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(or Socrates), Aristotle, and Demosthenes; and the present section we will take up briefly each of these phases, with reference to its place in seventeenth-century prose-criticism-reserving for the proper point the explanation of the paradox of describing the style of Demosthenes as a phase of the genus humile.

1. Of the first not much needs to be said. The nature of the controversy recorded in the Gorgias and Phaedrus was of courge known to the Anti-Ciceronian leaders; and they knew perfectly well, moreover, that the Isocratean, or Gorgian rhetoric was of essentially the same kind as the Ciceronian rhetoric taught by the orthodox humanists of the sixteenth century. It would have been strange if they had not used the name of Plato in propagating their new taste for a philosophical and intimate prose, or had not detected the similarity of the aims of their opponents to those of the ancient sophistic rhetoricians. It was in fact their occasional practise to apply to these teachers and their seventeenth-century successors the old name of "sophists." "

There was an additional motive, however, for the revival of this ancient controversy, which will strike the modern reader as & curiosity of literary history. The new "Attics" were nine-tenths Stoic in their morals, as they were in their rhetoric. But Stoicism was stigmatized as heresy-especially when it called itself "Christian"—at every distributing center of Catholic orthodoxy; at Rome itself it was under constant surveillance. In these circumstances the name of Socrates was a convenient disguise, partly because it was not hard to wrench his philosophy into a Stoic form, and partly because his conduct on his trial and the manner of his death had long given him a place among those who had fallen as martyrs of the struggle against conventionaal sentimentality. Quevedo occasioned no surprise when he linked the names of Socrates, Cato, and Job in his Stoic hagiology; " and Balzac's title Le Socrate Chrétien could easily be read in its real sense of le stoique chrétien.

For these reasons, then, we occasionally meet with the names of Plato and Socrates in the propaganda of the new school. But as far as the form of its style was concerned the earliest masters of Attic had but little influence upon it. In the first half of the

"See Balzac, De la Grande Eloquence, Works 1665, vol. 2, pp. 518ff., and the works of Naudé, passim.

"See E. Mérimée, La Vie et les Oeuvres de Quevedo, Paris 1886,

p. 288.

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century it is almost safe to say that they had none. In the second, on the other hand, there were several ambitious revivals of Hellenism, both in England and France, and the name of Plato is often heard as that of a writer and a model to be imitated. Thus the Chevalier de Méré proposes a purely Greek literary program: Plato in prose and Homer in verse are the preferred models, and next to these (since one must do lip-service, at least, to oratory) Demosthenes. But there is some disingenuousness in this and similar professions. The actual style of de Méré does 'not differ in kind from that of St. Evrémond, for example, which was formed in the "libertine" school of the first half of the century and "corrected" by the new mondanité of the second. Like other representative critics of his century, de Méré calls himself an Attic; but he had already discovered the eighteenthcentury formula in which Atticism is identified with the "agreeable" style of l'honnête homme; and this is a style very different from Plato's.

With less emphasis the same statement can be made of the style of Fénelon in his Dialogues. Though it superficially resembles the model it imitates, its Platonism is but a thin disguise of the romantic and Christian poetry that we are familiar with in his other prose writings. Indeed there is but one prose-style of the seventeenth century that will stand a comparison, either in kind or quality, with that of Plato: the prose-style of the Lettres Provinciales; and Pascal is neither deceived nor disingenuous about the sources of this. He acknowledges that it has been formed by the imitation of the same Stoic models that were in favor in the first half of the century."

The most important part played by Plato was to perpetuate the idea of an "Attic" style, with new and somewhat different associations, in the second half of the century, at a time when the Latin models of such a style, heretofore in favor, had begun to be discredited.

"Méré's "Atticisme mondain" is very exactly described and placed in its true relations by Strowski, Pascal et son Temps, vol. I, chapter 8, and vol. I, chapter 7.

"La maniere d'écrire d'Epictète, de Montaigne, et de Salomon de Tultie (that is, of Pascal himself in the Lettres Provinciales) est le plus d'usage, etc." Pensées, 1, 18, ed. Brunschvig, p. 327. See also his Entretien sur Epictète et Montaigne.

2. The part played by Aristotle was much greater. Of course neither his Rhetoric nor any other of his surviving works could serve as a model for stylistic imitation, as the works of Plato could. Yet it is probably correct to say that certain forms of seventeenthcentury prose-style are chiefly due to the attempt to apply directly, in practise, ideas concerning the relation between logic and rhetorice gathered from the first two books of the Rhetoric. This is probably true of styles so different in their associations as that recommended by the Royal Society of London and often used by its scientific contributors and that imposed upon the writers of the Port Royal Community by their teachers. Both of these are characterized by a deliberate plainness which Aristotle would have been far from recommending for literary use; but they both seem to rest finally on Aristotle's resolution of the forms of rhetorical persuasion into forms of syllogistic reasoning.

