The ethics of rhetoric

In an earlier part of this work we defined rhetoric as something which creates an informed appetition for the good. Such definition must recognize the rhetorical force of things existing outside the realm of speech; but since our concern is primarily with spoken rhetoric, which cannot be disengaged from certain patterns or regularities of language, we now turn our attention to the pressure of these formal patterns.

All students of language concede to it a certain public character. Insofar as it serves in communication, it is a publicly-agreed-upon thing; and when one passes the outer limits of the agreement, one abandons comprehensibility. Now rhetoric affects us primarily by setting forth images which inform and attract. Yet because this setting forth is accomplished through a public instrumentality, it is not free; it is tied more or less closely to the formalizations of usage. The more general and rigid of these formalizations we recognize as grammar, and we shall here speak of grammar as a system of forms of public speech. In the larger aspect, discourse is at once bound and free, and we are here interested to discover how the bound character affects our ability to teach and to persuade.

We soon realize that different ways of saying a thing denote different interests in saying it, or to take this in reverse as we do when we become conscious users of language, different interests in a matter will dictate different patterns of expression. Rhetoric in its practice is a matter of selection and arrangement, but conventional grammar imposes restraints upon both of these. All this amounts to saying what every sensitive user of language has sometimes felt; namely, that language is not a purely passive instrument, but that, owing to this public acceptance, while you are doing something with it, it is doing something with you, or with your intention.[117] It does not exactly fight back; rather it has a set of postures and balances which somehow modify your thrusts and holds. The sentence form is certainly one of these. You pour into it your meaning, and it deflects, and molds into certain shapes. The user of language must know how this counterpressure can be turned to the advantage of his general purpose. The failure of those who are careless, or insensitive, to the rhetoric of grammar is that they allow the counter force to impede their design, whereas a perspicacious use of it will forward the design. One cannot, for example, employ just any modifier to stand for a substantive or just any substantive to express a quality, or change a stabilized pattern of arrangement without a change in net effect, although some of these changes register but faintly. But style shows through an accumulation of small particulars, and the artist in language may ponder a long while, as Conrad is said to have done, over whether to describe a character as “penniless” or “without a penny.”

In this approach, then, we are regarding language as a standard objective reality, analyzable into categories which have inherent potentialities. A knowledge of these objective potentialities can prevent a loss of force through friction. The friction we refer to occurs whenever a given unit of the system of grammar is tending to say one thing while the semantic meaning and the general organization are tending to say another. A language has certain abilities or even inclinations which the wise user can draw into the service of his own rhetorical effort. Using a language may be compared to riding a horse; much of one’s success depends upon an understanding of what it can and will do. Or to employ a different figure in illustration, there is a kind of use of language which goes against the grain as that grain is constituted by the categories, and there is a kind which facilitates the speaker’s projection by going with it. Our task is an exploration of the congruence between well understood rhetorical objectives and the inherent character of major elements in modern English.

The problem of which category to begin with raises some questions. It is arguable that the rhetoric of any piece is dependent upon its total intention, and that consequently no single sentence can be appraised apart from the tendency of the whole discourse. Our position does not deny that, since we are assuming merely that within the greater effect there are lesser effects, cooperating well or ill. Having accepted that limitation, it seems permissible for us to begin with the largest unit of grammar, which is the sentence. We shall take up first the sentence as such and then discriminate between formal types of sentences.

Because a sentence form exists in most if not all languages, there is some ground to suppose that it reflects a necessary operation of the mind, and this means not simply of the mind as psychologically constituted but also as logically constrained.

It is evident that when the mind frames a sentence, it performs the basic intellectual operation of analysis and re-synthesis. In this complete operation the mind is taking two or more classes and uniting them at least to the extent at which they share in a formal unity. The unity itself, built up through many such associations, comes to have an existence all its own, as we shall see. It is the repeated congruence in experience or in the imagination of such classes as “sun-heat,” “snow-cold,” which establishes the pattern, but our point is that the pattern once established can become disciplinary in itself and compel us to look for meaning within the formal unity it imposes. So it is natural for us to perceive through a primitive analysis the compresence of sun and hot weather, and to combine these into the unity “the sun is hot”; but the articulation represented by this joining now becomes a thing in itself, which can be grasped before the meaning of its component parts is evident. Accordingly, although sentences are supposed to grow out of meanings, we can have sentences before meanings are apparent, and this is indeed the central point of our rhetoric of grammar. When we thus grasp the scope of the pattern before we interpret the meaning of the components, we are being affected by grammatical system.

I should like to put this principle to a supreme sort of test by using a few lines of highly modern verse. In Allen Tate’s poem “The Subway” we find the following:

I do not propose to interpret this further than to say that the features present of word classification and word position cause us to look for meaning along certain lines. It seems highly probable that we shall have to exercise much imagination to fit our classes together with meaning as they are fitted by formal classification and sentence order (“I am become geometries”); yet it remains true that we take in the first line as a formal predication; and I do not think that this formal character could ever be separated entirely from the substance in an interpretation. Once we gain admission of that point with regard to a sentence, some rhetorical status for grammar has been definitely secured.

