CHAPTER V
THE LITERARY CRITICISM OF RHETORIC
Criticism is inevitably a part of teaching. The teacher’s holding up of models involves both analysis of them and appreciation. The differentiation of the critic from the teacher is roughly that his judgments are not applied immediately to tasks of composition, that he rather defines or extends theory than promotes practise. His estimate of the professional writer is not directly brought to bear on the advancement of the amateur. He stops with appreciation; the teacher tries to carry this over into imitation. But the differentiation of the two functions has never been complete; and in classical times it went only a little way. Quintilian, who was typically the teacher, is included with respect in histories of criticism. Dionysius of Halicarnassus classifies his acute appreciations of orators and poets under text-book headings, and puts forth his treatise on style, as does the great unknown “On the Sublime,” for instruction. Both are what we now call critics. The classification of Dionysius does not hinder his critical appreciation; the classification of the great unknown merges into a kindling enthusiasm.
Probably most of the literary criticism current in the last years of the Republic and the first centuries of the Roman Empire came from grammarians and rhetoricians.[1] It is worth while, nevertheless, to consider separately from the manuals and methods of instruction those treatises which were written rather to educate appreciation than to further the tasks of the schools. Outstanding among these are the Brutus of Cicero and the Dialogus of Tacitus; but the two most specific and significant in doctrine are the ones mentioned above: Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Sentences (De Compositione Verborum), and the unknown author on the Heightening of Language (De Sublimitate). In some respects complementary, the two together offer a clear view of style in the classical conception.
A. Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Sentences
The most specific and systematic rhetorical treatise of Dionysius[1a] deals with sentence movement, or compositio[2] (see pages 25, 53, 67, 79). This, he makes bold to say in his second paragraph,[3] is the aspect of composition most profitable for the study of youth.
There is need ... of oversight and guidance ... for a choice of words at once pure and noble ... and a sentence movement combining charm with dignity.... The chief heads under which I propose to treat the subject are the following: what is the nature of sentence movement and what force it has; what are its aims and how it attains them; what are its generic varieties, and what is the distinctive feature of each, and which of them I believe to be best; and still further, what is that poetical something, both pleasant on the tongue and sweet to the ear, which naturally accompanies the sentence movement of prose, and wherein lies the force of that poetical method which imitates unpoetical speech and succeeds thoroughly in the imitation, and by what method each of these two may be attained.[4]
Sentence movement, moreover, Dionysius thinks to be more important than the choice of words.[5] He supports this assertion first by analyzing a passage from the Odyssey.[6]
Everybody would, I am sure, testify that these lines cast a spell of enchantment on the ear, and rank second to no poetry whatsoever, however exquisite it may be. But what is the secret of their fascination, and what causes them to be what they are? Is it the choice of words or the sentence movement? No one will say “the choice”; of that I am convinced. For the diction consists, warp and woof, of the most ordinary, the humblest words, such as might have been used off-hand by a farmer, a seaman, an artisan, or anybody else who takes no account of elegant speech. You have only to break up the meter, and these same lines seem commonplace and unworthy of admiration. For they contain neither noble metaphors nor hypallages nor catachreses nor any other figurative language; nor yet many unusual terms, nor foreign or new-coined words. What alternative, then, is left but to attribute the beauty of the style to the sentence movement?
In like manner he urges concerning a passage from Herodotus:[7]
Here again no one can say that the grace of the style is due to the impressiveness and the dignity of the words. These have not been picked and chosen with studious care; they are simply the labels affixed to things by Nature. Indeed, it would perhaps have been out of place to use other and grander words. I take it, in fact, to be always necessary, whenever ideas are expressed in proper and appropriate language, that no word should be more dignified than the nature of the ideas. That there is no stately or grandiose word in the present passage, any one who likes may prove by simply changing the harmony. There are many similar passages in this author, from which it can be seen that the fascination of his style does not after all lie in the beauty of the words, but in their combination.
