To every writer who enlists a well-endowed nature in it, the art of expression is comprehensive enough to include the highest and most exquisite literary achievement; while at its beginning, accessible to all, are the homely and useful details of plain words and clear thinking. Nor is any stage of the work so insignificant but genius can give it the charm of a fine art. III. Province and Distribution of Rhetoric. - The province of the study is suggested in the foregoing definition of rhetoric as art and as adaptation. Its province is to expound in systematic order the technic of an art. But inasmuch as this is an art governed in all its details by the aim of adaptation, its problems are not primarily problems of absolute right and wrong, but of fitness and unfitness, or, where various expedients are in question, of better and worse.1 What is good for one occasion or one class of readers or one subject may be bad for another; what will be powerful to effect one object may be quite out of place for another. Thus it traverses from beginning to end that field of activity wherein the inventive constructive mind is supposably at work making effective discourse. The distribution of the study bases itself most simply, perhaps, on the two questions that naturally rise in any undertaking, the questions WHAT and How. Round the first cluster the principles that relate to matter or thought of discourse; round the second whatever relates to manner or expression. Of course a question of expression must often involve the question of thought also, and vice versa; so the two lines of inquiry must continually touch and interact; but on the whole they are distinct enough to furnish a clear working basis for the distribution of the art. 1 See WENDELL, English Composition, p. 2. Reversing the order here suggested, for a reason presently to be explained, the present manual groups the elements of rhetoric round two main topics: style, which deals with the manner of discourse; and invention, which deals with the matter. Style. The question HOW, which underlies the art of style, divides itself into the questions what qualities to give it in order to produce the fitting effect; then, more particu larly, how to choose words both for what they say (denote) and what they imply or involve (connote), that is, both. literal and figurative expression; how to put words together in phrases and sentences, with fitting stress and order; and how to build these sentences into paragraphs. This division of the study is commonly regarded as the dryest; but it is the most indispensable, and its dryness gives way to intense interest in proportion as the importance of one's work is apprehended. No word or detail can be insignificant which makes more powerful or unerring a desired effect. Invention. - The question WHAT, which underlies the art of invention, must be held to suggest more than the mere finding of subject-matter, which of course must be left to the writer himself. No text-book or system of study can do his thinking for him. It belongs to invention also to determine what concentration and coördination must be given to every line of thought to make it effective; then, more particularly, what forms of discourse are at the writer's disposal, and what peculiarities of management each demands. This division of the study, while not more practical, has the interest of being more directly concerned with the making of literature, and the demands of self-culture therein involved. "Have something to say, and say it, was the Duke of Wellington's theory of style; Huxley's was to say that which has to be said in such language that you can stand cross-examination on each word. Be clear, though you may be convicted of error. If you are clearly wrong, you will run up against a fact some time and get set right. If you shuffle with your subject, and study chiefly to use language which will give you a loophole of escape either way, there is no hope for you." — Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley. |