In total rhetorical effect the sentence seems to be peculiarly “the thing said,” whereas all other elements are “the things named.” And accordingly the right to utter a sentence is one of the very greatest liberties; and we are entitled to little wonder that freedom of utterance should be, in every society, one of the most contentious and ill-defined rights. The liberty to impose this formal unity is a liberty to handle the world, to remake it, if only a little, and to hand it to others in a shape which may influence their actions. It is interesting to speculate whether the Greeks did not, for this very reason, describe the man clever at speech as δεινός, an epithet meaning, in addition to “clever,” “fearful” and “terrible.” The sentence through its office of assertion is a force adding itself to the forces of the world, and therefore the man clever with his sentences—which is to say with his combinations—was regarded with that uneasiness which we feel in the presence of power. The changes wrought by sentences are changes in the world rather than in the physical earth, but it is to be remembered that changes in the world bring about changes in the earth. Thus this practice of yoking together classes of the world, of saying “Charles is King” or “My country is God’s country” is a unique rhetorical fact which we have to take into account, although it stands somewhat prior to our main discussion.

As we turn now to the different formal types of sentences, we shall follow the traditional grammatical classification and discuss the rhetorical inclination of each in turn.

Through its form, the simple sentence tends to emphasize the discreteness of phenomena within the structural unity. To be more specific, its pattern of subject-verb-object or complement, without major competing elements, leaves our attention fixed upon the classes involved: “Charles is King.” The effect remains when the simple sentence compounds its subject and predicate: “Peaches and cantaloupes grew in abundance”; “Men and boys hunted and fished.” The single subject-predicate frame has the broad sense of listing or itemizing, and the list becomes what the sentence is about semantically.

Sentences of this kind are often the unconscious style of one who sees the world as a conglomerate of things, like the child; sometimes they are the conscious style of one who seeks to present certain things as eminent against a background of matter uniform or flat. One can imagine, for example, the simple sentence “He never worked” coming after a long and tedious recital which it is supposed to highlight. Or one can imagine the sentence “The world is round” leaping out of a context with which it contrasts in meaning, in brevity, or in sententiousness.

There is some descriptive value in saying that the simple sentence is the most “logical” type of sentence because, like the simple categorical proposition, it has this function of relating two classes. This fact, combined with its usual brevity and its structural simplicity, makes it a useful sentence for beginnings and endings (of important meaning-groups, not so much of formal introductions and conclusions). It is a sentence of unclouded perspective, so to speak. Nothing could be more beautifully anticipatory than Burke’s “The proposition is peace.”

At the very minimum, we can affirm that the simple sentence tends to throw subject and predicate classes into relief by the structure it presents them in; that the two-part categorical form of its copulation indicates a positive mood on the part of the user, and that its brevity often induces a generality of approach, which is an aid to perspicuous style. These opportunities are found out by the speaker or writer who senses the need for some synoptic or dramatic spot in his discourse. Thus when he selects the simple sentence, he is going “with the grain”; he is putting the objective form to work for him.

The complex sentence has a different potentiality. Whereas the simple sentence emphasizes through its form the co-existence of classes (and it must be already apparent that we regard “things existing or occurring” as a class where the predicate consists only of a verb), the complex sentence emphasizes a more complex relationship; that is to say, it reflects another kind of discriminating activity, which does not stop with seeing discrete classes as co-existing, but distinguishes them according to rank or value, or places them in an order of cause and effect. “Rome fell because valor declined” is the utterance of a reflective mind because the conjunction of parts depends on something ascertainable by the intellect but not by simple perception. This is evidence that the complex sentence does not appear until experience has undergone some refinement by the mind. Then, because it goes beyond simple observation and begins to perceive things like causal principle, or begins to grade things according to a standard of interest, it brings in the notion of dependence to supplement that of simple togetherness. And consequently the complex sentence will be found nearly always to express some sort of hierarchy, whether spatial, moral, or causal, with its subordinate members describing the lower orders. In simple-sentence style we would write: “Tragedy began in Greece. It is the highest form of literary art.” There is no disputing that these sentences, in this sequence, could have a place in mature expression. But they do not have the same effect as “Tragedy, which is the highest form of literary art, began in Greece” or “Tragedy, which began in Greece, is the highest form of literary art.” What has occurred is the critical process of subordination. The two ideas have been transferred from a conglomerate to an articulated unity, and the very fact of subordination makes inevitable the emergence of a focus of interest. Is our passage about the highest form of literary art or about the cultural history of Greece? The form of the complex sentence makes it unnecessary to waste any words in explicit assertion of that. Here it is plain that grammatical form is capital upon which we can draw, provided that other necessities have been taken care of.