Not content with analysis, Dionysius proceeds[8] to enforce his point by garbling. Fine passages of verse and of prose, without any change of words, are dislocated to show that their force resides not in these words taken singly, but in the sentence order, or movement. The method is ingenious. It is even telling. Any teacher who shall thus put side by side a fine passage of English prose and the same words in a different order will make his students aware of literary effects to which they should not remain deaf.[9] The connotation of pace and tune may be further exemplified by comparing, for instance, a tale of Chaucer’s with the version made by Dryden.[10]
The method is interesting, striking, to some extent revealing. What does it reveal? That suggestiveness is not only through the imagery of single words, but through their sound in combination; that a large part of the connotation which we call style is sentence pace. This is generally so little discerned that Dionysius may be pardoned for magnifying it; and he further guards himself by recording his intention of writing a treatise also on the choice of words. Occupied in the present treatise exclusively with their combination, he naturally brings out the importance of this as vividly as possible. Is the effectiveness of style in the choice of words, or in their combination? Here he seems to answer, “In their combination.”[11]
But effectiveness of expression resides primarily in neither electio nor compositio, secondarily in both. Primarily it is the writer’s keen sense of the ways of nature and of man, his receptivity and insight. Then it is concrete expression, the choice of words of sensation, the speaking in terms of light, sound, color, motion, attitude, gesture. Such words, whether figurative in the technical sense or literal, may be called imagery. Or, in other fields of composition, it is an illuminating precision. Finally, that effectiveness which we call style comes from apt and beautiful rhythms, from that compositio which is the subject of this treatise. In a word, style is a complex. That compositio is an important element Dionysius does well to show, for this is not obvious and is commonly neglected; but that compositio is the cause, or even that it is generally more important than the other elements, can hardly be demonstrated. Undoubtedly Homer’s verse weaves much of his spell;[12] but surely his words, though often, as Dionysius says, ordinary, have none the less that specific concreteness which characteristically makes epic vivid. In the following passage that he quotes from Herodotus, where the separable charm of the sentence movement is made more obvious by playing as it were in the wrong tempo, he might claim even more. Surely the dialogue method is important for vividness and economy, and this too is a matter of compositio. But is the compositio, for all its charm, the main cause? Who shall determine? The impression is a complex in which each element counts—the choice of details, the choice of words, the arrangement or movement—and in which we can hardly assign an exact proportion to any one. Certainly the beat and tune of prose are part of its connotation, its effect on the reader. Doubtless also—though here we lack scientific analysis to confirm our impression[13]—they are demanded subconsciously by the composing emotion of the author as he speaks or writes. Nevertheless Dionysius is an early instance of a danger lurking in statistical analysis of literature, perhaps also of a danger lurking in the treatment of style—much more of a single element of style—as a separate entity. Being a teacher, Dionysius doubtless thought that there was little danger in over-emphasizing the importance of pace with young students. They are too likely to be quite unaware of it to be corrupted by pedagogical exaggeration.
That “thin and bloodless talk” with which Cicero[14] taxes the philosophers Dionysius thinks to be due to defective compositio.
The main difference between poet and poet, orator and orator, is in aptness of sentence movement. Almost all the ancients gave this much study; and consequently their poems, their songs, and their discourses are things of beauty. But among their successors, with few exceptions, this was no longer so. In time it was at last entirely forgotten; and no one thought it to be indispensable or even contributory to beauty of discourse.[15]
Having established the importance of adapting sentence movement, Dionysius proceeds to show that such adaptation is little hindered by a priori consideration of logic.
I used to think that we ought to follow nature as far as possible in adjusting the parts of a discourse ... for instance, to put nouns before verbs ... the essential before its modifiers.... This idea is plausible; but I came to think it was not true.[16]
Does Dionysius mean that logic offers no norm for the order of words?[17] Hardly. Rather he shows by his instances that word order has little to do with philosophical or logical classification. The order in a given sentence is not determined abstractly by the logical idea of putting the subject before the predicate, or the substance before the accident. It is guided partly by rhythm; and it is widely variable.
