferred the old way, and read by flickering pine-knots, which cost many an old reader his eyes” (Creed, p. 101). Recall, now, Middlemarch and Casaubon’s dim tapers; recall Henry James’s avowal that to read that novel well one must read as an American; recall Seamus Heaney, who, in his meditations on the Old English word “êolian” (to suffer), had “undergone something like illumination by philology.” So, too, I think has Gildersleeve. His arguments and reminiscences have vivified the etymology of “ardent.” Everything remains aflame, the lights are burning, and the rhetoric of his accounts is like the old way of illumination by pine knots.

By the close of the nineteenth century, rhetoric had lost out to philology as the venue for a nationalist academic discipline. Though the rhetorical approach had inflected philological inquiry, and though the teaching of rhetoric had remained a mainstay of the undergraduate curriculum, its syllabi had ossified into instruction in good taste, good writing, and good oratory. James Morgan Hart’s dismissal of rhetoric in the 1884 PMLA as “a purely formal drill,” without relevance to literary study, spoke for one side of the curricular debate. As he put it, in a pungent rhetorical analogy of his own: “Rhetorical exercises are, of course, useful. So are the parallel bars and dumb-bells of a gymnasium. Need I push the comparison farther?”⁶⁴

Yet there were those, especially at the new universities in the Midwest, who would seek to revive rhetoric as scientific study. The rising interest in phonology—the analysis of regional pronunciations as well as of the physiology of speech production—had grown out of the Neogrammarian’s concern with sound shifts, on the one hand, and out of arguments about the nature and diversity of regional dialects, on the other. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the so-called science of phonology had begun to push speech study away from social education in the arts of eloquence to empirical inquiry into the organs of sound. Speech “science” came to embrace experimental phonology, therapy for the correction of impediments, and, also, oral interpretation. At the 1912 Minneapolis convention of the National Speech Arts Association came the call for a “‘science’ of persuasion.”⁶⁵ Speech became, in the terms of the Speech Communication Association, a discipline of “practical, systematic communication.” Such moves were designed, in the words of this discipline’s historians, “to unify, to place on a solid foundation, and to give academic stature to training in speech which was something more than ‘elocution’” (p. 500). By 1926, when the American Academy of Speech Correction was established, it set among its original goals “To secure public recognition of the practice of speech correction as an organized profession.” “Research into all phenomena of speech and hearing” was the goal of the new speech science (p. 508).

Against this background of scientific language study, several members of the Cornell Department of Speech sought to reassess relationships among expression, writing, rhetoric, and social thought. Beginning in the 1920s, the Cornell group redefined the place of rhetoric in a liberal education.⁶⁶ Its goal was a “search for the relation of rhetoric to the modern world and for a definition of [its social] function.”⁶⁷ And, as part of that search, the group attempted to synthesize the study of past texts and theories with the critique of contemporary modern culture.

The ancients, Gildersleeve had argued, had “to be interpreted into terms of American experience,” (ES, p. 105), and this, too, seemed the logic of the Cornell group. Concerns with what Gildersleeve had called the “practical” and “systematic” features of American identity found themselves expressed, often backward through historical projection, in the scholarship of the Cornellians. Nowhere is this projection clearer than in the work of Harry Caplan, perhaps the most well-known (and most influential) of the group.

Caplan’s first published article, on Latin panegyric, begins in good Ciceronian form by seeking to obtain the benevolence of his audience.⁶⁸ Here, it is the potentially hostile readership of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, for whom, in 1924, the historical study of rhetoric was a bypath along the road to modern scientific inquiry.