To see how a writer of consummate sensibility toward expression-forms proceeded, let us take a fairly typical sentence from Henry James:

Leaving aside the phrases, which are employed by James in extension and refinement of the same effect, we see here three dependent clauses used to explain the contingencies of “Merton Densher had an appearance of leisure.” These clauses have the function of surrounding the central statement in such a fashion that we have an intricate design of thought characterized by involution, or the emergence of one detail out of another. James’ famous practice of using the dependent clause not only for qualification, but for the qualification of qualification, and in some cases for the qualification of qualification of qualification, indicates a persistent sorting out of experience expressive of the highly civilized mind. Perhaps the leading quality of the civilized mind is that it is sophisticated as to causes and effects (also as to other contiguities); and the complex sentence, required to give these a scrupulous ordering, is its natural vehicle.

At the same time the spatial form of ordering to which the complex sentence lends itself makes it a useful tool in scientific analysis, and one can find brilliant examples of it in the work of scientists who have been skillful in communication. When T. H. Huxley, for instance, explains a piece of anatomy, the complex sentence is the frame of explanation. In almost every sentence it will be observed that he is focussing interest upon one part while keeping its relationship—spatial or causal—clear with reference to surrounding parts. In Huxley’s expository prose, therefore, one finds the dominant sentence type to consist of a main clause at the beginning followed by a series of dependent clauses which fill in these facts of relationship. We may follow the pattern of the sentences in his account of the protoplasm of the common nettle:

This is, of course, the “loose” sentence of traditional rhetorical analysis, and it has no dramatic force; yet it is for this very reason adapted to the scientist’s purpose.[120] The rhetorical adaptation shows in the accommodation of a little hierarchy of details.

This appears to be the sentence of a developed mentality also, because it is created through a patient, disciplined observation, and not through impression, as the simple sentence can be. To the infant’s mind, as William James observed in a now famous passage, the world is a “buzzing, blooming confusion,” and to the immature mind much older it often appears something done in broad, uniform strokes. But to the mind of a trained scientist it has to appear a cosmos—else, no science. So in Huxley the objective world is presented as a series of details, each of which has its own cluster of satellites in the form of minor clauses. This is the way the world has to be reported when our objective is maximum perception and minimum desire to obtrude or influence.

Henry James was explaining with a somewhat comparable interest a different kind of world, in which all sorts of human and non-material forces are at work, and he tried with extreme conscientiousness to measure them. In that process of quantification and qualification the complex sentence was often brought by him to an extraordinary height of ramification.

In summation, then, the complex sentence is the branching sentence, or the sentence with parts growing off other parts. Those who have used it most properly have performed a second act of analysis, in which the objects of perception, after being seen discretely, are put into a ranked structure. This type of sentence imposes the greatest demand upon the reader because it carries him farthest into the reality existing outside self. This point will take on importance as we turn to the compound sentence.

The structure of the compound sentence often reflects a simple artlessness—the uncritical pouring together of simple sentences, as in the speech of Huckleberry Finn. The child who is relating an adventure is likely to make it a flat recital of conjoined simple predications, because to him the important fact is that the things were, not that they can be read to signify this or that. His even juxtapositions are therefore sometimes amusing, for now and then he will produce a coordination that unintentionally illuminates. This would, of course, be a result of lack of control over the rhetoric of grammar.

On the other hand, the compound sentence can be a very “mature” sentence when its structure conforms with a settled view of the world. The latter possibility will be seen as we think of the balance it presents. When a sentence consists of two main clauses we have two predications of similar structure bidding for our attention. Our first supposal is that this produces a sentence of unusual tension, with two equal parts (and of course sometimes more than two equal parts) in a sort of competition. Yet it appears on fuller acquaintance that this tension is a tension of stasis, and that the compound sentence has, in practice, been markedly favored by periods of repose like that of the Eighteenth century. There is congeniality between its internal balance and a concept of the world as an equilibrium of forces. As a general rule, it appears that whereas the complex sentence favors the presentation of the world as a system of facts or as a dynamism, the compound sentence favors the presentation of it in a more or less philosophical picture. This world as a philosophical cosmos will have to be a sort of compensatory system. We know from other evidences that the Eighteenth century loved to see things in balance; in fact, it required the idea of balance as a foundation for its institutions. Quite naturally then, since motives of this kind reach into expression-forms, this was the age of masters of the balanced sentence—Dryden, Johnson, Gibbon, and others, the genre of whose style derives largely from this practice of compounding. Often the balance which they achieved was more intricate than simple conjunction of main clauses because they balanced lesser elements too, but the informing impulse was the same. That impulse was the desire for counterpoise, which was one of the powerful motives of their culture.

