DE QUINCEY ON RHETORIC AND PUBLIC SPEAKING

W

HOYT H. HUDSON

HEN the schoolmaster at Bath said of thirteen-year-old Thomas De Quincey, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one," he singled out one of the interests which De Quincey maintained throughout his long life of study-an interest in public speaking and rhetoric, rooted in a knowledge of the Greek masters. True, he never himself faced the perils or sought the prizes of public address; and in scattered passages he attacks, or at least discounts, wielders of rhetoric. Those familiar with the criticism of oratory need not be told that it is contemporary orators he discounts, in favor of the "giants" of a generation or two previous, and that he uses a skilful rhetoric to make his attack upon the art.

One or two of De Quincey's reminiscent anecdotes relate to quelled orators. "Ah! what a beautiful idea occurs to me at this point," he exclaims on one page of his burlesque novel, The Spanish Military Nun. "Once, on a hustings at Liverpool, I saw a mob orator, whose brawling mouth, open to its widest expansion, suddenly some larking sailor, by the most dexterous of shots, plugged up with a paving-stone." At this point the veil is drawn.

More revealing, perhaps, is an incident of his childhood. Thomas's elder brother had taken it upon himself to give lectures in physics to the other children of the family and their playmates. His "habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level" of his hearers' understandings, however, so irked his sister Mary that she planned an insurrection. When the speaker came to say, as was his custom, that he flattered himself he had made the point under discussion tolerably clear, gratuitously adding "to the meanest of capacities," and then, in an exuberance of verbosity, capping all with the phrase, "clear to the most excruciatingly mean of capacities," there was a feminine voice raised protesting, "No, you haven't; it's as dark as sin." This was

followed by a second voice-Thomas's we may presume-saying, "Dark as night," and still another with, "Dark as midnight,"-"and so the peal," writes De Quincey, "continued to come round like a catch, the whole being so well concerted, and the rolling fire so well maintained, that it was impossible to make head against it." The disconcerted lecturer finally fell back upon a phrase of Burke's, then current, and addressed his audience as a "swinish multitude," adding something about pearls.

Alert observation, multifarious knowledge, and critical acumen, together with the lively interest already noticed, served to make De Quincey a keen student of the oratory of all ages, including his own. He was one of those who rediscovered, as someone in each generation must, it appears, rediscover, that literary prose had its origins in public speaking; that the persuasive impulse—that is, an impulse not only to communicate but also to attract and influence a more or less clearly defined audience-underlies stylistic devices and effects; and that by taking into account the factors of changing methods of publication, changing polities, and changing standards of taste, the story of literary prose can be written in terms of speaker and audience.

Such are the important and inescapable conclusions left in one's mind after reading De Quincey's "Elements of Rhetoric,"1 an excursive review suggested by Whately's book of that title, together with his essay entitled "Style," and the section on orators in his "Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature in its Foremost Pretensions," 2 Yet when one attempts to go further and to ascertain De Quincey's concepts of rhetoric, eloquence, and style, and the interrelation of these, one is baffled by the author's continual discursiveness and occasional inconsistency. Such an ambitious attempt was originally the purpose of this study. Let it now be stated that the writer has rather chosen from the teeming mass of De Quincey's

1

Appearing originally in Blackwood's Magazine for December, 1828, and reprinted in the Collective edition (1859) under the title "Rhetoric." I have used Masson's edition, The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey (London, 1897), wherein the essays on literary theory and criticism are collected in Volumes X and XI; and Professor Fred Newton Scott's edition, De Quincey's Essays on Style, Rhetoric, and Language (Boston, 1893). Style" appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in four parts, 1840-41; the study of Greek literature in Tait's Magazine, December, 1838, and June, 1839. Nor should one overlook the essay, "Conversation," published in Tait's Magazine, October, 1847, and enlarged for the Collective edition. All are to be found in Masson, X.

2

ideas a few which appear specially significant, considered in relation to rhetorical tradition and recent stylistic theory and practice; and illustrations from our author's own practice of the salient points of his theory. After these major considerations were decided upon, a number of additional observations and suggestions from De Quincey's overflowing bounty were found to be too valuable or too interesting to omit.

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I

What, for example, are we to make of such a statement as this, set down early and prominently in De Quincey's essay on rhetoric: "And, in fact, amongst the greater orators of Greece there is not a solitary gleam of rhetoric"? It follows upon an accurate and important distinction between rhetoric as an ars docens, or theoretical study, and as an ars utens, or practical accomplishment; with the admission that "the theory, or ars docens, was taught with a fulness and an accuracy by the Grecian masters not afterwards approached." 2 The statement cited, then, has to do with rhetoric in practice. But why such a gap between theory and practice? The Greeks were the greatest of all teachers of rhetoric, the science; but in their best rhetorical discourse there is to be found no application of the principles of this science. Such is De Quincey's argument. Rhetoric, says Aristotle, is "the faculty of finding, in any subject, all the available means of persuasion." Granting that such is the ars docens, one must say that rhetorical discourse, the ars utens, consists in the employment of all available means of persuasion in speech. Yet, says De Quincey, "there is not a solitary gleam of rhetoric" in the orations of Demosthenes or Lysias or Æschines, though a little of it may be found in the unspoken ones composed by Isocrates.