The variability that he shows in the Greek word order is wider than in English. In both languages it is controlled by usage, by what is habitual and therefore expected; and this fact seems to be ignored by Dionysius. Even a Greek could not shape a sentence at his own will without reference to the habit of the language. But in this respect Greek usage, because the Greek could rely on showing sentence relations by inflection, was less restrictive than English usage. For English, then, it is not true to say that there is no sentence norm, no normal or natural order. That the norm is not determined by logic in the sense of abstract analysis is true for either, or any, language; but in modern languages, much more than in Greek, it is restricted by usage. Every careful translator has found his efforts to convey Greek style hampered by the inferior variability of modern sentence habits. Taken more generally, however, the contention of Dionysius is sound and suggestive. It is that the order of words in a sentence is not predetermined by logic, that it is freely adaptable, and that this adaptation constitutes a large element in effectiveness.
Having thus vindicated the right of the speaker or writer to deal with the order of his words artistically, unfettered by logic, Dionysius proceeds to inquire in what artistic shaping consists.
The functions of compositio [the tasks of sentence movement] seem to me to be three: (1) to discern what goes naturally with what to make a beautiful and satisfying combination; (2) to know how to make systematically out of these potential agreements a better harmony; (3) if revision is still necessary, whether abridgement, expansion, or alteration, to know how to work out the adaptation as the potential values demand. The scope of each of these I will explain more clearly by using certain analogies from the industrial arts with which all are familiar: house-building, ship-building, and the like. When a builder has provided himself with the material from which he intends to construct a house—stones, timbers, tiling, and all the rest—he then puts together the structure from these, studying the following three things: what stone, timber, and brick can be united with what other stone, timber, and brick; next, how each piece of the material that is being so united should be set, and on which of its faces; thirdly, if anything fits badly, how that particular thing can be chipped and trimmed and made to fit exactly. And the shipwright proceeds in just the same way. So, I say, they also should work whose task is to compose sentences well.[18]
To simplify the language of Dionysius by borrowing from music a metaphor which, though it does not cover his whole intention, is true so far as it goes, the three tasks of the shaper of sentences are: (1) to hear the tune, (2) to follow the tune, (3) to correct the tune. The first depends on the speaker’s awareness, his sensitiveness to words; the second depends on his technical ability to carry out what is thus suggested, to sustain and enhance; the third, more specifically technical, is to revise in detail.
On its face this division is new. Not only has it nothing to do with other divisions which apply to style in general, being limited to sentence movement, but it also differs from earlier divisions of this item by being synthetic. Its point of view is not that of a critic analyzing what has been already composed, but of a speaker or writer composing. It is practical.
Is it practicable? At the very outset of the exposition the analogy of the building arts is disconcerting. Even when allowances are made for the strict limitation to building, the exclusion of all that we now call architecture, the description still seems hardly exact. And, its exactness assumed, is it applicable? Is the analogy sound? Both the Rhetoric and the Poetic of Aristotle in speaking of sentences generally avoid analogies from the static arts. The Poetic even rules them out at the start by its classification of the arts; and Aristotle’s analogies for sentences are drawn not from building, but from walking, running, and breathing.[19] Dionysius both assumes and asserts the same point of view: “The science of public speaking is, after all, a sort of musical science, differing from vocal and instrumental music in degree, not in kind.”[20] And generally his discussion, like Aristotle’s, is in terms of rhythm. Why, then, this analogy with arts that Aristotle regarded as lying in quite another field? The famous analogy in the De Sublimitate[21] of building with solid blocks is not, in its context, so remarkable; for it is applied less restrictively to compositio. Is a shaper of sentences like a builder?
Is he like a builder in the process that Dionysius puts first, the discerning of inherent compatibilities in his material? The question is not of the subject-matter or conception of a whole work, but of component parts or details. Doubtless an author may be somewhat vaguely considered as discerning potentialities in this material; but what is the material? Is it words in the sense that the builder’s is stone or wood? Can an author find inherent compatibility in words as a builder in the strength, texture, shape, or color of his stone? His material is ideas and images. His choice of particular words for these is doubtless affected by connotations of sound;[22] but must it not be primarily suggested and finally determined by the sense? Can word combinations be considered as in themselves beautiful and satisfying, as really having compatibilities of sound? An author who followed Dionysius literally might launch himself into mellifluous nonsense. Dionysius is speaking figuratively; but is his figure really suggestive? We may well remember that more modern analogies drawn from the static arts of mass and line have been misleading for the consecutive art of words.