In this pattern of balance, various elements are used in the offsettings. Thus when one attends closely to the meanings of the balanced parts, one finds these compounds recurring: an abstract statement is balanced (in a second independent clause) by a more concrete expression of the same thing; a fact is balanced by its causal explanation; a statement of positive mode is balanced by one of negative mode; a clause of praise is balanced by a clause of qualified censure; a description of one part is balanced by a description of a contrasting part, and so on through a good many conventional pairings. Now in these collocations cause and effect and other relationships are presented, yet the attempt seems not so much to explore reality as to clothe it in decent form. Culture is a delicate reconciliation of opposites, and consequently a man who sees the world through the eyes of a culture makes effort in this direction. We know that the world of Eighteenth century culture was a rationalist world, and in a rationalist world everything must be “accounted for.” The virtue of the compound sentence is that its second part gives “the other half,” so to speak. As the pattern works out, every fact has its cause; every virtue is compensated for by a vice; every excursion into generality must be made up for by attention to concrete circumstances and vice versa. The perfection of this art form is found in Johnson and Gibbon, where such pairings occur with a frequency which has given rise to the phrase “the balanced style.” When Gibbon, for example, writes of religion in the Age of the Antonines: “The superstition of the people was not embittered by any mixture of theological rancour; nor was it confined by the chains of any speculative system,”[121] we have almost the feeling that the case of religion has been settled by this neat artifice of expression. This is a “just” view of affairs, which sees both sides and leaves a kind of balanced account. It looks somewhat subjective, or at least humanized; it gives us the gross world a little tidied up by thought. Often, moreover, this balance of structure together with the act of saying a thing equivocally—in the narrower etymological sense of that word—suggests the finality of art. This will be found true of many of the poetical passages of the King James Bible, although these come from an earlier date. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork”; “Man cometh forth as a flower and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not.” By thus stating the matter in two ways, through balanced clauses, the sentence achieves a degree of formal completeness missing in sentences where the interest is in mere assertion. Generally speaking the balanced compound sentence, by the very contrivedness of its structure, suggests something formed above the welter of experience, and this form, as we have by now substantially said, transfers something of itself to the meaning. In declaring that the compound sentence may seem subjective, we are not saying that it is arbitrary, its correspondence being with the philosophical interpretation rather than with the factual reality. Thus if the complex sentence is about the world, the compound sentence is about our idea about the world, into which some notion of compensation forces itself. One notices that even Huxley, when he draws away from his simple expositions of fact and seeks play for his great powers of persuasion, begins to compound his sentences. On the whole, the compound sentence conveys that completeness and symmetry which the world ought to have, and which we manage to get, in some measure, into our most satisfactory explanations of it. It is most agreeable to those ages and those individuals who feel that they have come to terms with the world, and are masters in a domain. But understandably enough, in a world which has come to be centrifugal and infinite, as ours has become since the great revolutions, it tends to seem artificial and mechanical in its containment.

Since the difference between sentence and clause is negligible as far as the issues of this subject are concerned, we shall next look at the word, and conclude with a few remarks on some lesser combinations. This brings up at once the convention of parts of speech. Here again I shall follow the traditional classification, on the supposition that categories to which usage is referred for correction have accumulated some rhetorical force, whatever may be said for the merits of some other and more scientific classification.

The Noun

It is difficult not to feel that both usage and speculation agree on the rhetorical quality of nouns. The noun derives its special dignity from being a name word, and names persist, in spite of all the cautions of modern semanticists, in being thought of as words for substances. We apprehend the significance of that when we realize that in the ancient philosophical regimen to which the West is heir, and which influences our thought far more than we are aware at any one moment, substances are assigned a higher degree of being than actions or qualities. Substance is that which primordially is, and one may doubt whether recent attempts to revolutionize both ontology and grammar have made any impression at all against this feeling. For that reason a substantive comes to us as something that is peculiarly fulfilled;[122] or it is like a piece in a game which has superior powers of movement and capture. The fact that a substantive is the word in a sentence which the other words are “about” in various relationships gives it a superior status.[123]

Nouns then express things whose being is completed, not whose being is in process, or whose being depends upon some other being. And that no doubt accounts for the feeling that when one is using nouns, one is manipulating the symbols of a self-subsistent reality.[124] There seems little doubt that an ancient metaphysical system, grown to be an habitus of the mind through long acceptance, gives the substantive word a prime status, and this fact has importance when we come to compare the noun with the adjective in power to convince by making real. Suffice it to say here that the noun, whether it be a pointer to things that one can touch and see, as apple, bird, sky, or to the more or less hypothetical substances such as fairness, spook, nothingness, by rule stands at the head of things and is ministered to by the other parts of speech and by combinations.

