Rhetorician

“ A very great and extensive portion of it is artificial eloquence, which men call rhetoric. For we do not agree with those men who think that the knowledge of political science is in no need of and has no connexion with eloquence; and we most widely disagree with those, on the other hand, who think that all political ability is comprehended under the skill and power of a rhetorician. ”

“ We noted at the beginning of this chapter that rhetoric deals with subjects at the point where they touch upon actuality or prudential conduct. Here the defense looks at the policy of teaching evolution and points to beneficial results. The argument then becomes: these important benefits imply an important beneficial cause. This is why we can say that the pleaders for science were forced into the non-scientific role of the rhetorician. ”

“ In a word, you could see that the rhetorician is despised and of no account, while the dialecticians are courted and treated with every respect, because in their ratiocinations there is always something obscure and intricate, and hence it results that the disciple always hangs upon his master and is his slave, held fast bound with a kind of everlasting fetter. ”

“ As soon as he is ready, the young aspirant for oratorical fame passes into the hands of the rhetorician, under whom he learns all the arts, and acquires all that knowledge, necessary to fit him for his profession. ”

“ They taught that the sole aim of the orator is to turn the minds of his hearers into such a train as may best suit his own interest; that, consequently, rhetoric is the agent of persuasion, the art of all arts, because the rhetorician is able to speak well and convincingly on every subject, though he may have no accurate knowledge respecting it. ”

“ Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge?—is not that the inference? ”

“ The base rhetorician, we may say, is a man who has yielded to the wrong aspects of existence. He has allowed himself to succumb to the sights and shows, to the physical pleasures which conspire against noble life. ”

“ We have our journalists, our book-makers (literary, not sporting) , our platform and parliamentary palaverers, our popular entertainers; and we also have our pedagogues, scholastic and collegiate, our scientific and other lecturers, etc. But the Rhetorician of old was a Jack of all these trades; and he too frequently combined the triviality, unreality, sophistry and catch-pennyism of the one division with the priggishness, the lack of tact and humour, and above all the pseudo-scientific tendency to generalisation, classification and, to use a familiar word, "pottering" of the other. ”

“ The most laboured efforts of the rhetorician bear no comparison with the honied, artful speeches, and the gay113 and cheerful air by which he detains, wheedles, and finally succeeds in obliging the passer by to purchase, or at least examine the contents of his stall. ”

“ The vices of the forum, which you have both, as becomes men of integrity, attacked with vehemence, will not have me for their apologist. But still I may be allowed to ask, have not you been too much exasperated against the rhetoricians?
I will not say in their favour, that I think them equal to the task of reviving the honours of eloquence; but I have known among them, men of unblemished morals, of regular discipline, great erudition, and talents every way fit to form the minds of youth to a just taste for science and the persuasive arts. ”

“ There is less to be said for the teachers of rhetoric, politics and eristic, who, in limiting themselves each to a single subject—the rhetoricians proper or forensic rhetoricians to one branch of oratory, the politicians or political rhetoricians to another, and the eristics to disputation—ceased to be educators and became instructors. ”

“ There are rhetoricians skilful in playing by words and manner on every chord of human nature, rhetoricians who move you, and may even carry you away for the moment, but whose sincerity is doubted, because the sense of spontaneity is lacking. ”

“ Classical rhetoricians commonly divided their subject into five parts. This analysis of rhetoric into inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio is to all intents and purposes universal in classical rhetoric and must be understood to give one a valid idea of its content. [58] Inventio, so often lazily mistranslated as "invention," is the art of exploring the material to discover all the arguments which may be brought to bear in support of a proposition and in refutation of the opposing arguments. ”

“ It was the era of the rhetoricians, or sophists, as they were sometimes called; of men who came in some instances to great fame and fortune, by way of a literary cultivation of “science.” That science, it has been often said, must have been wholly an affair of words. ”

“ They succeeded in spreading a popular education among a people that had lost all hope of a political life, but they soon degenerated into the use of narrow and formal methods. The 29 later rhetoricians attempted to hasten oratorical training and preparation for life, by teaching their pupils ready-made speeches and dialogues, together with a general knowledge of current questions. ”

“ It is certain, that, as painters are formed by painters, and poets by the example of poets, so the young orator must learn his art from orators only. In the schools of rhetoricians [b] , who think themselves the fountain-head of eloquence, every thing is false and vitiated. The true principles of the persuasive art are never known to the professor, or if at any time there may be found a preceptor of superior genius, can it be expected that he shall be able to transfuse into the mind of his pupil all his own conceptions, pure, unmixed, and free from error? ”

“ For the design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reason; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it. And I know not what exactness of Method, pure and proper Language, Figures, insinuating ways of Address and the like signify, any farther than as they contribute to the Service of Truth by rendring our Discourse Intelligible, Agreeable and Convincing. ”

“ Let that belief which you hold alone, have free course. I have observed that, in all public speaking, the rule of the orator begins, not in the array of his facts, but when his deep conviction, and the right and necessity he feels to convey that conviction to his audience,—when these shine and burn in his address; when the thought which he stands for gives its own authority to him,—adds to him a grander personality, gives him valor, breadth, and new intellectual power, so that not he, but mankind, seems to speak through his lips. ”

“ Moreover, she distrusted eloquence, Parliamentary, forensic, literary; thinking that the plain facts are the persuasive speakers in a good cause, and that rhetoric is to be suspected as the flourish over a weak one. ”