The distinction between Dionysius’s two remaining items may seem slight until we remember that the division is not analytical into elements, but synthetic into processes that are consecutive in time. Given the primary and general equipment of sensitiveness, the writer may enhance while he is writing and then afterward revise. In fact, there is a typical difference between following the flow of thought and imagery and sound, and then correcting it, between composing and revising. That the two should be distinct, and that both should be guided partly by sound, is counsel practically helpful.
In fact, once he proceeds to apply his second and third headings in detail, Dionysius is more convincing. The righting[23] of a sentence by transposing phrases or clauses is in practise, and should be in theory, a first counsel of sentence emphasis. A defect of modern text-books is to set forth this important process as if it were purely logical. Dionysius follows the ancient tradition in making it rhythmical; and he also clarifies it by specific instances. He proceeds[24] to the varying of the rhythm by lengthening or shortening. Here his preoccupation with rhythm tends to obscure other considerations. That a sentence is a logical unit, and that a given statement is left single or combined with its neighbor according to its logical bearing on the whole passage,[25] he seems to ignore or take for granted. Again, the lengthening of a clause to fill out the rhythm risks bombast. On the other hand, some of the additions that he quotes as unnecessary to the idea are not superfluous for the image; their value is not mainly rhythmical. But so far as it goes this chapter is suggestive.
Distinguishing[26] charm (ἡδονή) from beauty (τὸ καλόν), Dionysius finds[27] that they arise from four qualities: melody, rhythm, variety, aptness. Melody is an affair of pitch and inflection. The passage,[28] besides being a precious hint as to the Greek scale, is a useful reminder that English—and especially American—speech too often ignores variety of pitch. Similarly the treatment of rhythm as quantitative[29] should remind us that in our own habit it is predominantly accentual. These differences in habit of speech, while they suggest resources unused, should none the less warn us against transferring the distinctions and counsels of Dionysius bodily from Greek to English. Of those that are equally applicable to both languages is the general advice[30] to seek variety and aptness less in the choice of words, where there can be little latitude, than in their combination. Indeed, it is hardly too much to say that aptness of style, though abstractly it includes precision and imagery in the single word, is more largely than most of us realize an effect of rhythm, and that variety, except when in oral utterance it includes pitch, consists in rhythm exclusively.
Distinguishing[31] the letters as vowels or consonants, Dionysius finds Greek speech sounds to be neither more nor less than twenty-four. His phonetic analysis of these is specifically according to the position of the vocal organs in utterance. The following discussion[32] of the quality of syllables in combination, of effects hard, smooth, or sweet in sound apart from sense, is doctrine oftener accepted as an idea than tested.[33]
Syllables, which are combinations or interweavings of letters, preserve at once both the individual properties of each component and the joint properties of all, which spring from their fusion and juxtaposition. The sounds thus formed are soft or hard, smooth or rough, sweet to the ear or harsh to it; they make us pull a wry face, or cause our mouths to water, or bring about any of the countless other physical conditions that are possible.
These facts the greatest poets and prose-writers have carefully noted, and not only do they carefully arrange their words and weave them into appropriate patterns, but often, with curious and loving skill, they adapt the very syllables and letters to the emotions which they wish to represent.
[Passages from Homer are quoted as examples.]
Such lines are to be found without number in Homer, representing length of time, hugeness of body, stress of emotion, immobility of position, or similar effects, simply by the manipulation of the syllables. Conversely others are framed to give the impression of abruptness, speed, hurry, and the like.[34]
That such associations are natural is obvious, Dionysius thinks, from onomatopœia, the earliest and simplest form of sound-connotation in words. But he does not shrink from pushing his doctrine far beyond this to the conclusion that sound effects both subtle and various may be achieved, and should be consciously sought, by literary art.