Caplan begins publicly and oratorically, his very words signaling the triumph of the new study of classical forensics. He is, in short, an ardent rhetorician, taking up the pose of Cicero’s great orator in De Oratore: “It is the part of an orator, when advising on affairs of supreme importance, to unfold his opinion as a man having authority: his duty is to arouse a listless nation, and to curb its unbridled impetuosity…. Who more passionately than the orator can encourage to virtuous conduct, or more zealously [ardentius] than he reclaim from vicious causes?” (De Oratore, 2.8.35). He is aware that he is writing to the unconvinced, and yet he seeks their benevolence, makes them share in both his institutional experience (our QUARTERLY), and his fear. He comes to them with trepidation, someone “smitten hip and thigh,” like some corporeally punished schoolboy ill fit with his “scribblings” and idolatry to pass before the judgment of readers. Such schoolboy posturing, too, is part and parcel of the essay’s matter. Caplan does not take as his subject the work of those “high periods of Greece and Rome.” He does not begin at the beginning. Instead, he looks at rhetoric in a period of decline. He looks at Roman imperial literature in its decadent age. And he looks not at the great but at the schoolboys, at texts written by and for the children of late imperial Rome.

By inaugurating his career with a piece on rhetoric in its “decadence,” Caplan signals an important scholarly and pedagogical shift of emphasis. The study of rhetorical theory and practice will not be of the great exemplars of the art but of its daily teaching. As he states, the speech that he will study, as one of the “typical products of the activity of the schools, should be of special interest to teachers of Public Speaking.” This period, he states, “is made particularly significant to us by the fact that the orators were professors of Rhetoric” (p. 42). We have left the world of philosophers and statesmen and reside throughout this essay at the desks of the classroom.

Caplan thus focuses on the Roman equivalent of academic study—an attempt to figure in the texts of the past the practices of an institutional present. He peppers his essay with affective references to classical and modern locales of authority. For example, the Late Empire is a time when “Senators still harangued and maintained the fiction of a Republic and the image of the old Constitution” (p. 43). This is no “Hyde Park” (p. 43). Professors live for classes and their students, not the public (hence the reference to Latro, who “when suddenly called from his class-room to appear in behalf of a relative, he retired in a funk. He could not endure the open sky” [p. 43]). There is the well-chosen quotation from Petronius, who inveighs against the teachers of rhetoric: “I believe college makes complete fools of our young men…. [Y]ou teachers, more than anyone else, have been the ruin of true eloquence” (pp. 44–45). There is the obligatory reference to the Gettysburg Address in discussing the purposes of classical oratory (p. 46). And there are the references, toward the essay’s end, to issues in “literary criticism” and the notion of style as necessarily yoked together with content. Here, Caplan argues that the rhetoricians of the Late Empire offer us “eloquence empty of ideas” (p. 51). He notes that, while their Latin is grammatically correct and the diction finished, the works of the panegyrists are examples of mere mannerism, and their authors “specialists in externals” (pp. 50–51).

Caplan challenges the nineteenth-century traditions of that “oratorical culture” that found in rhetoric only the keys to ornament and polish. His imaginary antagonist is not the Midwestern speech scientist among the readership of the Quarterly Journal of Speech but rather his academic forbears at Cornell, Harvard, and other institutions of the previous century. The panegyrists of the Late Empire are, in these terms, to be compared with the popular orators of an earlier America. Yet such panegyric survives still, as Caplan avows in the final sentence of his essay: “It is necessary only to hear or read speeches delivered in our own country at inauguration ceremonies, the awarding of advanced degrees, and particularly the nomination of presidential candidates” (p. 52). Like Cicero’s orator, whose “duty is to arouse a listless nation,” or like Gildersleeve’s philologist, whose task is to explain the past through an American present, Caplan establishes the historical background for a modern revival of rhetoric. He wishes to reunify form and content, to grant university teachers and their students public validation, and to claim a pedagogical calling that will remedy Petronius’s claim that professors have been “the ruin of true eloquence.”

