Discovery of Facts: Testimony and Authority Inference from Particulars: Induction Inference from Generals: Deduction. II. Proof of Truth by Disproof of Error By Reducing the Issue to an Alternative Chas. &. Burbank PREFACE. 1892 Worcester, Mass. A BOOK on so old a subject as rhetoric can scarcely hope to give the world much that is new. But old things, in proportion to their living value, need from time to time to be newly defined and distributed, their perspective and emphasis need to be freshly determined, to suit changing conditions of thought; this we find abundantly recognized in the subject before us, in the rapidly increasing number of text-books that are appearing. To which number the present volume presumes to add one; and in setting forth its aim and standard would select for remark a single word of its title, the word practical. By practical elements are here meant, broadly, those elements which may be applied, as the result of the teacher's guidance, to the actual construction of literature. In this sense of the term, some elements of rhetoric, though very real and valuable, are not practical, because the ability to employ them cannot be imparted by teaching. They have to exist in the writer himself, in the peculiar, individual bent of his nature. No teacher or treatise, for instance, could ever endow the student with Milton's sublimity, or with Sterne's elusive wit, or with Bacon's weighty sententiousness; and any attempt on the student's part to work up these qualities by rule would be only a contortion. Other elements are not practical, because all that can be done with them is merely to discriminate and define them. The student can burden himself, for instance, with the names of some two hundred and fifty figures of speech; but when he gets beyond the name and inquires after the usage, he may safely omit two hundred and thirty-five of them as super of expression of which De Quincey says, "the rack would not have forced any man to do otherwise." Still other elements there are which are not practical to teach, because they have to be discovered. The finer principles of literary taste, for instance, the subtler music of rhythm and fancy and allusion, are obtained only through a special sense developed by long and minute discipline; they may come some time, but not ordinarily through the class-room. Such are the elements excluded from the present treatment." To say they are unpractical, however, is not to say they are useless; it is merely to confess that they are incommunicable. They belong, in a word, to a delicate and difficult science -the science of criticism, rather than to what is here sought, the art of constructing. Literature is of course infinitely more than mechanism; but in proportion as it becomes more, a text-book of rhetoric has less business with it. It is as mechanism that it must be taught; the rest must be left to the student himself. To this sphere, then, the present work is restricted: the literary art, so far as it is amenable to the precepts of a text-book and to the demands of a college course. The best way to discern whether a rhetorical principle is true and practical is to study its effect in the concrete. When the student sees how it looks in actual application, he cannot gainsay it; it is no more theory but fact. And all the more suggestive is the instance if it is not manufactured for the occasion but taken from those universally current works whose writers had neither the fear nor the worship of rhetoric before their eyes. For this reason, it has been deemed essential in this book to illustrate every important point by copious examples from standard literature; and though these have increased the number of pages beyond what was originally contemplated, it is believed that their value will more than atone for the space they occupy. AMHERST, MASS., June 25, 1887. |