The conclusion is inevitable, that style is beautiful when it contains beautiful words, that beauty of words is due to beautiful syllables and letters, that language is rendered charming by the things that charm the ear in virtue of affinities in words, syllables, and letters....
If, then, it were possible that all the parts of speech by which a given subject is to be expressed should be euphonious and elegant, it would be madness to seek out inferior ones. But if this be out of the question, as in many cases it is, then we must endeavor to mask the natural defects of the inferior letters by interweaving and mingling and juxtaposition.[35]
The following instances of poetic effects gained by apt combinations of proper names that have no such suggestions singly will remind English readers of certain sonorous passages in Milton.[36]
That the connotation of such combinations is due to their syllabic quality, however, as distinct from their rhythm, Dionysius hardly succeeds in establishing. The doctrine is flatly denied by Lewis.
A certain learned and well-known student of verse says that (for example) gutturals and sibilants express “amazement, affright, indignation, contempt,” and he cites as an illustration a passage from Paradise Lost.
One objection to this kind of doctrine is that it makes people think they have no ear for verse, for after careful reading they are still uncertain whether they can detect the effect described. Another objection to it is that it is not true. Compare with the lines quoted this little song from Browning’s Pippa Passes:
This is shorter by four syllables than the passage from Milton, but it has the same number of gutturals and two more sibilants; yet fancy describing it as an expression of “amazement, affright, indignation, contempt!”
For another illustration, in one of the standard manuals of versification it is pointed out that the surd mutes (p, k, t) “help to convey the idea of littleness, delicacy, and sprightliness,” and that the short vowel i is fitted to express “joy, gaiety, triviality, rapid movement, and physical littleness.” To illustrate both assertions, Mercutio’s account of Queen Mab is cited:
Here the effect is perhaps easier to recognize, and even an obtuse reader thinks he follows the reasoning; but compare Browning’s lines:
The “bitten lip” has as many surd mutes and short i’s as the “little atomies”; but it fails to express sprightliness, gaiety, or triviality....
The fact is, of course, that all this analysis of sounds proceeds upon a false assumption. When you say Titan you mean something big, and when you say tittle you mean something small; but it is not the sound of either word that means either bigness or littleness, it is the sense. If you put together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified; but whether the words are “a team of little atomies” or “a triumphant terrible Titan,” it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the significance.[37]
Rhythm is discussed in the same order, first[38] by classifying feet as iambs, trochees, dactyls, etc., then[39] by analyzing their effects singly and in combination. “A simple rhythm or foot has not less than two syllables nor more than three.”[40] This is commonly accepted for meter; but does it hold for the rhythms of prose? Moreover that the foot is the rhythmical unit, whether in Greek or in other languages, is oftener assumed than proved. Rhythmical effects, in English at least, seem to be not so much of feet as of measures, whether verses or clauses. Unless the foot is actually a unit, for the composer or for the hearer—and this is at least doubtful—such analysis as that of a noble passage from the funeral speech in the second book of Thucydides[41] lays too much stress on the components—spondees, anapests, etc.—and not enough on the compositio, or pace of the sentence. By way of contrast to Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes, Dionysius pillories Hegesias of Magnesia.[42]
Variety of rhythm[43] is discussed more generally, without instances, and as an introduction to rhythm in prose.
Prose diction has full liberty and permission to diversify the compositio by whatever changes it pleases. A style is finest of all when it has the most frequent rests and changes of harmony; when one thing is said within a period, another without it; when one period is formed by the interweaving of a larger number of clauses, another by that of a smaller; when among the clauses themselves one is short, another longer, one roughly wrought, another more finished; when the rhythms take now one form, now another, and the figures are of all kinds, and the voice-pitches—the so-called “accents”—are various, and skillfully avoid satiety.[44]
Aptness,[45] or appropriateness to the actors and the action, is analyzed rather as imitative smoothness or roughness in detail than as the speed of the whole stanza or paragraph. Dionysius says nothing, for instance, of the staccato effect of frequent predication. His text is the famous stone of Sisyphus from the eleventh book of the Odyssey.