“ All things considered, rhetoric, noble or base, is a great power in the world; and we note accordingly that at the center of the public life of every people there is a fierce struggle over who shall control the means of rhetorical propagation. Today we set up “offices of information,” which like the sly lover in the dialogue, pose as non-lovers while pushing their suits. But there is no reason to despair over the fact that men will never give up seeking to influence one another. ”

“ I once heard a peculiarly apt criticism of a speech made by a politician of profound learning and knowledge, but one not very much in sympathy with the more frivolous side of life. This orator, having to address a meeting in a country town, had beforehand been begged to remember that his audience was not remarkable for any great intellectual culture, and was consequently unlikely to appreciate historical allusions or erudite criticism—a chatty, sparkling speech judiciously peppered with anecdote and chaff would be the sort of thing to arouse enthusiasm and capture its sympathies. ”

“ Thus it appears that Rhetoric is as it were an offshoot of Dialectic and of the science of Ethics, which may be reasonably called Politics. That is why Rhetoric assumes the character of Politics, and those who claim to possess it, partly from ignorance, partly from boastfulness, and partly from other human weaknesses, do the same. For, as we said at the outset, Rhetoric is a sort of division or likeness of Dialectic, since neither of them is a science that deals with the nature of any definite subject, but they are merely faculties of furnishing arguments. ”

“ To enhance the illustration of the two main heads of the Art of Study, I will so far deviate from the idea of the essay, as to take up a special branch of education, which, more than any other, has been reduced to form and rule, I mean the great accomplishment of Oratory, or the Art of Persuasion. The practical Science of Rhetoric, cultivated both by ancients and by moderns, has especially occupied itself with directions for acquiring this great engine of influencing mankind. ”

“ The graces taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied contrivances of speech, shock and disgust men, when their own lives, and the fate of their wives, their children, and their country hang on the decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is in vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities. ”

“ We have shown that rhetorical force must be conceived as a power transmitted through the links of a chain that extends upward toward some ultimate source. The higher links of that chain must always be of unique interest to the student of rhetoric, pointing, as they do, to some prime mover of human impulse. Here I propose to turn away from general considerations and to make an empirical study of the terms on these higher levels of force which are seen to be operating in our age. ”

“ Here, and in scores of similar cases, lies often a trap for the understanding; but the Schoolmen evaded this trap by distinguishing between 'Rhetorica utens,' and 'Rhetorica docens,' between the rhetoric that laid down or delivered didactically the elements of oratorical persuasion as an art to be learned, and rhetoric, on the other hand, as a creative energy that wielded these elements by the mouth of Pericles in the year 440 b. c., or by the mouth of Demosthenes, 340 b. c.; between rhetoric the scholastic art and rhetoric the heaven-born power ”

“ I am far from being influenced by a like spirit of ambition, and far from flattering myself with the glory of invention, and I shall rest content with that which seems most rational, that rhetoric is properly defined as "The science of speaking well." Having found what is best, it is useless to seek further. ”

“ But if the middle ages had no opportunity to apply rhetoric in its function of persuasion in communal affairs, they did have real need of an art of writing letters and of preparing lay or ecclesiastical documents, such as contracts, wills, and records, and of preaching sermons. ”

“ Through speech after speech, strings of hollow abstractions are endlessly renewed as in a meeting of students in rhetoric for the purpose of practice, or in a society of old bookworms for their own amusement. ”

“ We have heard a few, a very few, good political speakers, who afforded us the pleasure of great intellectual power and acuteness, of soldier-like steadiness, and of a graceful and natural oratory; but in this man the audience might detect a sort of moral principle and integrity, which was more stable than their firmness, more discriminating than his own intellect, and more graceful than his rhetoric, which was not working for temporary or trivial ends. ”

“ If those exorbitancies of speech may be accommodated to instill good doctrine into the head, to excite good passions in the heart, to illustrate and adorn the truth, in a delightful and taking way, and facetious discourse be sometimes notoriously conducible to the same ends, why, they being retained, should it be rejected, especially considering how difficult often it may be to distinguish those forms of discourse from this, or exactly to define the limits which sever rhetoric and raillery. ”

“ All those agreeable and smart arguments, all those artifices of debate, and also all that ostentation of pathos that we find in it, come from rhetoric. Philosophy has furnished those grand commonplaces developed with talent, but not always germane to the subject. ”

“ To know law, and to speak to the point, is the only rhetoric approved, or indeed allowed, there; and therefore the jokes which witty men have made upon the cold and plain manner of speaking there return upon the makers. ”

“ The witchery of words, powerful enough on the printed page, is to me ten times more powerful when it is reinforced by voice and glance and gesture. Fine rhetoric and lofty declamation have always stirred my blood; and yet I suppose that Demosthenes was right, and that, though rhetoric [Pg 285] and declamation are good, still the most valuable asset for a public speaker is a complete identification with the majority of his countrymen, in their prejudices, their likings, and their hatreds. ”

“ At the beginning of my activity as a public speaker I made it my rule never to say anything in my speeches that I did not conscientiously believe to be true; never to hesitate to admit a mistake when I became convinced that I had made one; never to appeal to a prejudice or to a mean, narrow-minded selfish interest; to invoke only the highest order of motives—patriotism, the sense of right, justice, and honor ”

“ What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. ”