The Adjective

The adjective is, by the principle of determination just reviewed, a word of secondary status and force. Its burden is an attribute, or something added. In the order of being to which reference has been made, the noun can exist without the adjective, but not the adjective without the noun. Thus we can have “men” without having “excellent men”; but we cannot have “excellent” without having something (if only something understood) to receive the attribution. There are very practical rhetorical lessons to be drawn from this truth. Since adjectives express attributes which are conceptually dispensable to the substances wherein they are present, the adjective tends to be a supernumerary. Long before we are aware of this fact through analysis, we sense it through our resentment of any attempt to gain maximum effect through the adjective. Our intuition of speech seems to tell us that the adjective is question-begging; that is to say, if the thing to be expressed is real, it will be expressed through a substantive; if it is expressed mainly through adjectives, there is something defective in its reality, since it has gone for secondary support.[125] If someone should say to us, “Have some white milk,” we must suppose either that the situation is curious, other kinds of milk being available, or that the speaker is trying to impose upon us by a piece of persiflage. Again, a mountain is a mountain without being called “huge”; if we have to call it huge, there is some defect in the original image which is being made up. Of course there are speech situations in which such modifiers do make a useful contribution, but as a general rule, to be applied with discretion, a style is stronger when it depends mainly upon substantives sharp enough to convey their own attributes.

Furthermore, because the class of the adjective contains so many terms of dialectical import, such as good, evil, noble, base, useful, useless, there is bound to exist an initial suspicion of all adjectives. (Even when they are the positive kind, as is true with most limiting adjectives, there lurk the questions “Who made up the statistics?” and “How were they gathered?”) The dialectical adjective is too often a “fighting word” to be used casually. Because in its very origin it is the product of disputation, one is far from being certain in advance of assent to it. How would you wish to characterize the world? If you wish to characterize it as “round,” you will win a very general assent, although not a universal one. But if you wish, with the poet, to characterize it as “sorry,” you take a position in respect to which there are all sorts of contrary positions. In strictest thought one might say that every noun contains its own analysis, but an adjective applied to a noun is apparatus brought in from the outside; and the result is the object slightly “fictionized.” Since adjectives thus initiate changes in the more widely received substantive words, one has to have permission of his audience to talk in adjectives. Karl Shapiro seems to have had something like this in mind in the following passage from his Essay on Rime:

One of the common mistakes of the inexperienced writer, in prose as well as poetry, is to suppose that the adjective can set the key of a discourse. Later he learns what Shapiro indicates, that nearly always the adjective has to have the way prepared for it. Otherwise, the adjective introduced before its noun collapses for want of support. There is a perceptible difference between “the irresponsible conduct of the opposition with regard to the Smith bill” and “the conduct of the opposition with regard to the Smith bill has been irresponsible,” which is accounted for in part by the fact that the adjective comes after the substantive has made its firm impression. In like manner we are prepared to receive Henley’s

because “night” has preceded “black.” I submit that if the poem had begun “Black as ...” it would have lost a great deal of its rhetorical force because of the inherent character of the opening word. The adjective would have been felt presumptuous, as it were, and probably no amount of supplementation could have overcome this unfortunate effect.

I shall offer one more example to show that costly mistakes in emphasis may result from supposing that the adjective can compete with the noun. This one came under my observation, and has remained with me as a classical instance of rhetorical ineptitude. On a certain university campus “Peace Week” was being observed, and a prominent part of the program was a series of talks. The object of these talks was to draw attention to those forces which seemed to be leading mankind toward a third world war. One of the speakers undertook to point out the extent to which the Western nations, and especially the United States, were at fault. He declared that a chief source of the bellicose tendency of the United States was its “proud rectitude,” and it is this expression which I wish to examine critically. The fault of the phrase is that it makes “rectitude” the villain of the piece, whereas sense calls for making “pride.” If we are correct in assigning the substantive a greater intrinsic weight, then it follows that “rectitude” exerts the greater force here. But rectitude is not an inciter of wars; it is rather that rectitude which is made rigid or unreasonable by pride which may be a factor in the starting of wars, and pride is really the provoking agent. For the most fortunate effect, then, the grammatical relationship should be reversed, and we should have “rectitude” modifying “pride.” But since the accident of linguistic development has not provided it with an adjective form of equivalent meaning, let us try “pride of rectitude.” This is not the best expression imaginable, but it is somewhat better since it turns “proud” into a substantive and demotes “rectitude” to a place in a prepositional phrase. The weightings are now more in accordance with meaning: what grammar had anomalously made the chief word is now properly tributary, and we have a closer delineation of reality. As it was, the audience went away confused and uninspired, and I have thought of this ever since as a situation in which a little awareness of the rhetoric of grammar—there were other instances of imperceptive usage—could have turned a merely well-intentioned speech into an effective one.

Having laid down this relationship between adjective and substantive as a principle, we must not ignore the real or seeming exceptions. For the alert reader will likely ask, what about such combinations as “new potatoes,” “drunk men,” “a warlike nation”? Are we prepared to say that in each of these the substantive gets the major attention, that we are more interested in “potatoes” than in their being “new,” in “men” than their being “drunk,” and so forth? Is that not too complacent a rule about the priority of the substantive over the adjective?