Finally[46] Dionysius classifies sentence movement into three typical modes:[47] the rough (αὐστηρά), the smooth (γλαφυρά) or florid (ἀνθηρά), and the blended (εὔκρατος). Certain accidental likenesses to the familiar threefold classification of style[48] should not obscure the fact that we have here something different, a classification not of style in general, but of compositio. The first mode Dionysius defines as seeking rather the force of each part than the harmony of the whole. The words stand out separately, without fear of hiatus or other clashing of sounds, and without care for periods.[49] The aim is rather a direct stirring of emotion (πάθος) than a pervasive suggestion of character (ἦθος). This sterner, elder mode, quite different from “the showy and decorative prettiness of our day,”[50] he exemplifies, with his usual minute analysis, from Pindar and Thucydides. The second, or smooth mode[51] is periodic in its sentences and nicely articulated in its clauses and phrases.
It tries to combine and interweave its component parts, and thus give, as far as possible, the effect of one continuous utterance. This result is produced by so nicely adjusting the junctures that they admit no appreciable time-interval between the words.[52]
Aiming at the easiest transitions within the period, it is careful to distinguish between periods. The parts coalesce; the units stand out.[53] This is in line with the doctrine of Aristotle,[54] and is admirably exemplified by the practise of Cicero. Dionysius’s instances are Sappho and Isocrates. The third, or blended mode[55] Dionysius labors in vain to distinguish from the other two. Ingenious as are his analyses of the three modes, even sometimes suggestive, they fail to establish the reality of the classification. We can discern in the distinction between his first two a carrying out—perhaps an undue extension—of Aristotle’s distinction between the unperiodic style and the periodic.[56] His third mode seems to be not a mode at all, but merely a reminder that neither of the other two can be used exclusively or pushed to excess.
As to the distinction of prose rhythms from verse[57] Dionysius quotes with approval Aristotle’s dictum[58] that prose should be rhythmical without becoming metrical. It seems plain none the less that his own taste is for rather marked rhythms even in prose, and that he would encourage students to go a long way toward meter. Before he closes his book upon this consideration, he raises quite frankly the question of how far its analyses have practical value.
I have a presentiment that an onslaught will be made on these statements by people who are destitute of general culture and practise the mechanical parts of rhetoric unmethodically and unscientifically.... Their argument will doubtless be: “Was Demosthenes, then, so poor a creature that, whenever he was writing his speeches, he would work in meters and rhythms after the fashion of clay-modellers, and would try to fit his clauses into these moulds, shifting the words to and fro, keeping an anxious eye on his longs and shorts, and fretting himself about cases of nouns, moods of verbs, and all the accidents of the parts of speech? So great a man would be a fool indeed were he to stoop to all this niggling and peddling.” If they scoff and jeer in these or similar terms, they may easily be countered by the following reply: “First, it is not surprising after all that a man who is held to deserve a greater reputation than any of his predecessors who were distinguished for eloquence was anxious, when composing eternal works and submitting himself to the scrutiny of all-testing envy and time, not to admit either subject or words at random, and to attend carefully to both arrangements of ideas and beauty of words: particularly as the authors of that day were producing discourses which suggested not writing, but carving and chasing—those I mean of the sophists Isocrates and Plato.... What wonder, then, if Demosthenes also was careful to secure euphony and melody and to employ no random or untested word or thought?”[59]
The defense is sufficient abstractly, though it does not quite meet the fact that in practise both teachers and students of rhetoric have not infrequently frittered away much time in minute analysis of compositio. Such analysis easily becomes over-minute, easily deviates from the paramount consideration of the idea or the image. That it is properly the work of revision, not of the first draft, Dionysius often implies, but might well have stated explicitly. So applied, given common sense and the honest determination to say what one means, analysis of prose rhythms is distinctly valuable and often necessary.
FOOT-NOTES:
[1] For Cicero, see Chapter III, for Quintilian and Tacitus, Chapter IV; for Dio Chrysostom and Apuleius, Chapter VIII.