The importance of his influence upon the forms of style was as nothing, however, when compared with that of his influence on the theory of the Attic school. The advocates of a style suited to philosophical thought needed a classical authority for their support as unquestionable and orthodox as that of Cicero, and Aristotle's Rhetoric provided them with what they needed. The rhetorical aphorisms and discussions in Seneca's letters expressed their ideas, it is true, in popular and telling ways. They served the purposes of Attics who did not need to profess any great amount of classical learning or any profound knowledge of rhetorical theory. But Muret, Bacon, Hobbes, and the teachers of Port Royal-the men whose task was to lay the philosophical foundations of seventeenthcentury style were all Aristotelian at first hand, while many others, Lipsius, Descartes, and so on, obtained their ideas from the same source, though perhaps less directly. To show adequately the relation of each of these philosophers to the Rhetoric would be a task far beyond our present limits; but at least it may be taken for granted that seventeenth-century Anti-Ciceronianism, like all other historical movements of protest against the excessive study of rhetorical form, derives its ultimate authority from the first two books of that work." Even its third book proved useful. For its

Muret's dependence upon Aristotle has been mentioned on an earlier page. One of the characteristic expressions of his irony was his choice of the Rhetoric instead of a Ciceronian subject for his course in 1576-7,

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description of the usual Isocratean oratorical forms was taken for what it was, a mere conventional recognition of existing customs; whereas its highly original treatment of Enthymemes was often employed for guidance in the art of forming aphorisms and antitheta in which the seventeenth century arrived at absolute perfection, and its treatment of the metaphor was often appealed to by the new Attics in defence of their favorite figure." It is somewhat astonishing to find Aristotle quoted in justification of the devices of style by which concettismo achieves its dubious effect of power; but concettismo is, in fact, implicit in any "rhetoric of thought," such as Aristotle's was.

3. The third phase of Greek influence, namely that of Attic oratory, requires a larger discussion; for it involves the re-opening of the subject of the genera dicendi. Hitherto we have considered only two genera, or 'characters,' and this, as we have said, appears to have been the original form of the classification. The genus humile arose in opposition to oratory, as the appropriate language of intimate philosophical discussion; and the Gorgianic kind of rhetoric which was then regarded as the only, or at least the typical, form of oratorical style, then properly assumed the name of the genus grande in contrast with it. But a kind of oratory

when he had been badgered into a temporary renunciation of the new anti-rhetorical studies of the rationalists. See Dejob, M.-A. Muret, Paris 1881, pp. 293-6. Dejob fails to interpret Muret's career in an intelligible fashion because he does not understand the "Attic" movement and its intellectual implications.—Aristotelianism manifests itself clearly in the subordinate relation of rhetoric to dialectics and ethics in Bacon's Advancement and in the Port Royal treatises. On this point see Jacquinet, Baconi de re litteraria judicia, Paris 1863, pp. 48-51.

"The raptures of the concettisti in praise of metaphor may be studied in Gracian, Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio, Madrid, 1642, 1648, etc., passim; in Pallavicino, Trattato sullo Stile e sul Dialogo, 1646, etc., chapter 7 ("si chiama reina delle figure"); and in Tesauro, П Cannocchiale Aristotelico, 1654, p. 316 (“ il più pellegrino e mirabile parte dell' umano intelletto"). But Bouhours, the determined corrector of concettismo, is not less an admirer. See La Manière de bien Penser, 1687, pp. 20-21. The whole theory of concettismo is derived from Aristotle, especially Book II, chapters 22-24 (on Enthymemes) and Book III, chapter 2, sections 8-15 (on Metaphors). This point has been admirably brought out in the old work by Ferri, De l'Eloquence, Paris, 1789, pp. 228-233, the only discussion I know of in which the preeminence of prose over poetry in any proper consideration of the seventeenth-century conceit is observed.

arose at Athens during the fourth century which was not open to the charges brought against the Gorgian rhetoric by Socrates and Plato, which, on the contrary, had some of the same qualities that the masters of the genus humile arrogated to themselves, an oratory disdainful of the symmetries and melodious cadences of the Isocratean model and professing to make its effect by the direct portrayal of the mind of the speaker and of the circumstances by which he has been aroused to vehement feeling. This later type of oratory was of course familiar to the post-Aristotelian theorists who adopted the bipartite division; but so strong was the tradition of the earlier type of oratory that they took no account of it in their theory. They merely wished to represent the dichotomy of style in its original and most striking form. When, however, the oratory of Lysias and Demosthenes and their school had at last taken so firm a place in the tradition that they could no longer be disregarded in the doctrine of the genera, a curious situation presented itself. For now a mode of style had to be recognized which was allied in its rhetorical form and procedure with the genus humile, yet was unmistakedly grander than the genus grande and had the same uses. Nothing but disorder could result from such an anomaly; and in fact the adjustment that was finally made was little better than a confused and illogical working arrangement. The "Attic" oratory of Demosthenes usurped the title of the genus grande; the genus humile remained undisturbed in its old functions and character; and a third genus was added to take care of the Isocratean oratory, and was given the name of the genus medium (modicum, temperatum, etc.), though this name does not appropriately represent either the historical or the formal relation of the Isocratean style to the other two. In the time of Cicero it had become customary to define the character of the three genera more fully by a reference to the effect of each upon the audience. The genus humile is best adopted to teaching or telling its hearers something; the genus medium delights them or gives them pleas the genus grande rouses them and excites them to action." It is true that this explanation of the development of the tripartite classification is not so clearly documented as we should like to have it. It is only probable. But it is the result of what seems

ure;

This interpretation of the relation of the three characters follows that of Hendrickson in the articles mentioned in a former note (see p. 87).

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