We have to admit that there are certain examples in which the adjective may eclipse the substantive. This may occur (1) when one’s intonation (or italics) directs attention to the modifier: “white horses”; “five dollars, not four.” (2) when there is a striking clash of meaning between the adjective and the substantive, such that one gives a second thought to the modifier: “a murderous smile”; “a gentleman gambler.” (3) when the adjective is naturally of such exciting associations that it has become a sort of traditional introduction to matter of moment: “a warlike nation”; “a desperate deed”; etc. Having admitted these possibilities of departure from the rule, we still feel right in saying that the rule has some force. It will be found useful in cases which are doubtful, which are the cases where no strong semantic or phonetic considerations override the grammatical pattern. In brief, when the immediate act of our mind does not tell us whether an expression should be in this form or the other, the principle of the relationship of adjective and substantive may settle the matter with an insight which the particular instance has not called forth.

The Adverb

The adverb is distinguished from the other parts of speech by its superior mobility; roughly speaking, it can locate itself anywhere in the sentence, and this affords a clue to its character. “Certainly the day is warm”; “The day certainly is warm”; “The day is certainly warm”; “The day is warm certainly” are all “normal” utterances. This superior mobility, amounting to a kind of detachment, makes the adverb peculiarly a word of judgment. Here the distinction between the adverb and the adjective seems to be that the latter depends more upon public agreement and less upon private intention in its applications. It is a matter of common observation that the adverb is used frequently to express an attitude which is the speaker’s projection of himself. “Surely the war will end soon” is not, for example, a piece of objective reporting but an expression of subjective feeling. We of course recognize degrees of difference in the personal or subjective element. Thomas Carlyle is much given to the use of the adverb, and when we study his adverbs in context, we discover that they are often little more than explosions of feeling. They are employed to make more positive, abrupt, sensational, or intense whatever his sentence is otherwise saying. Indeed, take from Carlyle his adverbs and one robs him of that great hortatory sweep which makes him one of the great preachers in English literature. On the other hand Henry James, although given to this use to comparable extent, gets a different effect from his adverbs. With him they are the exponents of scrupulous or meticulous feeling; they are often in fact words of definite measure. When James says “fully” or “quickly” or “bravely” he is usually expressing a definite perception, and sometimes the adverb will have its own phrasal modifier to give it the proper direction or limitation of sense. Therefore James’ adverbs, instead of having a merely expletive force, as do many of Carlyle’s, tend to integrate themselves with his more objective description. All this amounts to saying that adverbial “judgments” can be differently based; and the use of the adverb will affect a style accordingly.

The caution against presumptuous use of the adjective can be repeated with somewhat greater force for the adverb. It is the most tempting of all the parts of speech to question-beg with. It costs little, for instance, to say “certainly,” “surely,” or even “terribly,” “awfully,” “undoubtedly”; but it often costs a great deal to create the picture upon which these words are a justifiable verdict. Asking the reader to accept them upon the strength of simple assertion is obviously a form of taking without earning. We realize that a significant part of every speech situation is the character of the speaker; and there are characters who can risk an unproved “certainly” or “undoubtedly.” They bring to the speech situation a kind of ethical proof which accentuates their language. Carlyle’s reflective life was so intense, as we know from Sartor Resartus and other sources, that it wins for him a certain right to this asseverative style. As a general rule, though, it will be found that those who are most entitled to this credit use it least, which is to say, they prefer to make their demonstrations. We point out in summary that the adverb is frequently dependent upon the character of its user, and that, since it is often the qualifier of a qualifier, it may stand at one more remove from what we have defined as the primary symbol. This is why beginners should use it least—should use it only after they have demonstrated that they can get their results by other means.

The Verb

The verb is regularly ranked with the noun in force, and it seems that these two parts of speech express the two aspects under which we habitually see phenomena, that of determinate things and that of actions or states of being. Between them the two divide up the world at a pretty fundamental depth; and it is a commonplace of rhetorical instruction that a style made up predominantly of nouns and verbs will be a vigorous style. These are the symbols of the prime entities, words of stasis and words of movement (even when the verb is said to express a “state of being,” we accept that as a kind of modal action, a process of going on, or having existential quality), which set forth the broad circumstances of any subject of discussion. This truth is supported by the facts that the substantive is the heart of a grammatical subject and the verb of a grammatical predicate.