[1a] For biography and bibliography of Dionysius see Roberts, W. Rhys, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Three Literary Letters, Cambridge, 1901, pages 1-50, 209-219. To the latter should be added: Egger, Max, Essai sur la critique littéraire et la rhétorique chez les grecs au siècle d’Auguste, Paris, 1902; Mætzke, Karl, De D. H. Isocratis imitatore, Wratislaw, 1906; Kremer, Emil, Ueber das rhetorische system des D. von H., Strassburg, 1907; Geigenmüller, Paul, Quæstiones Dionysianæ de vocabulis artis criticæ, Leipzig, 1908; Nassal, Franz, Æsthetisch-rhetorische Beziehungen zwischen D. von H. und Cicero, Tübingen, 1910; Hubbell, H. M., The Influence of Isocrates on Cicero, Dionysius, and Aristides, Yale University Press, 1914.
The best edition of the De compositione verborum is that by Roberts, W. Rhys, Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Literary Composition (text, introduction, translation, notes, glossary, appendices), London, 1910. A current summary of the De compositione will be found in Roberts, Three Literary Letters, pages 8-19; a more detailed summary, with a tabular analysis, in his edition, pages 1-10; a commented summary in Egger, pages 67-111.
The rhetorical system of Dionysius is tabulated from all his works by Ammon, George, De D. H. librorum rhetoricorum fontibus, Monachii, 1889. In English equivalents, the pertinent parts of his analysis are as follows:
| A. subject-matter |
| I. investigation (inventio) |
| selection (iudicium) |
| II. arrangement (dispositio) |
| 1. division |
| 2. order |
| 3. revision and elaboration |
| B. style |
| I. choice of words (electio) |
| 1. precision |
| 2. imagery |
| II. sentence movement (compositio) |
| 1. nature |
| 2. force |
| 3. processes |
| a. in phrases |
| b. in clauses |
| c. in periods |
| 4. charm and beauty |
| a. melody |
| b. rhythm |
| c. variety |
| d. aptness |
| 5. kinds |
| a. strong |
| b. smooth |
| c. blended |
| 6. verse and prose |
Kremer (see above), whose analysis, though less detailed, is substantially the same, collates from all the writings of Dionysius his doctrine on the several topics and gives foot-note references to Aristotle, Cicero, and others.
Nassal (see above), pointing out that Dionysius and Cicero agree strikingly in many points, argues that they have for common source in these cases a Greek treatise written during the years between the time of the Lysias of Dionysius and of the De Oratore of Cicero and the time of the Demosthenes of Dionysius and of the Orator of Cicero, and that this common source is very probably Cæcilius of Calacte.
Geigenmueller (see above) supplies a collation of critical terms with valuable comparisons.
Nassal (page 11) quotes from Doxopater a definition of rhetoric ascribed to Dionysius: “Rhetoric is the artistic mastery of persuasive discourse in communal affairs, having as its end to speak well.” (Usener, Fragment I.) The definition is sound and striking, but for the lame and impotent concluding phrase. As reported by Maximus Planudes (quoted by Ammon, page 1), the definition is substantially the same, but has amplified this concluding phrase with a clumsy twist from Aristotle. Whether the definition belongs to Dionysius or not, the tradition shows his fame as a rhetorician.
[2] That it deals with this exclusively, not with composition in general, is clear from both the Greek title and the Latin. The terms σύνθεσις and compositio are technically specific. They do not mean style in general, which in the classical treatises includes also choice of single words (ἐκλογή, electio). Much less do they mean composition in our larger modern sense, for which the ancient term is dispositio, collocatio, or more generally οἰκονομία. Dionysius makes the distinction quite clear at the opening of his treatise, and holds to it throughout. In this sense is to be taken the title of the admirable translation of Rhys Roberts, Literary Composition, as is shown by his rendering elsewhere The Arrangement of Words (page 8 of his edition of Three Literary Letters).
[3] i. 66. The Roman numerals in these foot-notes refer to chapters; the Arabic, to the pages of the Rhys Roberts text. The Rhys Roberts translation is used with modifications.
[4] i. 68-70.
