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PARTISAN REVIEW
sight
is
like faith, a gift by the grace of God, there is no use
in
teaching at all-if insight-teaching is our only way of going about it.
But
if
it
is
partly a gift and partly the result of labor (as Longinus
thought), perhaps the teacher could find a discipline of language
to expound to the class, with the hope that a latent gift of insight may
be liberated.
Rhetoric is an unpopular word today, and it deserves to be, if
we understand it as the "pragmatic dimension" of discourse as this
has been defined by Charles W. Morris, and other semanticists and
positivists. In this view rhetoric
is
semantically irresponsible; its use
is to move people to action which is at best morally neutral; or
if
it
is good action, this result was no necessary part of the rhetorician's
purpose. The doctrine is not new; it is only a pleasantly complex
and double-talking revival of Greek sophistry. But
if
we think of
rhetoric in another tradition, that of Aristotle and of later, Christian
rhetoricians, we shall be able to see it as the study of the full lan–
guage of experience, not the specialized languages of method.!
Through this full language of experience Dante and Shakespeare
could arrive at truth.
This responsible use implies the previous study of the two lower,
but not inferior, disciplines that I have already mentioned. One of
these was once quaintly known as "grammar," the art that seems to
be best learned at the elementary stage in a paradigmatic language
like Latin. I think of another exemplum that will illustrate one of
the things that have happened since the decay of grammar. I had a
student at the University of Chicago who wrote a paper on T. S.
Eliot's religious symbolism, in which he failed to observe that certain
sequences of words in "Ash Wednesday" are without verbs: he
had no understanding of the relation of the particulars to the uni–
versals in Eliot's diction. The symbols floated, in this student's mind,
in a void of abstraction; the language of the poem was beyond his
reach. Is the domination of historical scholarship responsible for
the decline of the grammatical arts? I think that it may be; but it
3. I
hope it is plain by this time that by "rhetorical analysis" and the "study
of rhetoric"
I
do not mean the prevailing
explication of texts.
If
rhetoric is the
full
language of experience, its study must be informed by a peculiar talent,
not wholly reducible to method, which
I
have in the past called the "historical
imagination," a power that has little to do with the academic routine of
"historical method." For a brilliant recent statement of this difference, see
"Art and the Sixth Sense", by Philip Rahv (PARTISAN REVIEW, March-April
1952, pp. 225-233). The "sixth sense" is the historical imagination.