If Caplan’s essay inaugurated his professional career, his Loeb Library edition of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, published in 1954, capped it. In its historical introduction and its critical apparatus, we may find the fulfillment of these early claims for the professionalization of speech education in America.⁶⁹ But the Loeb Rhetorica ad Herennium forms also the endpoint of the Cornell school: a manual of public speaking, whose very title, De Ratione Dicendi, Caplan translates freely as “On the Theory of Public Speaking.” As we open the pages of this text, we can look back to Adams’s arguments for ratio and oratoria, to the debates on theory and practice embedded in the rhetorical traditions as a whole, and to the complex interrelationship of the public and the private that is central to American rhetorical life.

The introduction establishes the nature of the ad Herennium as a textbook of rhetorical practice by illustrating, through examples and comparisons, the fundamentally practical quality of the work. Caplan’s opening paragraph states succinctly his impressions of the work: “It is a technical manual, systematic and formal in arrangement; its exposition is bald, but in greatest part clear and precise. Indeed the writer’s specific aims are to achieve clarity and conciseness, and to complete the exposition of his subject with reasonable speed” (p. vii). From the start, Caplan identifies those ideals not only of rhetorical practice but of scholarly and pedagogical method that had motivated his own work from the first paper on the Latin panegyrics. There is the emphasis on clarity and concision, speed and directness, and the keeping of “practical needs always in view” by avoiding extraneous matter. The vices of the panegyrists (and, by implication, of the earlier American generations of rhetorical and oratorical pedagogics) are absent here. Caplan returns to this ideal, reminding his readers: “We must remark, too, in our author’s case the thoroughly practical motives to which he constantly gives expression” (pp. xv–xvi)—again, a phrasing that, by now, should recall Gildersleeve’s practical Americans. The auctor ad Herennium’s exposition is characterized throughout as systematic (see p. xx), and Caplan avers once more “his primary purpose—technical instruction in the art of rhetoric” (pp. xxiv). Throughout, the auctor’s “counsel is for moderation and the considerations of propriety” (p. xx).

That auctor was a creature of some question for the nineteenth century: was he Cicero, Cornificius, or some nameless student? Caplan clearly wants the author to be a student of public speaking, but by no means the slavish imitator that earlier scholars had created. He wants him indebted to tradition, but he also wants some originality in his organization of material and selection of examples. He also wants him to be a person and not simply a collection of dedicatory and epidiectic tropes. Caplan announces: “Who, finally, was the real author? We have no evidence to determine that question, and so must assign the work to an auctor incertus” (p. xiv). But lack of evidence does not impede the editor’s judgment. Caplan wants to argue that the author speaks personally rather than merely rhetorically when he mentions his private life. “We have no reason to believe,” he asserts, “that when he speaks of the pressure of private affairs and the demands of his occupations he is merely following a literary convention or indulging in rhetorical fiction” (p. xxii). His examples from political history suggest to Caplan an intimate knowledge and even some partisanship in contemporary affairs. And the author’s many examples and patterns of organization also strongly imply, to the editor, an independence from his tutorial model. Note Caplan’s own rhetoric here: “We go too far if we assume that the precepts all belong to the teacher and very little more than the Introductions and Conclusions to the author. And one wonders how the teacher would have regarded the release of his own work, even if only for private use, as the work of his pupil” (p. xxiii). Caplan concludes this discussion of the author by continuing this line of belief as argument: “It seems best, however, to grant the author some degree of literary individuality, and to regard his claim to the use of his ‘own’ examples as at least an honest one” (p. xxxi).

Caplan privileges the personal over the rhetorical, the original over the received, the specific over the general. He imagines a voice and a life for the author: a life modeled along the lines of a kind of advanced student of rhetoric, a kind of Cornell graduate student of the first century B.C., who has culled from his teachers the best in practical rhetoric and who has the maturity or independence of thought to organize and augment material with his own invention. The story told in Caplan’s introduction is thus a story of education itself: a move from the imitative childishness of puerile excess to the grown-up security of restraint and decorum. His example of his author’s literary criticism may now be reread as a way station on this allegory of maturity. “If we crowd these figures together,” wrote the auctor, “we shall seem to be taking delight in childish style (puerili elocutione).” Such puerile elocution may, Caplan had admitted, be found in the book (pp. xxi–xxii). But, as he said, “not everything labeled as puerile by some critics justifies the label” (p. xxii). The search for what Caplan had signaled “manly independence of thought” (p. xxi) may well now be the critic’s charge, as the ad Herennium becomes not just a model textbook but a key to growth, a story of a boy become a man.