When we pass beyond the matter of broad categorization to look at the verb’s possibilities, we find the greatest need of instruction to lie in the verb epithet. It may be needless to impress any literate person with the verb’s relative importance, but it is necessary to point out, even to some practiced writers, that the verb itself can modify the action it asserts, or, so to put it, can carry its own epithet. Looking at the copious supply of verbs in English, we often find it possible to choose one so selective in meaning that no adverb is needed to accompany it. If we wish to assert that “the man moves quickly,” we can say, depending on the tone of our passage and the general signification, that he hastens, rushes, flies, scrambles, speeds, tears, races, bolts, to name only a few. If we wish to assert that a man is not telling the truth, we have the choice of lies, prevaricates, falsifies, distorts, exaggerates, and some others. As this may seem to treat the matter at too didactic a level, let us generalize by saying that there is such a thing as the characterizing verb, and that there is no telling how many words could have been saved, how many passages could have dispensed with a lumbering and perhaps inaccurate adverb, if this simple truth about the verb were better appreciated. The best writers of description and narration know it. Mark Twain’s most vivid passages are created largely through a frequent and perceptive use of the verb epithet. Turn to almost any page of Life on the Mississippi:

Here there occurs not just action, but expressive action, to which something is contributed by Twain’s subtle appreciation of modal variations in the verb.

There is a rough parallelism between the use of the complex sentence, with its detail put away in subordinate constructions, and the use of the verb epithet. In both instances the user has learned to dispense with a second member of equal or nearly equal weight in order to get an effect. As the adverbial qualification is fused with the verb, so in lesser degree, of course, is the detail of the complex sentence fused with its principal assertion. These devices of economy and compression, although they may be carried to a point at which the style seems forced and unnatural, are among the most important means of rhetoric.

The Conjunction

The conjunction, in its simple role as joiner, seems not to have much character, yet its use expresses of relatedness of things, which is bound to have signification. As either coordinator or subordinator of entities, it puts the world into a condition of mutual relationship through which a large variety of ideas may be suggested. From the different ways in which this relationship is expressed, the reader will consciously and even unconsciously infer different things. Sometimes the simple “and ... and” coordination is the expression of childlike mentality, as we saw in our discussion of the compound sentence. On the other hand, in a different speech situation it can produce a quite different effect: readers of the King James version of the Bible are aware of how the “and” which joins long sequences of verses sets up a kind of expectancy which is peculiarly in keeping with sacred text. One gets the feeling from the reiteration of “and” that the story is confirmed and inevitable; there are no contingencies, and everything happens with the double assurance of something foretold. When this pattern is dropped, as it is in a recent “American” version of the Bible, the text collapses into a kind of news story.

The frequent use of “but” to join the parts of a compound sentence seems to indicate a habit of mind. It is found congenial by those who take a “balanced view,” or who are uneasy over an assertion until it has been qualified or until some recognition has been made of its negative. Its influence is in the direction of the cautious or pedantic style because it makes this sort of disjunction, whereas “and” generously joins everything up.

Since conjunctions are usually interpreted as giving the plot of one’s thought, it is essential to realize that they have implicit meanings. They usually come at points where a pause is natural, and there is a temptation, if one may judge by indulgence in the habit, to lean upon the first one that comes to mind without reflecting critically upon its significance, so that although the conjunction may formally connect at this point, its semantic meaning does not aid in making the connection precise. A common instance of this fault is the casual interchange of “therefore” and “thus.” “Therefore” means “in consequence of,” but “thus” means “in this manner” and so indicates that some manner has already been described. “Hence” may take the place of “therefore” but “thus” may not. “Also” is a connective used with unimaginative regularity by poor speakers and writers, for whom it seems to signalize the next thought coming. Yet in precise meaning “also” signifies only a mechanical sort of addition such as we have in listing one item after another. To signalize the extension of an idea, “moreover” is usually more appropriate than “also.” Although “while” is often used in place of “whereas” to mean “on the other hand,” it has its other duty of signifying “at the same time.” “Whereas,” despite its pedantic or legalistic overtone, will be preferred in passages where precise relationship is the governing consideration. On the whole it would seem that the average writer suffers, in the department, from nothing more than poverty of vocabulary. What he does (what every writer does to some extent) is to keep on hand a small set of conjunctions and to use them in a sort of rotation without giving attention to how their distinctive meanings could further his purpose.

The Preposition

The preposition too is a word expressing relationships, but this definition gives only a faint idea of its great resources. When the false rules about the preposition have been set aside, it is seen that this is a tremendously inventive word. Like the adverb, it is a free rover, standing almost anywhere; it is constantly entering into combinations with verbs and nouns, in which it may direct, qualify, intensify, or even add something quite new to the meaning; at other times it combines with some other preposition to produce an indispensable idiom. It has given us “get out,” “put over,” “come across,” “eat up,” “butt in,” “off of,” “in between,” and many other expressions without which English, especially on the vital colloquial level, would be poorer indeed. Thornton Wilder maintains that it is in this extremely free use of the preposition that modern American English shows its superiority over British English. Such bold use of prepositional combinations gives to American English a certain flavor of the grand style, which British English has not had since the seventeenth century. Melville, an author working peculiarly on his own, is characterized in style by this imaginative use of the preposition.