The truth is that De Quincey, heeding his private genius, is for the moment disregarding every previous concept of rhetorical discourse in favor of one which apparently has just swum into his

1Masson, X, 94.

Masson, X, 93. De Quincey goes on: "In particular, it was so taught by Aristotle: whose system we are disposed to agree with Dr. Whately in pronouncing the best as regards the primary purpose of a teacher; though otherwise, for elegance and as a practical model in the art he was expounding, neither Aristotle, nor any less austere among the Greek rhetoricians, has any pretensions to measure himself with Quintilian."

consciousness, with all the dazzle of novelty playing about it. To be sure, he had made a show, at the beginning of his essay, of disposing of previous explanations of rhetoric. But so ill-considered is his treatment of them that Professor Masson finds it necessary to write a fifteen-hundred-word note designed to set the reader right, a note beginning with the suggestion that De Quincey suffers from "an imperfect recollection of the contents and substance of Aristotle's Treatise on Rhetoric." But De Quincey is in a hurry to set down his own delightful ideas-his bombshell theory concerning rhetorical enthymemes and his touchstones of rhetorical discourseso that he has not time enough to be wholly fair to his predecessors. And what is his own conception of rhetoric? Here is something like a definition (p. 922):

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But Rhetoric is the art of aggrandizing and bringing out into strong relief, by means of various and striking thoughts, some aspect of truth which is of itself supported by no spontaneous feelings and therefore rests upon artificial aids.

This alone does not appear to be strikingly different from the Aristotelian conception, and certainly does not justify the statement concerning Greek orators with which we began. It is from various comments, and from his illustrative material, that we learn what De Quincey is driving at. We find, for instance (p. 93), that rhetoric "aims at an elaborate form of beauty which shrinks from the strife of business, and could neither arise nor make itself felt in a tumultuous assembly." Again it appears that the essence of rhetoric is (p. 97) "to hang upon one's own thoughts as an object of conscious interest, to play with them, to watch and pursue them through a maze of inversions, evolutions, and harlequin changes." The modern French writers are found to be "never rhetorical" because in their work (p. 121) "there is no eddying about their own thoughts; no motion of fancy self-sustained from its own activities; no flux and reflux of thought, half-meditative, half-capricious." From these passages a fairly consistent definition emerges, a definition worded by the indispensable Masson (p. 92n.) as "the art of intellectual and fantastic play with any subject to its utmost capabilities, or the

1Masson, X, 82-5. This note contains a clear and authoritative summary of the classical concept of rhetoric and of the various permutations of that concept which have prevailed in various periods.

'Page references in the text are to Masson, X.

art of enriching any main truth or idea by inweaving with it the largest possible amount of subsidiary and illustrative thought and fancy."

Now if we allow ourselves to dwell upon the elements of "play" and "fancy" in this conception, and to draw from these the suggestion of a love for ornament, we are likely to conclude that, in classical terms, De Quincey limits rhetoric to the epideictic, or demonstrative, branch, and this only in its decadent phases. He favors the Asiatic against the Attic. He makes it a game rather than a business. It belongs, as he says more than once, to ages of leisure rather than to those of stress and turmoil. It is the maneuvering of troops for display, in the gold braid of dress uniforms, rather than their mobilization for warfare or their deploying for battle. And to say that there is not a solitary gleam of rhetoric in the best Greek orators is somewhat like saying that there was not a solitary gleam of soccer football in the battle of the Marne.

One must be aware that De Quincey's taste favored this playing with ideas, this "eddying about one's own thoughts," and with the sure instincts of a gourmet he went through the literatures of the world, smacking his lips over the choicest morsels. He would himself have admitted that his taste in this was a cultivated, a highly civilized, taste; perhaps an exotic taste. But it is a legitimate one, and it is not strange that he hastened to exhibit it, just as one who possesses a discriminaing taste for artichokes or even an undiscriminating taste for daily cold baths rarely attempts to conceal the possession. De Quincey's defense is sound (p. 101): "The artifice and machinery of rhetoric furnishes in its degree as legitimate a basis for intellectual pleasure as any other; that the pleasure is of an inferior order, can no more attaint the idea or model of the composition than it can impeach the excellence of an epigram that it is not a tragedy."

But to leave De Quincey here, thinking of rhetoric as a game, its end-product the "intellectual pleasure" of a few connoisseurs, and pointing to Ovid, Petronius Arbiter, the Senecas, Sir Thomas Browne, and Jeremy Taylor as its greatest players, would be to do him injustice and to miss the best part of his contribution upon the subject. We can appeal from De Quincey drunk with the heady rhythms of rhetoriqueurs to De Quincey the sober critic and craftsman; from the De Quincey who says (p. 94), "All great rhetori