ate degree as to suffice for useful and common-sense work in the ordinary occasions of writing. So much aptitude may be taken for granted; and if the higher degree is present it will according to its insight find the higher ranges of the art congenial.

2. Just as in these other arts one does not think of stopping with mere native aptitude, but develops and disciplines all his powers so that they may be employed wisely and steadily; so in the art of expression one needs by faithful study and practice to get beyond the point where he only happens to write well, or where brilliancy and crudeness are equally uncontrolled, and attain that conscious power over thought and language which makes every part of his work the result of unerring skill and calculation.

3. Like other arts, this art of rhetoric has its besetting faults, which it requires watchfulness, conscientiousness, and natural taste to avoid. The most prevalent of these, perhaps, is the fault of falling idly into conventional and stereotyped ways of expression, without troubling to think how much or how little they mean. This is at bottom insincerity; it is taking up with something that has embodied another man's thought and passing it off for one's own, thus pretending to think or feel what one does not. - - A second fault is trusting too much to one's cleverness and fluency, and not having patience and application in the exercises necessary to deepen and steady one's powers; in other words, neglecting the technic of the art. This is especially the tendency of those to whom writing comes easily; they think their native aptitude will make up for discipline, - always a fatal mistake.— A third fault is being so taken with tricks, vogues, mannerisms of expression as to think more of the dress one gives the thought than of the thought itself; thus making rhetoric the manipulation of devices of language for their own sake. It must be borne in mind that this art of rhetoric does not

exist for itself, but only as the handmaid of the truth which it seeks to make living in the minds and hearts of men.1

4. As in the mastering of other arts, so in this, there is an initial stage during which the submitting of one's work to severe artistic standards seems to spoil it; the powers that when running wild produced results uneven and uncertain indeed but full of native vigor and audacity become, as dominated by art, labored, wooden, self-conscious. This, however, is merely a temporary period in the necessary process of changing artistic power from arbitrary rules to second nature. To discard rhetorical discipline on this account, as many do, does not help the matter; it is merely to abandon what experience has contributed to a difficult art and set one's self to evolve one's own modes of procedure, with all the risks of mannerism and blundering. The wiser way is to work up through that self-conscious stage to the eminence where the art becomes at once artistic, uniform in quality, and full of the spontaneousness of nature.

Fine Art and Mechanical Art. The distinction ordinarily made between mechanical or useful art and fine art has its application to rhetoric; which may be classed with either, according as its results are merely practical, as in journalism and matters of everyday information, or more distinctively literary, as in poetry, oratory, romance. Nor is it either easy

or desirable to define the point where one kind of art passes into the other. Both the sense of the practical and the sense of the beautiful may each in its way control the same work; and thus the composition may be at once masterful contrivance and fine art, with each quality reinforced by the other.

1 These remarks on the faults of the rhetorical art are suggested by a sentence from Ruskin's Introduction to "Roadside Songs of Tuscany": "All fatal faults in art that might have been otherwise good, arise from one of these three things: either from the pretence to feel what we do not; the indolence in exercises necessary to obtain the power of expressing the truth; or the presumptuous insistence upon, and indulgence in, our own powers and delights, and with no care or wish that they should be useful to other people, so only they may be admired by them."

To every writer who enlists a well-endowed nature in it, the art of expression is comprehensive enough to include the highest and most exquisite literary achievement; while at its beginning, accessible to all, are the homely and useful details of plain words and clear thinking. Nor is any stage of the work so insignificant but genius can fine art.

give it the charm of a

III.

Province and Distribution of Rhetoric.

The province of the

study is suggested in the foregoing definition of rhetoric as art and as adaptation. Its province is to expound in systematic order the technic of an art. But inasmuch as this is an art governed in all its details by the aim of adaptation, its problems are not primarily problems of absolute right and wrong, but of fitness and unfitness, or, where various expedients are in question, of better and worse.1 What is good for one occasion or one class of readers or one subject may be bad for another; what will be powerful to effect one object may be quite out of place for another. Thus it traverses from beginning to end that field of activity wherein the inventive constructive mind is supposably at work making effective discourse.

The distribution of the study bases itself most simply, perhaps, on the two questions that naturally rise in any undertaking, the questions WHAT and HOW. Round the first cluster the principles that relate to matter or thought of discourse; round the second whatever relates to manner or expression. Of course a question of expression must often involve the question of thought also, and vice versa; so the two lines of inquiry must continually touch and interact; but on the whole they are distinct enough to furnish a clear working basis for the distribution of the art.

1 See WENDELL, English Composition, p. 2.

Reversing the order here suggested, for a reason presently to be explained, the present manual groups the elements of rhetoric round two main topics: style, which deals with the manner of discourse; and invention, which deals with the matter.

Style. The question HOW, which underlies the art of style, divides itself into the questions what qualities to give it in order to produce the fitting effect; then, more particularly, how to choose words both for what they say (denote) and what they imply or involve (connote), that is, both literal and figurative expression; how to put words together in phrases and sentences, with fitting stress and order; and how to build these sentences into paragraphs. This division of the study is commonly regarded as the dryest; but it is the most indispensable, and its dryness gives way to intense interest in proportion as the importance of one's work is apprehended. No word or detail can be insignificant which makes more powerful or unerring a desired effect.

Invention. The question WHAT, which underlies the art of invention, must be held to suggest more than the mere finding of subject-matter, which of course must be left to the writer himself. No text-book or system of study can do his thinking for him. It belongs to invention also to determine what concentration and coördination must be given to every line of thought to make it effective; then, more particularly, what forms of discourse are at the writer's disposal, and what peculiarities of management each demands. This division of the study, while not more practical, has the interest of being more directly concerned with the making of literature, and the demands of self-culture therein involved.