The Historians' History of the World 04

It is a characteristic distinction between the two philosophers that Plato, the incomparable artist in words, fiercely attacked rhetoric, while Aristotle made it a cardinal item in his programme of education. It was a power and he reckoned with it accordingly, not without yielding more to contemporary taste than we can approve. To the modern mind rhetoric is the least congenial element in the culture and literature of antiquity. We can understand that in the political agitation which pervaded the Attic empire, oratory, which was a daily necessity in parliamentary debate and in the law courts, was bound to develop into an art, and that a literature should have arisen corresponding to that of our daily press. So, too, we can understand that the manifold intellectual activity of the age of the sophists, and the tentative efforts of science, needed an organ which should not only convey practical information but have an eye to effect. That this prose should become Attic, in spite of the fact that the language of Athens had barely passed through its first phase of development in tragedy, was inevitable from the time when Athens took the lead in Greece. In the sphere of language, at all events, the country attained to national unity. But to us there is at first sight something monstrous in the fact that in the age of Pericles a set form of oratory should arise which not only consciously competes with poetry but seeks to supplant it—and which actually succeeded in preventing the development of any new poetic method. The whole classic world, including the Latins, devoted no trifling labour and skill to this art of eloquence, and its art-theory ended by making poetry a mere subdivision of it. We are now coming to recognise more and more how much modern poetry in particular owes to this prose-poetry and its methods: the modern connecting-link of the rhyme was discovered beyond all dispute by that Gorgias whom Plato attacked as the champion of rhetoric; the intermediate links lie before us in an unbroken chain. Our astonishment subsides, if we so far rid ourselves of prejudice as to realise how arbitrary is every line of demarcation between poetry and prose. Not only the poems of Walt Whitman, but a great many of Goethe’s finest poems would be regarded by every Greek art-critic as prose. Prose really implies that the language proceeds on foot; the reverse,—that it soars aloft by means of this device or that,—applies to every conventionalised form of speech; whether it is cast into a regular measure or not is irrelevant in comparison with the fact that it is informed by measure. The Hellenic bias towards style manifests itself here in the creation of a definite form, and we cannot question the fact that the development of the period demanded a new style and one unhampered by the laws of metre. For at such a high point of civilisation the poetic form does not suffice for what the world has to say and wishes to hear. Empty and conventional jingle, relying on tricks of style, undoubtedly attained a bad eminence in Greek and Latin oratory; but a similar spectacle has been afforded by poetry and the arts of chisel and brush. If a man had something to say, like Aristotle, Polybius, and Plutarch, it did him no harm to clothe his thoughts in a form, the effect of which we perceive agreeably even without understanding the art to which it is due. It is the same artistic conventionality which to this day lends to French prose, whether it be that of literature or of polite conversation, the charm which the Teuton does not possess in equal measure. And the French have attained to it by a rhetorical schooling traditionally derived from the method of antiquity. That elegance is not an inborn quality with them is shown by the formlessness of so great a writer as Rabelais. Were we in a position to read the laws of Solon we should perceive that Attic elegance was likewise no gift of heaven. An art which we find still dominant in the sermons and hagiography of the Byzantines is a power not to be despised, even apart from its historical value.

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