To find this man, one must find a voice, and Caplan subtly translates the concluding gestures of the ad Herennium to present them as a string of first-person avowals in that voice. He creates not just the figure of transcriber or compiler but of narrator. The final paragraph of the work begins with a series of clauses stating what the text has done: Demonstratum est; dictum est; traditum est; praeceptum est; demonstratum est (4.56.59). All these third-person perfect indicative passives Caplan translates as first-person perfects: “I have shown; I have told; I have disclosed; I have taught; I have explained” (p. 411). We have, in Caplan’s English, the articulations of an individual, one who appears to assert control over his material; one whose powers of systematic organization and clarity of delivery match the ideals that his work espoused.

At moments such as these, Caplan’s author speaks in his own voice, and the scholarly goals of his introduction find their voice in the narrative ends of his translation. The repeated concerns with finding “individuality,” maturity, and stylistic and organizational control come together at the book’s close. So, too, the origins and audience of such an author find expression here. If, as Caplan had stated, “the treatise is … an image of school practice” (p. xvii), then the auctor, however incertus, is a product of the schools, and his treatise is a testimony to the place and purpose of rhetorical education in those schools. If it is a document of its times, it is as well a tract for Caplan’s times: an affirmation of the ideals of expository writing and public speaking instruction of the first half of the twentieth century; a text for the Cornell group.

In the end, the Loeb edition of the Rhetorica ad Herennium is a textbook of rhetoric for the modern student. Caplan’s systematic and clearly organized summary of its contents (with its lists and diagrams [pp. xlv–lviii]) makes the work immediately accessible to that student, and it shows precisely where in the text he or she may go to find the definition of a given trope or the examples of its use. To make his treatise readable and usable by the modern English-speaking student, Caplan favors the use of familiar English terms, even when they may not precisely translate the Latin originals of their Greek sources.

On the one hand, Caplan writes out of “duty,” presumably to those students who will wish a textbook for their own scholarly and practical use. But, on the other hand, he historicizes his own practice, offering in a long footnote an essay on the tradition of translating Latin rhetorical terms into English. Look at the scholarship deployed to illustrate a single word: “I follow the practice, perhaps begun by Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique (first ed. 1553), ed. G. H. Mair, Oxford, 1910, p. 89, of translating constitutio (or status [= stasis], the term used by Cicero, except in De Inv., and by most other rhetoricians) as ‘Issue’” (pp. 32–33). And this is only the beginning. The Latin “constitutio” translates the Greek term “stasis.” “Adumbrated in pre-Aristotelian rhetoric (where it was close to Attic procedure), as well as in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, it was developed principally by Hermagoras” (p. 33). Caplan lists a range of sources: an American article in Speech Monographs, followed by German doctoral dissertations, articles, and encyclopedia entries, then a reference to “modern students of Roman Law,” and then a directive to see yet another one of Caplan’s notes, this one to 2.13.19. There, Caplan offers up a disquisition on the origins of “legal custom” (Latin “iudicatum,” Greek sunhqeia), followed by another daunting bibliography of German, Italian, British, and American scholars (pp. 92–93).

