new associations, all of which are exactly reproduced in the Latin style that represents it. We must turn back to the point where we left off the account of its development and consider these changes. We have seen that Aristotle first developed into a system the theory of style as it is determined by the processes of thought and that in the generations immediately after him a place was found in rhetorical teaching for a kind of style, known as the genus humile, founded upon this way of looking at rhetorical phenomena. We have now to observe that the great increase in the interest in philosophical studies in Greek communities during the third and second centuries was the cause of an increased attention to this genus humile and of interesting developments in its theory and practise, and that the occasions for the proper and healthy use of the more popular oratorical style were at the same time greatly reduced as a result of changed political conditions in the Greek world. Whether this change is to be regarded as a beneficent consequence of the restoration of order by absolute authority, as the Romans of the first century and most seventeenth-century observers considered it to be, or was, on the other hand, a lamentable indication of the decay of character that follows the loss of liberty, as Milton, for instance, undoubtedly thought it was, we will not stop to inquire. It is the fact alone that concerns us, and we will proceed at once to specialize it still further by noting that the important rhetorical fact is not so much the spread of philosophical interest in general, as the remarkable diffusion of the principles of the Stoic sect. This does not mean necessarily that Stoicism was in itself the most important philosophy of the age-though that also may be true-but only that it had clearer and more systematic theories than the other sects with regard to the form of a philosophical style, and was able to speak, at least on most points, as the general rhetorical representative of them all.

Aristotle describes two essential virtues of style: clearness and appropriateness. But his method of treating the theory of rhetoric in the first two books implies another of almost equal importance, namely, brevity; and in his immediate followers this virtue assumes actually a coördinate place with the other two in the description of the genus humile. Upon his analysis, modified in this way, the Stoic rhetoric depends; and the three qualities clearness, brevity, and appropriateness-appear and reappear in it, usually in the order named, and with only such additions and substractions as

8

always occur in a traditional formula. Each of them, however, is interpreted in a particular way and takes on a special meaning in the Stoic system." We will consider the three in order, and what they meant in Stoic practise.

1. Aristotle places clearness first. The Stoics often-though not always—give it the same titular position. But, whether they do so or not, it is never first in their affections. There were two features of Stoic thought that tended to reduce this virtue to a subordinate rank, or even to give a positive value to its opposite. Clearness is evidently the first merit of an exposition of objective reality, as in the statment of facts and laws of natural science; Aristotle occasionally had such exposition in his mind, and, partly on his authority, there have been in modern times several attempts to erect the theory of style on the foundation of mere scientific clearness. But the kind of truth that the Stoics chiefly had in mind was moral and inward. It was a reality not visible to the eye, but veiled from common observation; hidden in a shrine toward which one might win his way, through a jostling, noisy mob of illusory appearances, by a series of partial initiations. This kind of reality can never be quite portrayed of course, because ultimate knowledge of the mystery of truth is never attained. But it is at least possible to depict the effort of the athletic and disciplined mind in its progress toward the unattainable goal. And this effort of the mind was the characteristic theme of the Stoics, and the object of their rhetorical art. Though by the rigor of their theory they were bound to a cold passionless objectivity,

The clearest statements of the form of Stoic style in antiquity are in Diog. Laer. (Life of Zeno), vп, 59; Cicero, De Oratore (which Zielinski, with some exaggeration, describes as an exposition of Stoic theory), and Quintilian, xi, 10. In the modern period, Lipsius' treatise on style, Institution Epistolica, and La Mothe le Vayer's l'Eloquence Française (Oeuvres Iv) rest directly on ancient Stoic authority. The clearest recent statement is by Hendrickson (as above, Am. J. of Phil. XXVI, pp. 257-61, 272, 284). It should be said that in Diogenes Laertius another virtue, purity of language as determined by the usage of good society, precedes these three. This, however, proved so foreign to other ideals of the Stoic school that it was often omitted, and when it appears and is made prominent, as it is in the Roman Stoics of the second century, it is interpreted in such a way that it falls into virtual coincidence with the quality of appropriateness. Its history in the seventeenth century would make an interesting chapter, but must be omitted here.

they really aimed at a highly imaginative portrayal of their rel tions with truth; and even those who professed to strive for clea ness, and in fact did so, could not resist the temptation to conve the ardor of their souls in brevities, suppressions, and contortion of style which are in fact inconsistent with a primary devotion t the virtue of perspicuity.

In the second place, the Stoic sage was always, by his own account a foreigner in the world. His outward fortunes were bound up i every conceivable way with powers and conventions which wer alien to his soul; and the form in which the problem of lif presented itself to him was how to reconcile his inward detachment: and independence with his necessary outward conformity to the world, or even with the desire-which he usually professed to be of service to it. Obscurity, therefore, might be useful to him in two ways. Sometimes it was a necessary safeguard of the dangerous truths he had to utter; sometimes it was a subtle mockery of the puerile orthodoxies of society.

