METAPH'YSICALS AND BAROQUE
11
After all, the depreciation of rhetoric is a new thing in criticism, not
antedating the nineteenth century and the Coleridgean assumption
that language is not the "dress of thought," but integral with meaning.
Because rhetoric may have been abused, we have a distaste
fo~
all
rhetoric, a distaste that must limit our understanding of the classics
and most writers in the classical tradition.
Possibly a distinction can be made. According to Aristotle, who
discussed rhetoric in its original terms of the spoken word (and Mil–
ton, like Virgil or Homer, but unlike Donne, is to be read with the
tongue rather than with the eye)
"if
a speaker manages well, there
will be something 'foreign' about his speech, while possibly the art
may not be detected, and his meaning will be clear. And this is the
chief merit of rhetorical language" (
Rhet.,
III, ii, 6-7). Aristotle held
among the proper functions of rhetoric the adornment or embellish–
ment of a discourse that is soundly constructed. Aristotle's view is the
classic one sanctioned by Quintilian, who assumed that every speech
"consists at once of what is expressed and that which expresses, that
is to say, of matter and words"
(lnst.
III, v, 1). Indeed, Quintilian
held a Jesuitical or counter-reformation. view that rhetoric is
eloquen–
tia:
"The ornate is something that goes beyond what is merely lucid
and acceptable. It consists in forming a clear conception of what we
wish to say, secondly in giving this adequate expression, and thirdly
in
lending it additional brilliance, a process which may correctly be
termed embellishment"
(lnst.
VIII, iii, 61).
This sort of embellishment of structure well managed occurs in
a Roman Colosseum or triumphal arch, a St. Peter's, a historical
canvas by Rubens, an
Aeneid,
or a
Paradise Lost.
The nineteenth
century had a "rhetoric" of its own in both architecture and poetry.
Ruskinesque "Gothic" is a "pure" rhetoric, and to that extent false–
the embellishment
is
the structure; the structure
is
the embellishment.
Note that Ruskin so entirely misconceived Gothic as to presume that
a mediaeval cathedral is synonymous with the naturalness, change–
fulness, redundance, savageness, etc. of its decoration. Here the elab–
oration and the construction are one-as in the poetry of Shelley.
The rhetoric of
Prometheus Unbound
differs from the rhetoric of
Paradise Lost,
as the rhetoric of the Houses of Parliament differs from
the rhetoric of Vanbrugh and Wren, who "engage" the orders, as
did the builders of the Colosseum or as did Sansovino in designing
the Library of St. Mark. Keats is nearer to Milton and Virgil.