These notes form a microcosm of the Loeb edition of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, of the project of the Cornell group, and of the history of the study of rhetoric in the modern world. They bring together scholarship published throughout the world. They juxtapose the learned German dissertation with Speech Monographs. They discuss the problem of status with reference to pre-Aristotelian traditions, as well as in the work of Aristotle, Hermagoras, Cicero, and Quintilian. They make the discussion relevant to the interest of modern students. Finally, by opening with reference to one of the first sustained and comprehensive treatments of rhetoric in English, Caplan grounds his own enterprise in a scholarly tradition five centuries old. It might be more than coincidence that the first dissertation on the history of rhetoric at Cornell was written in 1928 by Russell Wagner on “Thomas Wilson’s ‘Arte of Rhetorique’”—and thus Caplan’s note hearkens back to the origins of advanced scholarship at Cornell.⁷⁰

These footnotes use the occasion of an etymology to write a genealogy of scholarship. They place the Americans on a par with the Germans, locate a terminological problem in their English language heritage, make the ancient forensic relevant to the modern legal. They are, in short, the epitome of philological rhetoric—a bravura display of learning that reveals the Cornell professor’s command of anything the German philologists (or any one else, for that matter) could serve up. If, in the end, there is an auctor to the ad Herennium, it is Harry Caplan himself: practical and systematic, pressing philological research into a pedagogical imperative, bringing earlier learning to bear on present teachings. And he remains a very American auctor at that.

The legacy of Harry Caplan and the Cornell group resides most obviously in those programs in rhetoric and composition that have stressed the classical tradition.⁷¹ But there remains a broader debt in the discourses of late-twentieth-century literary theory. For it lies in the fascinations with the etymologies of tropes that theorists and rhetoricians share a common cause. Words such as “metathesis,” or “metaphor,” or “catachresis” (to take but the obvious examples) can refer, to the English-speaking student, only to one thing: to the rhetorical device. But once we translate these terms—expose their Greek etymologies, research their Latin equivalents, seek to come up with vernacular English versions—then they no longer pose a simple one-to-one correspondence between term and figure. Instead, they come to narrate stories of manipulation, tales of verbal twists and turns. This question of the figurality of figurative terminology forms the nexus of philology and rhetoric. It governs not just the tradition of a classicizing composition pedagogy but the debates of theory and, by implication, the contemporary study of literature itself.

The most creative response to this legacy of figuralization lies in the de-constructive strain of American literary theory. Derrida’s fascination with the turns and figures of rhetorical ornament gave rise to a rhetoricizing or, perhaps more accurately, an allegorizing of rhetoric itself. Rhetorical figures became metaphors for social interaction and the construction of literary meaning. Irony, in particular, became a way of understanding language’s relationship to the world and, as a consequence, of literary theory’s place in aesthetic evaluation. It came to stand for the estrangement between signifier and thing signified. It embodied the fundamentally non-mimetic nature of linguistic representation. Language did not represent the experience; it represented language. A meditation on the history of irony (as in Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Temporality”) helped generate an awareness of the illusory nature of mimetic representation. Literary language, in this formulation, was, in some sense, always allegorical: not, however, in the sense that it was writing out extended narratives of coded meaning but rather in that it was always telling stories of its own attempts to make meaning. The allegory of literature was, in the terms of another of de Man’s titular bequeathals, an allegory of reading.⁷²

Theory, in this tradition, queried the very stability of language, be it the language of literature or that of criticism, and, in the process, it potentially undermined the practices of those who would attempt to deploy it. In contrast to the classical conception of rhetoric—that it is socially affirming, ethical in basis, persuasive in purpose, and disciplinarily unifying of the human constituents of ratio and oratio—the de Manian conception was precisely the opposite. Allegories of Reading addressed “the study of tropes and of figures (which is how the term rhetoric is used here, and not in the derived sense of comment or of eloquence or persuasion).”⁷³ By exposing the rhetoricality of all expression, theory of this kind undermined the stability of representation. De Man used Nietzsche’s words to argue: “There is no difference between the correct rules of eloquence and the so-called rhetorical figures. Actually, all that is generally called eloquence is figural language…. Tropes are not something that can be added or subtracted from language at will; they are its truest nature.”⁷⁴ And, as he summarized, “The first step of the Nietzschean deconstruction therefore reminds us … of the figurality of all language” (p. 111).