[5] iii. 74.
[6] iii. 76-78 (Odyssey, xvi. 1-16).
[7] iii. 84 (Herodotus i. 8-10).
[8] iv. 84.
[9] See, for example, my Writing and Speaking, pages 376-378; College Composition, pages 184-188.
[10] That this sort of analysis may be carried even further is suggested by R. L. Stevenson’s Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature, which is partly along the lines followed by Dionysius.
[11] That this is generally more important he explicitly affirms in his Demosthenes, chapter li. Reviewing the traditional five parts of rhetoric, he puts οἰκονομία (dispositio) above εὕρεσις (inventio), and σύνθεσις (compositio) above ἐκλογή (electio).
[12] Rhys Roberts’s use of imitative renderings to make this point is of course necessary; but readers unfamiliar with Greek rhythms should beware of inferences based on an assumption of equivalence between Greek metrical habits and English.
[13] This is the contention of Stevenson in Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature.
[14] De Oratore, I. xiii. 57.
[15] iv. 92.
[16] v. 98.
[17] Henri Weil’s classic essay on the order of words in the ancient languages has been translated into English by C. W. Super, Boston, 1887. The rationale of word-order is discussed in Spencer’s Philosophy of Style.
[18] vi. 104.
[19] See above, pages 28, 29.
[20] xi. 124.
[21] Section x.
[22] See above, page 60 and foot-note 95.
[23] vii.
[24] ix.
[25] See my College Composition, page 69.
[26] x. The same distinction is made in his Demosthenes, xlvii.
[27] xi.
[28] xi. 126.
[29] xi. 128.
[30] xii. 130.
[31] xiv.
[32] xv-xvi.
[33] In English it is urged specifically by Stevenson in Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature.
[34] xv. 154-156.
[35] xvi. 160, 166.
[36] It may remind some elder readers also of a story once current concerning a pious old lady who in reading her Bible found emotional satisfaction in the “blessed word Mesopotamia.”
[37] Charlton M. Lewis, The Principles of English Verse, New York, 1906, page 131.
[38] xvii.
[39] xviii.
[40] xvii. 176.
[41] xviii. 178.
[42] Stevenson makes similar use of Macaulay.
[43] xix.
[44] xix. 196.
[45] τὸ πρέπον, xx.
[46] xxi.
[47] Dionysius uses the same classification in his Demosthenes, xxxvi.
[49] xxii. 212. One thinks of Carlyle.
[50] xxii. 216.
[51] xxiii.
[52] xxiii. 234.
[53] xxiii. 236.
[54] Rhetoric III. ix. 1409 a. See above, page 28. Aristotle’s εὐσύνοπτος may have suggested the περίοπτος of Dionysius.
[55] xxiv.
[56] Rhetoric, ibid.
[57] xxv, xxvi.
[59] xxv. 262.
B. The Great Unknown on Imaginative Diction
“Longinus on the Sublime”[1] will for many years continue to name the most captivating of ancient treatises, though its author, whoever he was, was not the rhetorician Longinus, and though its subject is wider than our word sublime. The Latin sublimitas translates precisely enough the ὕψος of the Greek title; but our words sublime and sublimity are reserved for special application to such lofty passages as we quote from Dante and Milton. Sappho’s love poem, quoted by the author as a typical instance, though we feel at once its vivid beauty, we should not call sublime. The Greek word is more general. Meaning literally height, it includes in this treatise all such effects of style as lift us, as move us beyond comprehension or assent to sympathy or resolve. But though the meaning is clear, an equivalent English term is still to seek. Elevation has unfortunate suggestions of the rhetorical; height is too vague; heightening, though nearer, is not generally used in this sense. Falling back on such a periphrasis as heightening of style, we become aware that our word style, as used generally and untechnically, is not far from the author’s intention. Though in text-books and works of criticism it is often extended, in ordinary parlance it means that very heightening, or lift, which is discussed by the Great Unknown. So we shall convey his intention as fairly as seems feasible by translating his title Style.
In the following digest Roman numerals indicate the chapters, or sections.