Clearness is a virtue, then, to which the Stoics pay lip-service, which they more honor in the breach than the observance; and its value in the criticism of their prose consists chiefly in the fact that it enables us to distinguish two classes of writers among them. One consists of those who studiously defy it for the reasons just mentioned. Tacitus-le prince des ténèbres-Persius, and Tertullian are of this class, and their imitators in the seventeenth century, Donne (in his letters), Gracian, Bacon, Malvezzi, etc., may easily be distinguished by their cult of significant darkness. The other is of those who studiously cultivate clearness, not for its own merits, but as a wise corrective to the other qualities of Stoic prose, brevity and appropriateness, which they love better. Seneca and the seventeenth-century writers who directly imitate him, such as Lipsius and Bishop Hall, and Montaigne and Browne in some of their writings, are representative of this class.

2. Aristotle's second virtue is brevity, and this the Stoics liked so well that they sometimes actually put it first, in the place of clearness." It is a quality that is almost necessarily involved in the attempt to portray exactly the immediate motions of the mind. In the history of all the epochs and schools of writing it is found

"So, for instance, Lipsius, Instit. Epist., ch. ví: Prima illa, prima mihi, · sermonis virtus est.

that those which have aimed at the expression of individual experience have tended to break up the long musical periods of public discourse into short, incisive members, connected with each other by only the slightest of ligatures, each one carrying a stronger emphasis, conveying a sharper meaning than it would haye if it were more strictly subordinated to the general effect of a whole period. Such a style is a protest against easy knowledge and the complacent acceptance of appearances. It was of course a style loved by the Stoics. But there was a feature of their discipline which gave a particular value to the virtue of brevity; for they made greater use than any of the other sects of the art of condensing their experience into "golden sayings," dicta, maxims, aphorisms, sententiae. Chrysippus, working perhaps on hints received from Pythagoras, gave directions for the manufacture of sententiae, and the use of them in moral discipline, directions which are familiar to modern readers through Bacon's reproduction and expansion of them in his De Augmentis, unhappily without due credit given to his predecessor.* It is not enough to say of Stoic style that it tends toward brevity. In its most characteristic forms it tends toward the sententia, which is as properly to be called its ideal form as the rhythmic cumulative period is that of the Ciceronian style.

3. The quality of appropriateness is not so easy to deal with, for it has been the subject of puzzled discussion, and has assumed a Protean variety of forms. Yet it is of the utmost importance in the interpretation of Stoic style. Aristotle does not clearly enough define what he means by it, but it is evident that he thinks chiefly of appropriateness to the character of the audience addressed and the nature of the occasion: a style should adapt itself to the social requirements of discourse, and not be, for instance, either too lofty or too mean for the kind of audience contemplated. Through the recognition of this virtue of style, it seems, he is able to introduce into his Rhetoric the description of the Isocratean model of oratory which occupies his Third Book." But in this

Book VI, ch. 3. La Mathe le Vayer is more candid: see his l'Eloquence Fr., pp. 16, 57, etc. The source is Chrysippus as reported by Plutarch in his Controversies of the Stoics; but Aristotle's analysis of the enthymeme also contributed to the discussions of Bacon and La Mothe le Vayer. "See Hendrickson, as above, xxv, 135-6; XVI, 254.

use of the word there was an obvious danger to the Stoics; for it might be used as an open door for the entrance of those modes of popular and sensuous appeal which they deprecated in public oratory and carefully excluded from their own private discourses. They gave to the quality of appropriateness, therefore, a meaning more suitable to the theory of a style which was to concern itself intimately with experience.

The statement of it by Lipsius will serve to present their view - briefly." Appropriateness, he says, has two aspects, appropriateness to thing and to person. The former we will consider first for a moment. It is evident that taken in its strict sense appropriateness to the thing has nothing to do with rhetoric. If (as Lipsius defines it) "everything is said for the sake of argument (or subject)," and "the vesture of sentence and phrase exactly fits the body of the thing described," thought and discourse are exactly identical, and there is only one science of both, which we may call logic or dialectic, or what-not. The proper outcome of the doctrine of "appropriateness to the thing" is such a mathematical style... as was contemplated by Bayle, and some seventeenth-century Cartesians, a style admirable of course for scientific exposition, but limited to uses in which art has no opportunity. In short this phase of the Stoic doctrine of style exactly illustrates the instability of an anti-oratorical theory of style, which we have already noted in other connections. But, as we have also observed, practise never squares exactly with a theory; and insistence upon the more literal truth of language has often served as a wholesome corrective or a partisan challenge in periods sated with the conventional ornaments of style.

Secondly, there is appropriateness to person; and this, says, Lipsius, has two phases: appropriateness to the person or persons addressed, and appropriateness to the speaker or writer himself. In the former phase it may be taken as justifying the study of the abstract rhetorical beauties of oratory. So Aristotle seems to take it. But the Stoics lay all the emphasis on the other phase, namely, the exact interpretation in one's expression of the mode of one's thought; or rather they identify the two phases, the proper and effective mode of impressing one's hearers being, in fact, to render one's own experience in the encounter with reality as exactly, as

Instit. Epist., ch. 10.