Considered with reference to principle, the preposition seems to do what the adverb does, but to do it with a kind of substantive force. “Groundward,” for example, seems weak beside “toward the ground,” “lengthwise” beside “along the length of,” or “centrally” beside “in the center of.” The explanation may well lie in the preposition’s characteristic position; as a regular orderer of nouns and of verbs, it takes upon itself something of their solidity of meaning. “What is that for?” and “Where did you send it to?” lose none of their force through being terminated by these brief words of relationship.

The Phrase

It will not be necessary to say much about the phrase because its possibilities have been fairly well covered by our discussion of the noun and adjective. One qualifying remark about the force of the prepositional phrase, however, deserves making. The strength normally found in the preposition can be greatly diminished by connection with an abstract noun. That is to say, when the terminus of the preposition is lacking in vigor or concreteness, the whole expression may succumb to vagueness, in which cases the single adjective or adverb will be stronger by comparison. Thus the idea conveyed by “lazy” is largely frustrated by “of a lazy disposition”; that of “mercenary” by “of a mercenary character”; that of “deep” by “of depth,” and so on.

After the prepositional phrase, the most important phrasal combination to examine, from the standpoint of rhetorical usages, is the participial phrase. We could infer this truth from the fact alone that the Greeks made a very extensive use of the participle, as every student of that marvellous language knows. Greek will frequently use a participle where English employs a dependent clause or even a full sentence, so that the English expression “the man who is carrying a spear” would be in Greek “the spear carrying man”; “the one who spoke” would be “the one having spoken” and further accordingly, with even more economy of language than these examples indicate. I am disposed to think that the Greeks developed this habit because they were very quick to see opportunities of subordination. The clarity and subtlety of the Greek language derives in no small part from this highly “organized” character, in which auxiliary thoughts are compactly placed in auxiliary structures, where they permit the central thought to emerge more readily. In English the auxiliary status of the participle (recognized formally through its classification as an adjective) is not always used to like advantage.

One consequence of this is that although English intonation and normal word order tend to make the last part of a sentence the most emphatic, unskillful writers sometimes lose this emphasis by concluding a sentence with a participial phrase. We may take as examples “He returned home in September, having been gone for a year”; and “Having been gone for a year, he returned home in September.” The second of these puts the weightier construction in the emphatic position. Of course the matter of their relative merit cannot be separated from their purpose; there are sentences whose total meanings are best served by a retardo or diminuendo effect at the end, and for such closes the participial phrase is well suited for reasons already given. But in the majority of utterances it contributes best by modifying at some internal position, or by expressing some detail or some condition at the beginning of the sentence. The latter use may be quite effective in climactic orderings, and it will be found that journalists have virtually stereotyped this opening for their “lead” sentences: “Threatened with an exhausted food supply by the strike, hospitals today made special arrangements for the delivery of essentials”; “Reaching a new high for seven weeks, the stock market yesterday pushed into new territory.” This form is a successful if often crude result of effort toward compact and dramatic presentation.

But to summarize our observations on the participial phrase in English: It is formally a weak member of the grammatical family; but it is useful for economy, for shaded effects, and sometimes the phrase will contain words whose semantic force makes us forget that they are in a secondary construction. Perhaps it is enough to say that the mature writer has learned more things that can be done with the participle, but has also learned to respect its limitations.

In Conclusion

I can imagine being told that this chapter is nothing more than an exposition of prejudices, and that every principle discussed here can be defied. I would not be surprised if that were proved through single examples, or small sets of examples. But I would still hazard that if these show certain tendencies, my examples show stronger ones, and we have to remember that there is such a thing as a vector of forces in language too. Even though an effect may sometimes be obtained by crowding or even breaking a rule, the lines of force are still there, to be used by the skillful writer scientifically, and grammar is a kind of scientific nomenclature. Beyond this, of course, he will use them according to art, where he will be guided by his artistic intuition, and by the residual cautions of his experience.

In the long view a due respect for the canons of grammar seems a part of one’s citizenship? One does not remain uncritical; but one does “go along.” It has proved impossible to show that grammar is determined by the “best people,” or by the pedants, or by any other presumptive authority, and this is more reason for saying that it incorporates the people as a whole. Therefore the attitude of unthinking adoption and the attitude of personal defiance are both dubious, because they look away from the point where issues, whenever they appear, will be decided. That point seems to be some communal sense about the fitness of a word or a construction for what has communal importance, and this indicates at least some suprapersonal basis. Much evidence could be offered to show that language is something which is born psychological but is ever striving to become logical. At this task of making it more logical everybody works more or less. Like the political citizenship defined by Aristotle, language citizenship makes one a potential magistrate, or one empowered to decide. The work is best carried on, however, by those who are aware that language must have some connection with the intelligential world, and that is why one must think about the rhetorical nature even of grammatical categories.