Rhetorical reading became a way of pointing out the figurality of all discourses.⁷⁵ It centered on locating moments in a text that did not so much affirm as disrupt meaning. Rhetoric was what reading revealed—a dialectic of contradictions, of which the writer may not even have been aware. One contrasting meaning “always lay hidden in the other,” de Man wrote in “The Rhetoric of Blindness,” “as the sun lies hidden within a shadow, or the truth within error.” “Criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading,” he noted there, and rhetorical tropes could hold within them the keys to the deconstruction of the narrative text.⁷⁶ “The Rhetoric of Temporality” begins with the announcement that “recent developments in criticism reveal the possibility of a rhetoric that would no longer be normative or descriptive but that would more or less openly raise the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures.”⁷⁷

De Man’s is a rhetorical philology. A trope’s name contains within it a history of meaning or a narrative of estrangement—like the sun hiding within a shadow, or truth within error. But the real issue is the reverse. The etymology of tropes reveals a shadow in the sunlight, or an error in the truth. If “criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading,” then, I posit, rhetoric is a metaphor for the act of writing. And this rhetorical turn—with its focus on the etymologies of tropes and the embedded narratives of figurality—is a profoundly philological one. “The turn to theory occurred as a return to philology,” de Man wrote in the brief essay of that title, “to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.”⁷⁸

Perhaps the most ardent etymologist of the de Manian tradition working now is the Renaissance critic Patricia Parker. Throughout her work, error and etymology control the interpretations of the genre of romance, the ideologies of authorship, the claims of reading.⁷⁹ Word histories are never far from Parker’s ambit. They become the narratives that often focus her attentions, the true narratives that may displace, or supplement, the literary texts that are the ostensible focus of her claims. Her little essay “Metaphor and Catachresis” is a tour de force of such rhetorical philology.⁸⁰ Here, Parker goes back to the etymologies of the rhetorical terms of her title: metaphor means exchange, a placing of one thing in stead of another; catachresis similarly refers to the transferring of terms from one place to another, but, unlike metaphor, it is presented in the rhetorical manuals as an improper transference. Thus Parker calls attention to the Latin word for catachresis, “abusio,” and exposes it as something of an abuse of language. Catachresis becomes, for her, “a figure of ‘abuse’” and thus the occasion for reflecting on the inherent abusiveness of all figurative language—a sense, in other words, that, behind all tropes, behind all expression, lies a defacement, a violence, an act of power.⁸¹

But behind metaphor and catachresis lies, too, the sense of transfer—what Parker calls a “temporal narrative” behind the modus transferendi verbi. Working from Cicero’s De Oratore, she quotes the discussion about how metaphor “sprang from necessity to the pressure of poverty and deficiency, but it has been subsequently made popular by its agreeable and entertaining quality. For just as clothes were first invented to protect us against cold and afterwards began to be used for the sake of adornment and dignity as well, so the metaphorical employment of words was begun because of poverty, but was brought into common use for the sake of entertainment.”⁸² Parker finds a story embedded in this sense of transferal or transmission: a movement from something once before to now. “Metaphor,” she notes, “begins in this little progress narrative as catachresis—as a transfer necessitated first by the lack of a sufficient supply of proper terms.”⁸³ It then becomes, as she continues to read the ongoing discussion in De Oratore, a problem of control, a question of avoiding overuse or abuse. Delectatio, enjoyment, can become (in Parker’s reading) abusio, not just abuse but now the Latin rhetorical term for the Greek catachresis. Parker sets out to expose “metaphor’s potential for violence” (p. 67), a potential in line with the Derridean concern for the violence of the letter and the deconstructive commitment to the figurativity of all linguistic utterance.

