"I hope that your professors of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate that golden art- the steadfast use of a language in which truth can be told; a speech that is strong by natural force, and not merely effective by declamation; an utterance without trick, without affectation, without mannerisms, and without any of that excessive ambition which overleaps itself as much in prose writing as it does in other things." John Morley. INTRODUCTORY. Definition of Rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of adapting discourse, in harmony with its subject and occasion, to the requirements of a reader or hearer. NOTE. The word discourse, which is popularly understood of something oral, as a speech or a conversation, will be used throughout this treatise to denote any coherent literary production, whether spoken or written. The term is broad enough to cover all the forms of composition, and deep enough to include all its processes. I. Rhetoric as Adaptation. To treat a subject rightly, to say just what the occasion demands, are indeed fundamental to effective discourse; but what more than all else makes it rhetorical is the fact that all the elements of its composition are adopted with implicit reference to the mind of readers or hearers. The writer learns to judge what men will best understand, what they can be made to feel or imagine, what are their interests, their tastes, their limitations; and to these, as subject and occasion dictate, he conforms his work; that is, he adapts discourse to human nature, as its requirements are recognized and skilfully interpreted. The various problems involved in such adaptation constitute the field of the art of rhetoric. This idea of adaptation is the best modern representative of the original aim of the art. Having at first to deal only with hearers, rhetoric began as the art of oratory, that is, of convincing and persuading by speech. Now, however, as the art of printing has greatly broadened its field of action, rhetoric must address itself to readers as well, must therefore include more forms of composition and more comprehensive objects; while still the initial character of the art survives, in the general aim of so presenting thought that it shall have power on men, which aim is most satisfactorily defined in the term adaptation. NOTE. The derived and literary uses of the word rhetoric all start from the recognition of the adaptedness of speech, as wielded by skill and art, to produce spiritual effects. When, for instance, Milton says of Satan, "the persuasive rhetoric That sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve," or speaks, in Comus, of the "gay rhetoric That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence," he sees, in smoothness of speech and deftness of argument, rhetorical devices that in their place are quite legitimate, and incur reproach only as used unscrupulously. In the line "Sweet, silent rhetoric of persuading eyes," the poet Daniel regards the influencing effect as produced by means other than speech; a not infrequent use of the word. Distinguished by this Characteristic from the Sciences on which it is founded. The two sciences that mainly constitute the basis of rhetoric are grammar and logic, both of which it supplements in the direction of adaptation. Grammar, which deals with the forms, inflections, and offices of words, and their relation to each other in phrases and sentences, aims to show what is correct and admissible usage, not what is adapted to men's capacities. A sentence quite unexceptionable in grammar may be feebly expressed, or crudely arranged, or hard to understand; and if so it is to |