But what this reading also offers is a narrative of progressive estrangement. The definition offered in De Oratore is what Parker calls “the historical narrative,” and herein lies a story of civilization told as an allegory of figural language. “Metaphor,” we must now remember, is our modern English word for what Cicero calls modus transferendi verbi. It exists in this text only in the language of the translator. It may be more familiar for the modern reader, but that familiarity is, in Parker’s treatment, rendered an illusion. For, in essence, what Parker does is make metaphor the trope of the violence of the letter and the rhetoric of temporality. She compels her contemporary reader to look back over the seemingly transparent claims of translators such as Caplan to use familiar Anglicized terms and to recognize them as claims not for representation but estrangement. A word such as “metaphor” in English no longer signifies a rhetorical device; rather, it signifies only another string of signifiers—a concatenation of etymologically derived and linguistically translated terms that reveal all the terms of rhetoric to trope into their opposites. Delectatio is really abusio, pleasure really pain.

As de Man put it, “the one always lay hidden within the other, as the sun lay hidden within a shadow, or the truth within error.” And this is how Parker reconceives of metaphor as a form of error. “A noun or verb,” wrote Quintilian, in a passage Parker quotes, “is transferred from the place where it properly belongs to another” (p. 62). Words wander from their proper places, and this observations leads Parker to a reflection on the eighteenth-century reflection on the figurality of language. In a vast footnote on this link, she ranges from de Man to Fontannier, to Hugh Blair (who quotes Addison), and back to Cicero. Here is but a sampling.

This note’s associations between metaphor and errancy recall Adams’s sly remark on the etymology of error as “a wandering of the feet.” But what it also recalls is the Caplanesque genealogy of terms, the way he (in his own great footnotes) writes a history of idiom, of scholarship, and of reading. For Parker, that history is all about the indeterminacies of the three: about the errancies behind an etymology, the wanderings of the reader’s eye, the deep bewilderment (another word that echoes Adams) of scholarship. Such idioms are, as I noted at this chapter’s opening, profoundly transformed in an American context—where the “errand into the wilderness” took on a resonant geography, where Adams, Webster, and anyone after them could always be aware of what was real behind what Henry Tuckerman would later call “the dense and tangled forest of words.”

And yet, for Harry Caplan, this whole process is not about indeterminacy but about security. If we return to his great footnote, we see that it is about status: constitutio, from the Greek “stasis,” all deriving from the root sto, to stand, to stick fast, to stop. This is the method of, in Caplan’s words, “conjoining … two conflicting statements, thus forming the centre of the argument and determining the character of the case.”⁸⁴ It is not about dialectic but about resolution; not about finding the shadow in the sun, the error in truth, but about resolving something. So, too, the rhetoric of Caplan’s own discussion in his footnote is the rhetoric of resolution. A term and its history are in question; Caplan surveys the lexica, the scholarship, the contexts. As the Rhetorica ad Herennium put it in the passage that immediately precedes the one under discussion here, “The entire hope of victory and the entire method of persuasion rest on proof and refutation, for when we have submitted our arguments and destroyed those of the opposition, we have, of course, completely fulfilled the speaker’s function” (1.10.18, p. 33). This is the very view of rhetoric that de Man—and, by implication, Parker—would refute. And yet it is the logic of the Cornell group, the logic of historical philology and stemmatic textual criticism, the logic of Caplan’s footnote. It is the logic of being sure, of taking a stand, the logic behind the etymology of “status” and “constitutio.” It is the opposite of errare.

And no one took a stand against his errors better than Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve. The concluding lecture of his Hellas and Hesperia looked back over the fortunes of classical scholarship in this country. “Time was,” he says, “when we of this region were more bent on asserting diversity than unity” (HH, p. 90). “But we are all Americans now,” and, to this end, he quotes Walt Whitman, voice of Northern passion in the Civil War but, at the time these lectures were delivered (1909), recognized as “the true American poet and prophet; all the others mere echoes of European voices” (HH, p. 91). Gildersleeve quotes the passage from Leaves of Grass beginning: